3.30.2012

It's amazing...

That making everyone else do the cleaning,



all these weird outfits...




These disasters...





Way too much tv watching...


So many messy faces...



Countless meals out...


And so many questionable snack choices...


Are all perfectly explainable by something so tiny.  :)


Yep, Kilger baby #4 is due at the end of October, and we couldn't be more excited.  Of course the excitement of getting out of the first trimester (I'm about 10 weeks now, just a few more to go!) is most prevalent on my mind, but the thought of having another baby both terrifies and delights me.  And now you can understand (hopefully) my slackerness.  :)

Project: Catch-Up Valentines Skirts

For a craft night the week before Valentine's, I made three simple skirts for my girls.  I wasn't sure at first that they'd be as adorable as I'd originally hoped, but I think they came out all right.  For the younger girls, I used fabric I found on clearance at Walmart--it was a pack of 8 or 10 fat quarters for a dollar or two.  Sweet.  Breanne's is from JoAnn's Valentine's section.  For the waistbands, I used this tutorial.  I have seriously been converted for life.  I don't know if I'll ever do the fold over, sew, insert the elastic, sew the elastic, close the waistband thing ever again.

What do you think?

Cailin's has a bit of lace for length... I cut it a bit too short at first.

Breanne's, though hard to see, is red hearts.

Breanne also had Valentine's day hair, in cute little hearts.  Aww.

Janey wouldn't show me her skirt right side up...

And all three girls sat at this window for a good half hour, watching for our neighbor's missing cat.  We didn't find her, hopefully someone else did.

3.29.2012

Project: Catch-Up Cailin's Jacket

Another thing Cailin was lacking back around her birthday, thanks to me leaving a big bag of jackets and coats at my parent's house, was a nice warm jacket.  I had an idea in my head of what I wanted it to look like, so I went ahead and bought some fleece and made this:
I made the pattern myself, based off of a shirt of hers, and a shirt pattern I tested for another blogger.  Like I said, I just bought the fleece (probably at JoAnn's, maybe Hancock's, can't remember), and the lining I've had for a couple years, actually--I think I got it from Walmart, but I just loved the simplicity of the colors and patterns, and I was excited to finally find a purpose for it.  It's almost become a dress so many times... I like it better in the jacket.  :)
You can kind of see in the photos, the jacket has a hood, and welted pockets.  Hoods are surprisingly easy.  I feel like adding them onto everything... but Cory thinks (in general, not just in my projects) they make things look sloppy.  He's probably right, but I know Cailin loves the hood, so I'm glad I added it.  :)  The pockets are the sloppiest part of the jacket--turns out fleece is hard to get to welt prettily.  Oh well, they're functional (Cailin showed me today that she'd put rocks, m'n'm's and cheez-it's in there), and Cailin loves loves loves having a "pock" (pocket).  
(You can see the lining better in this awesome pic.  :))
The only thing I didn't finish on the jacket were the buttons.  It still doesn't have them, and every time Cailin wears it, I wish it did.  I just don't have a buttonhole feature on my machine, and I dread doing them by hand, because I don't want to make the jacket ugly.  :)  Maybe I'll finish that sometime.

I wish I had a better picture of the front--there is a nice gathering detail that I think really makes the jacket cute, but you'll just have to settle for what I've got right now.  No time to take more pictures today.  :)

3.28.2012

Project: Catch-Up Pincushion

Next up:  I finally treated myself to the new pins I'd been pining over for months.  Back when I first started sewing, I just bought the standard, short, cheap pins.  And they worked great for two years... but recently I discovered the joy of sewing with longer (and sharper!) pins, and couldn't stop thinking about them.  So, when they were on sale a few months ago, I finally bought them.  When I took them home, I realized I couldn't just stick the new, amazing pins in with my inferior old, bent pins, in my falling apart tomato pincushion:

So I decided to make myself a new pincushion.  Half an hour later, I had this:


I made it with a scrap I got from my friend Jess.  She's awesome like that and gives me cute pieces of fabric.  :)


If I had it to do over, I'd stick something more solid inside the pincushion, like sawdust, or even just a piece of cardboard in the middle, to stop the pins from poking all the way through.  The problem with long pins and a short pincushion... is that they poke all the way through. Whoops.  Oh well, I still like it, and I love my new pins.  Does that make me a total dork?

