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!

hope yours was happy!

This year's holiday season was pretty intense as it was the first year Emily was fully aware and into it. We started off by putting up the tree with her help:



I think this was her favorite of the ornaments:



she claimed my small pink tree as her own:



we went to our zoo's annual Christmas celebration, which was a lot of fun. We saw a ton of animals, including reindeer; Emily petted a rabbit, a chinchilla, a snake and a monitor lizard (!); we got hot chocolate, brownies and toasted marshmallows; Emily made a snowman ornament:



decorated a cookie:



and saw Santa, who gave her a little teddy bear. She helped me make stockings using designs from Aranzi Aronzo's Cute Book:



and we went to Mitsuwa to get our pre-ordered Christmas cake:



on the way home, we happened upon the Ridgefield Fire Dept getting ready for their Santa run! Santa came over and talked to Emily and gave her a candy cane. She was totally beside herself.



And while her dad was the Swag Lord of Xmas, she and I did pretty well too. We then made it through her birthday (yesterday) and are looking forward to another night out with friends tonight!

Hope your holiday season was/is as merry as ours!

happy holidays!!

Arrrrrrgh!!

Everyone else needed to be a pirate. So, I made more eyepatches until I ran out of felt. Good thing Emily doesn't realize I can actually buy more...

pirate baby!

Our happy little pirate, trick-or-treating! What you can't see in this photo: the cute little pirate cutlass, her skull-face trick-or-treat bag (from Target!), her dog's eyepatch and matching bag. You can see a little bit more here.

The costume has two main pieces: first, a real dress she can keep wearing, with a skull-and-bones bodice and pirate-striped skirt. I had a lot of trouble with the dress, actually, but finally found a pattern that worked perfectly. (Thank you Joann's 99 cent pattern sales!) Easy, buttons instead of a zipper, and very finished-looking when done. I'll definitely be making more dresses from it. My only problem? They were sold out of her size, and I had to scale down a size 4 pattern. It worked out alright, luckily.

On top of the dress is a separate jacket -- big thanks to Jenna (of Glamarama and Tartlette fame) who sent me lots of pirate advice and a link to a McCall's fairy costume pattern that I was able to adapt by adding sleeves and a belt. I lined it in taffeta to try and make it more comfortable (Emily is anti-top-layers) and also did a faux buckle effect with velcro underneath so she could get out of it fast if it really bothered her. I don't think she'll be wearing it for fun, but she did tolerate it long enough to actually trick-or-treat.

The hat was a cheapo hat from Joann's, doctored up with gold trim and a copy of the skull-and-bones from Brobee's hat. All in all, a costume we were all happy with. And Emily now has a pirate dress to wear until she grows out of it -- or wears it out, she is crazy for her pirate dress, I think is it now 2nd only to the Brobee dress in her wardrobe hierarchy!

I hope you all had a Halloween as fun as Emily's!!

a lot has happened...

In the month (okay, more) that I haven't been around. We went on two trips (yay!); our Milk & Cheese figures finally came out (yay!); the long-awaited Biff Bam Pow! all-ages comic finally came out (yay!); we've got more fun stuff in the pipeline (shirts and mugs, yay!); we all got very sick with the flu (BOO!) and in fact took turns being sick for nearly 3 weeks (double boo!). So things have been pretty busy.

So busy, in fact, we have had barely any time for Halloween around here. Just a few meals of Halloween-shaped pasta: Emily's costume (photos after Wednesday!), which actually won a little prize at her kid's gym Halloween party last Friday; a little bit of Halloween music and repeated viewings of the Yo Gabba Gabba! Halloween episode.

Which, by the way, premieres in...um about a half an hour EST? I'm sure they're repeating it this week, plus it's actually been available on demand for a couple of weeks now. It's my favorite episode so far, and certainly one of Emily's (she goes crazy for the "Too Much Candy" song). Plus there's another Super Martian Robot Girl segment!

Anyway...hope you are all having a lovely Halloween week and enjoying the week or two of Fall I guess we'll be getting before Winter strikes!