One Less Shirt To Wash

You know, there are whole workbooks you can buy these days on developing "scissor skills" for your preschooler to be sure their snipping will be up to social standards. I think we have this particular skill covered in our preschool here at Chez Armstrong as Nib so easily demonstrated here.

Curved lines? No problem. He's got it down. Two years old and he's a crack shot with a pair of snips and Mommy has less laundry too! Forget those chi-chi workbooks. Who needs 'em?

Scribble Shirts

Today, I had a little help in the form of a fabulous mother's-helper from church who brought her freckled brightness to our home and played endless games with two bouncing little boys so that I could multiply my hours and get astounding amounts done. There is fresh clean laundry...there are matched socks...there is even warm banana bread...and there were even naps for all three of my sons!

Muh!!!! Is she cute or what?

Heavens!

With all this fabulous bounty of energy and productivity I thought it was a good time to squeeze a little sewing project into our lives. Its been about forever and a day since I had a needle in cloth and I miss it. In our new house, I'm hoping to set up the sunroom to be a delicious Carlie Oasis where I can lay out patterns and cut them, water ridiculous amounts of plants, set up my easel and pose subjects for blog photography. Plan to come visit and check it out sometime...but yeah, I digress.

Anyhow! I decided to launch into a sewing project I'd been toying with a formulating slowly in my mind for a while and suddenly, once I'd decided I was sewing something, the idea gelled completely and somewhat instantly and there I was with a plan!

See, Dee has too few t-shirts for wearing in this hot weather (like four? which all end up in the hamper far, far too quickly) and he has too many of these plain white undershirts...

...enter semi-obvious "Plan"....make some of these undershirts into legitimate shirts via decoration of some variety.

I pulled out one of my fabric scrap bags and let Dee choose his favorite (bright red, what else!), cut it into squares and handed him an ink pen. He drew the scribbles of his choice and then for fun I did one and lent the pen to Ru to do a square of his own to decorate a plain tee that he had in his bottom drawer. Why leave anyone out?!?

Then, I took their pen marks and embroidered on top of them (thus to make them show up and make them more decoratively permanent. For Ru's more representational art I included a little title (Balloons with a Seatbelt, for those who wonder!) and also embroidered the date (an oversight I mean to correct on Dee's) and then I zig-zag appliqued them to the shirts!

Voila! Instant t-shirts, instant sewing project and instant artistic coolness in our ultra-productive day!  

Yay sewing!!!