Some recent projects

I worked on a couple of dresses for Kayla at quilt retreat. The little boys shirts for Connor was ready to be mailed a while ago but I never made it to the post office. I finally drove everything to the post office this morning. I am hoping that everything is large enough to wear next year since Auntie Ellen is late as usual.

Last year I bought several pieces of candy cane fabric. I was just waiting for the right pattern. I had been looking at the Portabellopixie pattern "Claire" and wanted it badly. My obstacle is that the patterns are expensive, about $16 then you need to add shipping on top of that. You won't find this at Joann's or Hancock Fabrics. It came to me one day that the candy cane fabric would be perfect for this and bit the bullet and ordered the pattern. The little Santa elf is from Planet Applique. It's a cute little applique. My only issue is that there was about 33 thread changes with this design. I think the design took almost two hours to complete. I love this design though. It was worth the time to stitch it out. I will definitely make this dress again.

Over the summer, I found the cupcake fabric on clearance at the Wal-Mart store near the office. It has sparkles in it so I knew that it would be perfect for Kayla. I had most of the dress finished then decided to take this up to retreat also so I could cross it off my list. The pattern came from the website YouCanMakeThis.com Once again, I kind of shuddered when I hit the "pay" button. You get spoiled when you can buy patterns on sale for 99 cents. The indie patterns do not go on sale. I really wanted Kayla to have a little twirly dress and I didn't see anything in the Big 4 patterns books so I bought this pattern off the internet. The cupcake design is from Embroiderylibrary.com. The watermelon outfit is similar to the outfit that I posted for Mikalya.

For Connor's shirts, I found the designs off the internet for free. I wanted to add a little hammer or some other tool to the garage design but decided Connor probably didn't want a lot of decoration on his shirts. I purchased his shirts a size larger because I know that I can procrastinate and they would be too small before you know it.