Z Shoes

I know what you are going to say...
"Shannon, you already tried making baby shoes and you failed miserably."
Well thanks for your confidence, but I am at it again. This time, instead of stressing myself out by trying to make a retail-quality product, I made a pair of boots just for Z. Its a lot less stressful making stuff when you know its for your own child. So what if there are 20 little pieces of thread sticking out of the sides? So what if its uneven? Nobody will notice, and nobody cares. Its great! I had a pair of boots for her that I absolutely loved but the dog ate one of them (anybody want a dog?), so I cut the other one apart and made a pattern out of it. Heres a picture of some of the pieces laid out before I sewed them together.

I used purple felt for the outside and white fleece for the inside. The felt was a bad idea. It has already started pilling all over the place, so Im making another pair out of canvas.

This is looking down into the shoe as I stitched the elastic together so she couldn't pull them off.

And finally, customized baby boots. I put "Z" on the front of both, because really why shouldn't she have super hero shoes? Actually it was originally to cover up a sewing flaw, but I love it!

Hats for the lady

A dear friend of mine is about to get married so a bachelorette party was in order. She placed many intolerable restrictions on us though, such as no inappropriate images on a cake, no male dancers, no pornographic hats. I mean, what does that leave us with? How are we supposed to embarrass the bride-to-be?!! So I did some research and found inspiration in the world of high fashion hats. They can be stunningly embarrassing without even a hint at inappropriate body parts. Most are lovely and ridiculous at the same time. Here is one  found on Style Redux that inspired my design.

I grabbed some tulle fabric from the cloth store, some cheesy fake flowers from Michaels,

 and with a needle and thread put together one of my favorite wearable creations. It has a clip underneath so you can attach it to any part of your hair. I prefer the silliness of having it sit slightly over your forehead. Take a look...

And here it is on the lovely brides head on the night of her party. She had it clipped to a green sparkle-covered headband.

Fabulous!

What happened to the holidays?

Its already the end of January and I haven't managed to find the time or motivation to post my holiday projects. What has the world come to?!

My absolute favorite would have to be the Christmas stockings that I made using a pattern by Alicia Paulson from her book, 'Stitched in Time'. Of course I have no photos so it will have to wait for another day. I did manage to take some pictures of a cake I put together for our Christmas dinner. We hadn't bought anything to decorate it with so I scrounged around and managed to put together this snowy scene using powdered sugar, graham cracker crumbs, crushed oreos, and grated chocolate. The little blobs are supposed to be snowmen representing everyone that came to dinner that night. The poo looking blobs towards the left were all of my mothers dogs and cats. It was horribly sweet and so dense you had to lean on the knife just to cut through the 4 layers of cake and 4 layers of fudge filling. Oy (and merry christmas).

The recipe for the cake and the fudge icing came from the book '1 mix, 100 cakes' by Christine France. I tried finding a link for this book, but maybe it has been discontinued?

By the way, the terrariums are all still alive, yay! The only thing that isn't doing well is the live moss in the opened containers. The moss in the enclosed terrariums are so happy and super green, but the open-air ones are looking like I might be pulling them out soon. So sad.