the panda is back!

Remember the awesome Fry Pan-da that Fred Flare had a year or so ago? (Which, I can testify is actually a pretty awesome pan in daily use.) Well, they've got a Baby Pan-da in stock just in time for the holidays:



Much smaller, just 7" so not as useful. But just as cute! And yes, one is already stashed away in our house for Emily. So, everyone who's been wanting a Pan-da of their very own - now's your chance!

eye spy...adventure

Or an adventurer, anyway. This is Emily on the Giant Wheel ferris wheel in Wildwood this past year. It was her second year riding the giant wheel and her 4th or 5th ride all told. She is fearless! She also begged to go on the flume ride, which was too much for a 4-year old -- she was just too small and I truly feared losing my grip on her on the 2nd (really HUGE) drop, but she was tall enough so they let her ride. And she didn't get off after the first drop either! (you have a spot where you can leave before the big one). Go, little Miss Adventure!

This week's eye spy theme brought to you by Louise!

how to make a muno dress

One of the most common questions I get is, "how'd you make those Yo Gabba Gabba dresses?" I can't help you with the Brobee dress, that's made from a cast & crew shirt (although you could certainly make a dress out of any cool YGG tee!) But I can help you with the Muno dress (or whatever character you want) -- and here's a little how-to.



First you need your dress pattern. Any simple, a-line dress with a one-piece front will work. I used this cute dress pattern, Butterick 3772. Here's another Butterick dress/top pattern, that wraps and ties instead of fastening at the shoulder. The Farbenmix Anna dress would also be perfect, although a little harder to find. And here's a simple McCall's dress with no fasteners at all!

Now for your YGG design -- there are lots of goodies you can work with in Nick jr's YGG papercraft section. They have a full set of iron-ons you can just print out onto transfer paper if you don't feel up to applique -- just pick one, print it and transfer it to your dress front!

If you do want to do an applique, or something else crafty, there are plenty of templates on those printable pages. For full-body images, look for the coloring pages, and for large heads, go for the masks. I used the Muno mask for my applique!

I printed it out at the size I wanted it to be on the dress -- you should be able to print the page larger or smaller when you print it. I actually "printed" the mask as a pdfs using Cute PDF Writer and saved it so I could print it as much as I wanted without going back to the Nick site. I added some more Muno at the bottom and then redrew the mouth, fixing it where it was crooked and adding in the teeth (and yes, his teeth aren't pointy -- anymore. This is how they looked in the pilot, which Emily was used to at the time. Now she thinks it's freaky.)

I cut the pieces out of cotton knit (old t-shirts, actually) -- since knits don't unravel, you don't have to finish the edges of the applique. I assembled the whole thing first using some fusible interfacing (you could also use something like Steam-A-Seam , which I've used on other appliques). If you look close you can see that I overlapped everything -- for example, the teeth are under the upper part of the mouth, and over the bottom part. This made it a lot easier, since I wasn't matching edges up.

Finally, I placed the finished Muno on the dress where I wanted him, and stitched all around. (I assembled the dress most of the way, but did the lining and hem after adding the applique. If I was going to use an iron-on or maybe use fabric paint, I would probably have completely finished the dress first.)

There's only one bad thing about this Muno dress....it's too small! But I think a Foofa dress may be in the offing (and I don't mean her costume). We'll see. Who will be on your Yo Gabba Gabba dress?

halloween was happy!

Emily has been choosing her own costumes since she was 2, and until now it was always simple. Two years ago, after seeing the Halloween episode of Yo Gabba Gabba, she just declared, "I will be a pirate, like Brobee!" After Halloween that year, she told me that the following year she would be a witch like Toodee, then after that, a fairy like Foofa (and then a cat, not sure where she got that from). She stuck to her plan last year and was a witch. But this year, as summer went on, she started wavering...

She wanted to be a fairy. Then, maybe a witch again. Or maybe, Foofa. Then back to the fairy. And so on. Finally, as we got closer and closer to Halloween I sat her down and told her she had to pick one. And finally...Foofa won out. (I admit, I pushed a little for Foofa since I don't know if she'll want to be her when she's much older. You can be a witch or fairy at any age.) And here's the final result:



I went with a dress, kind of interpreting the character a bit. I know my girl, and if she wasn't totally comfortable she wouldn't be happy. This outfit is actually leggings (studio tantrum Laguna), a long-sleeved shirt (farbenmix Zoe), a sleeveless dress (my own pattern) and a vintage hat pattern. I made everything out of pink cotton velour, with flowers out of some cotton, stiffened with this stuff I found called "InnerFuse". We all gave it two thumbs up!

