Dress Designs

Me and my best friend designed dresses. My brother and my dad went to a civil war ball. We designed  
gowns. We will go next year.

I folded a large piece of fabric for this one.

This is my favorite dress.

 We stuffed a dress form with stuffing and we pinned fabric to it to make dresses. We had fun and next year I can't wait to design a real dress and go to the ball!

My Fashion Sewing Party

Yesterday was my birthday party. I'm going to be 11 on June 1st. I had a fashion party. We made doll things and I made a skirt.

These were the treat bags- for the girls to take home what they made

One of my friends brought her mom's machine so we had two machines to work with. Mine is the one in the back corner of the picture.

We all found work space in my room.

This is the skirt I made.

My friend made a doll pillow.

E is using my machine- just the arm to sew a seam at the top of her dress.

This is my skirt after I made a change. I actually added a button on the ribbon too.

It was awesome. My favorite part of all was sewing with my friends!

Elizabeth

I think Elizabeth looks lovely,  doesn't she?  

Elizabeth loves to read!

I collect American Girl dolls. Right now my collection is at 8 dolls. I'll share more with you about my dolls. I've also been doing an American Girl unit this year with my mom. You can read about it on her blog- Blog, She Wrote.

Guess What's Blooming!

Look what I found in our garden. I love flowers. I took these crocus pictures with my own camera!

I think I am going to enter these into the 4H Fair. What do you think?

(this is really R doing my own blogging)

My Sewing Library

I'm excited to share with you my sewing library. I get to use these books to find projects I like to work on. Some are easy books for kids and some are a little more advanced, but I always learn something when I read them.

This is one of my newest additions to the library.

• Sew What Skirts- there a few styles in here my mom loves. It's easy to make a skirt just from measurements and since I like my skirts long, this has some great instructions.
• Sew What Bags- fun bags to make for all levels of sewers.
• Bend-the-Rules Sewing- great if you want a guide to a new kind of sewing!
• Bend the Rules with Fabric- fun ideas for being creative with fabric
• Simple Sewing- this one is made by Klutz and was such a great hand sewing kit. It appears to be available only used
• Simply Sewing
• Sewing School- my favorite! Easy projects for hand sewing or machine sewing
• Quilting (Kids Can Do It)
• Sewing Bits and Pieces- using fabric scraps to sew new things
• Get the Most from Your Sewing Machine- tips for using features on your machine to do cool things
• Weekend Sewing
• Sew Serendipity- some sweet projects in here
• Singer Sewing Essentials- some great basic sewing guidelines
• Seams to Me
• Quilter's Complete Guide- pretty big guide on how to make different quilt designs
• Handmade Home- fun little repurposing projects in here
• The Creative Family- some easy sewing projects for being creative
• Making Fleece Crafts- I love sewing fleece!

This is really a combined library. Some of the books are mine and some of them are my mom's that she has been using for a long time. She used to sew more (when kids, homeschooling and blogging were not past times so much!) and had started a small library when she got her sewing machine. Now that I love to sew we've added on. Everyone knows I love craft and sewing books so it's an easy gift! We also get them from library book sales and with discount coupons. Mom says we rarely buy a book at full price.

Hokie Bag

I made a bag for my oldest brother for Christmas to hold all his lego star wars mini-figs. He's a collector and he has a huge collection- 75 at the last count! It had to be a bag that could carry them all.

I made it burgundy and orange for his favorite football team- the Virginia Tech Hokies. I was able to choose the perfect fabric. I started it at my sewing school and finished it at home. I was pretty happy when I found the orange knit material for the drawstring. I was afraid I would have to go with some other color and it wouldn't be nearly as exciting.

He loves the bag!

4-H Demo: Making a Drawstring Bag

I recently did a 4-H Public Presentation on sewing a drawstring bag. I took my sewing machine and demonstrated making the bag and sewing the casing. I showed how to put the drawstring in and told everybody why you always sew on the wrong side.

These are my tips and instructions for making the bag.

This is me practicing- only during the demo I was facing the audience.

My awe-inspiring poster (I used The Synonym Finder for this description) As a side note, The Synonym Finder is immensely satisfying (and I did not use the finder for the word immensely. I just thought of it.)

My brother suggested that my sewing machine is enigmatic*. And I'll agree because it has many groovy buttons. As in cool. Did you know, according to The Synonym Finder, there are 11 kinds of cool? Some of them sort of say what I want to say, but not really. So, I went with groovy.

I enjoyed it because I like speaking to the public and sewing is extra awesome! In dictating this to my mom, I used my language arts lesson on not using "commonly overused words". How did I do?

I get to go on to the next level and present it again. And I hope to move on to the level after that, but that will be it because this year this is no "level after that" (state level).

* Enigmatic- go ahead...look it up!

** Disclaimer- Heather (Mom) is only the stenographer. She had almost nothing to do with the moments with The Synonym Finder unless you count that both E12 and R10 were doing an assignment on humor along with being challenged not to use overly used common words. It's all about application and I'm pretty sure I could make a mint on writing lessons to go with nothing but a dictionary and thesaurus!