3.27.2012

Project: Catch-Up Cailin's Quilt

So like I mentioned a couple posts ago, I do actually have quite a few projects and things that I want to share with you all, it's just taken me a while to get around to it.  So I'm hoping to have a series of posts with the Project: Catch-Up title.  Hope you guys enjoy it.  :)

First project--Cailin's big-girl bed quilt.  I've made each of my girls a blanket when they moved into a toddler bed.  Breanne's and Janey's were each just whole-cloth quilts that were tied, nothing fancy.  When Cailin's birthday came around this year, though, I decided to go a little more all-out.  I didn't feel like making her traditional blocks for a quilt (like the other girls' bunked quilts), but I wanted something sort of pieced.  So I did some online pattern searching, and some fabric shopping, and came up with this:

I know the whole craft world is in love with the chevron pattern lately, but I just couldn't resist the sweet simplicity of this quilt. It seemed like a great way to showcase all the prints without using a ton of any of them.  I love how it came out!

If you look closely, you can see that I pieced it with turned rectangles and squares, instead of triangles.  I love that I wasn't dealing with fabric cut on the bias--it made for many fewer extra stretching issues.  Also, there is orange in that fabric on the far right of the above photo, it's just a very small print, so it's hard to see.  It does pull all the fabric together in real life, though.  :)  All the printed fabrics are from the Denise Schmidt line at JoAnn's--I just couldn't resist them when I saw them all stacked together waiting to be put on the shelf (I got there during stocking one day).  Such fun patterns.  The border solid is a Kona cotton, and the white is just a regular muslin.  For the quilting, I just quilted 1/4" or so away from each of the chevron lines.  I really like how it all came together.   


And so does this person, which is what's really important anyway, right?  As soon as she saw me taking pictures, she dove into her bed, messed up the quilt, and said "Mine bed, mine ba (blanket)!  Take a pic a me, mom!"  So I did.

What do you think?

3.04.2012

Cailin

So during my blogging absence, Cailin turned two!


I know, I can't believe it's been two years, either.  Thankfully, her second year of life was nowhere near as traumatic as her first--no rsv, no chickenpox, etc.  Just a solid year of Crazy Girl.  Seriously, she answers when I call her that.  :)  Cailin has so much personality.

Yup, crossed legs.  Goofball.  :)
 I know I've felt that way about each of my children, but Cailin just has this way of making herself and her needs/desires known.  She knows exactly what she wants, and most of the time, has how to get it all figured out.

(For example, she insists on holding onto this railing EVERY TIME we get Breanne from school, never mind the fact that it's hard for her to reach it and walk at the same time so it takes her twice as long to walk up the ramp... ) 


She is my best tantrum thrower, but also my funniest girl; she can be so sweet and loving, but can also hit and kick with the best of them.  She is a handful, at her best, and "trouble-trouble" at her worst.  She is my best helper around the house, always emptying the silverware and helping with the kid cups, bowls and measuring spoons and cups, also always trying to sneak in and take over my mopping and sweeping, devastated if I don't give her a turn too.


I sure do love this crazy, crazy girl.


A few things about Cailin--

Age--2
Height--33" (50th percentile)
Weight--28.5 lbs (65-75th percentile, and only about a pound less than Janey.  I get asked at least weekly if they're twins... ha).
Favorite Food--Cocoa, cookies, treats, oatmeal, anything I happen to have served up for myself.



Favorite Show--She's gone through a few phases, but currently it is definitely "Boots Lella!"  which means Boots and Dora (Dora the Explorer, of course).
Favorite Song--Toss up between Popcorn Popping, Pattycake, Snowman, and Who Came to Church Today?  Also, favorite radio type song--Great DJ by the Ting Tings.  All my girls love it still, but she'll immediately pick her head up off her headrest and dance along in the car.  She even sings the words.  Love it.
Favorite Toys--Baby dolls, sunglasses, and the new kitchen she got for her birthday.  But let's be honest, she'd rather be watching Dora than playing with any old toy.


