Sewing: Plaid Christmas Dresses

When I was in highschool I bought this great black plaid fabric with red, green, white and yellow stripes and made myself a dress. It had an empire waist, a scooped neck, a long gathered skirt and buttons down the back, and I loved it. But just a few years later I of course thought it passe and was ready to get rid of it. My mother took the dress and took off the skirt and began using it for a Christmas tablecloth. These many years later I found the plaid  fabric among her Christmas things and decided it was the perfect thing for the girls' Christmas dresses. It's made quite a fun trip to end up hanging on them this Christmas season!

I barely had enough fabric to make these two dresses work! I laid out the pattern pieces one time and thought it was good but then realized I hadn't matched the plaids. Laying it out to cut was a bit of a nail-biter. It took more time than you would think to try it a number of different ways until I got it to work. So it goes with this size of a repeat I guess. Luckily the weave on the fabric is completely reversible and the plaid can be oriented in either direction. Otherwise it wouldn't have worked. Haven't tried all this plaid matching before. The result is great but I'll certainly buy a lot of extra fabric next time I am smitten with plaid.

I saw a vintage pattern I wanted to use for Audrey's dress but it was sold out. It was a full-skirted jumper with a fitted bodice and square neck. Pretty simple and seemingly easy to duplicate. I found this pattern (McCall's 6020) and thought "close enough." I love that it is fully  lined and has a square neck in front. I dropped the waistband it includes on the front bodice and opted for a buttoned back (covered buttons of course!)

But, sadly there is a "but," I forgot about my original inspriation for this dress as I got into it. I was sewing it under self-imposed deadline--trying to get these ready for them to wear for pictures for our Christmas card--and only when Audrey was wearing it this past Sunday did I realize I'd veered and didn't like the result as much as the initial idea. So what to do? This dress is pretty straight, and to make matters worse, I made it a size larger than Audrey's because the photos on the pattern made it look more fitted and I wanted to be sure there was room for a blouse underneath. She still looks pretty cute in it...

...but it's not as cute as I'd like. So now, deadline past, but Christmas still approaching I'm wondering if it would be worth the effort to either: 1. rip some things apart and take in the side seams on the bodice (this would disturb the plaid the least but involves bodice lining, bodice and skirt, which will need to be re-gathered, sewn, etc....), or 2. rip some more things apart and add two darts in the front and back of the bodice (which would change the look of the plaid on the bodice, obviously, but might be a nicer fit, lots of ripping and reseaming however...the skirt might as well come all the way off...), or 3. go buy some very wide black satin ribbon and see how it looks if I sew it to the side seams to make a sash in the back?

Audrey certainly won't know the difference, and you can't see much of the dress in the photos anyway.... But I would sure love the dress so much more if it were a bit fit-and-flare. Wish I'd thought to make the back of the bodice with a square neck too, but nothing to do about that now. So maybe I'll see how I'm feeling about taking in the bodice in a day or two. Makes me want to hunt again for that vintage pattern!

Scarlett's dress on the other hand is perfectly darling (in my opinion)! I love this simple a-line jumper. Also fully lined. Also with covered buttons. It's such a cute shape on her. I have used this pattern (Simplicity 3662)  before, in a dusty rose colored corduroy for Audrey to wear under a sweater I knit for her, and I'm thinking I should use it some more.

Scarlett and Audrey are wearing matching black knit Olive Juice blouses under these jumpers, which saved me some time. Also time-saving is the use of Scarlett's first Christmas dress for Tess. I thought it would be fun for Tess to add some punch to the picture with a bit of red. Still love that corduroy dress. This is not the picture we are using for the card (since it appears Tess is toppling out of view) but it's one of the better ones we got. Such a stress trying to get a picture with all three looking as close as possible to their darling selves, and before one or all have a meltdown!

If you want to view the last few years of Christmas outfits here they are:

2009

2008

2007

2006

Cooking: Advent Sunday Cookies

Yesterday was the third Advent Sunday of the four we celebrate leading up to Christmas. This is a tradition my family embraced while we were living in Germany and my siblings and I have continued it now that we are adults with our own children. It was my turn to host so my family gathered to read the Christmas story from Luke 2, sing carols, and eat Christmas cookies.

A few years ago I made my siblings the present of Advent songbooks. I found the lyrics to our favorite Christmas carols, along with a bit of history on the carols and a few illustrations and bound them in these booklets. I made personalized covers for every family member using vintage Christmas illustrations and included a CD with instrumentation for all the carols since none of us had pianos at the time. The carols are all numbered (and correspond to the tracks on the CD) so the family can literally be all on the same page. These worked so well last night, especially now that there are grandchildren old enough to read the words. Without them it seems we often get the verses all mixed up!

I have an Advent wreath on my dining table, just as last year, with four candles. I should have lit three of these last night but I don't have this set up quite right for a low risk candle burning so I've left the candles unused. Still very pretty I think. 

My father read the Christmas story and the grandchildren listened quietly, quietly because the quietest earned the opportunity to pick the first Christmas carol we would sing. My nephew, Holden, was the winner and he chose Frosty the Snowman!

Audrey and I had been making cookies for a couple weeks. I wanted to serve a variety because my grandmother, my mother's mother, used to always bring a huge variety of her homemade cookies with her when she came to our home at Christmas. This year I made some traditional and some new, including:

Chewy Almond-Raspberry Sandwich cookies

(From the current issue of Bon Appetit and which I served single instead of sandwiched. You pipe the dough for these cookies, which was a first for me. Fun to make and very tasty! )

Orange-Coconut Macaroons

(I have been making these for a few years and LOVE them! Not too difficult!)

