I = proud parent

When I picked Becky up today, her teacher told me that she had stood up to the class bully. Now, she's one of the bully's favorite targets, and the teacher has been great at working with all of us to decrease the incidences and encourage Becky to stand up for herself and not let this other girl get away with it. So I was pretty proud of her for standing up for herself. But then the teacher clarified: not only did Becky stand up for herself, but later when the bully went to pick on another child, Becky yelled at her, "Hey! It's not nice to hit people!" My kid stood up for another kid who was getting picked on. I'm so proud I could just about burst.

In other news, I spent the day cleaning the house and as part of that, tackled an area of my studio. For a good long while now my jewelry station has looked like this:



Clearly, I was not making any jewelry there. I spent a couple of hours cleaning, organizing, and labeling, and now it looks like this:



All I need is a new propane tank and I'm ready to start making jewelry again! Yay!

Finally, today's make:



A couple of things about this one:
First, the make itself: I've had this tee kicking around for awhile now...I originally used a really cute palm tree iron on applique on it, which dissolved the first time I washed it. Except it didn't dissolve the glue. I was just going to put another applique over it, but I had some t-shirt scraps (see below) right next to me and so I decided to make a nice bunch of three dimensional fabric flowers to cover the gluey area. Then they needed stems, because it looked sort of weird just sitting there in the middle of the shirt, and then they needed that last little touch to finish them off. Buttons! With yellow thread for stamens.

Now, this was not going to be my make for today. I actually cut up a couple of t-shirts to make skirts out of, but then realized that I would have to pull out the sewing machine to put them together (well, not have to, but I just don't enjoy hand sewing straight lines enough to do a bunch of seams and hems). That was really more energy than I wanted to expend, so I figured I'd go ahead and do the applique thing. It took me about 2 hours to get the flowers made, put on, and embellished. The skirts probably would have been done in about 30 minutes, including the time to take out, set up, and put away the sewing machine. Sigh. I'll probably make the skirts one day this weekend, so you'll get to see them soon regardless. I need vacation wear for the shore next week!

posted by Laura Y. @ 8:15 PM