Crowns, craft and sewing skills

 

I love the way Eleanore just whipped up this crown for Mimi moments after she announced she was going to be Cinderella today. Mimi had put on 'the dress' (mine from like 50million years ago) and suitably made up her face with glitter and greasy lipbalm. And suddenly there was Eleanore presenting her with a personalised head piece. Oh to be so capable, focused and efficient. I can only dream of such creative achievements.

My Mum is of a similar creative type. So that when I turned up at her house with material and a pattern (and a live 7-year-old model for measuring purposes), within 24 hours Mum had produced this gorgeous reversible dress. And this was even when the pattern (which the lady who sold it to me swore was dead easy) turned out to be only suited to girls half Ellie's age, and hence much extra measuring and calculations had to be made. My mathematic skills are even worse than my (non-existent) sewing skills so I found Mum's efforts doubly impressive.

But I do take consolation in the small part I had to play in this creative triumph (stay tuned, there's hope yet if you can't sew on a button) because I think I do have a gift for walking into the chaos of a fabric store (Spotlight at Birkenhead Point - if you've been to a Spotlight (any will do) you'll know what I'm talking about) and finding perhaps the ONE quality fabric - and I'm talking the elusive combination of pattern and actual material (med weight) - in possibly the entire store! This is me. I found this fabulous fabric/design, in red, purple and blue (pictured) and it looks so good. I'm seriously thinking about racing back to snaffle the rest. And it was CHEAP! So I was pretty excited with myself, and Eleanore and Mimi (okay, not Arch, but he's only 1) were even excited enough to forget how annoyed they'd been 5 minutes earlier at being dragged into a boring chaotic fabric store...

Oh, and did you notice those fabric covered buttons at the top of the dress? Well I did those. The lady in the shop was right, they were dead easy.