Productive Morning

Time is growing short. Can you feel the pinch? I know I'm feeling it. This morning, I have to wrap. HAVE to. Once the kids are done with school, that's it- I'm relegated to wrapping in the bedroom on the bed, which I hate. So, I have today and tomorrow, and then it's bedroom city.

Already this morning I have cut yarn for the kids to do yarn ornaments tonight, which I found on another blog this morning. Since they will be today's ornament of the day, you will see those later.

After doing that, I did up 2 quick Teacher's gifts for the kids to take into school tomorrow. I don't have much money, so I went with what I had on hand. Remember the spring clips I found at Goodwill in my basket of goodies? There was an Apple one. I had hoped there were two, but alas, only one apple. I used that one, and a flower shaped one to make the gifts.

For Gillian's teacher, I used the apple one, then Mod Podged red paper to each side. One side just says Happy Holidays over and over again in white on red. The other side is the center of a poinsettia flower with a snowflake center. From there, I used a sponge brush to stain the wooden bases with red & brown ink. I mod podged over top of that so the ink won't stain anyone elses fingers.

For Chris's teacher, I took the flower, and used the same red Happy Holidays paper on one side, and a black and white pattern on the other. I used red ink to stain the base, and once more, mod podged over the ink. My brush and the mod podge turned pinkish. Oops! Ah well, better than the fingers, I guess.

It was a fast project- about 10 minutes from start to finish.

Aside from wrapping, I need to finish Gillian's dress. Last year, I bought the cutest dress at Goodwill. It has a green velvet upper, and the skirt is long and full dark green taffeta. It's actually bigger than a circle skirt, that's how full it is. When I got it, I had visions of a tree skirt. After all, it was much too big for Gilly. Well, Gillian fell in love. Last year, I had the horrid sewing machine, so I used a plethora of safety pins to hoist the longer-than-ankle-length skirt up, and tighten the dress.

This year, I got ambitious. I decided to make a bubble skirt out of the dress, which this year, was still ankle length on her. I thought- easy peasy, lemon squeezy. I thought wrong.

{the skirt was not fully extended- thus, bigger than a circle, and also, inside out}

{the inner slip I sewed to create the bubble}

{the ruffles created by pulling the top thread of the machine stitch}

The skirt, being so full, was TOO full to hand pleat into a bubble. UGh. When did I figure that out? After I had hand pleated almost the entire thing, and ran out of space on the fleece slip I sewed into the dress. Yes, fleece- I live in Michigan. It could be 60 degrees on Christmas, or it could be -15. Fleece seemed the logical choice for added warmth, since -15 is far more likely than 60 (though, it has happened).

I undid all the pins, and brainstormed. After all, the slip was already sewn into the dress. I remembered the many tutorials on how to sew a straight stitch, and pull it to form a ruffle, and thought... well, I can do that. I hope.

So, I did. I failed to take into account, once more, the fullness of the skirt. The thread broke no less than 3 times. I sewed across the ruffles in many places, so they wouldn't be lost when the thread broke. After a Loooooong time, I finally had the entire thing ruffled.

From there, I tacked the skirt to the slip in 4 places, but ran out of time to fully stitch it to the slip. I tried it on Gillian last night, and of course, one of the tack's tore out. -sigh-

She better love this dress.