The Christmas Project

After days of grey, cloudy, rainy/snowy gloom, some beautiful

sunshine today. So I took some pictures on the deck. The fading

sunlight was deceptively warm at first, viewed from inside the

house, and I quickly remembered that summer was well and

truly gone as I stood shivering outdoors in stockinged feet with

my camera. Need shoes now, I made a mental note.

And a jacket. And mittens.

But here are some pre-reveal photos of the big Christmas project.

It's made up of many, many parts, and I will try and do a post each

week leading up to Christmas, of the parts I have completed. All I

can say right now is that it is colorful. Very colorful. There's even pink.

Operation Christmas Child Dolls

Earlier this week I finished these two ballerina dolls for our 

Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes. We usually buy softies 

or dolls for our boxes but this year, good dolls were hard to find. 

So they had to be made. Didn't have muslin or fleece in a suitable 

color in the house so I used felt. Not my favorite material for 

machine-sewing, especially when there is so much turning-out to 

do but it worked. Didn't have a pattern so the Yellow Damsel is 

the experimental prototype. She had a few glitches, like weird hair 

and wavy arms so the Rainbow Maiden is the slightly improved version.

Their clothes and shoes are removable 

but they don't stand up by themselves very well.

Here they are working out in ballet class together:

First, stretching

Then some barrework

Splits 

and a fancy finish.  

The dollies leave for better homes in late November when 

we drop off the shoeboxes. Emily and Jenna are sad to say 

goodbye and have asked for dolls for themselves for Christmas. 

I saved the final pattern so I can make more, just in case. 

Would anyone like to adopt a dolly? I am not going to start 

and etsy shop anytime soon, while the girls are still small 

but I'd consider doing the odd request every now and then. 

Email me if you are interested! 

Emily's Halloween Costume

Halloween has come and gone and Emily got to go trick-or-treating 

in costume after all. And now that all the doorbell-ringing and 

pumpkin decorating are over, I am finally sitting down to post 

pictures of that elusive dress Emily asked for. Here's the first 

picture just to prepare you for the color it is. 

We started out with this

and ended up with this.

Drats, I should have ironed the skirt. Mumble..mumble......mumble......

But I must say it turned out better than I'd expected. I was planning to 

sew her a fabric tiara but surrendered at the last minute and braided 

together remnants from the dress to make her that 

headband/pretend-garland.

In case anyone is wondering - er, what is she supposed to be? 

Tamborine dancer? Crown-less princess? Hippie?

A ballerina. 

But not the tutu kind. People just don't go out in the dark 

in tights and a tulle belt in October in this part of the world. 

That's hypothermia waiting to happen. 

So Emily got fleece. And long sleeves. And a semi-circular skirt. 

The skirt is the main thing- at the very least it had to twirl properly. 

And a fleece skirt, while warm, is not fancy, and therefore not fun. 

So it had to have floaty shimmery layers. Not organza, which would 

have been easier to work with. Chiffon. With sparkles. And satin in 

the bodice to make it princessy. Thank goodness for a serger.

But I like how it turned out, the skirt especially. It has nice movement 

to it, even for fleece. A full circular skirt would have been spectacular 

but it would have also been too heavy for a little girl. 

The assymetrical layers in the skirt were fun to do, especially 

considering that I carelessly bought too little fabric 

to do it the easy way.  

The best part of this? If last year's princess costume was anything 

to go by, Emily will probably wear this over and over again 

throughout the year. All that mileage is good for a dress 

with that much pink in it.

How to Make Chocolate Cupcake Toppers

I experimented with making these little white chocolate Maisys 

this week for Jenna's birthday cupcakes. Had I been able to find 

these in the store, I would have bought them and saved myself the 

(what I thought was) trouble of making them, but Maisy -themed 

anything is hard to come by in this part of the world. So I had to 

make them, and they were so easy that I thought I'd post a tutorial 

so anyone who wanted to custom-make odd-themed edible characters 

might be convinced they were easy enough to do.

You will need:

• White chocolate
  
• Small plastic bags - doesn't matter if they have ziptops or not
  
• Toothpicks
  
• Wax paper (not in picture, sorry!)
  
• Food coloring
  
• Microwave oven
  
• Scissors
  
• Drawing or picture you want to turn into edible decoration
  

Step 1:

• Find a picture you want to make edible decoration out of.
  
• Or draw one (the heart and tree on the left are examples) on paper.
  

Step 2:

• Place a sheet of wax paper over it, large enough to cover the entire picture.
  

Step 3:

• Heat white chocolate in a microwave-safe bowl in the microwave oven 30 seconds at a time until just melted, stirring occasionally.
  
• Add food coloring to desired color. I find it useful to use a toothpick to add tiny amounts of coloring at a time because a whole drop is too much. Stir to mix well.
  
• Transfer tinted white chocolate to small plastic bag and snip a tiny corner off as shown. 
  

