Shaking my Spoon

Vintage Little Girls Dresses Completed!

Yep, they’ll have grown out of them by New Years.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I’ve been looking forward to making something for my nieces, so I got in gear this weekend and whipped up this little number to bring with me to our family get-together. The girls are at a perfect age where they love to dress up, and still like the cute and pretty styles. I figure I have a couple more years, and then I’ll have to wait until they are through their teen years. ha!

Thanks to Lauren for raiding her Grandmother’s pattern stash to find this…

I had Tara try it out this weekend. A bit big in the shoulders but at least there’s room to grow into!

Buttercup in Action

Kristin and I waiting for the TTC with our friends at Nuit Blanche 2009.

Something I’ve been listening to lately:

Dress #2

Simplicity # 2886

I’m a lot happier with this dress than the last one.

The lines on the bodice are much better because it’s lined rather than having facings. I managed to use left over fabric from the dress for the lining and saved myself the expense of buying extra material.

 I also preferred doing the pleats instead of gathering. It took longer to get it precise, and I still think I didn’t make them straight enough. The skirt kinda billows and I’m afraid that people might think it’s a maternity dress if I wear it. You know, women of a certain age wearing an empire waist is always a recipe for embarrassment.

Here is the finished product on “mini-me”. It’s tighter on the mini-me than on me so I need to rename the dress form to something more appropriate. All suggestions are welcome!

Autumn

This is my cat Autumn. It’s really hard to take pictures of her that don’t turn out blurry or with major red eye because she’s so dark. Plus, she always looks ticked off unless she wants something.

Anyway, she’s up for all of you who come over to our house and never see her. Really, I do have a cat.

Pink Snowmen

This afternoon I had my nieces, Aislinn and Tara over to bake some Christmas Sugar Cookies. We all agree that stirring is very hard work. But is well rewarded by a good squishing of the fingers in a big bin of flour (or using the dough as playdough).

 Sugar Cookies (from my mom’s recipe box):

1 Cup Shortening

1 Cup Sugar

2 Eggs

2 tsp Vanilla

2 1/2 Cups Flour

1 tsp Baking Soda

2 tsp Cream of Tartar

1 tsp Salt

Cream together shortening and sugar. Stir in eggs and vanilla. In a separate bowl combine flour, soda, tartar and salt. Mix together wet with dry, roll out on floured surface and cut into shapes. Bake 375F 8-10 minutes.

  I usually decorate my sugar cookies with a few sprinkles but in our case, today we made up a glaze that I grabbed off the internet and had fun “colouring in” the shapes. Somehow the red and green for Christmas ended up pink and green.   

When we were finished we crashed on the couch and watched Christmas movies.