the brobee dress has a friend!

Emily has been asking for a "real" muno dress ever since I designed one for her Animal Crossing character. Finally I figured out how best to do it and let her pick out a dress pattern and fabric color for the base. Muno is appliqued with raw edges out of knit fabrics (the black is actually from a t-shirt that was too big!). She loves it, and it's super-cute on! Unfortunately for me, she immediately listed off for me the 10 or so characters she wants dresses of, including a Yo Gabba Gabba character that's been seen twice for mere seconds!! Yikes!! I told her, maybe later.....

(update: I've finally finished up a Yo Gabba Gabba dress how-to entry, if you're looking for tips on making your own, check it out!)

cool find: felt slippers

Emily, who grows like a pernicious weed, recently grew out of the slippers she got just a little over a month ago. Sadly, I couldn't get them in a bigger size (they were pink, with scottie dogs, and she loooved them) as slippers are pretty much selling out everywhere at this point. So I went slipper hunting on Amazon and turned up these adorable felt slippers!! Here are just two of them:






too rich for my blood ($64 for toddler slippers? Maybe if she didn't grow out of everything every 4 months!) but how incredibly cool! The company's own site is a bit glitchy for me, but it looks like the slippers have different designs on the right and left slippers - too bad amazon doesn't have photos of both.

(And what did I get her? She picked out some fleece slippers with penguins on them. Very cute and a better price for something she'll only wear for 3 or so months!)

birthday food!

No, not the food we ate, but the food I made! My mom got Emily a basket of Haba play food for her birthday, and we got her a bunch more to complement what my mom sent. I decided she needed more play food and delved into the world of felt food. (I have actually had a Japanese craft book with patterns for felt cakes for a while but had never attempted any.) It turned out to be incredibly easy, and fast -- I did all these in a couple hours the night before her birthday.

thumbprint cookies, not actually something we eat around here but they're like cartoon cookies or something. you know they're cookies:



farfalle! this is Emily's favorite pasta shape (other than, say, pumpkins or penguins):



farfalle with (Haba) mushrooms, ala Emily:



and the reusable shopping bags I made for her to keep all the food in:



I had a yard of this Paris street map fabric and had never found a good use for it. For some reason it struck me as perfect for shopping bags, I don't know why. In any case, cute and she loves them.

All the food was a huge hit, Emily has been making "stew" (her recipe includes bananas and a loaf of bread, and she laughs hysterically when we go "bananas?! bread?!") and pie and pasta with mushrooms ever since she opened everything. And I want to make more, more more! At least the felt cookies. So cute and easy!