And I got it done just barely in time for the festivities -- we had a decent time at the Zoo Spooktacular (although it poured the whole time, cancelling out some of the fun), a great time at the Museum's free Halloween fest, and then a fantastic time trick-or-treating. And even after tossing out half of it, Emily's got enough candy to last her a month! I hope everyone's Halloween was as much fun!

cute ikea hack

Saw these totally cute stools on the Brainpop blog:



Looks like they used Frosta stools from Ikea, plus a bunch of Contemporary Home toilet lid covers from Target (which come in a bout a zillion colors). They suggest they'd be great for classrooms - I agree! But also I think they could be pretty cool for your house! They even still stack with the fluffy toppings on!! Super-good idea. Although I'll probably never do it.

project princess coat

So, Emily has this thing about jackets and coats. "Thing" meaning that she hates them. It has to be freezing, literally, for her to even wear long sleeves. This year, I thought that making a coat that she helped me out with might encourage her to wear it, so I asked her what kind of a coat she would like. The answer was that it had to be red (or orange), and "look like a dress". We went through my pattern collection and looked at some patterns online, and here's what she picked out (view B, in a red wool):



And all I can say right now is what was I thinking?! Now I understand why the boxy coats have endured in children's wear, because this thing is about to defeat me. I am on the 2nd full muslin and seriously considering throwing in the towel -- the problem being that Emily is the width of a size 2 or 3 but the height of a size 5. So I have lengthened and narrowed and redrafted this pattern like crazy, and it is still too short. (Although, happily, it is still working and makes a very cute coat!)

It has also struck me that there's a good chance that she'll grow out of it before the end of winter if I'm not careful. So I'm looking at some cute raglan-sleeved swing coat patterns and wondering if she would actually wear one of them (since they don't really look like dresses). Now I just have to decide if I should switch to something easier, or if I should just forge ahead and make her the princess coat! (Truthfully...I think she will be much happier with the princess coat, but the selfish lazy part of me is starting to balk.)

In other news -- Happy Halloween!! Emily's costume came out great (panics over the fabric not showing up in time aside) and hopefully I'll get some good pics today.

Also, thanks to everyone for your kind words and thoughts. They are much appreciated!

a pain in the neck

I have been frozen up the last month and a half, finding it hard to write anything -- a blog post, emails, comments...even on twitter more than half the time I stop typing partway through my 140 characters and close the page. And here's why, because I need to get this over with:

Our luck has been bad this year (two massive basement/storage space floods, appliance fails, and my shoulder maladies* to name a few things) but it took an astounding turn for the worse when, while Evan was away at a signing in September, I found a lump in my neck. Hoping it was just a swollen gland, I gave it a week to get better. But it didn't. The next week I saw my doctor, who noted that the lump was on my thryoid gland and immediately sent me for a scan and an amazing battery of bloodwork. The bloodwork came back fine (in fact I'm astoundingly healthy according to five pages of test results). But the scan found a very large and "complex" nodule in my neck, on my thryoid. Next step was to see a specialist (an otolaryngologist, what a word!) but the wait for that appointment? A month! (And I do have insurance!)

So, we spent a month with all the worst-case scenarios unspooling in our brains, making contingency plans and trying to avoid stressing out the four-year-old any more than we can avoid. In the meantime, I have been stuck between talking about it (because I really didn't want to more than I had to) and avoiding talking about it....which meant saying nothing because "normal" conversations made me feel like a phony.

This week, I saw my specialist, who is great. Statistics are on my side, and he is full of infectious optimism so I am feeling much better. He was able to biopsy me without surgery (I was told that wasn't possible) and while we won't know those results for a few more weeks, even the worst case scenario is not that bad. So, all in all, the stress levels are starting to float back down to their normally heightened levels around here, rather than the state of full-on-panic we've been in.

So finally, I'm getting this monkey off my back so I can write/speak/etc again without feeling like I'm hiding things! Hopefully all will be well -- and to be honest, being forced to wind up loose ends and make contingency plans? Never a bad idea.

*One of the blog entries I never finished/posted was about my shoulder, in fact. Some of you may remember the mystery injury and all the tests I endured earlier this year -- turns out, I have something called "frozen shoulder". No-one knows what causes it, and there is no proven effective treatment for it. It takes a year or two to go away, no matter what you do. Yay!