For friends

We are very lucky to be a part of a fantastic play group, with lots of really wonderful kids and their interesting, thoughtful, and often hilarious moms and dads. Over the next month we will be celebrating the birthdays of five of the kids, so I wanted to make some of their gifts myself instead of completely breaking the bank on plastic stuff from China. So there's Little Omi modeling a sweet panda bear scarf, from Aranzi Aronzo's Cute Stuff. Next we (yes, Omi helped!) made these little bean bags. I used double-sided fusible interfacing to make the letters and numbers and then just stitched around them onto the circles to reinforce the glue. The actual bags are circles (I used an old cd to trace onto the fabric) cut with pinking shears, then sewn with wrong sides together. I left a small opening so we could fit a funnel in and fill them with rice (this is the part where Omi helped), then stitched the opening up by machine. Hope our friends will like them!

(Sorry for the awful pics. It was dark outside when I finally finished the bean bags and I couldn't wait for the photo shoot.)

O Pumpkin, My Pumpkin

It's a good thing we got out the camera(s) for these pics:

(my turn with the camera)

(Little Omi's turn)

Because the very next morning, I found all three of our pumpkins smashed in the street:


Wah! We went out and picked up two new pumpkins, which have been rolling around in the back of my car for several days now because I'm afraid to put them out on the porch in case they become the victims of neighborhood ne'er-do-wells.