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These gals will be up in the shop in notecard form in a few weeks. I really get a kick setting these scenes up. I wish I had the time and patience to do little animations with the dolls. It was so fun making their coordinating outfits and knitting tiny sweater vests. I'd love to do a back to school set up with them too with little backpacks and berets and blazers. Oh geez, now I think I need to do that.
Quilting Bee
Knitting Club
Safely on the ground because her hair's not quite sturdy enough for flight yet.
I'm thinking about Sugarplum Fairy Christmas cards this year. That'd be cute right? This gal is floating around in the craft room waiting for her partner Gum-Drop to be done at the salon.
Speaking of waiting, this pile is waiting to become a couple of baby quilts but I'm not inspired. Seen any cute baby quilts lately?
Oops, sorry blog. Sometimes time just flies like that. What can you do. How about to make up for it I'll try to post every day for a while. So I was hoping I'd have something super fun to show & tell for my time away but all I've got is a botched-to-hell project that Tim and I spent all our free time last week on. The botching was on my end, not on Mr. Workshop's so I don't know how happy he will be to read this post which is me lining up his next project...
Oscar and I found this doll cradle in a barn sale and decided that he and daddy would like to fix it up. I'm thinking it'd look great in this crib's perfect purple. Or maybe a gray blue. That'd be so pretty! I've got a soft spot for doll crib's these days. Phoebe's room already has two and there are another two in the basement waiting for fix up. Poor girl has the smallest room in the house and I'm cramming it full of toe-stubbing stuff.
All that time Tim spent in the workroom didn't go to total waste though, it inspired him to finally take the camera down there and document the very cool workshop the previous owner of our house left intact for us. All the pics are here on his flickr. This room has everything you'd ever need (minus the scary 1950s chemicals!). Makes me wish they'd left the entire basement, and maybe the attic, full of treasures too.
I really *really* enjoyed this "internet miniseries event" from Joss Whedon. Check it out now if you're interested b/c I think it's only up til tomorrow night.
I've blasted up the a/c and am in denial. I've done my time this morning on the surface of the sun watching Oscar splash around at swimming lessons. Now I've handed him off to the young peppy babysitter who doesn't seem to wilt in the heat as I do and I'm settling in for some doll-sized knitting. I'm working on a set of notecards for the shop. We're trying to get some non-pattern stuff in there. Mix it up!
Check out our new Rosa ribbon.. Goldilocks! I love it! Thanks Rosa for making such super cute ribbon for me to hoard :)
While I'm on the topic of supplies indulge me while I do a little bitching about my fabric stash will ya. I have two ginormous closets full of fabric, two!, and still I cannot put together a simple little patchwork without a mountain of effort. All my pieces are too small or the color is okay but the scale is wrong. Too many things on white backgrounds. Too many novelty prints. Too much japanese fabric that doesn't work for anything (hello storybook prints). Too many scraps of vintage fabric that are too scrappy to make anything from. Not enough stripes and dots. Not enough basic florals. And somehow I can never find just that right green. Or gold. Or pink. Or lavender I'm looking for. I feel like I spend a ton of money on fabric but maybe I don't spend enough. I need to live near a quilt shop so I can fill those little here and there needs on the quick instead of making the biannual trek to the stitches and stuffing and hope that'll get me through. No, I need a fabric store to sponsor me! And send me giant boxes of samples every month. Oh, wouldn't that be heaven. Or maybe I need to just move into a fabric shop. Some giant emporium with stacks to the ceiling of every print imaginable. Somehow I imagine I'd still have quilters' block when it came to picking my patchwork pieces. Or maybe I need to just take a day to sort my stash by color so I can flippin find anything. Anyway, here's what I came up with. I just picked one color to go with, blue, and then it made things a little easier.
Ok. I drew up the instructions for the fairy dress-up dress. They're a little slapdash but should do the trick. I was hoping to make another for Phoebe and was planning to draw up the instructions as I went. Unfortunately I didn't have any good coordinating fabrics on hand to go with my new pink cotton lawn print (also from sale aisle at JoAnns) so I had to just draw this up by memory. Hope it works! Nothing is very exact. I figured it's dress up, and it's a pullover apron deal so it doesn't need to be exactly the right size and will last a few years before it's outgrown. And I didn't want to finish any edges so that's why it was put together the way it was.. finishing-free. But you're lucky, Tim saved you. He insists my handwriting is illegible so he went through and typed up all my handwritten instructions. So now it's fancy! Here it is. Here's the original in case you're wondering what the heck I'm talking about.
The super busy holiday weekend sort of shook me out of my gardening obsession phase. That, and the hail that came through and knocked off half my new flowers petals. hmpf. Before I'd leveled out I was getting very into the idea of an almost magical garden, you know the kind that glowed in the evening, smelled amazing and was full of perfectly matched sparkling purples and blues. (it's sort of getting there) Now that I've come to my senses I just hope I can keep these plants alive and in one piece until Fall. But back in the throes of gardening excitement I dragged the family to American Science & Surplus in search of some sort of industrial looking windmill-y like object that I could put in the garden as the perfect little cool modern fairy type of thing. Yeah, didn't really find anything like that but I did find these cool glass fruits. I can't resist a bauble. It's the sort of thing the 10 year old Hillary would have gone crazy for. I think I'm going to start packing these things up in little time capsule packages for Phoebe to open as she gets older. How excited would I have been if one Summer day when I was really bored, my mom whipped out a box with old paper dolls, tiny little re-ment sets & plastic raspberries in it!
