Sewing Mama

With my handy new sewing machine, I have begun to dress my children the way my mom dressed Kelle and I as kids... with beautiful handmade clothes.  I have a long way to go before I can be considered in the same category seamstress as my mom but here is my attempt at being a Little Debber.
I had a pattern for this dress but decided I wanted to jazz it up a bit so I used guitar patterned fabric and added my own guitar creation.  I was amazed how easily and quickly it went together.  The most tedious part of the whole thing was sewing all the little parts of the applique on.  I love the way it turned out and have plans to make many, many more in funkier fabric and some in girlier fabrics, too.  Lilly's robot dress is next up.  Here are some pictures of the dress alone and with a very happy Lauren wearing it.  She loves it so much, it is hard to get her out of it.  She calls it her "Kiki dress" because Kiki on the Fresh Beat Band (Nick Jr.) plays guitar and loves pink.  Therefore, she is Kiki because she loves pink and now has a guitar on her dress.  Let me know what you think of the dress.  It has been a long time since anyone other than my sister has left me a comment.  Thanks, Kel!

 

And what post would be complete without a picture of our dear, sweet Lilly girl?  She was sitting in her bed, dressed as Cinderella and reading her Tag Jr. books.  She was doing the cutest things with her feet so I had to take a picture of her tootsies.

 

And to prove that I don't just write nasty driveway notes to the hubby using chalk, here is a picture of a sweet love note I left in tonight.  I ♥ Keith!

Nothing New

So I really don't have anything new to say, I just had to post something new because it is January and I still had a Merry Christmas post up. 
I don't have many new pictures to choose from because I haven't been taking any new pics.  I go in waves.  I find that every few months I stop taking pictures and just chill.  I think the girls like it when I take a break from shoving a camera in their faces all the time.
I have been playing with a  lot of my photos in photoshop and figuring out how to work my camera better but not really taking pictures.  I have also been getting back into sewing lately.  I have a new machine that is completely AWESOME!  It is a Brother sewing/embroidery machine and it is by far the easiest machine I have ever used!  The bobbin just drops in and it picks up the thread all by itself.  Anytime I get stuck, I can hit the help button and it shows me the steps to take to fix the problem I am having by displaying pics on its LCD screen.  Nice.  It has an automatic threader, 70 built in embroidery designs + 5 different fonts and about a billion stitches!  I love it!  I have a feeling I am going to be sewing a lot more!  I have a dress for Lauren all cut out and ready to go but I screwed up when I was first putting it together.  I make the same mistake every single time I start sewing after having not done it in awhile.  Instead of sewing the right sides together, I sew one wrong side to one right side.  This time, I had a row of straight stitches and a row of zigzags that had to be pulled out.  I haven't had a chance to resew it.  Maybe tonight but I have had a migraine all day and yesterday so we will see what I can accomplish as the night goes on.  Amazingly, my headaches always seem to let up once the kids go to bed!  That is a skull scratcher!
Here are a few pictures that I have been playing with in Photoshop. They are some older pics but so much fun to look back on. 

Here is Lilly playing Rock Band.  Well, she thinks she is playing.  We don't actually turn on their instruments because they don't usually finish a song and then leave us hanging.  Lauren is actually quite a good drummer.  She always counts us in while banging her drumsticks together.  She can stick a song out so maybe we will have to play a couple songs on no fail to see how she does.

 

This is a book I made for Lilly with robots.  She loves robots.  I had a lot of fun making this book because I got to try out a lot of different stitches on my new machine.  The girls love it and I am going to make a book for Lauren.  She wants rainbows.  I'll post pics when that is done.