Thursday, September 1, 2011

NW Balloon festival, and my little budding fashion designer

Last weekend was the Northwest Art and Air Festival in our new home town of Albany, Oregon. We attended the festivities the first evening, where they lit up the balloons at night, and we got to do a kids craft workshop and lots of other activities. It was a great fun!
The next morning, we woke early and walked down to the park to watch the beautiful hot air balloons launch. I'm afraid we live about 5 miles from the launch site, so my pictures weren't the clearest. But Liz and I both immensely enjoyed watching the sky fill with balloons. We stayed out at the park for a good 1/2 hour, just sitting and watching the sun rise with the colorful hot air balloons.

Although you can't see them all in this picture, as they spanned the entire southeastern sky at their peak, we saw almost 30 balloons in the air at one time.
On a completely unrelated topic, Liz got a silly little toy from Burger King. Mind you, we don't eat fast food often (it hardly existed where we used to live), but we do indulge about once a month. This was a pretty cute toy though, it comes with a dollform and 4 fabric squares, so kids can "design" their own clothes.

Liz immediately took to it, so I went through my scrap bag and cut out another dozen or so pieces of fabric for her to use. She's enjoying creating all sorts of looks by layering fabric at different angles, and playing with lots of colors and fabric types.
As you can see here, it's just a plastic doll form that you lay fabric on top of, then close the form to create the doll and her clothes.

There is a small slider at the bottom of the form, so you can make pants or a skirt. Depending on how you lay out the fabric, this allows you to make jumpsuits, PJ's, shirts, pants, skirts and dresses. Liz really enjoys this simple little toy. I can't believe we got it out of a fast food kids meal! I'm so glad I could really add too it by added a few fun fabric scraps, too. :)


I have not been sewing much lately, possibly due to the heat, but I hope to get back in the swing of things soon. My husband's shorts are cut, and the underlining basted on. I just need to get it together and get THEM together. :) I got side-tracked because my mother's birthday is coming up, and she requested I make her an armchair caddy to hold her TV guide and all of her (4!!) remotes. So I've been working on that...slowly. I have no pattern, just winging it. I hope it works out. Wish me luck! Happy sewing everyone. :)

1 comment:

  1. You realize, don't you, that Liz will take over your sewing machine soon? :-) What beautiful balloon shots-so ethereal.

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