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My latest layout for the Pebbles blog, on the them of "Favourites":
I made these rolled paper flowers using my Wishblade and Laina Lamb for Two Peas in a Bucket cut files.
The new release, Floral Lane, is on it way to me as I write this! I can't wait to tear that package open and get scrapping some springy, girly layouts!
My sister and I have our birthdays 6 days apart. (Two years and 6 days, to be exact.) I made her a reversible bag this year, using two favourite fabrics-- one light, one dark, so she can use it year round. I download this free pattern, and it was done lickety split!
For summer:
For winter:
(Yes...we are SO related.)
We're off to the beach pretty soon, so I thought I'd make up two new dresses for the girls. These both use my trusty Leila and Ben Sweet Dress pattern! I love that pattern. So easy to sew up, and so easy to modify.
Here's the back:
For Audrey's dress I cut the bodice using the top third of the pattern. I cut the bottom portion out of striped fabric, allowing an inch overlap at the top. Then I sewed them together with a french seam, which created it's own little channel for elastic. The band at the bottom was an afterthought. I wanted the dress a little longer, and I had just the right amount of fabric, so why not? When I held it up for Audrey, she just said "Love it.", then went back to her picture. Apparently Mommy making dresses is already old hat.
For Lily's I did the same process with the bodice, then for the skirt portion I set the pattern about an inch in from the fold to make it a little wider. Then I gathered the skirt a bit before sewing it to the bodice. It makes for a fuller skirt. I also gave her puffed sleeves with a button, rather than gathered with elastic. (By that point, I was pretty sick of working elastic through fabric.)
Awwww.... they always love the cuddle shots.
If you read this weekend's post, you know that I went to some garage sales on Saturday with the girls and finally started sewing a few things for myself. I feel so much less pressure when something is a refashion-- because I'm not putting $$$ of fabric at risk! Case in point:
I bought this Tommy Hilfiger 100% silk skirt at a garage sale for 75 cents. It still had the tags on-- it was originally $120! In the past I would have overlooked it, being several sizes too big for me and not a great cut:
This time, though, I knew I could somehow make it great. I remembered seeing a blog post not too long ago that featured a skirt-to-top refashion, and sure enough I found this tutorial lickety split through Google. (It's in french. Put the blog address into google translate and you can read any blog, in its original format, in your chosen language. Amazing.)
The basic idea is to flip the skirt upside down so the waistband of the skirt becomes the waistband of the top. (I know, weird, right?) I'll give you a quick step-by-step, but here is the after:
I have been pinning all sorts of stripes and chevron patterns to my Pinterest board recently, so this fits right in! It's sort of a sassy top-- quite loose fitting, slides off the shoulder sometimes, so I'm wearing a cami underneath.
Here's the back:
There's the zipper peaking out the bottom. Rather than cut out armholes, I just created fold over peekaboo sleeves:
I made up a quick pictorial of how I made this top, just in case you want to give it a shot! Feel free to take this image and adapt it to your liking. Link me up if you make a skirt top of your own. :)
Hubby took the photos again this time-- he always makes me laugh. A husband should always make you laugh.
I finally did it-- put some of my new found sewing skills to use for myself! The girls and I went garage sale shopping this morning (there were probably 30 or more in our neighourhood), and I found this dress for $3:
(Oops. I just realised you can see my bra in this photo. I'm going to assume you've all seen a bra before and move on.)
This is a Rodier Paris dress-- quite high end, and lovely material. As you can see, it's a bit sackish on me, and too big. It's also too long. I'm trying to move out of Frumpville. You can see in the photo that there is a very wide hem at the bottom. It was double stitched and gave me the perfect place to shorten it to. I just ironed the hem up all the way around, pinned and sewed it, then cut off the excess. I took in the sides a little bit, too, between the arm hole and the pockets. Then, I used the part I trimmed off the bottom to make a wide belt. Here is the result:
No more frump! I love it-- comfy, not too long, with a little shape. Hubby took these photos. He's very proud of himself:
(Yes, I usually put my hands on my hips during photos. Not sure why.)
To make the wide belt I took the left over strip of fabric and cut it to my waist size. Then I trimmed the ends to look like the end of a crayon (can you tell I'm a mom?) like this:
I sewed the right sides together, leaving the ends open and enough room to flip it back right sides out. I pressed the seams, then I cut the original tie in half and fed the unfinished ends about and inch inside the wide belt opening. Then I topstitched over the ends and, voila, wide belt!
I know what I'm wearing the next sunny day...
I know I haven't been blogging much lately-- I haven't been sewing or scrapping much either! I try to take time for myself every day, but I only have time for one thing-- either scrapping OR sewing OR blogging OR something else. The girls are getting more independant and it feels so luxurious to take those few extra minutes to do some of things I used to do pre-kids.
This past week was about reading. I used to read so much. I used to fly through books and practically live at the bookstore. Sadly, I can probably count on one hand the number of books I've read since Audrey was born. (Okay, maybe I'd need both hands. Still.) When I was out with my Mom last week we went to the bookstore and I was drawn to this book:
"The Midwife of Venice" by Roberta Rich
It's about a Jewish midwife in 16th century Venice who is called on in the middle of the night to attend the birth of a Christian child-- which was illegal in the day. In the meantime, her husband is being held as a slave in Malta and the money she would earn from this one birth could pay the ransom to bring him home. I flew through this book in two days. What a page turner! However, I read it so fast that I kind of regretted buying it! So a few days later I went to the library to search out a few other books I had almost bought.
Yesterday I finished this one:
"The Help" by Kathryn Stockett
This was excellent. It's a story about the relationship between black maids/caregivers and the white families they work for. It's written in the voice of three women, and it is so evocative of the time and place-- Mississippi in the 60's. This book is so popular it was only available for a 7 day loan, and I had to read a lot during the week to get it finished. A wonderful read, though. Highly recommended.
