Kindergardens

I think this is week 3?  What I do know, is that I missed last week!  But I made sure to take plenty of pictures this weekend.  I still have more plants to get in the ground but I am waiting until the weather cooperates more.  Between the hail and rain, I am surprised anything has survived! 

Last Saturday was bee -u -tiful, so the girls and I worked outside for most of the day.  I planted veggies, they played in the mud and their fairy garden. 

Speaking of fairy gardens, here is what they have so far. Snap dragons, mexican heather, impatiens, Salvador purple which is a salvia, coreopsis (which reminds me of my granny, so I am glad they chose it!) and some little red flower thing that I can't remember the name of. All of them are just kind of willy nilly planted where they fit.





The amphitheater and watch guard.



Not sure what this is, maybe the beginnings of a fairy swimming pool..



A spider has been visiting the fairy garden!



Can you see it closer now...









The girls spent lots of time playing with their neighbor friend and getting dirty!















In other news, here are the rest of the pics from the garden. Lots of veggies. Some flowers, mainly ones the girls picked out because they thought they were pretty! I did buy myself some black petunias. Very pretty with such striking colors. They are black with gold stripes. I had never seen them in those colors so I bought a pack and stuck them in a planter with the purple ones!

A pepper!


Lettuce



carrots



cilantro



some plants



lettuce in the front yard. This lettuce patch suffered a beat down from the hail the other night, right after this picture was taken. Literally an hour after this picture it was shredded and matted up in the mud from the hail and rain. It seems to be making a comeback...



peas!



I just love pea flowers, they are soooo pretty!



tomatoes (I have about 4 more to be planted) these are mostly heirloom varieties, with one early girl. Red zebra, which are pretty, rosso scillian and german pink. One of the german pinks got shredded by hail, so I pulled it and replanted a tomato plant which I failed to mark. if I had to guess which variety it was, I would guess german pink base don the leaves. Once the tomatoes arrive, I can tell for sure!



okra, with 4 more to plant also, oh and weeds!



onions



cucumber



hosta flowers



hmmmm, I wonder why I only took one picture of the pepper plants. I have like 11 planted...

not garden related, but clothes on the line, which I try to do exclusively on weekends



my favorite part of summer, sun tea!



And finally, the hail that damaged most of our city the other day.









my poor lettuce!



Whew, that was a lot!

Skirts galore

It's no secret that I am raising girly girls.  Amazon size girly girls, but that's not what this post is about.  They love sparkles, rainbows, hair pretties, dresses, pink, purple, unicorns and skirts.  Well, maybe not so much the unicorn part.  But they do love their skirts!  Here are three new ones.

The Lil Blue Boo ruffle bustle skirt.  Nin wants to wear the bustle part in front.  Why you ask?  Because it's the pretty part and she wants to be able to see it.  I kept trying to tell her that it's the suprise part of the skirt.  No one will expect it and then when she turns around, bam!  A surprise!  That went over like a lead balloon and I had to bribe her to wear it correctly for the pictures.  It remains to be seen if this will be a continuing problem. 







I bought this ruffle fabric at JoAnns knowing that it would make the girls happy. It's ruffley, pink, purple and a skirt. All they qualities they look for.

This is just 2 pieces of ruffle fabric serged onto a 3 inch wide piece of elastic. Just like Justice sells. For both skirts it cost me $7.50 or $3.75 each. Take that Justice. You and your $30 kid skirts. Ha!





I put a tag on the back of each one so they could tell them apart!







The girls and I dyed the elastic for the waistbands since all I had was white. Since the elastic is mostly poly and it doesn't hold dye as well as something like cotton, it may fade over time. In fact, on it's first wash it lost a lot of color. But it's still pretty pink! Below is the process.

I initialed the pieces so I would know which waistband belonged to which girl, but after I finished dying them , I figured out they were exactly the same size! 


Salt



dye



stir stir stir



Then it sits for an hour in the dye, and when it came out it was this color



After the first wash it is now bubble gum pink!

Robots and hair pretties

Those are two things I would have never thought I would say in the same sentence. 

Remember the Ahoy shorts I made for TheoLeo in the robot print?



I made him a matching shirt. The front has an embroidery of a robot and the back has the word robot with the second "o" being a robot. The back design is the biggest embroidery I have done so far. My machine does 650 stitches per minute and this sucker had a stitching time of 49 minutes. Quick, someone do the math and figure out the number of stitches.  Since I am not fast at changing colors and get distracted easily, I bet this thing took about 1 1/2 hours to complete! Then I still had to sew the shirt together! It's super cute though and I am glad I made it for him.

Pattern: Ottobre Design 4/2004, same shirt as the upcycled ones last week.
Embroidery- Stickbaer

Look, you can still see the impression left by my hoop! It will come out in the wash.



Back





On a somewhat related subject, I mailed this package out to him on Friday and he got it on Monday.  The impressive part is that he lives 1800 miles away near the coast.  I am in land locked Kansas!  Kudos to the Post office.  Now, I have a long standing feud with the Post office (which is a story for another day), so when I say kudos, you know I mean it.  :)


While the embroidery machine was up and running, I made a bunch of hair pretties for the girls. My girlies are in love!

Embroidery- GG Embroidery Designs
Hair stitchies- they are basically embroidered felt sandwiches. A clip gets sandwiched in between. I didn't buy the clip covers designs, and I didn't have enough small clips so some of them are a little long.



the back. The watermelon has the clip properly inserted into the felt sandwich because it fit. The peace sign heart is not sandwiched, but hot glued since I didn't have smaller clips.



I will be buying more of these since my girlies love them so much! I actually had to break up fights over who got what. Then I had to promise to make more....