Chocolate Bunny Heads for Breakfast

There are so many good memories to share from today’s Easter celebration, but honestly, I’m just too tired tonight.  Watching my kids eat sugar for the first time in 8 weeks was like watching bottle rockets shooting into outer space.  They wanted nothing to do with Greg or I at the family dinner, and stayed occupied (and in constant motion) with Cousin Avery for 6 hours.  With the chocolate washed off their faces (and out of their hair), they are lying in comas in adjacent beds right now.  I cringe at tomorrow’s potential sugar crash.  Look for us to spend most of the day at home.

The bedskirt from the girls’ crib

For Easter this year, I got the wild hair to repurpose.  I’ve never been one to repurpose things: I lack the vision and the impulse to keep things.  I fall more on the “purge” side of the keepage-coin.  But, when we sold the girls’ crib last year, I kept the bedskirt.  It’s a Liz Claiborne silk-cotton blend, both fabulous and expensive.  My mother-in-law made the bedskirt 5 years ago, and I couldn’t bear to part with it.  I took one look at the perfect gather, and I knew exactly what to make: Easter Skirts.

Kelly’s Easter Dress

I didn’t immediately think to pair it with tshirts, but it was a natural progression from Halloween to Valentines Day, and now to Easter: the year of the tshirt dress.  I was initially thrilled that I would not have sew my own gathers, only to decide to turn the bedskirt into 4 bubble skirts, hence, requiring me to gather like I’ve never gathered before.  I actually sewed a gather onto a gather, and then did it again, and then attached all of those gathers together, only to gather a tshirt onto it.  In case you were wondering, I only broke one needle, proving my new Bernina can sew through concrete.

Sara’s Easter Dress

The pinwheel idea came from here.  Sara’s dress originally matched Kelly’s, but it was not at all flattering to her tall and thin frame.  I tried to disguise the drop waist with an oversized pinwheel, and Greg and I both agreed it looked like it was attacking her.  Oversized flower?  Cute.  Oversized pinwheel? Deadly.  I sewed every ounce of scrap fabric together to make a cute sash that turned, “Um…nooo”, into “YES!  That looks like Sara.”  Fortuitous, because after Sara’s initial trying on of the dress, she insisted she would be wearing it forever.  Both girls claimed these are the most comfortable dresses they own.  After the beating these pediatric ball gowns took today, I’d say they are also the most sturdy.  I’m not surprised.  Between the two, there is an entire spool of yellow Gutermann thread holding them together (I sew strictly with Gutermann or Mettler, with a slight preference for Mettler, and with a preference for silk thread over cotton).

Not bad for $10 dresses

And for those of you who wonder how I found the time to do this, just remember, crafting comes at the expense of everything else.  I don’t watch TV.  I wanted to watch a new sitcom a few weeks ago, and I realized I had no idea how to find NBC.  I grew up with 3 channels, and watched them all religiously.  I now have 1000 channels, and I don’t watch any of them.  Crazy, yes?  The house is a disaster.  I can’t even talk about the laundry.  The playrooms are impassable.  I thought about the making of these dresses about 5x longer than it actually took me to sew them.  I finished ZERO of my other Easter crafting projects (although I finished these at 9:30 pm, and their baskets were done weeks ago…shouldn’t the Mommy Medal Van be arriving soon with a gigantic trophy?).  Unless I get to the store tomorrow, we’ll be eating chocolate bunnies for lunch.  But you know what?  It was worth it.  To have the girls hug me tightly and tell me they love their comfy and beautiful dresses and watch them bounce around in them all day?  TOTALLY worth it.  I will clean the house tomorrow.  Today, it was Easter, and to quote Sara, “We had an absolute ball Mommy.” Hey sweeties…me too.