July Dress Up and working on "Alice"

We still have the four kids almost every day and out of desperation I made a declaration that I have to sew.....ALONE...The sewing isnt the problem, it is sewing without three extra bodies upstairs all wanting to create something different...Andrew, who is four, likes to paint....(paint everywhere..), Olivia wants to sew and does, thankfully without my help and Daniel makes things out of paper and glue and whatever he can find...(big giant paper mess). I put the two boys out on the picnic table and told them to knock themselves out and Olivia and I took back the sewing room!
We have been sewing scrap blocks like the ones I showed about a week ago. She just got her first sewing machine and she uses the blocks to practice straight seams. She is getting pretty good at it already.
Then I started on my July paper dress...This is hostessed by Margaret at http://aliceandcamilla.blogspot.com
The idea is to make a dress a month and she has quite a few participants, then we all visit each other and ooh and ahh over the dresses...It is like paper dolls for grown ups. Olivia jumped right in on this one....She told me what shape she wanted and I drew and cut it and then she decorated and finished it...With no help from me! This is one cute dress.....Here is Olivia's.....







She picked out everything herself.....
My dress just felt like it had to be red and blue in honor of July...I can just picture it with a pair of red cowboy boots....cutie, patootie!









Yee haw cowgirls...

Tonight after the kids went home I headed back upstairs and started to work on my Alice In Wonderland apron....I am going to do it collage style and just kind of wing it...In other words no pattern and on the artsy side...I drew some legs and a petticoat on fabric and then used free motion sewing and a ton of thread and this is the finished result...not the apron, just the bottom of Alice going down the rabbit hole.....











If you click on the pic, it gets big and you can see all the thread.....anyway, it is a start...I can see the finished thing all in my head so we will see if it turns out the way I think it will, or if it has a life of it's own.....
Happy Summer!