Elongated Dress

I love to wear dresses in the summer, especially when its really hot. The problem is that most of them are way too short, one gust of wind and HELLO!

When it was still a little cold outside I bought this black dress from Target ( I also bought one in pink, but more on that later). It was of course really short. I just wore it over jeans with a cardigan.

You can’t really tell how short it is in this terrible picture, but it is. (Ignore my son’s unmade bed in the background!)

The dress had an empire waist, so I just ripped the seam there. I wanted the dress to be about 6 inches longer to hit me right above the knee. I had some white cotton knit tshirt material that I had leftover from a different project that I cut to length and width.

I added some fabric rosettes for interest.

Next up is the pink one. I’ll share it with you when I finish it!

Collaberation

I working in conjunction with Sian’s Posh Boutique making these adorable embroidered dresses. I’m making the dresses and she’s embroidering them.

They come in pink or orange plaid twill and can be embroidered with an initial on the bodice.

They’re $45. If you’re interested contact me or Sian.

PS. The orange with pink lettering is my favorite!

Bedtime Instructions Sign Tutorial

Every night when its bedtime I tell the kids “head upstairs, potty, jammies, brush teeth.”
To fill a blank spot over the toilet in their new  bathroom, I came up with this sign…

You’ll need a scrap piece of wood. Mine is left over from the towel rack in the bathroom.
Vinyl letters from an office supply store.

Primer

Spray paint

chain (have this cut to length for you. I learned the hard way.)

“S” hooks

eye hooks

Piece of scrap wood

I cut it into 3 not so equal parts.

Spray primed them. Then painted them all white.

Then I affixed the vinyl letters to spell out “potty,” “jammies,” “brush teeth.”

I sprayed over two of the boards with orange spray paint and one with red spray paint.

When its thoroughly dry, peel off the vinyl letters. (don’t be impatient like me or you’ll end up with a mess like this.)

Because the “P” was messed up, I decided to outline the letters in black and then distress the boards with sandpaper. Once again be patient or you’ll end up with a giant black smear across the board.

Evenly space out eye hooks to the top of the bottom board, and the bottom and tops of the other two boards. I didn’t use “s” hooks. I just pried open the first link of each piece of chain. That was a lot harder than I thought it would be. The chain kept breaking.

I hung it from a hook screwed to the wall.

Picnic Blanket

I love picnics.

I saw this idea about a year ago, and knew that I’d use the green canvas I had instead of denim.

It took me just under a year to finish it!

I used all orange and yellow scraps I had. I even patchworked some of them together.

I’m in love with this square/circle.

Even the back is pretty. I just used a mishmash of yellow, orange and white threads. Whichever bobbin was full!

Now, if it would stop raining, we need to have a picnic!

I’m thinking of sewing some sort of handles to it, so I can just fold it up and swing it over my shoulder…stay tuned.

Swap

Here are a couple of the fat quarters I received from the swap.

This one is so sweet!

Who can resist sleeping hedgehogs?

This one is pretty funky. I have more to share, but they’re buried in the abyss of my sewing room!

Pouches

Here are some pouches that should find their way into my etsy store sometime early next week.

Felt Strawberry on yellow with red polka dots.The inside is lined in red and there are little polka dotted pockets inside.

Polka dots with an orange flower.

Inside is lined with orange.

Pretty purple with yellow flower.

Inside is yellow.

Kids’ New Bathroom

We finally finished the kids’ bathroom redo.It took a lot longer than plan, but isn’t that always the case with home improvement?

This poster from IKEA was my inspiration for a gender neutral kids bathroom.

We replaced the vanity, vanity top and faucet.

A new light fixture.

Toothbrush holder that hangs on the wall…also from IKEA. Its yellow against a yellow wall, but the pictures don’t show the colors very well. There’s no natural light.

Shower curtain.

New toilet that’s white, but looks yellow here!

New floor and orange rug.

Kid’s eye level hooks, so they can hang up their own towels!

They each have their own colored towels, red, orange and yellow.

Instead of ripping out perfectly good, but ugly tile, we just had it all reglazed white.

I left an 18″ border of white along the ceiling, and added red, orange and yellow vinyl polka dots.

Once again these pictures aren’t doing this justice. It looks a lot better in person!

Kids Bathroom Before

We saved the best for last as far as updating the house goes! The kids’ bathroom was definitely still stuck in the 70’s. Too bad it wasn’t cool retro. It was just fugly.

Nice wallpaper and harvest gold tile.

Harvest gold toilet with matching backsplash. Ugly tile floor.

Ugly vanity.

I did manage to salvage the knobs for Piper Ann’s  bedroom.

The countertop was also harvest gold, but its a terrible picture.

Ugly brass lamp…do you see a theme here?

ugly brass towel rack.

Hi Piper!

The wall to left had an ugly built in medicine cabinet that Ricardo took out like a year ago.

Vegetable Garden

Here are the remnants from last year’s vegetable garden. It was my first, so there was a lot of trial and error. The biggest error I made was not building a fence to keep out critters. Mostly everything I planted was eaten by something other than us.

I did get a bumper crop of Jalapenos, some tomatoes that were really small, basil, one green bean, and one green pepper.

I tried “Liquid Fence,” but it didn’t do a very good job.

Here is the new and improved version of our vegetable garden…

Its hard to tell in this picture, but the wire fence we put up goes along the wooden fence as well.

There’s no roof on it to keep out squirrels, but hopefully we’ll be fine…fingers crossed.

I’ve probably planted to many things, so we might have overcrowding issues.

We planted two kinds of tomatoes, jalapenos, cabbage, broccoli, watermelon, canteloupe (those two alone are going to take over.) zucchini, yellow squash, basil, and rosemary.

Here’s to hoping I have a green thumb!!