A day with friends...

Last night I stayed up late, until around 2:30 a.m., working on dresses for my daughter. In about two hours I almost finished two reversible a-line dresses and two matching headbands. The dresses are themed for Valentine's Day, but can be worn any time of the year.

So, this morning I was up at 8:30 a.m. to get a shower, get the kids up, dressed and fed and get us all out the door to meet our friends at Michael's. I was about 5 minutes late, but that is still pretty good for me!! We looked for ribbon to put on the dresses we have or are going to make and then headed over to one of my favorite stores, JoAnn Fabrics. I visit there quite often and almost always spend more than I plan to, but it is fun shopping for fabric and other crafty stuff! My friend just started sewing right before the holidays because she and her husband wanted new Christmas stockings. She did such a great job on those and then moved onto making other things, such as dresses for her girls, headbands (we all wear headbands), a quilt and I'm sure there are other things I am missing. I am so proud of her for projects she has accomplished. I've been helping her with patterns and answering her questions as best I can. I've been sewing for several years, but there is so much more I need to learn!! So, anyways, back to JoAnn's, I got a little sidetracked, which isn't hard for me. We looked around JoAnn's and found buttons for the dresses, some remnants and my friend found some really cute monkey fabric to make dresses for her girls. I can't wait to see how the dresses turn out.

We checked out and headed back to her house, nursed the babies and then fixed lunch for all of us. While we ate the kids played in the play are in the basement and like always, my son made a mess by dumping stuff all over the floor (for no reason except for it is fun). We didn't find this out until we headed down after lunch. He dumped two containers, one with letters and numbers and the other with foam pieces to make bracelets and necklaces. I never figured out who picked them up, but they all ended up mixed together, so us adults, my son and the oldes girl dumped them back out and seperated them (not a short task!). During this my 10 month old daughter crawls around and works her way back to us and wants to pick up the pieces and put them in her mouth. Always fun trying to clean up with her around because whatever you put in a container, she wants to take out, so we had to keep her from getting too close to the containers. One task finished and now onto sewings....

My friend was very productive yesterday and sewed up thress matching dresses for her girls and 3 matching headbands. It turned out that one of the dresses, the one for her older daughter, was shorter than she wanted, so we had to tear the dress apart in order to add a ruffle. Ruffles aren't too hard when adding one to a dress that isn't reversible, but for the life of me I could not figure out an easy way to do it on a reversible dress (that is until long after we got it all done). I thought I knew what I was doing until I needed to sew the side back together and realized the ruffle was going to be sewn into the side, which means it would not hang down and would look very funny! I sat there trying to figure out how to sew it all back together and still have the ruffle hanging down. It got sewn back together and the ruffle hangs, but the side where I sewed the ruffle together and sewed the hole that was left was not a pretty side. Luckily it is on the side and not easily noticed (hopefully). As I sat there at 4:30 p.m. nursing my half asleep daughter and talking to my friend as she tried to get the button holes sewed on (and the sewing machine not cooperating), I realized all we had to do was sew a ruffle on the bottom instead of sewing under the bottom. I'm so tired right now, I'm not sure that made sense, but I'm going to give a try on one of the next dresses I make for my daughter. For my friend, the button holes never cooperated, so she sewed the buttons through the front and back of at least two of the dresses (not sure it is going to work on the third since the hole for the head probably isn't big enough). An easy fix for the problemed buttonholes and you would never know she didn't put the buttonholes on the dresses. Buttonholes are never easy or fun!!

A long, but fun day with our friends and we arrived back home around 5:30 p.m. Our get togethers usually end around 3:00 ish so I can get my kids down for naps, but today we skipped the naps so I could help my friend and the kids had fun too!! Now, off to do more sewing....