once i’m done with a project, i can’t not post it (at least the picture! the blog posts wait sometimes…) i mean, i’m glad Mia can’t actually read yet, because by then she’d surely know how to work the mouse and be reading my blog for signs of gift-giving. anyhow, i really wanted to get her a bamboletta doll because they’re so beautiful, but really, i shudder to think of the sand boxes this expensive doll would frequent, of the marker experiments done on her precious face, etc. so instead of a bamboletta, i decided to make her a doll myself. i can’t claim the genius of designing this doll (i don’t have the time to design a doll myself at the moment) but i did make it from scratch and i am pretty proud. Her pattern name is mae but i call her may because that’s the month in which my little one was born. i’m hoping that when i’m long gone and she’s an old lady, she will still keep this doll as one that her mama made her.

for our upcoming trip to disneyland (for my mom’s birthday), i made mia a disneyland outfit i embellished the hoodie with ears and a bow and sewed the skirt. i also made her a tee shirt for underneath, done with my very first applique. A little rough, but not bad for a first time:

i’m totally proud

and my model was happy to oblige a photo. she’s really getting to the point where she loves dress up, so whenever she wears this, she meows and tells everyone she’s a cat. i made the mistake of putting the ears on first and then the earflaps, so they’re a little bit off, but she doesn’t seem to mind i think next time i really want to make a calico cat… or maybe a tabby. that would be super cute.

let’s start with my birthday since that’s the beginning of the month. we decided to go to an amusement park that’s geared mostly toward toddlers and the pre-school set, so that mia could have fun at my bday too we had a blast! it was so much fun hanging out with two of my favorite people in the world… couldn’t think of a better way to spend my birthday. i even won a birthday care bear in the games area! woo hoo!

halloweeness was rampant around our place it’s my favorite holiday; possibly because it’s so close to my birthday, possibly because there are crazy costumes involved… this year it was fun because it was the first real trick or treating outing for mia (before she just kinda went along but this time she outlasted even the bigger kids we went trick or treating with!) she was a fairy and i made her costume myself. here’s a little gallery of our weeks leading up to and including halloween:

ohh and i’m lame this year and never dressed up party pooper!

we saw a super clear rainbow! it was mia’s first

wow i made this necklace a million years ago (ok, maybe 3 or 4?) and now it’s popping up in blogs. i made it for an etsy contest about reusing items you might throw away… i’ve known people to chuck pennies away like garbage so i thought it counted. it cost exactly 36 cents (i already had the jump rings)

holy crow these crack me up big time

i can’t believe it! i made it on to the cake wrecks blog! it’s my absolute favorite blog and i made it as an honorable mention! you know how at the oscars they say that it’s an honor just to be nominated? it’s an honor to be honorably mentioned too. hate to toot my own horn but there’s also a lot of chatter about my roach on facebook

woo hoo can’t stop smiling!

and here is my awesome cake wrecky inscription from jen! and my coolio bookmark making me an official wreck creator

so for today’s great adventure, marco, mia and i went to a book signing for the new cake wrecks book. i love cake wrecks the blog, and i really wanted to go to this book signing AND enter the cupcake contest they were having. the deal was to make a replica of one of the cake wrecks from the blog. i picked a cockroach cake that i thought was gross and funny all at the same time. i especially took this sentence to heart in the entry: Do you think if you made a cake like this out of Twinkies, it’d be twice as likely to survive a nuclear holocaust? Just wondering. so i decided to make a cockroach cake out of twinkies lol. it was a crazy idea but hey, it was funny! and we had a lot of fun making it.

unfortunately, our entry didn’t win but marco and i had a chance to really have some quality time together and our taste tester, mia, found out she really loved twinkies (and frosting. and chocolate.) so it was all worth it