The Clothkits Peekaboo dress

Most mornings my elder daughter hops out bed and says something along the lines of “I want to wear this [insert description here] dress today”. Trouble is she keeps growing, so her selection of dresses is being whittled down to a very small number. So last week, instead of starting on my dress (no, NOT procrastinating) I reached for one of the Clothkits dresses that I was gifted from a friend, whose daughters had grown too big for them. 
It came together very nicely. My only real error was cutting it to fit Piper’s chest (age 4) and forgetting about her length (nearer age 5). So after realising that it sat too high in the neck and under the arm I spent the rest of the day unpicking everything that I had painstakingly sewn together.

I used the remains of the visible markings to extend the neckline and armhole and sewed the whole thing back together. Then I just had to wrestle with the placket. A lot. May add an invisible zip next time instead…
I must admit, I cheated on the button holes, as I was sewing it up at Mum’s house, and rather than learn the process on her fancy computerised machine, I just worked out the spacing, marked their positions and let Mum work the machine. Next time buttons, next time.
(I feel like I made up for this though by being more creative with my button choices!)
However Piper and I are both really happy with this – apart from the fact that it needs washing all the time – and it is already one of her go-to dresses.

And some of the other stuff…

Aside from the birthday fun we had in June I have been kept quite busy on other projects.

One of the school mums seems to have fallen in love with the backpacks I have been making for children’s birthday presents, and has been spreading that love among her friends (thank you!) so I had another four bags to make last month – three Butterfly Backpacks and a Simply Stripy one.

And then our soon-to-be brother-in-law Skip had a birthday. Cathy is trying to train him in her use of all the different towels and cloths to be found in the kitchen, so a while back mentioned tea-towels as a useful present. And because the children have great memories of scoffing raspberries straight out of his garden that is what we put on them.

This was swiftly followed by an emergency birthday present make for one of Matthew’s friends as we received a belated invitation to her birthday party. She already had a butterfly bag (the first one!) so she was due a pencil case this year.

My other sister also had a birthday, and she too is trying to get her house sorted out, so she got a carrier bag holder, a couple of lavender sachets (to match last year’s cushion) and a Beezer annual from 1979 (her birth year).

And then of course there were the bean bags. *sigh* I had made both bean bags on other occasions, but had slightly under-stuffed them so when the one my sister had commissioned came back I not only topped that one up, but also Matthew’s bean bag which was a little limp. The (big) downside was that my house was full of small polystyrene beads AGAIN (I am still finding them lurking in corners that I thought I had already vacuumed). he plus point was that I finally got to photograph the other bean bag which I made back around Christmas and despatched so quickly that my camera never got near it.

one very badly edited photo of the purple bean bag

On top of that I did LOTS of wedding related laundry – but no photos as they would be spoilers!

Tent for three

A few weeks ago we celebrated the all important third birthday of our little Robin (she has been looking forward to it for the last 9 months). Our dilemma was what to give her as a present when she already has everything the other two enjoyed when they were 3. After some trawling of the internet, and a chance comment from my Dad, I settled (and why not?) on a tent. And just in case it isn’t clear, there is also room for all three of them to fit inside.

My inspiration came from this reading nook tent I saw on Ana White’s blog, we just gave it our own take, especially as we wanted ours to be used in the garden. So a few lengths of timber and a couple of curtains from my stash later and we had something resembling a tent.

Not anything like pretty enough though, so I then spent some rather too much perfectly good sleeping time sewing up tapes to tie the canvas/curtains to the frame, and making bunting to wrap around it instead. This used up some more of two vintage sheets that I had already cut into for other projects.

Although I could make a case for this project meeting the June stash busting theme of “containment” – the tent has pockets in the side to hold books and toys - thanks to a quick redefinition I definitely get to submit this to the stashbusting challenge – and using up two curtains does make a nice hole in my stash! (well one box of stashness anyway).