a birthday dress for Tilly

Sewing clothes, for me, is still rather a challenge. The pattern tracing and cutting, the notches and facings and armhole bindings -- all of that work, and then the whole thing may or may not actually fit. And so I save clothes sewing for only the most special of occasions -- each year, a new birthday outfit.



This year, the pattern for Tilly's dress came from Girl's Style Book -- a new translation of a Japanese book. I chose a simple tunic blouse (pattern 'K' in the book), which turned out to fit more like a dress this year, but has plenty of growing room.

And, because it can be a little difficult to encourage her to actually wear particular clothes, I made a very simple matching dress for Sushi the Frog, and a small bow-tie for Fuzzy Frog as an incentive. Luckily three-year-olds still think that coordinating your wardrobe with your frogs is very cool.

This lovely fabric comes from a new online fabric shop, Modern Yardage. Instead of selling the usual fabric collections that you find in shops, Modern Yardage have their own team of designers, creating collections just for their site. Fabrics are printed to order, in an unusual design that includes the normal 44" print of fabric, plus an extra 12" or so of white space (like a selvedge), on which they print special features. Very original, and always a lovely surprise to see what little extra will arrive with your fabric.

This print, Thrive in Vanilla, is from my favourite collection, Verdant by Liz Ablashi. Amazingly, most prints are available in three different scales, (small, medium, large), so that you can pick the exact look you want. Tilly's dress used the large-scale print.

With the remnants, I just sewed up a quick little strand of bunting to hang on her playhouse -- as if she and her frogs needed to be any more matchy-matchy!



Such a lovely day, with this lively little spirit. Tilly, we celebrate you -- your life, your light, your mischief and sparkle! Here's to a superb third year together.

{good morning, two-year-old}

Today, Tilly is two -- a morning celebrated with a breakfast picnic, and a first play in her newly-finished, newly-furnished house.

Inside the house, she has a little kitchen, some animals, and a lovely miniature grand piano that our neighbours passed along. So far today, Tilly has been finding new and unusual combinations of putting these three elements together -- using a spatula to play a tune on the piano, cooking up a big pot of peanut-butter-and-animal soup, and sitting her little wooden tiger on top on the piano so that she can serenade him.

Now having a little midday rest, Tilly will no doubt be all-energy again in time for the dinner party she's having tonight for her friends. Let's hope they like stewed elephant.

 

 

And, if you'd like to see a little of us all in (stop) motion, here's a video that I've made, just remembering the last few weeks of playhouse building and decorating. 

Watch out for:

• Justin recreating one of his favourite Simpson's moments.
• Tilly walking the plank.
• me proving that IKEA kitchen scissors can do anything. Yes, even cut roof shingles.
• a lot of dancing cups, and a Marmite jar that likes to twirl.

Enjoy!

{all work and no play... yet}

This is the house that Justin built.

Perhaps you remember it as the giant pile of wood that I showed you in September? (Inspired by a little playhouse we saw while on holiday in Denmark) Well, that's almost exactly what it still was until last weekend. Almost all this -- walls, studs, screws, paint -- in three days. I keep having to pop out into the garden and touch it, just to make sure it's really, really real.

There's still plenty more to do -- several more coats of paint on the inside, and a whole roof to go -- and then the proper fun can begin. Curtains! Pictures! Little window boxes full of bright little flowers! Oh, and Tilly will probably enjoy it a bit, too.

Our final deadline is the 29th of June -- Tilly's second birthday, when hopefully a little crowd of friends will help her warm her new home with apple-juice toasts and a little summer picnic!

{b is for birthday}

This week, we celebrated Justin's birthday, with an all-day tribute to his favourite foods, and a few little handmade surprises. 

Tilly got in on the fun, and completed this "portrait" card of Justin -- multi-coloured eyes and a shining orange halo. He loved it! 

She also dictated her message to him -- I tried to convey her intonation as best as possible, but she felt that some words needed a little colourful emphasis. 

And, as a little last-minute pressie, I put together this alphabet T-shirt. It makes more sense if you know that earlier that day, Tilly had been fixated on trying to read Justin's "Run for Compassion" T-shirt -- the text on which is curled and slightly gothic. She couldn't make out any of the letters, and Justin remarked that he'd like to have a shirt which simply had the alphabet printed on it. 

One trip to the craft shop, twenty-six iron-on decals, and four hours of ironing later (yes, the "60 second" recommendation in the instructions was a little off), voila...

Although it is primarily for Tilly's benefit, Justin loves the fact that it brings them closer... literally, as Tilly leans in, peers at the letters, and then proudly exclaims "A!" "A!" "A!" while poking Justin in the chest! So, happy birthday to Justin, who fills our lives with love, happiness, and now, the alphabet.

{the leaning tower of cupcakes}

Step back in time two weeks. Take one ninetieth birthday party, two days to get it all sorted, three tons of moving supplies from my parents' garage, and a glimpse of this Lakeland cardboard beauty. It could only be a job for the butcher, the baker, and the cupcake stand maker.

It all centred around sliding artist's palette-shaped cardboard pieces onto an old kitchen roll. Now, if Kate Spade or Paul Smith made kitchen roll, this is what it'd look like: brightly striped. Unfortunately, neither of them has had that idea yet, so I used coloured tape (that matched our cupcake flags) to cheery the whole thing up a bit. Because, let's face it, bare cardboard hardly says "Get your party on." 

What does say "Get your party on" is a dozen Bakewell cupcakes (again, from our recipe, inspired by Britain's second best amateur baker, Holly). As do the Union Jack cake cups. But what most definitely does not help the party mood is when adding the cupcakes to your cupcake stand makes the whole thing topple over. Ever think you're going to be the least popular person in the room? Well, drop twelve Bakewells on the floor fifteen minutes before a hoard of hungry pensioners arrive, and you will be. Guaranteed.

