Doll Diapers and Dresses

Today I have a very special guest post. This summer the girls and I have been doing a lot of craft projects. I am trying to keep them busy so that they don't find their own ways to entertain themselves. As I mentioned before, one of my tactics for making my daughters dread Joann's Fabric Store less is to allow them to choose a fat quarter when they are on sale. My daughter, Halley, and I used some of them to make doll diapers and dresses. I let her use my camera to photograph them and now she is going to tell you a little more about them while I bake cupcakes with her sister and make lunch...

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Hi, I'm Halley! My mom and I made dresses and diapers for my Baby Alive doll, Mandy Grace. The outside of the diapers are made out of fat quarters from Joann's Fabric Store. The inside is made of flannel scraps.We used velcro to attach the flaps to the front of the diaper, and a little strip of elastic in the back so they don't fall off of the doll. 

Here are all of the diapers we made.

Here is the  reversible dress, along with the matching diaper we made out the leftover fabric. We used a tiny bit of other fabric to cut out a little heart and sew on. We also used a little bias tape leftover from my Sunrise Dress.

Here  is the other side of the reversible dress  made out of the same fabric as the heart on the other side of this dress.

We also made a Reversible criss-cross dress that matches two of the diapers we made. The pattern was no longer available. They did have picture of the pattern, though! Unfortunately it was taken at a weird angle. So my mom drew a picture of the pattern. It worked, but unfortunately it was a little too big for Mandy.

Here is the other side. We didn't use velcro, instead we used snaps. Let's just say my mom isn't too experienced with snaps. She had to rip them out a couple of times.

Well, that about sums it up.Thanks for stopping by and checking out my first ever post!

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Thank you, Halley! Yes, she is brutally honest. ;) I did make some adjustments to my pattern and I have it all worked out now, so I will probably make more of the criss-cross dresses. 

Manly Bunting

I am trying to do more craft projects with the kids because it affords me a few minutes where they are not inventing their own “projects.” So, while supper was cooking last night, we threw together a “Welcome Home” bunting for hubby who had to stay away for a night because of work. Since it was a last minute job, I used whatever I had on hand. I wanted to make it “manly” for him, so I stole a few old hunting magazines from the basket (Before you gasp at that- I usually purge them after they are 6 months old anyway and he doesn’t seem to notice or care.) I picked out the pages that were mostly pictures and cut them into bunting shape triangles for later.

I cut out letters from a black gel pen paper tablet the kids have (Thank you, Mr. Schwalm, who made us learn how to cut out block letters every year in elementary! I still remember!)

Then, since I realized they weren’t gonna show up so well against the dark pages, so I had the girls glue stick them to some pages that were mostly black type on white background.

Then I cut around the edges of those and had them glue stick them to the triangles.

We folded over the back with the yarn in it and taped it down (this was a three person job- one to cut tape, one to hold, and me to stick it down- excellent because little hands were kept busy!) Then we hung it up in the window and waited for him to come home.

Of course, he didn’t see it when he stumbled in exhausted later that night, so I had to ask for a drink of water. But I was glad he was…