Princess Leia and Friends

Becca's brother, Peter, was born 7 weeks before the first Star Wars movie was released. Today is his birthday and so I made him a set of those puppets I made before, plus a few more.
To make Princess Leia's hair, I used the brown felt on the back, stitched to the back of the puppet head and then included in the seam where the body front and back are joined. But the hair back is not attached at the neck line.



For the braids I used 15 - 6 foot lengths of brown yarn. I tied one end of the bunch to a door knob and then braided them with 5 strands in each section. I tied off both ends so they would not come apart. I found the center of the braid and pinned it to the center of Leia's forehead along the seam line. I hand stitched the braid around her face, leaving it free just above the "neck". Then I wound each braid into a bun on the side of her head and hand stitched it into place.


She has real blush on her cheeks and a pink embroidered mouth.


Her dress is cut from the body pattern (without a head), slightly fuller and with elongated sleeves. It is made from an old white sheet. For the hood I sewed two rectangles together on two sides forming an "L". Opening up the hood, I made a narrow hem on the longest unsewn edge. This is opening of the hood for the head. Then I gathered the short unsewn end and attached to the neck of the gown. I used some silver gift ribbon for the belt and hand stitched it into place.

Her gun is made with two popsicle sticks. One stick is the base of the gun. The second stick is cut into 3 segments and hot glued into place to make the handles and scope of the weapon. I sandwiched the the stick gun in between two layers of black felt and hot glued those together.

The Storm Trooper is the simple puppet body made in white felt with a helmet based on the helmet pattern for Darth Vadar. Accents are in black felt. His and Bobba Fett's guns are made the same way as Leia's.

Luke Skywalker is a simple puppet body with yellow hair. In this picture he has a brown hooded robe, but everyone thought he was Han, so I made him a white felt jacket with brown belt, fringed his hair, and gave him a light coat of blush on his cheeks. Now he looks like Luke, but he is in L.A., just in time for Peter's birthday.

Needing a Little Help from My Friends

 Posting about this quilt on 12Squared.

 Click HERE to read more.

Mini Makeover: The Kitchen

What does it mean when you go to blog about updating your kitchen and while searching through old photos for pictures of said kitchen (pre-update) you realize you may have liked it better the old way?  

Before:

I took these pictures when we first moved into to our little house.  

It seems bigger and brighter.  And the floor seems... shinier or something.   

Maybe it's just that we had less stuff.  

Before:

At any rate, one thing that did really bother me about the old kitchen was the old beige Formica counters and back splash.  They just didn't feel in sync with the rest of the room.

Before:

But, much to my delight, several months ago, our dishwasher broke which started a chain reaction resulting in an updated kitchen!  A previous owner had put the black and white ceramic tile flooring in and ended up raising the floor a good half inch, tiling in the base of the old dishwasher.  The only way to get the original dishwasher out, was to either tear up the floor or take off the counter tops.  

I voted for the counter tops.

We removed the old Formica, put in a new dishwasher, and had Home Depot install a new gray Formica counter top. 

And that's where things slowed down.  

For the next several months, this is how our kitchen looked:

I didn't get around to doing the back splash until this Spring Break.

After:

This was my first time tiling anything and I'm pretty proud of myself!  

I learned a lot.  

There are definitely things I would do differently next time, but overall, it was an easy, fun project!

Next on my big house sprucing to-do list is painting, painting, painting.  I have plans to do all the doors, trim, hallway, and ceilings.  If that goes well, I'll redo the kitchen (probably a lighter yellow and the cabinets) and the bathroom.

Anyone want to help? 

:)

Spring Breakin'

Lately, it seems like the speed of life exceeds the speed of blogging.  Here's my attempt to record what we've been up to for the past two weeks.
We've just finished up our Spring Break and while it's nice to get back to a routine, we really enjoyed the free time.  

Henry got some new pajama pants!  I'm in love with the fabric!

And we learned he needed these:

We also picked up this:

We'd been debating getting a pet for a while and when Billy's professor told him they had a litter of Dachshunds ready to find new homes, we caved and brought Mochi home. 

The kids are in heaven.  Lucy keeps saying, "I still think I'm dreaming!". 

 I am... tired.  

Mochi is six-weeks old and doesn't quite like being by himself or sleeping at night.  But, so far, I think the
 pro's out weigh the con's.  

And we worked a bit in the backyard.  It's needed some landscaping since we moved in-- that was, oh, five years ago.

Before

(the first time the grass caught on fire, billy went to get the garden hose, only to find the pipe was broken, so that was one more project on the spring-break-fix-it list)

Part of our driveway comes up into the backyard.  It is original to the house (built in the 50s).  But, more recently, a fence was put in, which cuts off the old drive.  It is cracked and coming up in places.  We started pulling up the broken concrete and leveling that corner of the yard.

Some friends stopped by and surprised us with a plate of delicious cookies that kept our energy up to finish the job!  

Thanks, Taggerts!

After

It feels so good to have that done!

I also finished a big, on going kitchen project that I will blog about soon!  

Capes and Robes

Our oldest grandson turned 13 last week! Yikes, am I that old?? All he wanted for his birthday was a medieval cape with a big hood. Knowing it was going to get drug all through the forested back yard and beyond, I didn't want to spend a fortune on fabric. I felt impressed to check out the local Sally's (Salvation Army Store) and there was 5 plus yards of brown polyester double knit just waiting for me for $4.99! If I could even find that at JoAnn's it would have been just what I wanted! I used Simplicity Pattern 9887.
With the scraps I was able to make Jacob the Jedi his robe. I improvised a girl's bathrobe pattern, hence the puffy sleeve. I didn't have enough to cut out another sleeve. If you look close you can see I had to piece fabric together to make the sleeve I had. Oh, well. He is happy and claims he really does have the force, so look out!