Easter 2015

Sunday, April 5, 2015

Easter baskets, followed by General Conference and then dinner and Easter egg hunt at my parents' house. Plus it was my mom's birthday so we celebrated that as well!

Taking a quick nap before heading to Grandma's!

Her feet are not touching the floor!

The girls in their Easter dresses. Originally I was not planning on having them done in time for Easter - since there was no church on Easter Sunday. However the girls begged me to finish them so that they could wear them to Grandma S's house. Blondie and Kitty have the same dress pattern in different colors and then Kay and MJ have the same dress pattern as well.

The girls love to play with and entertain their baby cousin!

My sister made the cute vests that her boys are wearing!

MJ reaching for the egg!

DH going for an artistic shot...

Easter dresses 2013

Sunday, March 31

I am not a big fan of Easter in March - mostly because it means less time for me to work on the Easter dresses for my girls!  This year I bought the fabric way back in February, but I always seem to be making a mad dash to get them finished up by Easter morning.  M&M did a good chunk of work on her own dress this year, but it was a very difficult pattern - especially the bodice - and we didn't like the sleeve so we used a sleeve piece from another pattern and tried to make it fit the dress.  She got many compliments on her dress at church.  I found the fabric for the younger girls' dresses in the clearance aisles at the fabric store.  MJ and Kay's dresses were the same in a different color fabric and the same for Kitty and Blondie.  And Kitty and Blondie's dresses were a pretty hard pattern too that took a lot of fabric and had many layers.  M&M had a hard time finding some fabric that she liked and then ended up loving the one that we finally picked.

MJ was in no mood for having her picture taken when we came home from church, as you can tell from the pictures.

This picture was taken during the Easter egg hunt, not right after church with the rest of them.  After she wore this on Easter I ended up shortening the dress about 3 more inches.  It looked cute long, but she almost ripped the skirt from the bodice from trying to get up and down the stairs and onto chairs.  It was so long that she kept stepping on it and kneeling on it.

If you look closely, the ribbon along the top of these dresses is actually made into little bows all along the top.  It took a little while to do it and decide if we liked it.

We added some of the contrast fabric at the top of the dress to create some contrast between M&M's skin and the dress. I think it really helped to tie the colors together.

Sewing projects

While the kids were off track for 2 1/2 weeks after Christmas, I took the girls to the fabric store to pick out some fabric so that I could make them some little storage bags for some of their things.  It is such a chore for me to pull out my sewing stuff and then put it right back away over and over again that I have been really dragging my feet to get to work on those projects.  Then my nephew's birthday came up and I thought that one of those bags would make a great gift for a 3 year old so I found some scrap fabric that I had and then went to work on it.  I had some basic instructions to follow, but I wanted to make the bag reversible so I had to adjust the way I did it a little.  I was pretty pleased with the finished product and then it took me a little while to pull everything out again to work on ones for my girls.  I have now finished a bag for MJ and Kay, but still need to work on some for the older girls.  Here are pictures of the ones that I have made so far:

Bag for my nephew

Kay's bag

MJ's bag - She calls it her Rainbow Dash bag (there is a My Little Pony whose name is Ranibow Dash). 

First sewing project

M&M has expressed interest in learning how to sew and I thought that it might be a fun project for her to try and make her own skirt this summer before school started. A few weeks after MJ was born and after the elementary school kids were in school we finally managed to take a trip to the fabric store one morning. I had an idea on how she could make an easy skirt and so we just went there to look for fabric and hopefully buy some. M&M was initially looking for some fabric to match a purple skirt that she has, but we had a hard time finding anything that would match that she liked. As we were getting ready to leave empty-handed I saw a fabric that stood out to me and had a color of flower in it that I thought would match a shirt that she owned. I pointed it out to her and she liked it as well so we ended up buying it.

M&M just wanted a simple skirt that was gathered at the waist so we used a pattern piece from another pattern that we have and just cut out a front and back section that she then sewed together. Then she folded over the top to make a casing for elastic and then just hemmed it. The skirt turned out really cute and the fabric matches her shirt exactly. She finished it in just two days of working on it (I had to go back to the fabric store to buy elastic that I thought I had already). She was able to wear it to church on Sunday along with some new shoes that she just bought. When we get another chance we may go to another fabric store to look for some fabric for another skirt to match her purple shirt now.