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.

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.

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!

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)

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

today, my grandma made empanadas… actually my grandma, my mom, mia and i all helped make empanadas. grandma started off, as usual, with the idea that she would be the only one working at it and it would take her all day long. this is typically true, as we ingrates who reap the bounty of the empanadas usually watch tv or hang out while watching the poor old woman slave away at these little dumplings. today, however, there was a challenge: grandma couldn’t figure out how to braid the edges of the empanada. so i put on an apron and swore i could figure it out and suddenly, i was helping. then my mom said she would try, then SHE was helping. then mia saw we were all working on stuff with the consistency of play-doh so she was in it too. we all made an assembly line (mia got the job of putting  on an olive before closing the dumplings) and kicked out the empanadas in a half a day… woo hoo! they’re not super pretty but they tasted great… and we made about 100 of them, so we’ll be eating them all week long.

before school starts, i decided to tackle that shirt for mia… and i was done and the measurements were good and i sewed it twice and it took me all night and everything… and in the morning, i was all excited to try it on her and then…

mommy, take [it] off. no like it. itchy.

WHA? i spent all that time sewing and slaving away at a shirt she will not wear. not for a second. or a millisecond. the kid won’t have any part of it oh well, at least it lives on as a testament that

1. i can make a shirt fit, if not good enough, for a human being.
2. the walmart $2 a yard section is not the bargain i hoped for.
3. i’m stubborn and slightly mean, ’cause i’ll try to make her wear it later in the future… maybe after a cycle in the dryer with fabric softener?

mia is at a stage right now where she likes to take off doll clothes but is too impatient or perhaps, “free-spirited,” to care about putting their clothes back on. truth is, i think she sees no point in wearing clothes herself so she hardly cares about whether or not the dolls have clothes. i, however, am saddened to see a doll i spent so much time making lovingly with my own two hands all nakey nakey. so, because i had some extra fabric lying around and because those pillows lit a fire under my sewing dreams, i learned to make a peasant blouse (actually, i made it a dress) for the naked waldorf doll named “dolly.”

here is dolly in her tattoo print dress:

and then, ’cause the first dress didn’t come out as perfect as i wanted it and ’cause i had too much minky left over from the pillows, the cabbage patch kid named “dolly” also got a dress (do you see a trend in naming dolls? we also have stuffed dogs named “doggy” and bears named “bear”). dolly, the cabbage patch kid, gets a nightgown too:

so next, i want to graduate to making a peasant shirt for mia. she’s basically a very large dolly, right?

so mia needs her own pillow in her bed so i can get mine back… and i’ve been wanting her to take a pillow for naptime at preschool (which she will be starting at the end of the month) so i made some very quick, highly-satisfying instant gratification envelope pillowcases. they’re super simple, but they ended up pretty cute, if i do say so myself.

i also wanted to share a sweet picture of my big, preschool-bound girl:

she wasn’t supposed to grow up, but just ’cause she’s stubborn with her mama, she has