star wars quilt color scheme

For Christmas I will be making a quilt for the girls, and for a while I was dragging my butt when it came to choosing fabrics. Picking out colors that I like, and that go together, and wondering if I will like them when they come in the mail/if they even look like they do on the computer screen, or worrying that I will be "over them" by the time I make the quilt....it's all very stressful. Lol.

The star wars fabrics were already here, but I wanted solids to go with them. It took a while for me to decide on these colors, but I finally did it....so hopefully I like them. Lol.

 

 

 

 

 

It's going to be a very girly star wars quilt! I'm really liking peach right now, and I like how it looks with yellow and gray/blue. Clover is all about the pink, and I knew there needed to be pink in the quilt, but I couldn't bear the idea of Barbie pink soiling the awesomeness of the Star Wars quilt.  Plus, I have to look at it all the time. Peach seemed like a good compromise.

 

My plan is to do a simple triangle quilt top of some sort, half square triangles maybe. And scraps thrown together haphazardly at the last minute will likely make up the back. I've got a "full" sized cotton batting that I picked up for 50% off a while ago (the only way I can afford cotton batting!) waiting to be used. 

 

Clover knows that I'm making them a quilt, and even hovered around while I was picking out fabric, so she is expecting something to come in the mail. Unfortunately I think she expects it all to arrive finished and ready to use  : s

 

My hope is that we can use the quilt for our "circle time" in the morning, snuggling on the couch, and sitting outside reading in the spring. Maybe by then Violet won't only want to run away from me every time I take her outside. Sometimes mothering is really exhausting. 

 

collage advent tree

Clover has that 3 year old sense of time, where her whole life up to this point is "yesterday" and everything that is coming up is happening tomorrow. After several questions about whether she could go to bed so Christmas could come over, and if Christmas is here yet...yet....yet,  I decided that a visual representation of the passage of time was in order. 

I wanted to use things we had here, so we came up with this tree. It's a collage of green paper, peppered with gold reward stars from a preschool book, and dotted with ornaments  made of tinfoil. Clover wants to glue paper circles onto the spaces for each day.

I stuck a piece of cardboard from a box of diapers on the back, added some foil, stabbed holes in it with a knitting needle, and strung it up with floral wire.

The first three minutes of this project with my little ladies was really fun. After that it became more of an endurance test for how long any of us could go without either screaming, crying, or throwing something. Thankfully most of my sarcastic comments went right over Violet's head....When I congratulated her on her huge mess from throwing everything on the floor, or thanked her for doing something naughty, she just replied with a "thank you".

Poor Clover has been suffering through a post-holiday cold. She's got a red snot irritation mustache and a scratchy teenage boy voice. Hopefully the illness vacates soon. It hasn't slowed her down much, but we're all getting testy. Her not feeling well, the endless torrent of snot and coughing, Violet's broken leg, holiday fatigue, and not enough sleep for all of us makes for a volatile household. Yikes. 

How do you like that background blur? Tim got me a very early birthday gift over the cyber sale weekend (actually I ordered it myself, but I'm the only one who knew what I wanted). My birthday is on Jan 1st, but I was looking to snag a deal on a camera lens during all the sales. Now I can use my new Pentax 50mm/1.8 prime lens to take nice pictures over the holiday!

Star Wars rebel pilot skirt

Clover was a bit jealous of Violet's sweet Star Wars cast. And when I muttered something about "maybe mommy will put some Star Wars fabric in your next skirt" to make her feel better, she latched on to that statement and reminded me of it several times an hour.  "Is my Star Wars skirt done?" 

....No, Clover...I haven't started it yet!

(FYI, Clover put together the ensemble in these photos, including the headband with flowers sticking straight out of her forehead. )

 

Her tactics worked, and soon I was dragging out fabric to get a skirt made with. She really needed another skirt anyway because she lives in a (still unphotographed!) big purple skirt I made for her with some of my big purple Target bed sheet. 

In her words she looks like a "disney princess" in her "big huge skirt", and nothing else shall do.

She chose the reddish orange fabric from my stash, and I thought it looked like the color of the rebel pilot suits in Star Wars..... Rebel pilot princess!  To amuse myself, I added some diagonal pintucks to the front of the skirt.

Source: allposters.com via Debbie on Pinterest

It's a very full skirt (per her requirements), and maxi length (also her requirements), with large pockets to carry her blasters and light sabers (and dolls and jewelery). I sewed the pockets onto separate side panels from the main front and back panels so that the edges of the pockets would be encased in the side seams. If anyone has ever made treasure pocket pants from Figgy's, it was like the technique from that pattern.

The lighting was not ideal for getting photos taken, with the mid day sun glaring on us, but it needed to be done before she wore the skirt any more and trashed it somehow. Thankfully, she loves it.

Now I just need to decide on some other fabrics to go with the rest of the Star Wars fabric, and make the kids a quilt for Christmas!

broken leg, unexpected craft

We finally discovered on Tuesday what was ailing our girl from her accident last Friday. She still wasn't walking on Tues, and I was worried despite the urgent care reassurance that she would be fine. One super traumatic orthopedist visit later (for violet AND mommy), and Violet is doing much better in her tiny pink cast. 

She broke her tibia (shinbone?), but not enough to break the bone open to cause bruising and swelling. There is a diagonal crack along the bone. 