I'm going to yoga today, then back to the library this afternoon with Lily, then scrapping tonight!
(I guess that's more than one thing for myself. Decadent!)
Happy National Scrapbooking Day!
(And to all my non-scrapping readers, yes there IS such a thing as National Scrapbooking Day.)
I have a few layouts to share, but before I do, I wanted to share some BIG news from Scrapbook and Cards Today-- a new series of live events!
Make sure to head over to the SCT Blog for more NSD festivities!
I've saved a few recent layouts to post here today.
"The Year You Were Born"
I had some beautiful photos of my Nan from her 88th birthday party a few weeks ago, and this one of her and Lily was my favourite. I wanted to highlight the 86 year age difference between them, and I thought researching some facts from the years they were born would be a fun way to do that. Gotta love Google.
I loved finding out details from 1923. "Yes, We Have No Bananas" was the number one song! hee!
I don't know what was harder to write on Lily's side of the layout: "Katy Perry" or "Stephen Harper". No wait, definitely Stephen Harper.
"This Past Wednesday"
One of my very favourite things about scrapbooking is detailing every day moments. This layout was all iphone photos, and a totally typical day.
"Passport Pictures"
I renewed the girls' passports last week, and the photo finishing place gave me two sets for the passport office. So, I decided to scrap the extras:
Enjoy NSD scrappers! I will definitely take some time scrap today!
It was my birthday last week, and my hubby took me out for a fabulous dinner with a few friends to "Lee on King". It's "Top Chef Masters" Susur Lee's new restaurant, and let me tell you it was AMAZING.
We left around 6, because the only reservation we could get was at 6:30. I managed to fit into a dress I haven't worn since before the girls were born-- and I remembered after I put it on that it was given to me for my birthday ten years ago by my castmates in "Mamma Mia". They all knew that I love JCrew, so they all went in together to get me this dress:
A little snug, but it fits! lol!
When we got to the restaurant we decided to do "Chef's Choice" and just have them bring out the Chef's favourite dishes. This was good and bad-- so delicious, but too much food and awfully expensive! Still, next time we will know exactly what to order. My faves were:
The oysters. So fresh. I haven't had oysters in years:
Next was Susur's signature salad, the Singaporean Slaw. There are 19 ingredients in this salad and I would never have believed cole slaw could be SO fresh and delicious.
Another dish was a cheeseburger spring roll, wrapped in lettuce.
After that the dishes were coming out fast and furious and I put away the camera. The food was so delicious and so plenteous, I could have burst. At the end they brought out chocolate molten cake:
and Quillan asked that the Chef come over to wish me Happy Birthday. :) Chef Lee was very friendly and happy to take a photo with me:
It was such a great night-- and such a great meal!
I'm up on the Pebbles blog today with a few swap projects with American Crafts. I'll admit, I squealed with delight when the goodie bag of American Crafts arrived on my doorstep. Amazingly, I didn't have any of products already in my stash! (I have A LOT of Thickers...)
I thought I would elaborate on my projects here:
What a treat to combine our Pebbles lines with some of the delicious new lines from American Crafts. I started out with a two page layout about some of my recent sewing projects called "Refashion Girls". I cut three circles of paper from some Ever After and Hello Sunshine designs, then edged them with blue American Crafts fibre to define the edges. I layered the 6 photos across the top, and had this:
After that I created custom embellishments by layering a Happy Go Lucky chipboard flower over a punched paper flower of American Crafts "Bliss", then taking the button from one of the other chipboard flowers and adding it to the American Crafts butterfly dimensional sticker:
For the title block I chose two colourful sets of Thickers, bookended by the Mr. and Mrs. metal metal flowers:
Pebbles Supplies:
Carefree (751083)
Splendid (751081)
Cheery Varnish (751080)
Chipboard Flowers (747071)
Metal Flowers (747085)
American Crafts Supplies:
Bliss (35395)
Thickers Sunrise (53179)
Thickers Sunset (53183)
Delights Sunbeam (72011)
Remarks Good Morning (42194)
Smores Ribbon (893960)
Other Supplies:
Cardstock (Creative Memories)
Once I finished this layout, I had some very interesting scraps-- what to do with a perfectly good sheet of paper with a big hole in it? I'll be honest, usually this would end up in the scrap bin, but since it's one of my favourite patterns from Happy Go Lucky I decided to challenge myself to put it to good use. I came up with this layout about a local french pastry shop,"Bobette and Belle":
The "Carefree" paper layered over the American Crafts grid made a perfect spot for my title and journaling:
Here's a tip: If you take pictures at a restaurant or shop, grab their business card on the way out! The business card from this patisserie matched my layout perfectly, and I used it in two ways on the layout. First, I punched out their circular logo with a circle punch and layered it on top of a Pebbles chipboard flower, then added a Flair to the centre. (Here's another one of the scraps from the previous layout, too, acting as a frame for the photo of my girls and I.)
Now I had a hole in the middle of the business card, so I used it as a little frame, too, adding a bit of Happy Go Lucky borders sticker and some bling to dress it up a bit:
Pebbles Supplies:
Carefree (751083)
Ever After ABC (732045)
Chipboard Flowers (747071)
Happy Go Lucky 12" Border Stickers (732037)
American Crafts Supplies:
Bliss (35395)
Cool Cat (35389)
Thickers Fellow (53174)
Reinforced Decorative Tags (85543)
Flair Good Golly (70068)
Remarks Chickadee (can't find a number for this one)
Other Supplies:
Jewels (Bo Bunny)
