RaptorMama

I am addicted to bows.  Particularly bows from Gymboree.  I love them in all their corkscrew glory.  The only problem is that they have barrettes and Kate doesn’t have quite enough hair for them.  No worries.  I just convert them over to alligator clips.

First I use this random tool that Michael found for me out in the garage.

I use it to cut away the plastic barrette part.  You have to be careful while you’re cutting away the pastic that you don’t cut through the ribbon or any of the thread connecting the ribbons.  You have to kind of scootch the ribbon to the side, cut away one side and then scootch it back over to cut out the other side.

Then you have to work the piece of plastic around until you can get it out.  Finally you are left with only the ribbons which should have a small piece of ribbon holding them together.

Thread a piece of ribbon through the loop and then slide your alligator clip through it.

Next you just put some glue on the ribbon and fold it over.  I use felt glue, but I’m sure you could use pretty much anything.  The ribbon will glue to itself through the holes in the alligator clip.

Then you do the other side.

I think the ribbon gives the bow a nice finished look, plus it seems to help grip Kate’s fine baby hair.  And here’s the finished bow!

Too bad I ran out of alligator clips before I could do the second bow.  Raptor was not pleased when she only got to wear one bow.  She kept demanding “Two!  Two!”  Guess we’ll be making a trip over to Sally’s in the near future to buy some more.  🙂

 

 

The Raptor has been absolutely fascinated with water lately.  I swear she spent an hour earlier this week pouring water from one cup to another in her water table.  So today, Michael took her out to water the trees.

Hmm…  I use the phrase “water the trees” loosely.  Mainly she wanted to make mud.  Oh well.  This tree isn’t looking so good anyway.  I think I have a green gangrene thumb.  After a very cursory watering, Kate moved on to the mud making portion of the evening.

And then on to the puddle splashing.  She had a blast!

I stumbled across this idea for a thumbprint hyacinth on Pinterest the other day and decided to give it a whirl.  It seemed easy enough.  Famous last words…  Nothing about precision finger painting is easy with a toddler.

First I drew the stem and leaves on with a green marker.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you should go ahead and take the trouble to find one of your nice markers to do this.  Using whatever partially dried up old thing you find in your child’s art drawer is probably not going to cut it.  Oh well.

Then you dip your child’s thumb in purple paint and stamp it up and down the stem.  Huh.  Yeah, that probably works a lot better with an older kid.  It probably also works a lot better if you’re not trying to take pictures at the same time.  You know, I’m not even going to bore you with our final product.  Check out the example if you want to see how it should look.  Her’s looks awesome.  🙂  Incidentally, Michael wanted to know why I didn’t use blue paint for the bluebonnet.  Hmm…  Maybe we’ll try again next year, but make them bluebonnets instead of hyacinths.

Luckily, Kate and I are not ones to let something as trivial as a failed thumbprint craft get us down.  Especially not when we already have paint out!

Kate had a great time making handprints.  In fact, she demanded “Kate’s hand!  Kate’s hand!” until I finally acquiesced and covered her hand in paint so she could stamp it.  I really need to get some paint brushes to facilitate this.  Mommy is not a fan of getting her own hands covered in paint.

Here they are, the tutu pictures in the bluebonnets!

The patterned tule made it much more skirt like than some of her previous tutus, so I left her shorts on underneath to give it some fullness.  That, and her daddy thought that it would be more comfy on her tush if she sat down in the bluebonnets.

She was way too busy running around in the giant field to even think about sitting down!  I have to say it was a but easier to get pictures last year before she was mobile.  🙂

And here’s another picture of my new skirt.  I plan on making many more of these this summer. 🙂

 

And I am so proud of myself!  It was a bit more of a challenge than I was anticipating, but I love the finished project and plan to make a few more so I have a summer wardrobe.  I started out with a pattern of course.  What I was not expecting was that the sizing on the pattern was a bunch of lies!  Lies I tell you!  Sadly, I am not a small person, but I swallowed my pride and dutifully bought a pattern in the size that I wear.  Ok, ok,  it was one size smaller, so sue me.  They didn’t have it in tub-o-lard size.  When I got home, I decided to check my measurements against the pattern measurements.  Imagine my surprise when my tush was 10 inches larger than the pattern.  Seriously.  I don’t even know how that is possible.  Never one to be deterred by such frivolities as a lack of a workable pattern, I pressed on.

I did a bit of math and redrew the pattern.  At this point, it wouldn’t lay on the fabric like I wanted (stripes should go up and down *not* side to side) so I redrew it again to make the a-line a bit steeper.  Then I remembered that my waist is smaller than dress designers think it should be given the size of my tush and I decided that since I was making this pattern I might as well make it fit me.  A bit more redrawing later and I had a pattern that I thought would work.  At this point, it seemed wise to make the skirt out of some cheap dollar-a-yard fabric we bought years and years ago first to see how it fit before cutting up my pretty fabric.

I sewed up the sides and tried it on.  Um, yeah, it was enormous.  Maybe they were on to something with this whole sizing thing.  I had Michael pin it and then had a moment of panic over how I was going to get it off.  In the end, it went over my head without disturbing the pins.  I cut off the excess, sewed it up and tried it back on.  After Round 2 of pinning, cutting and sewing, I had a template that fit pretty well!  It’s very loose so that it can fit over my head.  This had the added benefit of making it super comfy.  Plus, no zipper or elastic required!  🙂

I turned it inside out and laid it out on top of my nice fabric.  Then I just cut along the template.  This only really worked because in the initial pattern the front and back were exactly the same.

