Dress-Up Rack

Happy Friday Friends!
I thought I would show you one last fun present that the girls got from "Santa" this past Christmas. It's too cool not to share. We had been having storage issues for all of the pink and purple...and pink princess dresses and skirts. Most of the time it all ended up stuffed into a corner of their playroom. I knew a solution had to be found. Then I found the perfect thing....on Pinterest. A Dress-Up Rack. You can find the original instructions here. I decided to change the colors to make it a bit more our style and then we made it a little taller than the one in the tutorial also. But the rest is the same. I can't really take credit for this one. I just found the idea and instructions and then handed it over to the husband.....er....I mean Santa. Who did an amazing job! I wanted to give it more of a rustic look, so instead of painting the base blue, we sanded and stained it a gorgeous wood color, then we painted the piping a beautiful copper color. I love copper so much. I have had a can of copper spray paint just waiting to be used for something fun and I was so excited to finally use it. The cool thing about this project is that you can make it in just about any combination of colors. You could even make an adult sized clothes rack for some fun extra storage in your room. All you need to do is change the measurements. Anyway. Here is what Santa and his elves made for the girls this Christmas.

See what I mean about the purple and pink? Yikes!

Talk about cool storage! I want one too!

Here you can get a better look at it without all the stuff on it.

They seem to enjoy using it as a stage also.

 Oh my little girl. I can't get enough of her cuteness.

Enjoy the weekend!

Princess And The Pea Playset

Good Morning! Today I am going to show you the project I made for Princess's Christmas Eve present. Everyone knows I love a good fairy tale. I am a sucker for the magic and romance. Princesses, castles, mythical animals....One of my favorite fairy tales is the story of the Princess and The Pea. And for any of you not familiar with the tale, I will give you a quick summary. One stormy night, a young maiden knocked on the door to a castle belonging to a Prince and his mother, the Queen. The maiden insisted she was a Princess, but the Queen was not convinced and decided to put her to the test. She told the servants to make a bed of several mattresses (I can't remember the exact number, but a ridiculous amount) both firm and soft and to place one single pea underneath all of them and she warned the servants not to say a word about the pea. She said that if the maiden didn't notice the pea, then she was not a princess. But if she truly was a princess, it would be noticed. Sure enough, the next morning, the Princess complained of being black and blue and having had a terrible night's sleep. She had felt the pea beneath all those mattresses. The Queen then believed the Princess and the Prince and Princess were married.
There is this crazy expensive, yet freakishly adorable Princess and The Pea Playset that I have always wanted to get for Princess. But I could never justify buying her something like that when it would probably get broken anyway. So luckily, I found the inspiration for making my own play set from yet another Craftgawker.com find. You can see the original instructions here. This is how mine turned out.

 I made the base of the bed from Popsicle sticks (and lots of hot glue) and then the rest was made of sticks.

My poor daughter is so story deprived. I have never even read her this story! That's soon to change though.

 Princess loves the "pillows" the most and insists that the Princess is Sleeping Beauty.

I love how the little doll turned out. She was made in such a hurried frenzy, that I'm surprised how well she looks. (I would like to make more dolls like this, so look out for future fairytale playsets) The one problem with her is that I had a really hard time getting her hair to stay on. Hot glue just made her hair look funny and regular glue wouldn't stay. So consequently she has a ton of hair under there that's just kind of shoved under her hood. Princess brings the doll to me every now and then to "fix" it when the hair starts falling out....

 I used a green bead I had on hand for the pea.

I wanted my bed to look a little more "woodland" inspired than the original Popsicle stick one. So once again I went outside and ripped branches off of a giant tree in our yard to make supplies for it.

The mattresses were the easiest part by far. I just sewed together squares of fabric in several different fabrics and then stuffed (actually I had my brothers and brother in law helped with the stuffing....it was Christmas Eve day! Talk about last minute right? I told you I was busy!) them with fluff then sewed them closed with the sewing machine.

Now that's a real Princess!

