I was going to make a dress that looked just like this, but then my muddled pregnancy brain got in the way and I cut the fabric on the selvedge instead of the fold. Then after picking out another lovely piece of fabric I did it again. Amazingly I didn’t just go upstairs and eat chocolate, but instead picked out fabric that I had yards and yards of so I could continue to screw up and still get a dress out of it.  And ta da! I cut on the fold (yay!) and used the elastic thread that’s been sitting in my drawer for over a year. I used Erin’s sunny dress tutorial, but stopped after 5 rows of shirring because I liked the baby doll shape of the dress. I never did like the straps that tie (even though I know they are super useful) so I made thicker straps instead. Then high on my one success, I made my son matching shorts. They are a little longer than shorts–board shorts? short pants? long shorts? everyone has a different name for them. I think they are just cute as hell.

oh and thanks for all your comments on the last post. I guess I’ve never read the comments on apartment therapy before. I didn’t know they liked to get down and dirty. I wasn’t hurt at all–everyone’s entitled to their opinions–but I think I may put a disclaimer on my blog about using my photos (to be fair, AT did credit me, they just didn’t get the facts straight) or maybe even have an edited version appear in RSS readers. How do you protect your work?

We had a really lovely weekend. I pretended to know what I was doing in the garden while my kids made mud pies and my husband mowed the lawn. It doesn’t get more suburban than that. And it was awesome. We ate every meal outside, including these ridiculously awesome carrot cake cookies. The recipe says they make 18, but I only got a dozen, so double it because they are super delicious: not too sweet, but not too healthy either and small enough to eat too many without realizing it. And just the cure for when all your decorating decisions get totally panned (in the comments) on a popular website–who knew rug placement was such a hot button issue?

We’ve had jute rugs for a couple of years now (you can see one here) and they were getting ratty as hell. Not to mention totally beige and boring.  They hide every stain though and with two dirty dogs and two toddlers that is pretty huge.  But the boringness was outweighing their usefulness when the spring came, so I sprung for some new ones. Rugs are really expensive (if you didn’t know) and I would like to tell all the shelter magazines and design blogs to stop telling everyone that 1000 bucks for a rug (or a couch or anything really) is cheap, because it is not. 10 bucks is cheap. And that’s what I paid for one of these yellow stripey runners at Ikea.  I duct taped them together–classy I know–and now I have a rug that I is far from beige and cost less then take out.  I got two more for the living room and it like we live in a whole new house (granted one where I have to vacuum a lot more, but still they look pretty good).

I have stocked my little shop in quite some time, but I’m trying to make it look presentable again. There are four new kiddy messenger bags in some pretty fantastic prints: Heather Ross (who I hear won’t be designing fabric for a while–damn!), Alexander Henry, and the Japanese line Kokka, most of them lined with vintage gingham.  I also made the little bear from that awesome Kokka forest print. His name is Julien and he is the first bear of mine stuffed with 100% wool. I need to look around a bit more for wool stuffing, because damn it’s expensive, but so much nicer to work with than sucky poly fil (anyone have a good wool hook up?).  I’m moving to use only natural materials for the stuff I sell. The bags are now lined with cotton twill, because interfacing is weird and god only knows what it’s made of. I switched to using  cotton thread a while ago, mostly because it just sews so much nicer than polyester thread. And now the stuffing is wool, but I do use foam for my diggers and tugboats and I just don’t know what natural material could give them that same structure.  Anyone have any ideas? I will always use vintage and thrifted fabric even though I’m sure most have some polyester in them, but their coolness factor makes up for that. right?

I was going to make a fancy dancy dessert for easter, but I spent too much time looking for the perfect one which left no time for actually making dessert (though I will make this cake some day). Most of the recipes for our easter dinner came out of Suzanne Goin’s fantastic book, Sunday Suppers at Lucques and I found a simple springtime dessert in there too: Tangelo Creamsicles. These are super delicious and you need to make them.  A recipe is pretty much unnecessary, all you do is squeeze some tangelos (which I think are oranges crossed with grapefruits?) and pour them over vanilla ice cream. Tangelo juice is on the sour side so you don’t need too much of it (should be about half as much liquid that’s in a root beer float). When we were pouring the juice over the ice cream my husband and I were pretty skeptical.  I mean, it’s pretty much just orange juice and milk mixed together, which sounds totally disgusting.  But instead it turned out to be more like the best creamsicle ever. We will be eating these until I can’t find tangelos anymore.