First Day of School 2013

Another school year is here, and my kids are ready!

Oh wait! I promise that's the result of bright sunshine and gnats on the grassy lot outside of school. Let's try again against the building...

Both of my kids were very excited to start school back up today! That is a blessing I do not take for granted. They were also both thrilled with their first day of school shirts that they helped design. Neither are exactly what *I* would have picked in terms of fabrics and threads, but it's exactly what they wanted, and I aim to please my two favorite customers. :)

Annaliese selected East Coast Applique's "Sweet Grade" design. I added "4th" by using the 4 from 8CP's Frills and the th from 8CP's Waiting.

She has two skirts in her closet that we love (great length for her long legs plus they built in shorts) but they are ODD colors and we can't find matching shirts for them. Applique to the rescue! :) Although honestly I didn't have much fabric in my stash to match them either. She decided to pick colors so that it would match BOTH skirts. Whew, that was a challenge but we figured it out!

 Dashiell loved ECA's School is a Blast design. I wish I could have recorded our negotiation session picking fabrics and threads. Green had to go (it's sneaky afterall). It was ok for the pencil to be yellow, but the star could NOT be yellow. So he made that red and insisted that "is" be yellow in it's place. He also wanted a solid red P and not one of my "beautiful" fabrics (I had picked a cool chevron or a cool stripe for him to choose from). So... it's not exactly the most balanced and legible design, but it's what he wanted :)

 And his reaction to the completed shirt made it worthwhile: "Wow Mommy that's great! I could wear that forever!"

Our kids delivered their school supplies in personalized shopping totes:

 Annaliese's classroom is decorated with a baseball theme, so I used ECA's divided baseball (vintage stitch) and 8CP's College Block Small.

Dashiell's teacher likes cherries :) So I went on a hunt for a large single cherry design to use as a patch. I ended up modifying 8CP's Applique Cherries design. I separated out one of the cherries and enlarged it A LOT (like 80%?!) which of course made the satin stitches huge. That's ok, my plan was to delete them anyway and just make it a raggy patch. When I deleted the satin stitches, I noticed the tackdown was a lovely blanket stitch, which worked perfectly! :)  I added her name with 8CP's Janessa.