Miaou

Things have been rather quiet on the blog front - I have been busy putting together a dress for Eilish for a school project. She wanted a traditional spanish dancer’s dress. I used an old T-shirt of mine, 4 metres of plain blue cotton and 3 metres of spotty. I cut the t-shirt down, cut the polka-dot material into strips and hemmed them, then gathered them and added them to the plain blue fabric (which I had cut so that it was narrower at the top than at the bottom. Then I ran a seam up the side to join the skirt, gathered and pinned the top and sewed it to the bottom of the t-shirt (which I had cut shorter to make it waist length). The only spanner in the works was my *!?$&* sewing machine which would not sew through the t-shirt material and kept skipping stitches - I struggled through altering the body of the t-shirt, but when it came round to the sleeves and to adding the skirt, I gave up and sewed it by hand! Consequently, I ran out of time to add ruffles to the sleeves. Ah well.

It might seem like a lot of work to do for a school project, but Eilish had been wanting a long frilly dress for ages (and shops don’t sell them above the age of about 4!), and it will come in again for the Town Gala Fancy Dress Competition in the summer (for which I might have recovered enough patience to add sleeve ruffles). She is very pleased with it and it went down very well at school too.

A tired old pair of jeans …

And a charity shop dress?

Huh? Huh?

A new handbag of course!

… but we had a great time!

And finally I will show you the outfit I made myself for the wedding. It’s not the best picture, but hey, I hate having my photo taken!

This one shows the jacket better.

Caitlin and Eilish just before we left for the wedding (we were staying in wigwams by the way, I recommend them, they were great!)

Caitlin at the reception. She doesn’t do girl clothes but I think she looks just fab in this suit! She chose the tie herself; the colour was a nice feminine touch I think.

The wedding cake was fantastic - I love a cake with a sense of humour! The bride and groom love hillwalking so this was a very fitting tribute to their hobby.

Calum had a wonderful time trotting round the garden where the wedding and reception was held.

Sadly I forgot to take any photos of Nick looking very resplendent in his Jacobite kilt!

The following day we went to Blair Drummond Safari Park. Definitely worth a visit if you are near Stirling on holiday. Quite a few wild animals there though

I was thinking about this whilst we were there - we are all so familiar with bears, giraffes, elephants and the like, but how often do we see them in real life? Nick managed to get some great close-ups.

And then the following day we broke our journey home (270 miles!) with a four-hour stop at Landmark, just south of Inverness:

Where there were lots of activities for the older children to do, plus a lovely treetop walk with the chance of seeing red squirrels (though they were all hiding the day we went!)

Phew! A very photo-heavy post. Next time I will post a glimpse of what I started making whilst we were away!

I hate this part of making a toy. At the moment it looks less fairy and more … hippo. I think it may look better once it has hair and a facial expression, but I hate doing hair, it is not my strong point! I think I made the tunic bit too long as well, which is annoying me, but I might just leave it for now.

For now I am reserving judgement.

(And she needs knickers.)