Step 4:

• Squeeze all the white chocolate towards that corner of the bag and squeeze out as much air as possible through the tiny hole.
  
• Pipe an outline of white chocolate on the wax paper, using the outline of the picture underneath as a guide. If the chocolate hardens as you work, put the bag in the microwave oven for 10 seconds at a time to soften it. 
  

Step 5:

• If you are using a second color, repeat Step 3 and use the new color to fill in the details within the outline. Try not to leave gaps between the filling and the outline, unless you are planning to do a lacy/filigree sort of design like with the heart:
  

Step 6:

• Keep filling in the space within the outline with more white chocolate, tinting it as you need to. Maisy is largely white, so I just used more of the earlier white chocolate to fill her in. I also snipped the original hole a little bigger to allow faster flow of chocolate as I squeezed the bag. It doesn't matter if the chocolate is lumpy within the outline 
  

because you can use a toothpick to "stir" it and smooth it out.

Step 7:

• Add final details. I used regular semisweet chocolate chips (melted) for Maisy's eyes, nose and belly-button, rather than tint white chocolate brown. 
  

Step 8:

• Add a "stake" at the bottom of your decorations to enable it to be pushed into the cake. This is as simple as piping a rectangular shape that is touching the bottom part of the figures.
  

Step 9:

• Let dry half an hour.
  
• Gently peel the wax paper away from the figures and stick them into your cake.
  
• I used a star nozzle to pipe frosting on the tops of the cupcakes before sticking the edible figures in. The frosting was only about a quarter inch deep but with the "stake" inserted partway into the cake itself, the figures stood quite well without toppling over.
  

Enjoy!

P.S. Sorry this post isn't about Emily's Halloween costume. It's finished but yesterday we celebrated Jenna's birthday and today we were busy with the trick-or-treaters and I didn't get round to sorting through the many pictures Dave took of her in it. Will post on it tomorrow!

Still Sidetracked

3 days to Halloween and I am still doing Other Stuff. 

A friend is going through a difficult time now with some family 

changes, including a challenging baby situation, so I thought I'd 

stop working on Emily's costume midway and put together a 

package of stuff for her. Mostly food - tea, hot chocolate, chocolate 

and other hopefully healthy snacks. 

But also a crystal necklace for her

and one or two of these fleece blankets for her little one. 

This stack of blankets would have been twice as high had I not 

run out of woolly nylon. It was just as well, since I shouldn't have 

been serging fleece blankets by the tens when Emily's sad outfit 

was being pointedly ignored. 

Making the jewellery was also a nice diversion because I hadn't 

indulged in that particular pastime for about 5 years. But it was 

slow going, since I was so rusty. That, and I'm still using the 

old pliers from the home fix-it kit lying around the house.

I did work a bit on the costume today, though. 

Its pinkness might be getting to me, I think.

Puppet Theater

While working on Emily's halloween costume, I've been sidetracked by 

a cold, restless children (also sick) and the general need to multitask 

projects. I find that this often happens when I am ploughing through 

a "serious project" (like a garment that needs to fit) or working with 

sensitive fabrics - like chiffon that frays like no tomorrow- or anything

 cut on a bias with the potential to stretch itself out of shape. Emily's 

costume is all three. And pink, to boot. So I paused in the middle of 

making it and instead sewed this simple puppet theater for doorways 

and hallways. I ran across this idea online here and here and thought 

it would be a nice, space-saving alternative to our cardboard puppet 

stage that may not live to see the new year.

Essentially it is a yard of fabric supported by a tension rod, the sort 

that shower curtains hang on. I got mine from Walmart for $1. My 

aunt Rosalind gave me several yards of children's fabric some time 

ago and it was perfect for a colorful project like this. Just for 

decoration, I added black triangles in a row at the top to form a sort 

of banner. Even with the embellishment, it took me under half an hour. 

I also made a second, upper curtain to frame the kids' puppet shows. 

As part of my ongoing effort to use remnants rather than going fabric 

shopping again (a bit ashamed of my recent binges), I cut up an old 

blue bedsheet I got at a garage sale, and sewed on strips of yellow 

sweatshirt fabric that I'd bought by mistake earlier. It is also supposed 

to double as Jenna's personal puppet stage should Emily end up 

hogging the lower one (which she did tonight). Not the best pictures 

here because I was too impatient to wait till morning to get the nice lighting. 

The girls quite enjoyed playing with it tonight, although Kate 

did not understand that it was not meant to be pulled down 

repeatedly with a crash.

Now back to serious sewing. Halloween is 5 days away.

The Halloween costume I did NOT make

but that I badly want to own. Kathleen at Grosgrain not only sewed this 

(and corset undergarment not visible in the photo) but is also giving it 

away. Giving it away, people! Now if I win this, I don't have to work on 

Emily's Halloween costume after all. Not that I dislike sewing, I mean. 

But why sew a whole dress when I could be making bibs? 

Pick me! Pick me! Please, please, please....