A puffed sleeved dress

 A while back I read Anne of Green Gables out loud to the kids. I am still reading that series to them but we are quite a ways past the first book. Anyway - in case you aren't familiar - in that book Anne desperately wants a dress with puffed sleeves. Well Megan shares Anne's love of puffed sleeves. I think it is partly from reading the book but I actually think she liked them before that as well.

  Last winter Megan was given a piece of fabric that she wanted to make a dress out of. It wasn't enough by itself but we figured we could combine it with something else. This last week when the other kids were gone to camp we finally made time to work on the dress.

First Megan drew me a picture of what she wanted:

 She also was full of instructions and ideas on how it should be made. Concerning the puffed sleeves she specially had strong opinions. Most of all the needed to be BIG!

  We started looking through our fabric to see what we might have that could go with the yellow, gold, orange and brown fall fabric that she had.  I was very excited (and amazed at how God works out even the very unimportant things in our lives) to find some bright yellow fabric in my stash that matched perfectly! Someone had given that to us as well many years ago.

  I found a dress pattern with puffed sleeves in my pattern box and we proceeded to make the dress partly using the pattern and partly according to our own ideas and to fit with what we had on hand. It was a fun project.

 And no, we didn't use the treadle sewing machine though I would love to get it going again! I think they are pretty fun to use. Megan has just been enjoying looking at it lately.

I wanted to show off another project that was done recently too.

For the fair Mara (with a little help from Grandpa, Grandma and I) made a really neat tree identification board. It is of trees that are found in our area and she entered it in the forestry department at the fair.  Grandpa helped her to get wood chunks, and then seeds and leaves/needles were collected of each type. She also printed out an outline of each and a description. We covered an old political sign with fabric and she attached them to that. We thought it turned out really nice and the people running the place did too. They asked if she might be willing to leave it as a more permanent display which we were glad to do.

   Those are a couple of projects recently completed around here. Many more are in the works but I only have so much time to blog! :-)