All Things Mum

I hope you all had a lovely Easter and holiday. I got up before the kids on Easter Sunday and finished off the zipper so she could wear the dress. I am so totally against zippers! Urghh. Anyway, it worked out well and I finished the dress off with a pink ribbon which really made the dress shine. The best decision was to re-do the skirt by gathering it instead of having those pleats. This is a size 8 so she will be able to wear it for a while, at least til end of summer (Feb) over here. Next time I make up this dress I will use a lighter fabric. It's a nice pattern which also includes a plain bodice which is fully lined. If I do use a ribbon tie again it's a good idea to make those ribbon belts or sew a part of the ribbon to the dress so it doesn't ride up. It seems that during Easter the retail sector like to have sales so I popped into Lincraft and they were having a 30% off sale storewide. I hadn't planned on buying anything more than a dress zipper (f...

View B is the top right pink dress. Well, I stayed home yesterday morning (instead of going to the gym) and sewed away determined to finish the dress, or at least most of it. This is most of it done and she tried it on last night. We decided that we didn't like the raspberry flounce and I did not like those pleats. Urghh they look terrible when she wears the dress. It might have been suited to a more flowy fabric than the quilting cotton I used. It's from Spotlight when they had 30% off when you buy the whole bolt. I had done the bodice which was pretty easy. It was my first properly lined bodice in a long time and I almost gave up wondering what to do with the yoke so I winged that a little. The pictures and instructions on the New Look 6579 pattern were not great. I love the bodice though. The yoke is really cute and this is a size 8 which fits nicely on my 7.5yr old. It is a bit loose in the back though so I could have gone down to size 7 or maybe even 6. ...

Hello everybody!!! I took a quick break today to announce the winner of the Scholastic Easter Book Prize. Random generator picked #2 who is: Amber Boyce . So send me an e-mail and I will post the books out to you asap. Thankyou to the rest of you who commented. I like it when I get comments! We celebrated Palm Sunday and the girls wore their Sunday best. They behaved so well, actually all the kids behaved quite well and I consider it to be a fantastic church morning if none of them ask to go to the toilet. It is alot to ask kids to sit quietly through one hour of mass (or longer) and I didn't even bring any snacks to entertain them. Yes, I have made a start on the Easter dress. I cut out the pieces today (which I think is the most boring and yucky part). I hope to get started on some sewing tomorrow. I have a charity meeting and church again tonight so no chance of getting to sit at the sewing machine tonight. This week will go in the blink of an eye. Last week I ma...

Scholastic sent me these First Readers recently. They are A5 sized books and are very much like the home readers the Kindergartens read. I like them because they are a good size for the kids to hold and are a good start in basic reading. These ones are written by award winning Australian Author/Illustrator Kerry Argent . Here is the boy reading One Woolly Wombat which is an International Best Seller and a great Australian counting book. It presents the audience with the magic of dancing kangaroos, koalas sipping gumnut tea with lamingtons and goannas creating havoc in the kitchen and kookaburras writing with old-fashioned fountain pens. He would get a word wrong on some pages but he's a funny reader like that. He'll just add in words or make up words he thinks it would be. I'm forever telling him to read the words properly but he is a pretty good reader anyway.                                  ...