Favorite Book--Ni-ni, Moon!  (Goodnight Moon)
Favorite Color--Pink, or green.  She knows her other colors, but if you ask her what color something is, she'll most likely tell you one of those two colors first, just to test you.
Other things of note about Cailin--she is by far my mobile-est child--she can keep up with Breanne better than Janey, probably, on the trampoline--she's an excellent jumper.  And loves to jump off of anything. The child has no fear.  Thankfully she has yet to hurt herself too badly (knock on wood).  She also has recently taken to running out into the street when we're outside, a fight I never really had with my other girls.  Learning to discipline Cailin has been a challenge, because she just keeps finding new ways to push the rules that I don't know how to deal with.  But I feel like we're finally coming to an understanding... maybe her terrible twos just came early?

Cailin is also my best talker at this age.  She puts together 5 word sentences all the time, and for me, they're very understandable.  Everyone else, including Cory, struggles to understand them a bit, but I definitely know what she's saying most of the time.  She came into the kitchen tonight humming to herself, and then stopped, and said "haha, my hum, mom.  My hum, song!"  So, so cute.  We have been watching Downton Abbey lately, and today she walked in during a part about WWI, where there were several explosions, causing the men in the bunkers to fall down.  She looked at the tv, said "Uh-oh! Him! Fall Down!  Oh No!"  and then laughed and laughed and pretended to fall down herself...  Crazy girl.  Every time I sneeze, she'll look at me (and if I'm not looking at her, she'll take my face in her hands and turn it to her and say "Mom!  Look-a-Me!") and say "Mom!  You fine Mom?"  She's a thoughtful girl.

Cailin is so funny, and she knows it.  She is constantly making faces at us, and teasing her sisters and me. She'll hide her face behind something and ask "You see me, mom?" over and over until I respond.  She has her knock-knock joke that she's gotten really good at these days, she says all the lines now, you don't have to provide any of them.  She has a skip-run that I love to watch--she'll just randomly gallop when she's running across a room.  She also loves loves loves to pick out her own outfits, and will put on things just to make me laugh.  She has taken to wearing 3-5 skirts at a time, regularly over her footie pjs (if she can't get them off herself, that is... one night I found her wearing nothing but her diaper and 3 skirts in her bed when I went in to check on her.  hahaha).

(I think this is a moment of 2 skirts only (plus the leggings, of course), but there are frequently at least 5)

She loves hats, and sunglasses.  Yesterday the girls were riding bikes in the garage, and Breanne and Janey had both put on their helmets.  Cailin doesn't have a helmet yet (she rides on a sit and scoot toy, instead of a bike, but she still probably needs one...) so she came running inside, crying for a hat.  She went upstairs and got a sunhat, and was perfectly content with that.


This is getting crazy long, but I just want you all to understand--Cailin has been, by far, my most challenging child.  She gets up out of her bed several times before falling asleep, and then wakes up in the middle of the night several times during the week.  She also challenges me daily with her physical assertiveness and strength.  Despite all that, though, I deeply love this girl.  She has a spirit that is meant to be here.  We weren't planning on having her so soon after Janey was born, but she was meant to be with us, and we knew it.  She kicked her way out of the womb, putting me into labor, she came out in 1/2 a push.  She was supposed to be named Natalie Paige, but that was just not her name.  She is just meant to be here, and to be herself, right now.  I feel privileged to be the mom of such a strong little person.  I'm excited to watch her grow up, and to see who she becomes.  I sure do love my baby girl.



3.02.2012

Back?

Hey all!  Sorry for the extreme absence.  I have no real excuses.  Pretty much I've just been making everyone else do all the work anyway.

(Yup, that's Breanne doing the dishes.  And I only had to go back and redo a couple pans.  What a great kid.)

I'm hoping I'm back at blogging for good, but I make no real promises.  The truth is I've been pretty busy sewing (and watching a whole lot of Frasier, among other shows), so I've got plenty to show you.  Plus, you know, birthdays, and awesome kids and stuff.  So.  See you again tomorrow?