dinosaur purse

My goal this year (it started with Christmas) is to try and MAKE instead of BUY as much as I can, and that includes gifts. It's actually pretty fun to make the stuff, but it's so fun to GIVE handmade! Havi was invited to her friend Amelia's dinosaur birthday party, and this year's birthday gifts will be purses to go with the theme, so we came up with this fun little purse. We filled it with some candy, wrapped it up and voila!

(last week we did a ladybug purse, but that got rushed off to the party before pictures could be taken).

Warning!!!

I've been on a creative binge this last month. Here's what happened:

Birthday Outfit

Teah turned 6! I made her this little skirt, headband, shirt thing. The white shirt is store bought, but to make it more a part of the outfit I traced a butterfly from the skirt and stitched it on the shirt. And the number 6. I like how it turned out, but I want to play around with this whole stitching thing a little more. There's some potential there!

Bracelet

I made two of these and gave the cuter one away as a birthday gift. So here's the less cute one, but you get the idea. Pretty simple- layer a couple circles of different fabrics together and sew to a strip of fabric. I put a pearl bead in the center, but a button would look cute, too. Then make a button hole and attach a button. The cuter one had a two smaller flowers, this one is a little too big, in my opinion.

Crayon roll

April hits us with a string of birthdays, so these little beauties, along with a pad of paper, made great gifts. I don't know what I have against following patterns, but I just winged it. Either way here's a tutorial for something similar.

Play dress

I had that pink/white striped tank that was stretched out (I wore it when pregnant), and Teah had that blue tank that had a bleach spot on the bottom. So I cut them both in the middle and sewed them together to make this cute little play dress. I left the edge showing on the pink striped. It fits both Teah and Havi.

Eden's Dress

Here's Eden't denim dress. I love how it turned out. I put pictures of Teah and Havi's dresses on my blog earlier, it just took me a little longer to Eden's done. Worth the wait, though. On all the dresses, I found a dress they already had in a cute, simple style. I traced out the pieces on a scrap piece of fabric (I have cheap white Ikea sheets that I use), then pin it together to see if it works. When tweaking is done, I use those as a pattern and pin it to my denim and make the real thing. I'm either too cheap or too impatient, but when the urge hits to make something, I don't want to go to the store to buy a pattern! It's been hit or miss, but I'm definitely learning.