My Old Shirt = Toddler Tunic

So I've been rummaging through my bag of clothes to donate and came across one of my favorite shirts. I really did not want to part with it. If it had not gradually started to shrink little by little with each wash, I would for sure have kept it since 1) it is super soft 2) it has an owl on it (I LOVE owls - I'm a bit obsessed these days) and 3) it's just a really adorable shirt. So rather than say goodbye I decided to turn it into a little tunic for Ava....during her naptime today.

I simply modified my pattern I use for the Griffin picnic dress and voila! An adorable toddler shirt. In less than 1.5 hours. Woo hoo!

Before (a year and a half ago before it shrunk so much that my stomach showed):

After:

I think it turned out super cute. And Ava, upon seeing it for the first time, said, "My favorite dress! I want to put it on." I think that means she likes it. :)

Twins

I received an email with this photo from my friend who bought the Hamburger and Fries onesies for her boss' newborn twin sons. Apparently the onesies were a huge hit with family and friends over the holidays. Always nice to see my stuff in action!

Custom Storybook

So this was the year of the custom/personalized Christmas gift for me. For some reason, I decided to make 3 different handmade (and rather time consuming) projects as gifts and 2 of those went to my little 8 month old niece Griffin who lives in NYC (the last one was not technically a Xmas gift but rather a bday gift for my hubby - see previous post).

I say for some reason because I decided to start these projects a month and half before Christmas (so I would have time to do them) and then, because I felt like I had so much time (read the sarcasm here), I took on all sorts of other projects from some friends. A few dresses here, a few baby sets there, a last minute hanukkah shirt etc. None of which took that long but with Ava fighting naps daily and her little 8 hrs of school dwindling, I started to feel the time slipping away. And got stressed. But let's move on...

Anyways, what came out of that long drawn out story was that I made this custom storybook for my little niece since she lives so far away and since we probably won't see her but maybe 2x a year if that. It's a storybook I made about all her family in Texas to help her learn our names/faces. I made a similar book last year about daughter and my husband called "Ava loves her Daddy" using the same concept as this one. (Of course that book was so that Ava would think about her Daddy while he is at work). This one is better though as I had a month to work on it, typed up the words and used colored pencils to do the drawing. My previous one I did in 2 days and used markers and although it's cute, it simply does not compare to this one.

So here it is (photos don't really do it justice) - "Griffin's Trip to Texas" and btw, my sister did cry when she opened this gift. Sign of a good gift in my family. :)

Portrait of First Child

I've been a big believer in the handmade gift for many years now. Especially when it comes to my husband. A) He is hard to shop for. Like me, he buys what he wants and when he really wants something it tends to be expensive. B) His birthday sadly falls right after Christmas . He got the short end of the stick there as it is hard to come up with 1 gift idea let alone 2 ideas.

Having run out of things to make for him that have something to do with our daughter ( I commissioned a portrait of her for Father's Day one year, framed photos of her another, and made a storybook about the 2 of them), I turned to his other love, his first born child..er dog, Smokey.

So this past summer I took photos of the dog outside and used this one:

in order to paint a portrait of him for D's birthday. Considering I am not a portrait artist, I thought it turned out well and of course, he loved it.

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).