Birthday Recap

Well I've been desperately trying to catch up on dishes and more dishes housework, so I haven't done much crafting or sewing in the past week. I thought I'd give you the birthday recap I said I would. First of all, it was great. My family (especially Hubs) and friends made me feel so blessed and it was just an all around enjoyable day!

I opened some presents before we went to dinner. Hubs was smart and looked at my Pinterest boards for ideas. He saw a necklace, but unfortunately the link didn't work. So he looked on Etsy until he found the exact necklace! How great is he?? I was totally surprised and excited! I won't detail everything I got, but lets just say everybody must know me really well because I LOVED everything!

Note to self: must use flash in PF Changs. We got the waitress to take a picture, and silly me didn't check before we left to make sure it was a good one. It looks ok in black and white, but you should see the original orange version haha.

After PF Changs we walked around the outdoor shopping center and made a few stops. We hardly ever go into Macy's, but we were looking for a bathroom so we went in and I found a dress perfect for the Air Force ball this fall. On clearance. In my size. Happy Birthday to me!

Thanks to all of my family for making me feel so special and loved. And especially thanks to Hubs for taking me out and having a fun night even though he had a project due and ended up staying up late to finish.

Coming up sometime soonish on the blog:

• Post about the shirt that went horribly wrong and hopefully my solution to salvage it...I haven't exactly come up with the solution part yet
• I'm going to attempt to recover an old jewelry box with mod podge and fabric
• Possibly probably some baby item since I'm going to visit my niece in August

I hope everybody is having a good week so far!

Pillowcase dress for baby

Guess I'm on a little bit of a baby clothes making kick. I decided to make a top similar to a pillowcase dress for myself, got halfway through and decided to make a pillowcase dress for a friend at church who's having a baby girl soon. Too bad my top won't be able to compare in cuteness since it's hard to beat a tiny dress with a bow like this.

I think I may like this one even better than the last baby dress I made. And it's even easier! (I just hope it fits...I didn't exactly use a pattern and didn't have any baby clothes to compare it to : / ) I looked around a little bit at patterns/tutorials for these, but wasn't seeing exactly what I was planning on doing so I basically threw everything out the window and just did my own thing.

Here's what I did, I'll update the post after baby gets to try it on and tweak the dimensions if I need to. Cut 2 rectangles 10"x15" (I would suggest cutting more like 12"x15" because mine looked really tiny). Cut curves out for armholes; I used this template. I scooted the template down about an inch from the top, like this:

Then I sewed the two rectangles together on the edges (right sides together). Hem the bottom; I folded the edge up 1/2" then up another 1/2".

I used this tutorial at Prudent Baby for finishing the armholes with bias tape. I think it really took the dress up a notch as far as looking more professional. And made me wish I was doing that on the shirt I started for myself haha.

For the top you need a tube to feed the ribbon or fabric tie through. I folded the edge under 1/4" then down about 1" and sewed along the edge. Kind of like the picture below.

Then you just feed your ribbon through and tie it in a bow.

Then say "aww that is so cute!' in a little baby voice. Oh wait, I guess you don't have to do that part, but I'm pretty sure that's what I did. : ) I was taking pictures of the dress for the blog, and you can really only take so many pictures of a dress hanging on a hanger. Since I don't have any spare newborns laying around I had to rope Fred into trying it on.

Sorry Fred.

I have to say, it does look pretty good, even on a monkey. Which means it should be even cuter on a little baby girl (assuming she can fit...). Stay tuned for possible pattern updates. The concept of the dress is really simple though, so you can just adjust the dimensions based on the size of the girl.

Have a great weekend!

Get Free Stuff

Wanna know how to get free stuff? Just be born. Seriously. I guess I've been gradually signing up for emails for different restaurants and stores and this year it just hit me how many free things you can get. If you aren't taking advantage of this, you definitely should. I could've eaten out for free my whole birthday week if we lived near any of these places. (Unfortunately our little town doesn't have about 75% of the places that sent me stuff, so I'll have to wait until next year.)

I thought I'd give you a quick run-down of who's giving what for birthdays. No one is sponsoring this post, I just wanted to share the birthday love! Also, to avoid getting a bunch of unwanted email I have a separate account that I always list when sites ask for my email. I still check it regularly, but I can usually delete most emails.

• Sunglass Hut - $20 in store coupon (no minimum purchase! And before you say there's nothing in that store under $20 think holders and cleaning kits.)
• Moes - free entree 
• Qdoba - buy one get one free
• Firehouse Subs - free medium sub
• Starbucks - free drink (I think this is because I registered my Starbucks card...which was also free from my bank hehe)
• Red Robin - free burger
• Cold Stone - buy one get one free (pretty sure this one used to be totally free, but oh well)
• Ihop - free Rooty Tooty Fresh n' Fruity
• World Market - $10 (no minimum purchase! I got a mug, a ring holder, and some chocolates and only spent 16 cents!)

I'm sure that there are others, but I was pretty excited about all of these! Next year I'm going to eat well (assuming the Air Force moves us somewhere that has this stuff)!  Tonight Hubs and I are going out to PF Changs to celebrate, compliments of my aunt : ) I'll try to take a few pictures at dinner (and of the goodies my family sent!) to post later. Have you found any other great birthday deals?