It's a bird, it's a plane...

No! It's Super Olivia!

There is a Children's Bicycle parade this Saturday and Olivia decided she wanted to be a super hero riding her scooter, so I went searching on the web for ideas and found a cute little cape pattern here. If you use a felt or something like that it can be a completely no-sew project, which is normally the kind of thing I go for since I'm not great with the sewing machine. But unfortunately I couldn't find pink felt (only blues, reds blacks and whites) so I ended up getting some pink flannel instead. I had to sew the edges to make sure it didn't fray, but even with my limited skills it only took about 10 minutes at the sewing machine to do this one for Olivia and another little one for Rachel that matches. (Can I get a collective "Awwwww")

I found a bunch of downloads on this site for the mask she's wearing, wrist bands and belt buckles all in matching superhero looks. There were some pink ones on there so I printed them out and then glued them on a white sheet of foam, then cut them out the next day and let Olivia decorate them with glitter glue. She's not wearing the belt and wrist bands yet, but you get the idea.

I took a few pictures and told Olivia to "pose". She gets down on one knee like this and then says "Mommy, is this posing?" I laughed and told her it was a perfect Superhero pose and snaapped a few pictures. What a cutie.

Last night Olivia had a sleepover at a friend's house for the very first time. She's had a friend over one time and she's had a sleep over at her Nannie's house, but never at another friend her own age before. It was nice to put Rachel down to bed and not have to fight with Olivia for an hour or more to go to sleep. It reminds me what it was like only having one child again. I hardly remember what I did with all my free time. lol.

No stitching progress to report. I'm still in my stitching slump. Hopefully I'll get back into it after this weekend. I'll be busy most of the weekend with stuff at the Fair. We're taking Olivia and Rachel out to the rides tomorrow and I'll be working the Figure Skating booth tonight and tomorrow night selling tickets on a Diamond Ring. Here, take a look. This is the picture of the ring that I downloaded from the Crescent website. They donated the ring for our fundraising efforts! Thank you Crescent Gold & Diamonds!!!

Snowflake Extraordinaire!

Well, the ice show is over and done with for another year. Thank goodness. The girls all did great. I didn't get to see as much as I would have liked to because we ended up standing by the entrance much of the time. I spent most of that bouncing Rachel around or carrying Olivia so she could see the skaters.

Olivia did wonderful as a snowflake. I've got a few pictures to show everyone and a video that is currently uploading to photobucket and hopefully will be done before I finish with my post.

Here are some of the pictures from today.

Here's a few of Olivia and a few of her friends getting into their costumes before the show.

Aren't they adorable little snowflakes!

Here she is all dressed and ready to go!

These ones are pretty far away. I think Olivia was the one down crawling. (near the middle)

Here's a picture of a few of the boys, they're dressed up as the snowmen.

A lot of people around here put their boys in figure skating for a year or two before they start them in hockey. At this age, they're not actually learning any figure skating stuff, but just learning to skate. And they want them to already know how to skate once they start Hockey, so we've got 3 boys in the preschool agegroup and I think another 4 or 5 in the older ones. (around 8 or 9 years old)

Olivia was crawling around the ice and she went over by the boards.

She's waiting there for her Nannie to drop a flower for her.

Olivia posing with her flowers and teddy bear she got after she was done.

Another shot of the same.

Here's the video.

Olivia is the one who skates by (around 30 seconds into the video) and then runs into the boards! She's also the one (around 1:20 into the video I think) who is crawling around on the ice.

Impatiently Waiting

I'm (Im)patiently waiting for my fabrics to arrive from Silkweaver. After nearly mauling my mail carrier for the last month and a half wondering when my free fabrics were going to be here, I got an email on Tuesday telling me that they'd been shipped. I can't complain too much about the speed though. I emailed Tracey at Silkweaver and asked if I could trade a few of my 10 smaller free pieces for one large piece that I need to finally start stitching Fairy Celebration. (see the bottom of this post) She had no problem with that and said that she was crazy busy right now but as soon as she got the piece dyed she'd ship them out to me. Since the piece I was looking for was a custom size piece and she had to cut and then dye it for me, it wouldn't be one she normally had in her stash.

