another party

SuperFriends.
How Wolverine celebrates his birthday.
Looks like HawkGirl should be perched here instead.
No, Zero the Hero didn't hit the Hulk. They're both just camera shy.
Zero the Hero (from Schoolhouse Rock) now over his camera-shy-ness.
The barely green Hulk.


Batgirl posing for her featured article in the Gotham Times.

The Hulk transforming during Batgirl's photo shoot. My camera barely survived.

How I made the costumes: The Hulk is pretty obvious. A cut off shirt and cut off pants. I think the best way to describe the Batgirl outfit is to answer Heather's question. "So, what did you dissect to make her costume?" The answer is: a windsuit, a fleece sweatshirt, and a vintage leotard. The sweatshirt is any yellow that you see. The leotard is the hat and the arm cuffs. The puffy windsuit sleeves are now the cape. The front of the jacket is the back of the shirt--the pants, the pants. And the bottom of the pants became the boots--I even kept the zipper so they'd be more like real boots. Its my first attempt at complete shoes, so they don't fit so well--too big. In fact, they only fit well enough to take pictures in, not to walk in. But, I plan to keep trying.

pony party (some craft ideas, too)

Aubie turned 5 last week, and this past weekend we had her party. She requested a pony party, so here's what it looked like:
Waiting to pull the pinata strings. Does this pinata look sorta familiar?

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle has a whole new meaning to me now... Like, revamping last year's castle pinata by painting a couple of horses and turning it into a "pony palace" or...
cutting the pony tails from the end of a purple plastic table cloth I've been able to reuse for several years.
Easy Pin the Tail on the Pony: Online horse coloring page, magnified on Paint, then printed (on several pages) and traced onto a Dollar Tree shower curtain.
Aubie opening gifts. She loved all of her pony presents especially!


Time for cake and icecream!



Jill with her pony.
A whole bunch of ponies. I was having a bit of trouble coming up with ideas to go along with the pony party theme. Why not make hobby horses? I found this great tutorial and improvised a bit. Instead of a dowel rod, I used mops from the Dollar Tree. Aubie has been wanting a unicorn hobby horse for several months now, but I didn't want to spend $15 on one that was too short for her. Since I bought new fabric for her horse, I'd say her's cost maybe $3 or $4. For all the others I used scraps that I already had, so they ended up costing around $1.50.

the latest project

I'm sure you've been wondering where I've been. The past two weeks, I was working on this:

I did a lot more hand quilting on this one than I have on the past few quilts. Since I was getting paid for it, I wanted to put more effort in to it, obviously. I really had forgotten how relaxing it was to sit and hand quilt. I have got to get a quilt going just for fun!
Also, I was working on a refashion project for Mixtape Zine--an Australian Magazine published by the founder of Wardrobe Refashion. But I'll let you know more about that when the article comes out.

the beach

Daniel will be leaving Pensacola at the end of May. So if we wanted to go to beach and have a free place to stay, we needed to go, like now. Since David didn't have to work overtime this past weekend, we thought it would be the best opportunity. So we loaded up the car and headed down Friday night. It was gonna be a very quick trip, but, its the beach, so it was worth it (to me anyway).


This is Saturday morning on the balcony. Daniel has a great view of the bay from his condo. Poor Matthan has puffy eyes due to his lack of sleep from traveling the night before.


We got good and woke up at IHOP (a still-sleepy Aubie pictured here).



And then it was off to the beach.



Matthan loved it, as I knew he would. We went back again in the evening to play in the sand a bit more, and it was very difficult keeping him from getting in the water again. Aubie and I collected pieces of sand dollars . We never found a whole, but it was fun looking for the biggest piece.




On the way home...

This is one of the best rest stops I've ever been to. Not because the bathrooms were so great, but the nice clover-filled picnic area really did allow you to "rest", even though for Matthan, "rest" means running all over the place.
Aubie showing me all the boo-boos from the weekend.

Not sure what this face was about, but it was funny.
Matthan loved seeing all the big trucks so close and he loved the little dogs that you can barely see in the right corner of the picture. He kept waving goodbye to them.
So yeah, it was a quick trip. But we had fun, and Matthan got to the beach for the first time. And now that he's been, I know we're gonna have to go back.

*Sorry "later this afternoon" turned into later this week. I couldn't seem to get all the pictures uploaded and type stuff too.
Oh, and the daytime pictures were taken by me, and the night time pictures were taken by David (except for the "crazy kids" picture).

this is so...

Aubie has obviously inherited her mother's imagination and her Aunt Leah's love for words. Friday afternoon, I was getting the van cleaned out and ready for our trip to Pensacola. Not a very fun job, but it had to be done. Aubie and Matthan were in the van while I was cleaning it, which added to the un-fun-ness (why they wouldn't play outside, I don't know). With a very teenager-y voice, Aubie said, "This is so appelagate (u-pell-u-gut)!"
"What?"
"This is so appelagate."
"Is that a word you've heard before, or did you make it up?"
"I just made it up."
"Well, what does it mean?"
"It means this is really, really boring."

My sentiments exactly. But even though cleaning out the car was "appelagate", going to the beach wasn't. So I'll be posting pictures of that later today. : )

no picture, sorry...

I just had to post what Aubie just said. She is so funny.
I told her that I had petted Monk (Mimi's cat that now belongs to us) last night and he really is such a sweet cat.
Aubie said, "That's my Monk! You remember the other day, when Miss Elizabeth (Leah's cat) tried to kill me? And Monk saved me? I remember that day."

Two posts in one week? What?

Sunday was such a beautiful day! We really did have a happy Easter. Can you believe we actually have a picture of the whole family? And we're all dressed up? Wow!
Craft points: I made my skirt out of two pillowcases (Note to self: never make a skirt without using a pattern and try to put a zipper in, too). And Mom made Aubie's dress as practice for the upcoming flower girl dress.






The kids had an egg hunt at Mom and Dad's. I didn't realize that Aubie still had her jeans on under her dress when I took the picture (she changed back into her Easter dress for the hunt--I wasn't going to let her eat in it!)
Matthan really didn't enjoy "hunting" up eggs (there was really no hunting to it--they were scattered all over the ground). He was more interested in the contents of the only three he picked up.

P.S. Until I get a charger for my camera battery--cannot find it anywhere : ( --I'll be taking pictures the old fashioned way. Kinda fun for a change, but with a wiggleworm of a son, I'm pretty sure I'll be wasting a good bit of film.