Xmas 2016

Christmas Market 2016

 This weekend, we celebrated Thomas's dad's birthday.  It was also the annual Christmas market with, as usual, free face-painting and pony rides!

Tassia was feeling tired and grumpy and refused to get her face painted.

Alina's 8!

Yesterday, Alina turned 8 for the third time (she may or may not actually be ten, but SHHHHHH!!!).  Here are the present pictures:

 True to my high-school and college habits, we wrapped her presents in newspaper.  OK, OK, so we didn't have any wrapping paper!  I think that this so offended Thomas's wrapping paradigm that he almost refused to do the wrapping. 

 A very enthusiastic hug to say thank you!

 She loves her new parrot from Grandma.  And, the new parrot (who may or may not have been given a name at this point) was happy to make the acquaintance of Enormous Penguin.  Much ado was made out of their difference in size.

Trumpet

School show

The girls' school's show was last week.  Here are Sybille and Tassia in costume.  Somehow, we missed Alina.

Then I found this on my camera.  I'm sure I didn't take these pictures!

Guess what...

made its way into our house?  If you're guessing small child, you're wrong.  If you're guessing animal, fuzzy or otherwise, you're wrong.  Try thinking...

TRUMPET!!!!!

(OK, so it's actually a cornet, but shhhh!)

Guess what woke everyone up this morning who was not up at the same time as Tassia?

Sewing Adventure

Many of my sewing projects tend to have long incubation periods.  For months, I've been contemplating what I wanted:  A long-sleeved, long, full dress.  I had the material sitting in my closet.  I just needed the perfect pattern.  I looked through patterns I already had, browsed the internet, flipped through the library's collection of sewing magazines.  I didn't really find what I wanted.  I didn't even really find something that was easily modifiable to become what I wanted.  I finally decided that I'd just have to make the pattern myself.

A dislaimer:  I've never really done this before.  I mean, I've somewhat modified existing patterns, but I've never really made a pattern from nothing.  And, as I got into it, I realized that I have a woeful lack of experience sewing anything with sleeves.  I mean, I've made tons of skirts, some pants, a fair amount of sleeveless sundresses.  But not so many things with sleeves.  I mean, if I had had a basic shirt pattern I liked, adding a skirt onto it would have been a cinch.  But, I didn't.

So, anyway, after hours of contemplating, some drawing, some sewing, and a few glitches along the way, here is the result.

I'm pretty happy with it, considering I really didn't know what I was doing.  But, before anybody gets too impressed, let me say that it doesn't look quite so good if I raise my arms.  It kind of does funny things, actually.  I'm assuming everyone out there has seen the movie Brave, right?  (OK, so not everyone has elementary-aged girls).  Well, let's just say that if I tried to shoot a bow an arrow in this dress the way she did in her dress of the same color, I would have the same problem.  So, it's almost exactly the dress I was dreaming of, just not quite.  In all fairness, I've tried on store-bought dresses that didn't work so much better than this, and I think I know what I'd have to modify to at least partially fix the problem.

I guess I'll just have to make another one.