Fabric Dollhouse And Fabric Babies

Over the crazy holidays, (I'm not sure how I accomplished it, but I did) I made a few things that I am really proud of. So I thought I would share some of them with you. I decided to make one really cool thing for each of our girls to open on Christmas eve from their parents. Our tradition is to open any presents from anyone on Christmas Eve and then Santa presents ONLY on Christmas morning. So we give our kids at least one present from us on Christmas Eve, so that there is a better distinction between us and Santa. I wanted to give our little Peanut something really cool. We found she was really hard to shop for this Christmas, because anything we would have wanted to buy her, her big sister already had. And why would you buy two of them when they can share right? So I was pretty excited about this project I made for her. A Fabric Dollhouse with Fabric Babies to put inside. Perfect for her to tote around and play with. I found the idea from Making It Sweet via Craftgawker.com and based my house off of hers and the ones she based hers off of. You can find the other tutorials here and here. I hate following directions, so I basically looked at the pictures and then designed my own. But sometimes it helps to have actual measurements! I made mine a bit bigger than those in the tutorials because I wanted a decent sized dolly to fit inside. Here is how mine turned out.

My husband actually suggested using a zipper for the sides when I was having issues with closing up the sides with buttons. What would I do without him?

 I used boning (its used for making corsets) for the handle so that it would stay upright.

Not perfect by any means. Somehow not all of the edges lined up even though I cut them straight and I had to force the pieces together. But I thought it turned out pretty darn cute anyway. Too bad my little one wasn't as excited as I was!

Once I made the house, I moved onto making the babies to go inside. I figured the simpler the better. There are so many cute dolls being made these days that are plain and simple and somehow the cutest things ever. Like this one and this one from Land of Nod. So I found another tutorial for these cute Peanut Babies. Name coincidence? It was fate.

 I decided to make them little dresses too so they wouldn't be naked. All I did was cut out a little fabric, added some thin elastic to the top so that they would stay on and then I finished the bottom edges.

Night Night little baby!

Back Again

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year! I'm sorry to have been gone for so long. I didn't mean to be. I had all these aspirations to have tons of Christmas crafts and recipes to share with you....and a full Holiday Home Tour in the days before Christmas and to have posts made and ready for when I left town after Christmas.....but what happened? I got busy. (As I am sure, most of you did too) SO busy! Suddenly everything had to be rushed, because Christmas was days away and I hadn't finished even half of my shopping. I had baking to do, Santa to see and way too many presents to wrap and make. So as difficult as it was, I decided to just let go and worry about blogging once we got back from our annual Christmas trip to Hood River. So here I am at last. And I thought I would show you some of the highlights from the last few weeks to catch you up. This is what the Shephard family has been up to.

Our annual trip to Molbak's to see all the Christmas decorations.....and two very squirmy children!

The only snow of the season so far.....so sad that our snowman could only be a few inches tall!

Gingerbread house decorating. Princess couldn't understand why we were letting her eat so much candy. But I think she was ok with it.

Someone else got some too.

Princess in her gorgeous Christmas dress.

Sister love.

Nervous about meeting the big guy in red.

The Paper Plate Angel Wings that I meant to give a tutorial on. Oh well. Maybe next year!

Princess drinking her "Baby Champagne" at the Nutcracker.

She absolutely LOVED the Nutcracker. I think ballet lessons are in our future.

Snowflake Lane with our Auntie Heidi! Someone was a little wary of the giant mouse.

Spreading out Reindeer food before Christmas so that they knew where to land.

Christmas Eve. It was my favorite night of the season.

Listening to The Night Before Christmas read by our Nonnie.

She couldn't wait for Santa.

Christmas morning! Santa came! Santa came!!!

But wait, Santa left one more surprise present in the garage.....Our new puppy Tank!

Little Peanut got her first haircut. This is how we do haircuts around here...half naked, with Sophia the 1st and a hunk of cheese.

I am loving her sweet little bob haircut. So fitting with her personality.

And that pretty much sums up the last few weeks around here. Hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year as well! Here's to a wonderful 2014!