Fit for a princess...

Davin and Miren were given handmade dolls for Christmas by their Aunt Carrie, and Davin has really taken to hers, coming up with her usual grand plans.  She came wearing a dress, but Davin has requested pants, shoes, gloves, and a crown.  So far we have only managed to make the crown, but I had to take a picture because although not exactly how I would have done it, reminded me again that I many times need to step back and let the girls exercise their artistic abilities.

The first thing I did was ask Davin to draw a picture of what she wanted it to look like.  Then I took her drawing and enlarged it to accomodate the doll's head.  It had to be "golden" of course, and then I just let her choose various ribbon and felt and cut out shapes as she saw fit.  I put the heat n' bond on the back, and then she placed them where she wanted and I ironed them on.

It was actually a quick project, and aside from Davin's first (but certainly not last) burn on the iron, I think it turned out great.

Booties are up next!

Christmas Cards and Photo

I have been making my own Christmas cards for more than 10 years now, but as the girls get older I want to include them.  Inspired by these, this year we used up a bunch of watercolor paintings the girls had done over the year, cutting them up using our Christmas cookie cutters to get the shapes.  Most are already in the mail, but I did have a couple left to get pictures of.

We included a picture with the cards, I wasn't even going to try getting a picture of all of us together, but Dame came up with this after some brainstorming.

We had some challenges getting Miren to look to the right, but in some ways I like the effect better, her little personality shines through, as does Davin's, who couldn't resist sticking out her tongue!  The dogs don't look too impressed, you can tell they were not willing participants.  After we had the pictures I found some free scrapbook paper here and then put it all together using Picasa, which I have had a lot more luck with than Photoshop, which I didn't find very intuitive to use.

Merry Christmas!

A Good Day

Today was a good day, full of the things I'd like to be doing more of with the girls, as opposed to the few preceding days which were pretty rough, and largely sleep deprived.  I think a lot of it had to do with moving William to his crib 2 nights ago, which resulted in him sleeping for 4-5 hour stretches, giving me a bit more sleep as well.  But back to today, there was:

• Some yummy date squares baked with the girls' assistance;
• A silk scarf dyed a beautiful green compliments of this little tutorial;
• Some simple paper garlands made to decorate the girls rooms;
• Paper pumpkins made
• And Davin's continued new found love of spelling and writing notes, so much fun to see developing all on its own.

I even managed to sneak in a load of laundry and reorganize Miren's drawers and pull out all the clothes she has outgrown.

Between that and listening to the coos and seeing the smiles of our almost 8 week (!!) old, it was just about a perfect day.