I'm hoping that US/Canada Post don't take too long with the delivery. Hopefully they'll be here early in the week, because I could go completely nuts knowing that they should be here any day but not knowing when. The worst part is Canada Post recently assessed our mailbox as being too dangerous where it is and moved us to a community mailbox. We now get our mail about 1km down the road, which is nice when it comes to shoveling out our mailbox in the winter time, but it also means that I can't just run down to the mailbox while the baby's sleeping. I've actually got to get the kids up, dressed and ready for outside, then head over to the mailbox-- only to find that there's a flyer for the Beltone hearing test that comes to town once a month.
Needless to say, I don't make it to the mailbox every day now that it's moved.


Speaking of "Waiting", I realized that I never posted the 90 hour picture I took back in January. lol. It's been a while since I've done much stitching on it. Here's the most recent picture, taken January 31, 2007 at 90 hours work. The window and outside the window are completely done. I'm now working on the dreaded bieges in her dress again, though I haven't been working on her much, so no more pictures yet.

Tomorrow is Olivia's Ice show and she's going to be a snowflake with the other preschoolers. (the boys are snowmen) The costume is finally finished as of last night. I spent the evening hot glueing stars and sequens in the shape of snowflakes onto her costume. Then I velcroed a large snowflake on the back that one of the other mothers cut out and spraypainted silver.
The whole thing is very cute. I'll post some pictures tomorrow after the show is done.

Tonight however I'll be spending the evening decorating trees. The theme for the ice show is A Walk in the Park - Four Seasons, and we need 4 trees-- one for each season. We cut down four small birch trees in the woods behind my house and put them in buckets half filled with cement. Of course the winter tree is easy, I spreay painted some white on it to look like snow/frost and it's ready. Easy Peasy. But the other three are quite a bit more work.


I'm currently working on the summer tree. I'm using green painters tape to tape bunched up squares of green tissue paper to the branches. I've only got about forty minutes on it so far because I can't work on it when the kids are up. I'll most likely be spending all evening and half the night tonight working on it. Janice is coming over right now to pick up the spring and fall trees. They only need about half the amount of "leaves" on the trees because they would either be just starting to grow in the spring, or already half gone in the fall. Hopefully we'll get them done without losing too much sleep. It would have been a lot easier if Jason didn't have to work, then I could spend the whole day downstairs working on it, but unfortunately he does, and I couldn't get anyone to come watch the kids for a few hours, so I'm stuck doing it tonight instead.


Here's a picture so far. I got about 40 minutes work on it when Rachel was napping earlier. Olivia was a bit of a pest getting into everything down there while I was working, but we managed for a bit. Hopefully I have enough green tissue paper to finish it. Janice stopped and checked at one of the local stores to see if there was any more, but there wasn't. She picked up some green crepe paper streamers instead. I can attach these the same way, I think, but it might still look quite a bit different. Instead, I might try mixing the streamers in with the tissue paper so it looks more naturally mixed in, instead of on half one shade of green and the other half another shade. I dunno, we'll see how it looks tomorrow.

Edit: It's 11:15 pm and we just finished the tree. I wanted to log on and add a picture of the finished result. For some reason in the picture the tape holding the apples on (green painters tape) reflects the flash a lot more than the tissue paper or crepe paper streamers and it looks like it's quite a bit brighter. (It's almost glowing on the tops of the apples.) But IRL you don't even see it. It matches almost exactly the colour green of the papers. It looks pretty good.

Looking at it again in the picture, I think I might tie up that rogue branch on the left side and make it a bit more uniform looking. Then again life's not always about uniformity is it?
Damn, I get all profound and stuff at a quarter after 11 at night don't I?

Alright, I'm pooped. Off to bed for me! Later everyone.