I sewed up the two sides and tried it on.  Lose, but comfy.  My kind of skirt.  🙂  Next up was the hem and I dithered over this for a while because I wasn’t really sure how to go about doing it.  I’ve seen my Mimi hem things before though, so I decided to just press ahead.  She continually measures the hem as she is ironing it.  This seemed like a pretty good idea to me, but I couldn’t find a ruler.  Necessity is the mother of invention.  I marked off a line on a scrap of chipboard and used it as a gauge.

I turned the hem under twice as instructed, pinned it and then stitched it.  Then I did the exact same thing for the waistband.

Et viola!  I have a skirt.  The only thing left was to get some awesome shoes for it.  When my mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I told her that I wanted wildly impractical shoes to go with this skirt.  I love them.  I may not be able to walk tomorrow, but I don’t care.  🙂

We went to a toddler art group today and it was awesome!  It took a while to make the paint, but the kids didn’t seem to mind a bit.  They were having a great time in a baby pool that had been filled with gravel.  Genius.

It took a bit of tinkering to get the consistency right.  We finally decided just to leave it a bit gloopy and chalk it up to a sensory experience.

We also decided to add a bit of food coloring to the paint to make it a bit brighter than the koolaid alone.

Then we stripped the kids down to their diapers.  Kate was indignant at the thought of being in public in just a diaper.

You win this time kid.  I suppose you can paint in your clothes.  It’ll probably wash out, right?  Then we turned the kids loose outside.  Our lovely hostess taped some big sheets of recycled wrapping paper down on back porch and the kids went to town.  We parted the paint into cups to make it easier for the kids to handle.

I was so impressed with Kate’s use of the paint brush.  We aren’t civilized enough to have paint brushes around here.  She actually managed to avoid getting any paint on her dress!  We had such a great time.  Hopefully we can make this toddler art group a regularly scheduled event!

So I decided to start my Project Life project yesterday.

That really means that I started it today, I just used pictures and a story from yesterday.  Good thing Kate loves stickers so much.  We sat down and had some quality mama/ baby scrapbooking time.

Here’s my sticker tip.  Now maybe this seems painfully obvious to everyone else, but I had a eureka moment over here when it finally occurred to me.  Peel the background of the sticker sheet off and throw it away.

Kate demands to do everything by herself and stickers are no exception.  She would get really frustrated though when she couldn’t get the sticker off and needed my help.  I’m not going to lie, it was frustrating for this mama too.  It’s hard to get any scrapping done when Kate is demanding a new sticker every 2 seconds.  We worked this system out while I was working on my December Daily album.  It’s awesome.

Now, moving on to the actual content of this post.  🙂  So I realize that I’m only one day in, but I am *so* in love with this kit!  I could easily have just stuck in a 4×6 photo and a journaling card, but I decided to jazz it up a bit.  We went out to dinner last night and Michael took a few pictures on his iPhone using the hipstomatic app.  Love the filters!  Only problem is that they are 4×4 not 4×6.

No worries.  The kit includes some extra patterned paper.  Add a bit of ribbon and a metal embellishment that has been looking for a good home for years and I’m calling it good!

I used one of the bifold journaling cards so I could write a bit more since it’s my first day.  Added a few of the included arrow stickers and used the date stamp.  Man this stamp is crisp.  Almost makes me want to go back to rubber stamps.

And yes, I realize that it’s folded backwards.  The cards are double sided and I liked this side best even though it’s supposed to be the interior part.  Don’t judge me.  🙂  Then I trimmed down a picture of Kate from dinner and included it in one of the small spots for journalling cards.  Here’s the completed “day.”

I’m thinking I might have one post a week dedicated to the previous week’s layout.  Thoughts?

 

I would love to say that I’ve been super productive while Michael’s been out of town, but I would be lying.  🙂  I did manage to get one layout done tonight after Raptor went to bed, but I had to cut the scrapping short since I’m running out of cardstock.  That and the fact that the battery died on my laptop which was really cutting into my trashy TV viewing.

I was so in love with this paper last fall.  Of course last fall I was scrapping summer pics and couldn’t use it.  Now I really want to start scrapping spring stuff, but I hate being so far behind in Kate’s book.  It’s a vicious cycle!  I guess I’ll just have to pick up the pace Seriously though, I still think this line is really cute.  This is a pretty simple layout, I just layered the patterned paper.  Most of the photos are still 4×6, but I cut the ones in the center down to 4×4.  I even ::gasp:: cut one photo in half.

I use post bound albums so the photos still line up pretty well.  I can totally see the appeal of 3 ring binders, but I like 2 page layouts too much to make the switch.  I do make it a policy never to cut a person’s face in half though.

I love the matching ribbon and rubons.

I made a lot of progress on the skirt this weekend, but I was derailed by our lack of an ironing board.  Usually I just iron stuff on top of a towel on our kitchen island, but I don’t think that’s going to cut it this time.  All that’s left though is to hem the top and bottom!  More on the skirt later.

Michael gave me my birthday present early since he’s going out of town and I am thrilled!  I have been wanting Project Life for a *long* time.  Like almost a year and a half.  I couldn’t believe it when I opened the box from Amazon and saw this:

Squeee!  It so awesome.  All of the components are well thought out and of a very high quality.  He picked out the turquoise one and it’s gorgeous!  Here’s the binder.

And the page protectors are super thick.  It’s luxurious.  🙂  The idea is that you take a picture every day and then they go in these divided page protectors.

Then you journal every day on the cute little cards and fit them in the page protectors too.

At the end of a year, you have a really awesome “scrapbook” that showcases the every day memories.  I’m probably most excited about being “forced” to write something every day.  My birthday is the 31st and I’m going to start the project then.  I can’t wait!  I keep pulling all of the components out of the box and playing with them.

Should you choose to accept it, is to turn this piece of cloth

into a skirt this weekend.  Oh my, what have I gotten myself into?  🙂