More presents

The good thing about visiting family for Christmas over New Years is that it gives me some extra time to get things done, and relieves a little bit of stress!

Our nieces on Dan's side are all little girls. Five little girls, all about six months apart in stair steps (although Draya is the baby, being two years younger than the next girl). They are hysterical together. But I know these girls are like mine, and don't want for anything. So for Christmas, I always try to come up with something unique. This year, I found great big huge coloring books, and made them each a personalized bag to keep them in:




To complete the set, I also made a matching crayon roll (loosely based on this tutorial). There is a pocket in each bag to keep the crayon roll neat and tidy.

I really had a lot of fun making these, and they just turned out so cute!

Next project for the weekend was to work on some clothes for my youngest, who is in between sizes, and just tall and chunky. She's sort of hard to fit (although, as I keep telling her, she would be easier to fit if she would choose to use the potty instead of being stubborn about being the baby and staying in diapers, but that's another story....). So today I made her a shirt from an overrun of mad sky chickadees, and some dark brown no wale cord pants, with a simple embroidery to match:


The pants are big, but not enourmous, and will give her some much needed growing room. I just love that chickadee print, it really makes me smile to see it on her.

Merry Christmas!

I hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas. Ours was fantastic, with good presents, good food, and wonderful times together as a family.

The girls in their matching Christmas Nightgowns:

With me in my matching pajama pants:


For a present, I made them each a fleece vest, with a coordinating embroidered white tee (if you want to see the embroideries up close, Draya's is here, and Abby's is here)


Merry Christmas! I hope that yours was a blessed and wonderful as ours!

Bumblebees and a busy month!

I am not sure if I have mentioned this here or not, but my mother in law wrote a children's book, The Bumblebee book. It's pretty cute, and the best part of it is that she had her grandchildren (my daughter Abby and her cousin Samantha), illustrate it! It is so neat.

They had a book signing at her local Borders, and it was a lot of fun. She had stamps made for the girls that were their exact signatures, just in case they got tired of signing. But those little troopers signed every book sold that day, and stamped them too! It was pretty cute at the end, Abby was becoming quite the diva, and every signature also included a smiley face, heart and star :)

Once we found out about the book signing, I was on a mission to make the girls matching bumblebee outfits. Now, bumblebee fabric seems like something that would be readily available, but it's not! I finally found a bit on ebay, and had to squeeze two skirts out of what I had:


We also went crazy and made bumbleebee korker bows to match. It was too much fun!

And here are the girls signing books with Grandma Juli:



It really was a lot of fun. The girls were pretty worn out at the end, but they were so good, and such little troopers!

I have been plowing through orders, and have a stack to get done before Christmas (which I hope to make huge progress on this weekend). It's been busy!