Did ya miss me??

I've been neglecting my blog a bit lately, and I do feel kind of bad about it. Hopefully I can pick back up on the frequency of my posts soon (although I can't make any promises since we may or may not be moving sometime in the next 2 months...yay for "planning ahead" in the military!).

I would show you a cute little skirt I made for my niece, but I forgot to take pictures of it. My bad. And it was way too big, so I won't have a picture of her in it for a while. Apparently I have no concept for how big or small babies are. It is really cute though! It's kind of along these lines:

But obviously much better. Hah! The fabric has tiny flowers on it and looks kind of vintage-y. I was in Memphis last week visiting family and meeting said niece. She's even better in person (although smaller) than I expected.

I kind of hogged her since I'm not there very much. Hopefully she didn't get too spoiled by me holding her even when she was napping sometimes : )

It was so much fun to see family and spend time hanging out (ok, she napped and I smiled at her because she's cute) with my niece!

In other news...I GOT A NEW SEWING MACHINE!?!  A Brother CS6000i (whatever that means). So I'm going from one stitch on my old Singer to 60! ...60!? What will I even do with all of them? I was so tired from the trip I didn't even open it when I got home last night.

But that didn't stop me today! I started reading through the instructions (boo!!) because honestly I don't even know where to begin with this thing.

I did find it funny that they pointed out you shouldn't drop or hit the machine if you want it to work well. Was that really necessary? I guess they're just covering all their bases (probably thanks to those people who sue because they burned their mouth on the coffee they ordered because it didn't say "Caution: Hot" on the cup).

I got all the way to page 16 (meaning I read how to wind and load the bobbin and thread the needle) before I threw caution to the wind and started trying out stitches! It's like magic people! Leaves, squiggles, asterisks, loops, criss-cross...you name it, the machine will do it! (Also, I need more thread. I didn't even have enough to completely fill a bobbin since these bobbins are bigger than my other ones.)

And now I need to get to work on the sewing table so I have somewhere other than the living room floor to put it. Any thoughts on what my first project with the new machine should be?? I have more projects than I can make several projects pinned on some of my Pinterest boards, but I haven't picked anything yet.

Lena Beth and the tiny dress

I thought I'd share some pictures of the dress I made my niece! And share some pictures of her because she's adorable, and who doesn't want to see pictures of adorable babies?

I used the pattern from Made by Rae for the Itty Bitty Baby Dress. I used the bigger size since "little" Lena was 8lb. when she was born. I also enlarged it to 105% or 110%, I can't remember. I wanted her to be able to wear it for a while and since I haven't seen her in person (*gigantic sadface*) I didn't want to err on the too small side.

(See the tiny hanger? We didn't have any baby hangers and it was too small to fit on a normal one so I took one of those pants hangers you get from the cleaners, took the cardboard tube off and bent it to form an itty bitty hanger for an itty bitty dress hehe)

The dress came together pretty easily (read: no zippers on buttons to slow you down). But it did involve piping and bias tape, which I had never used before. And I still haven't used piping...I kind of just rigged the bias tape to work for that since I didn't have any on hand.

I untied the straps for a picture so you can see what the straps look like.

I also added an itty bitty tag so you could tell which was the front and which was the back (you might be able to see it better if you click on the picture to enlarge it). The front and back patterns are identical, so it wouldn't really matter except I put all of the seams for the bias tape/piping on one side and I wanted that to be the back.

Her Mommy and Daddy were sweet enough to take a picture of her wearing it for the first time!

I'm glad it's a little big, maybe she'll still be able to wear it when I visit next month! Now for a few more baby pictures because I'm a proud aunt : )

the happy family

It seems like whenever she is awake, she's looking around at everything. Especially in the top right picture, haha! My sister-in-law said she sat like that for a few minutes! I seriously can't wait to visit! A big thanks to everybody who's been snapping pictures and sharing them, I love seeing them.

If you have a baby girl or are related to one or remotely know one, I would really suggest this dress. The pattern was easy to follow, I finished it in an afternoon, and it doesn't require a ton of fabric since it's itty bitty. And it's tiny and cute - does anyone else notice that the tinier something is the cuter it is?

The last few days

Wow, creative title. You'll have to excuse that, I just ran 6 1/2 miles and I guess I lost my creativity somewhere along the way. I feel like I have a bunch of stuff to share so instead of doing a few different posts I thought I'd just cram a bunch of stuff into one, so here goes.

I had lots o' fun with my sister here. We went down to the coastal path one day to check out the seals and the view and such.

And since I showed a silly picture of her last week, I thought it was only fair that I show you how never to pose for a picture with a tree.

Do the opposite of that pose and you should have a stellar picture! We also drove around after sunset to look at houses and beachy ocean stuff.

Nevermind the crazy disheveled hair, I didn't think ahead to picture time when we left the house.

Aaaand some big news....I'm an aunt for the first time! My sis-in-law had her baby on Monday and we are so excited! We waited 9 long months to find out that it's a girl! (Honestly I think everyone else was more impatient to find out the gender than the parents...or maybe that was just me, haha) I can't wait to go visit, I wish I could go see them right now! In fact, I was so excited I may or may not have made the cutest little gift for her today. : ) I'll share pictures after she gets it...wouldn't want to ruin the surprise!

The last thing I'll squish into this little bit of everything post is that I just reached 50 followers! Back in the day when I had less than 5 I never thought I'd see this day. So thank you for reading!! I may try to do a little something special to celebrate : ) Hope everybody is having a great week so far!

Clay - not my favorite medium

So my sis is visiting this week. Yay!

(Hopefully she'll still read my blog after I posted the picture she told me to delete...love you sis!) I thought it would be fun to try something new.

 from one of my Pinterest boards: link

Aren't those cool? Yeah, and didn't seem too hard so I picked up some clay at the craft store. Weellll have you ever used this stuff? Here are the detailed instructions:

Really, Sculpey?? That's all you can give me? How about a 6th line or something. No tips on making the shape or what to do when your clay starts smoking in the oven? Since I know absolutely nothing about clay I got two little packages. I thought that should be enough for a few little bowl plates...wrongo.

And we used hot glue sticks to roll it out...real professional-like. What? I didn't want to stain my nice bamboo rolling pin.

Not the best method, in case you're wondering. Also, you should probably use one package per dish unless you want your dish to be somewhere between cardstock thickness and 1/4". After lots and lots of futile rolling, it was time to cut out our dishes.

I knew there was a reason I kept those tiny plastic swords.  They worked like a charm (it's about time something worked right with this project)!

I had this idea to use a toothbrush holder I found in the bathroom to give it some texture.

My practice pieces turned out pretty cool...not so much on the actual dish.

Time to cook these things! We put them on oven-safe bowls so they would curve up on the edges.

We'll gloss over the part where there was a funky smell coming from the oven and perhaps a tiny bit of smoke coming off the clay. Apparently I didn't have the cooking time exactly right.

Looks like they didn't exactly turn out perfectly.

Oh well.

We still had the pearly clay to work with! Let's get this disaster over with Yay! I went for a mini tree that would hold my hair ties. My sis went for her initials and a flower. I had to hold mine up with thread because it wasn't exactly structurally sound before I baked it.

Andrea's turned out well...

Mine, not so much...this is what I saw when I opened the oven to stick Andrea's in.

I thought maybe I could fix it, but turns out I definitely couldn't.

Oh well, still fun to spend time with my sis and learn that I much prefer sewing to sculpting! More fun from our visit coming this week : )