Silhouette

I've been wanting to try this one out for a long time...a silhouette of Ava. I made this using fabric and paint and a canvas I already had. It ended up being pretty cute but it's not exactly how I wanted it to turn out.

I think next time, I am going to use a less busy fabric pattern and a fabric that I can do a black silhouette on. The white silhouette just doesn't pop as much as I would like it to. But all in all it's still adorable! For now it will hang in Ava's room until I do another one. Next time I am going to use one of my rectangular canvases too as I think that might be more pleasing to me. We'll see!

Yeah! New Family Dolls!

So way back when Ava was little, I came up with the idea to do custom dolls of family members who did not live in Austin so that Ava would know who they were and could play with them at any time. The first 2 attempts were not great so I went back to the drawing board.

Many many months later, I finally figured out how I wanted to do them and so I enlisted the help of my AMAZING graphic designer friend, Brooke, to help me accomplish my goal. (She is also the one who painted this super awesome portrait of Ava--she's talented!)

She was able to create the blank doll bodies, attach the heads and provide them to me in a jpg so that I could print them, sew clothes on and sew backs on them too. I love the results and can't wait to give these 3 little dolls to a very special someone (can't tell you who!...yet).

Best part is that the clothing/backs are made from fabric scraps (and Darren's clothes are made from a tshirt and pair of shorts we were giving to Goodwill...good way to go green & recycle if you ask me!)

Front:

Back:
Thanks again Brooke for the help! Now I want to make Ava a set of all of our family and make these for other people....although not all at once and not that soon. Bit tired from all my projects :)

PS. Need to get better photos of these but it's been wet outside and the lighting was not quite right.

Hanukkah Shirts

My friend Amira contacted me about doing a Hanukkah onesie for her 9 month old daughter. She had a great idea that she had seen about doing a Peace, Love, Dreidel shirt. So here is the end result. I also ended up doing 2 navy blue toddler shirts for her friends' kids as well. And because these were so cute, I also did a Peace, Love, Christmas Tree shirt for Ava (although I did not get a photo of it...yet).

A Stocking for Ava

Whipped up a little stocking for Ava for Christmas this year. For the past 2 years we just had some store bought one that was not that special and since my own stocking was handmade for me by my grandmother or aunt (can't remember), I wanted to make one for Ava.

I used 2 Amy Butler patterns (free on her website) to make this stocking...kind of manipulated them to fit my needs. The flower is from a Snow Mum pillow pattern and actually called for felt but I used fun Michael Miller Christmas fabrics (no shock there...love their fabrics) instead. It's not perfect but it turned out quite well seeing as I had to figure out how to get it together on my own. Oh and the back is red polka dots so that is fun.