Adrianna from crafterhours told me about how she mod podged fabric onto her daughter's cast

and I immediately knew that Violet would be getting her cast decorated. I've been planning to get some Star Wars fabric at joanns to make a quilt for the kids for Christmas, and on Thursday they had a one day sale for 50% off all licensed fabrics. 

So we trooped out there and chose a couple of prints and a jar of glossy mod podge. 

 Seriously, unless I'm getting fabric there I can't find anything easily. There is something horribly unintuitive about this Joanns. It's a wonderful, huge building with lots of light and space, but it took me 20 minutes of running around with cranky kids to find my stupid mod podge. Clover was going ballistic over all of the many many....MANY displays of jewelery and sparkly beads, and couldn't handle it if I didn't stop to gaze upon every jewel that caught her eye. "Mama! You didn't see it!!! Mama!!"

We gathered in the living room to decorate Violet's cast. She picked out a few sections from this great vintage looking print, and I globbed them on with copious amounts of mod podge and a big fat paintbrush. Clover helped me spread it around with a little watercolor brush. Once it was on I stared at her leg and thought "this might have been stupid. she isn't going to keep still until it dries". Violet is now very active again with her leg stabilized.....

So I brought out the hair dryer and got it dry enough to not goop all over everything she touched. She loves it. Clover loves it too. But like in the "I like it so I'm super jealous of it" kind of way. So I made mention of incorporating some Star Wars into the next skirt I make her. Now she is pestering me about it. She is obsessed with this maxi skirt I made her (and never photographed or posted about....oops) because it's really full and apparently she feels like a "disney princess" in it. I've had to forcefully take it away from her for washing, so I think it's time to add a second one into the mix. 

Our other wardrobe issue is that Violet's pants pretty much consist of leggings and skinny jeans, which are really difficult/impossible to get on and off with her cast. I've got her wearing Clover's pajamas right now. What would be great in cold weather is having loose knit cotton pants with drawstrings in the ankles so I can cinch them up and keep the drafts out when we're outside. I'm bemoaning not having the supplies laying around here to get a couple of pairs made! 

nothing to see here...

Life has been moving on here at the breakneck, yet snail's pace that parenting small kids offers you. 

 The only "project" that I really have to speak of right now is just cutting up some scraps for a long term quilt project. I got the idea from Jessica's x&+ quilt

I've gotten some cutting done, and all of two blocks put together. Is everyone painfully slow and awful at cutting squares and rectangles?.....

Poor little Violet had an unfortunate injury at the playground on Friday while riding down a very narrow slide in my lap. Her shoe caught the side of the slide and got stuck, yanking her foot and knee back at a bad angle. She was really hysterical, and refused to even try standing afterwards.

Our girl is normally nonstop, running around, getting into everything, climbing, dancing, but she still refuses to even set her foot on the floor even when she's sitting down. We took her to urgent care, but at that point we weren't even sure which part of her leg was bothering her since she wouldn't tell us, and nothing looked bruised or swollen. It wasn't until after we got home from urgent care that she told us it was her foot, when before we thought it might be her knee. If she doesn't start trying to walk tomorrow, I'm anticipating a trip to an orthopedist. Poor little thing : ( 

She is otherwise in good spirits, but it's really odd not having her running around constantly.  Normally, any injury she gets only keeps her down for a second or two of loud crying and cuddles from mommy or daddy, and then she's off running again.

We are nearing the end of a nice three day weekend. All the girls love it when our man is home. 

Normally I'm a bit of a scrooge when it comes to unfurling the Christmas spirit until after Thanksgiving, but this year something has gotten into me. I've got this urge to start playing (slightly depressing/indie) Christmas music and decorate. I'm terrible at seasonal decorating, but I really want to get something done to amp up the magic around here this year. I'm thinking that if I confine myself to a specific style/color palette, a couple of crafts, and predetermined places I want to decorate, I might have a chance. 

life dump

poor, poor blog. neglected! abandoned! at least in blog years....

life here has continued to go on, despite the total lack of posting last week. 

first off, we survived hurricane Sandy.....not much happened with that, thankfully

It didn't take long before I started to feel trapped and crazed when we were waiting for the storm to really hit. It had been raining and raining and raining, and I figured I ought to take the kids out to play before all hell broke loose. They lasted about three minutes, which is decidedly less time than it took me to get them ready to go out

I grabbed some blank butterfly masks from Target and the girls each decorated their own. Turns out they are horribly designed, and all of us were getting our eyes poked out by the masks when we put them on. But if you put them on upside down, they fit fine! They reminded me of Mexican wrestlers with their flipped butterfly masks. 

 

There was storm trooper pumpkin carving

Then on Halloween I got really scary with my bentonite clay pore cleansing mask, and we ate lunch by candle light. 

 

We braved some horrible  traffic and went out to Dogfish head alehouse on Halloween evening. The girls were all dressed up in their costumes, and we had a great time (there was delicious imperial stout involved). Fried potatoes were abundant, decorations were all around, and Clover got her face painted. 

 

Clover continued to wear her costume the day after Halloween, and was forcibly removed from it the next. Her hat was a very rushed semi-fail of a knitting attempt. It came out too floppy, and I was so out of time (15 minutes before we were supposed to leave) to make buns to attach to it that I flipped up the earflaps and sewed them onto the hat, stuffing them with socks. 

 

We played in the leaves once they got crunchy again.

 

I did housework in a set of butterfly wings

 

And the girls were hopelessly adorable as usual.