Just pretend...

That I went out for milk and now I'm back. I have a lot to catch up on.

I'm doing this

Done!

I think I nailed it! When I saw the pink wig for $6 I knew it had to be. We also added a "slime"to a headband to help keep her wig on. The "slime" is a key character of the Dragonquest game...apparently. Bear was very happy with the way the costume looked, the acid test of recognition by her peers was passed with flying colours....although her music teacher thought she was Gelda or was it Zelda?.

two down, one to go

I have completed the costumes for Boo and Yum Yum... they wanted to go as their cuddlies.."Bunny" and "Ducky". It would have been a whole lot easier to just buy them a costume each...but I always have to complicate things and make more work for myself.

Bears' costume is still a WIP, to be completed very soon, hopefully by the time the Halloween tailgate starts this afternoon! The fabric glue is making me feel a little odd.

Wish me luck....

Bear wants to be this "hero" from the Dragonquest game. Apparently the game allows you to choose your own hair colour so we won't be concerned about pink hair. We have come up with a compromise regarding the skirt , it will be an apron. The chances of finding pale yellow long sleeved top and leggings are slim so we will be using white, possibly dyed with some tea.

sewing-fail

Not very productive ... I'm a slacker, what can I say! I did finish embellishing the girls dresses, Yum Yum excitedly announced "nighties"..err, yeh they do kinda look like nightgowns now that you mention it, but nope.Have now promised to sew nighties (good grief!). They do love the little brooches I stitched them- they wear them very proudly and Bear has requested one too. In other news...apparently Santa is coming. They are practicing boxing items up, pretending to be asleep, waking up and acting surprised , unwrapping presents and saying "oooh I love it Santa, thank you very very much!" They did this in turn for about an hour. Then Bear brought out a tub of Little People...and of course Santa and his reindeer are in there. Mental note- separate Santa from his Little People until December. It really IS too early isn't it. OMG, it's NOT.

slow going...

I did try to keep up with the kids wear challenge- truly I did...but I didn't make anything. Yet.

I did work on a makeover of some dresses that I bought on sale for Boo and Yum Yum last year. They are a light corduroy but a very drab colour. I could have dyed them (must remember that for next time) but instead have gone with a bit of ribbon, ric rac and then there will be a few buttons and an embroidered fabric brooch. The weather here last week was very warm, shorts weather. However this week will be rainy and soon the girls can wear their tights, boots and autumn dresses.

Apart from the sewing I'm not mentally prepared for autumn, it seems to me that the leaves are turning too early. I'd better get my camera out before I miss the best of it.

sew sew

Good ol' dad
Originally uploaded by bearbooandyumyum

I am doing Elsie Marley's sewing challenge. I am, really I am but I can't get the button to load over there on the right. My week started with a migraine and I am solo parenting this week, so day 1 was a bust. Day 2 not so sparky either but I did some cutting out - photos to come.

I did do a heap of sewing prior to our annual trip to Australia. It is winter when we go home and early August here it is hard to find suitable clothing at a suitable price to round out what they already have from last winter...so in the first half of August I made

3 pairs of flannel PJ pants
3 pairs of sweatpants
2 skirts for our trip to Legoland
2 pairs of jersey lined denim pull on pants

Some of these items are in my Flickr album ..but they are shots of when my children just happened to be wearing what was sewn, not good pictures of the clothes themselves- those I will try to take whilst they are at school tomorrow.

My list for the rest of this week
Alter sweatpants made for eldest-Bear, waaay too wide in the leg!
Make 3 scarves out of old favourite or never worn T shirts
Make second attempt to sew two piece swimsuits for Boo and Yum Yum to see them through the winter season
Embellish two corduroy dresses bought on sale last year, with something autumny
Make fabric hair clips- something pumpkiny
Make fabric necklaces- something halloweeny
Start on two halloween costumes, 1 duck, 1 bunny (order fabric at least)
Refashion some fine knit but hslightly damaged sweaters into something my Bear can wear.
Embellish Bear's grey velour top to cover stain...

Getting back to those skirts I made last year...

The skirts were not very exciting technically , but very quick to make! I had seen a few bandana creations in the bloggy world and was inspired to try it myself. But I am not really one for following instructions, particularly if it involves sewing two squares together. The thing is, I didn't want to do any cutting but the length of the bandana was too long for my little people. My solution was to fold the bandanas to make a layer which is almost apron-like. In order to do this the reverse fabric needs to be reasonable as it will be the top layer. Then I simply stitched the sides together up to the point where the fold was and then stitched a casing. Put in some elastic and voila...bandana skirts. For $2. Each. Three lines of stitching and some elastic.

You can see that Yum Yum's skirt , the pink one, does twist on her body so that the seams are in the middle instead of the sides. She's skinnier than Boo so I think that is why that happens. I was thinking that it would look cute at the back if there was a large dark blue bow attached to the casing and a smaller one at the front, or I could just take it in a pinch...or she could just fatten herself up a bit! Another feature that my girls would probably approve - pockets. Maybe just one more bandana .... cut, edge, attach patch pockets to the "aprons". The $1 bandanas came from Walmart and have softened up nicely.

Feeling a little Bloggy today...(many random words to get out of my head)

I have my back to the laundry piles, the Littlest Pet explosion and am listening via baby monitor to Boo and Yum Yum discussing their dresses for the ball. I know that there is this morning's Barbiefest on the floor of their room tangled up in blankets, and am expecting a dress-ups pile-up at the top of the stairs. They have had ballet this morning and have since changed into "comfy" clothes consisting of skirts made by mummy last year. Those clean clothes will now be discarded at the scene of their most recent costume change. So ignoring the mess I am taking 10 minutes to give some thought to their clothing.