Kitchen weights to the rescue. Of course, meticulous Holly might throw a razor-edged meringue at me if she were to see her prized cakes being served on such a precarious pile of old cardboard and rusting metal. But she'd have to throw it rather hard to reach me in Texas, so I feel relatively safe showing you the photos now.

So, there you have it -- cardboard box to cupcake monstrosity in twenty-five moderately difficult steps. What can I say, at least it didn't overshadow the cakes. Which were, as always, scrummy. 

{diy: washi tape flags}

Washi tape. Chances are you've seen a roll in a pattern you can't resist, and bought it. Chances are, once you've got one roll, you've decided to become a washi collector. Chances are, you now have an entire cupboard piled high with red tape, blue tape, tape with musical notes, with Japanese stamps, with the entire words of Shakespeare printed in miniature. 

But what do you actually do with the stuff?

You make flags. And then you make cupcakes. And then you stick the flags into the cupcakes and have a jolly good time.

Having made millions hundreds dozens of little flags for Mossa's birthday earlier this week, I've got the method down. Is it so basic that you could probably do it in your sleep already? Yes. Am I going to share it anyway? Yes. It might save you a bit of awkward finger/scissor/tape/cocktail stick manoeuvring.

(Are you drooling over those cakes above? Bakewell Cupcakes, baked by my sister, Alice, they use The Best Cupcake Ever recipe that I shared the other day)

You'll need:

• scissors
• cocktail sticks (long or short. I prefer long as you can cut them to make short ones, too)
• washi tape

Pull one end of the tape out, a good ten centimetres, and place the unpokey (i.e. 'blunt', for people who use 'real' words) end of a cocktail stick in the middle of the length of tape.

Fold the end of the tape over the top of the cocktail stick, sticking it to the tape on the other side of the stick. (Note: at first I was very worried about lining up the edges on both sides of the tape, but then got over myself and decided it looked quite nice uneven anyway.)

Snippy snippy. One straight cut, to separate the flag from the roll of tape, and two pointy cuts, if you like the snake-tongue effect. 

Here's another case of unnecessary worrying -- I oh-so-carefully measured the first two or three flags, and then decided that it was all a bit faffy, really, and decided to enjoy a variety of lengths of flag. Perfectly imperfect. Or, so I tell myself. We also scribbled '90' onto the flags in a very imperfect and blobby blue biro. 

We stuck the flags in cupcakes. We stuck them in Fruit Pastilles. We stuck them in Cadbury's Giant Chocolate Buttons. We slotted them into the holes in Polo mints. I even poked a couple into the tail feathers of my Mum's favourite straw chickens, to give them a bit of festive 'pluck'. In short: stick a flag in anything, and it becomes more exciting. 

So, tell me: am I wrong? Do you have tons of uses for washi tape? Have you never heard of the stuff, much less been tempted to buy any? Or do you, in fact, have the complete works of Chaucer on washi tape instead?

{a ninetieth birthday in photos}

It's the end of a long day of party poppers, pass the parcel, and Polo mints -- a ninetieth birthday party with personality. As all of our energy has been used up, scrambling to get the biscuits baked before the old folks arrived for their lunch, I'm simply going to show you some photos and go to bed. (With a leftover biscuit... or two!) 

{hello world, it's me, tilly}

Tilly's gone global. Find her sharing tips and tricks from her "Say Cheese" birthday party today over at the brilliant Ohdeedoh (the children's section of Apartment Therapy).

Or, if you've had enough cheddar, cameras and birthday party pics to last you a lifetime, why not check out these other inspired ideas:

• London-in-a-bag wooden block set
• The best apps for traveling with kids (please, remind me of this in a month, as we fly across the world with a wriggly jiggly fourteen-month-old)
• Cloudy day blackout shades
• Build your own bicycle sidecar (with two seats -- one for Tilly, one for Bella!)

{the signature tablecloth: year one}

You saw Tilly's birthday tablecloth when it was just a bit of fabric. Then you saw it getting drawn on with black Sharpie by our friends and family at Tilly's first birthday party. Now, here it is, fully decked out in many many stands of white embroidery thread. 

As I said, the idea is get everyone who celebrates Tilly's birthday with us to sign the cloth. And each year, I will embroider over the names in a different colour, creating a record of all our lovely guests for Tilly to look back on.

Yes, ALL the guests... Bella was included, even though she spent the entire party in our bedroom feeling sorry for herself. (Don't be sad for her -- she got to have Tilly's uneaten Cream Bomb cake!)



As a last touch, I drew around Tilly's hand, and added her age to the centre of it. I'm sure she'll enjoy signing in her own way in the future (I know I loved to practice my signature when I was little -- so much so that I still use the same juvenile star shape now. Yes, I've had cashiers laugh at me. No, I'm not changing it).

And, of course, her friends will start signing by themselves, too. We're not going anywhere anytime soon, so I'm hopeful that we'll see many of the same names next year, too.

I'll admit, some of our guests put my sewing skills to the test. I just hope I did their artwork justice!

Recently, someone asked me if I'm already planning next year's party, to which I replied that, no, unfortunately, every year will most probably be downhill from here. But, as I think about it, much of the work this year is going to be reused every year. Tilly's birthday crown will be worn again next year (and hopefully won't be falling down over her eyes), as will her felt envelope, and the growth chart. As for the birthday badge and party dress -- they're for the next little Slagle!

And, I think that officially marks the end of all things birthday. Hurray! (Although we seem to have bought the world's longest lasting balloons -- two weeks later, our living room is still full of them. I can't bear to pop them... perhaps there'll be here to reuse next year, too!)