Underachiever Homemade Sandwich Cookies rolled in green and red sugar

My grandmother's Ginger Molasses Cookies (recipe below the break)

(which I served with orange slices)

Caramel Apple Cookies and homemade caramels my sister made.

(Saw these cookies earlier this year and had to try them!)

Luckily we had a decent crowd so we don't have too many cookies left over. The challenge of baking them all is trying not to eat them all!

The highlight of the evening was singing The Twelve Days of Christmas. I have assembled props, including Audubon stuffed birds with recorded bird calls (my favorite is the French Hen), for each of the days and we line up the cousins, each with a prop or an action and sing through all twelve. I love the leaping lords!

Read more for the Ginger Molasses Cookies recipe.

Cooking: Buttermilk Syrup for Gifting

 

I went to breakfast with some girlfriends this week to celebrate Christmas and exchange some small gifts. What a luxury to go out to breakfast, and especially this time of year! It was so nice to take a breather and talk about lighthearted things before leaping back into juggling kiddos and Christmas to-dos. The annual gift exchange and lunch, which is what we typically do, is one of my favorite events of the season! I came home with some heartfelt and handpicked things to add to the Christmas display and to use all year round.

This year I was giving this fun snowflake-shaped pancake mold and wanted something to go with it. I don't typically do handmade for the Christmas gifts (I save that for the birthday gifts, such as these) but I decided to make some buttermilk syrup to go along with these. I saw a recipe for this syrup in this cookbook and have been thinking about it since. I found some recipes for it online as well so I combined them a bit for this version (click below to read more for recipe).

 

To package the syrup I used these simple canning jars I found when planning Audrey's birthday party this spring. I love the brushed silver lids and they were readily available when I was trying to pull this together in an afternoon.  I cut out circles from some scrapbooking paper to stick on the top of the lids and wrapped the jars with red ribbon. Then I punched out matching tags (using this recently acquired Giga punch) for the pancake molds, loaded everything in a tote and I was off to breakfast!



Click to read more if you are interested in the syrup recipe. If you like butter and sugar then this is the syrup for you!

Crochet: Spa Cloth Gifts

I have a group of girlsfriends with whom I swap birthday gifts. Seems such a rare thing at this age--to give and receive birthday gifts with friends--and so it is so much fun!  There are no spoken rules but the idea is that these aren't expensive but they are girly and fun and sometimes a bit luxurious. Some very minor indulgence you wouldn't buy yourself, not necessarily due to cost, but because it isn't a necessity. We get together for lunch a few times a year near one of the birthdays and the birthday girls goes home with an armful of little luxuries.

Two of these friends share the same birthday and it's in early December, so I make an effort to chose something for them that has nothing to do with Christmas becauase I figure December birthdays are threatened to be overwhelmed by the big holiday this month. For the past few years I have also tried to give something handmade. I have been coming up with something and then duplicating it throughout the year for all the birthdays. Last year I made and gave monogrammed stationery, and the year before that I gave felted flower corsages, and before that some simple crochet scarves like these.

This year I am doing spa cloths. These are cotton washcloths I crocheted in the sedge stitch using this pattern. I love this stitch! It has such a gorgeous texture. I've thought of using it for a children's sweater but haven't yet. Seems the perfect little indulgence for the bath. I am giving two paired with a good bar of soap. So many possibilities here but I went with Burt's Bees Radiance bar. It smells great and I love the natural ingredients. A good all-natural package.

Wrapped the little stack in a natural tissue, tied with yarn and added a tag I punched from some scrapbook paper I had on hand.  I would enjoy receiving something like this (and haven't yet made some cloths for myself--cobbler's children...) so I hope the birthday girls feel the same way!

Oh, and did you notice I seem to be continuing what I'll call my Tess Color Palette, which began with this cut-chenille blanket and this lavender crib bedding? Why not? I think these colors are gorgeous together!

Knitting: Blue Baby Mittens on a String

The landscape has sure changed around here--we're below freezing and covered in snow. Clear blue skies however, so it is gorgeous. The perfect environment for little blue mittens. I found the pattern for these (after seeing them on a linky party, and now I can't find the blog...) on the Spud and Chloe blog and just had to knit them up for my friend Amy's baby, Frankie. He is the cutest thing ever and I hadn't come up with a welcome gift yet and thought these would be perfectly cute, if not perfectly practical! I always lean towards the former and why not?

I do think there is something a bit practical about mittens on a string for babies, however (I added the string, a crocheted chain, after seeing a pair with the same on that linky party; the pattern doesn't include it). I love keeping their little hands covered and the string makes it impossible to lose a mitten. Typically you would thread the string through the arms of a jacket, where they would hang at the ready when not in use, but you could leave it out too. I would use these indoors or outdoors, and they would be so darling in a photo of a bundled-up baby! Maybe with a baby-sized scarflette!

When Amy put these on Frankie (don't worry--I know they have a bit of "frosting" in these photos but trust that they were cleaned and dried before gifting!) he seemed to love just looking at them on his cute little hands. They are a near match for his eye color--such great baby blues. So they also double as a baby toy. And, if all else fails, they would look great draped on the limbs of a Christmas tree.

I made these in 100% cotton, because it seems ideal to use a natural fiber for babies, and it will make them both stretchy and easy to care for. This is Bernat Cottontots in Blue Berry.

Did I mention these "mittens" are actually thumb-less? Thank goodness. It's hard enough getting mittens on a toddler let alone delicate little baby fingers.

I think Tess needs a pair.