I seriously wonder why I bother providing them with regular clothing, be it practical, cheap & cheerful, homemade, handmade, cute, pretty, darling, funky, trendy, funny, expensive... whatever ..because they would quite happily wear their dress ups all day and everyday. Except on the days when they would wear their swimsuits all day instead or if they had glitter and sequins on everything else.

I read on one of my fave blogs, Elsie Marley, that there is to be a week devoted to sewing for your kids....and an interesting post on Indietutes about keeping your own creative ego in check so that kids might actually wear what you make them.

So ...I ask myself should I be contemplating some sewing next week?

NO- I have an awful lot of other things I should be doing. Really. A lot.

NO- they don't "need" any more clothes. The store of Bear's "hand me downs" goes back to our arrival here in the US when she was just a little older than the twins are now. She was petite and gentle on her clothes, and I was a rather enthusiastic shopper ...and so begining with this summer it is feasible that we could dress the twins entirely in "hand me downs" for the next 10 years give or take a snowsuit, snowboots and other things that one kid doesn't normally have two of.

But you know what...I am still going to do it!!!

YES- the challenge calls for 1 hour a night. I waste many more hours a night procastinating, dithering online and not getting anything done anyway.

YES- It would make me really happy to do some sewing. It's a stress reliever for me.

YES- I have a lot of fabric (understatement) and I have many partially completed items, repairs, cluttering my workroom and many creative ideas cluttering my brain.

YES- I have a feeling that my girls will be excited about what I make them.

YES- There are things I want to teach myself about sewing esp with knits. This would be the time to try .

And in order to show that I am serious and to up my credibility in the crafty blogging sphere (ie. zip) I will share with you something I made for them last summer. Those skirts I mentioned earlier....

And, just as I was about to impress you with my sewing skills, there was intense wailing over the baby monitor. The following two hours was spent consoling an injured Boo who had managed to hurt herself quite badly. What I have pieced together is that she was upside down (OK- that part is still puzzling me) on her bedhead trying to turn on her nightlight (huh?) which is actually in a pocket hanging on the bedhead...she fell smashing herself just behind her ear on the pointiest hard thing she could find, the corner of the nearby bookcase. Fortunately no blood was involved. It was not the afternoon I had planned. I expect that she will have a very sore ear/neck and a big bruise tomorrow...and that I may still be taking her to see a DR just-in-case tomorrow. I did manage to get to my own re- scheduled medical appointment to be told that my blood pressure and ECG are great. So now I know I can feel totally crap but my blood pressure will still be awesome. I have to go see a Dr tomorrow to check my TB test ( story for another time) and I know that I can ask him to look at her because we FINALLY discovered a pleasant local Dr who requires no appointments and does urgent care- as well as medical reports for the Immigration Department and who takes our insurance. So ......deep breath, I so need a good night's sleep. We all do.

Wonky Blossoms - Inspired by Leslie!

I wanted to do a post to thank Leslie whose work inspired me to make these "Wonky Blossoms" for the newborn twin girls of a friend here in the US. Until recently (ie tonight!) I hadn't managed to stumble upon the source and now I would like to link back to Leslie's '

blog . I really enjoyed making these.

As the mother of twins I was trying to give something unique but not too 'precious". We are drowning here in a sea of outgrown clothes, toys and baby gear. I didn't want to give something that would become clutter.

Her delight and appreciation for the gift of the Wonky Blossoms was well worth the time it took to stitch them. It took a little while to select the fabrics and do the embroidery. I wasn't able to assemble the blossoms as neatly as I would have liked. Having 3 year old twins at the time meant this was a project I had to adjust to doing in little snatches of time.

My friend, the mother of these babies, is someone to whom I was instantly drawn when I first met her in Singapore. She is a genuinely sweet person. At that time I was engaged and she, well, was with someone that wasn't good enough only she didn't seem to see that. For a time we all shared a house in Holland Village. We were thrilled when she kicked Mr Wrong to the curb, and ended up with Mr Right.

We were stoked when we were able to visit them and their 2 children in Texas in 2005. Very excited when they moved closer to us- PA. And stunned when she told us that she was unexpectedly expecting twins...girls at that. If 10 years ago anyone had suggested that I would be living in the USA not too far from this friend I would have scoffed at such an unlikely scenario as nice as the idea may have been. That we would both have a set of twin girls, there would have been beverages exiting from my nostrils.

Life has proven to me to be so full of the totally unexpected that when I try to guess what our future holds, I try to now deliberately think of the most far fetched thing I can. And yet everything is a consequence of some conscious decision, and the future is probably written in front of us but we don't have our reading glasses on. Who wrote that...oh I think I just did LOL.

I woke this morning convinced I should run to delete the cat post. After rereading it I was actually happy I had written it down (apart from the typos). There were lots of things that that had started to fade from my memory. I can't say it was all pleasant recalling the emotions that went along but I hadn't intended to chronicle my life from that perspective when I tried to simply tried to explain why Tinkerbell is our cat. There is a shorter answer of course.

The excercise raised questions that I can ask of my mother whilst I still can. I will go on to finish the cat story soon. I have debated with myself how much of the Ugly I should leave out but I think I needed to acknowledge it because otherwise it isn't going to be the whole picture. I don't think I have a gift for creating fiction, and I didn't come here to be constantly checking myself. I really don't want to be bitter, twisted and boring either, just honest. I won't say that I had it bad, but it wasn't good. Eventually it all exploded. This is also something that informs my views on mothering, on parenting, on families and on my own motivations, strengths and many weaknesses.

Cheers