I should really be at my sewing machine because Mrs. Claus still has one last project to finish, but I just got done sewing the theater curtains and have to take a quick break to show you the finished dress up closet/puppet theater that Santa is bringing! Lots of credit to Ana White's easy-to-follow plans and to The Picky Apple for thinking of adding the theater, plus my dad for cutting all the wood and pre-drilling everything for me so all I had to add was paint, hardware, curtains and costumes. Originally I was going to purchase something very similar from Guidecraft, but I hated the pastels of their product and thought I could build it for less. I was delighted to find similar plans online and then the theater idea just seemed too perfect not to incorporate! My dad and I made a slight change to the design to allow the front to hinge so the girls won't have to climb over the front lip to use the theater. Now that it's finally complete, I am absolutely thrilled with how it turned out! You can see in the pics below how it spins around from dress up storage to puppet theater, and how the front hinges down flush with the bottom for the theater : )

... is a few more hours in the day! As I'm sure is true for most people this time of year, I have been busy (and I sure wouldn't mind if tomorrow just happened to have a half a dozen extra hours of daylight). Lots of family crafts, holiday gifts, and a few Santa projects have been in the pipeline.

Here are some cute lavender sachets I stitched up.

And check out our family's new advent calendar that I made. Thanks to my friend and fellow Army wife, Close to My Heart consultant Lindsey Collins, for hooking me up with the cubby to get started! My girls have been flying downstairs every morning eager to see what's been tucked in the drawer for them : )

Finally, here's a sneak peak of the doll quilts in the works for when Santa brings "new" doll beds on Christmas morning. My mom is passing her childhood dolls' bunk beds on to my girls; she made nice new mattresses, pillows and sheets, and I'm working on coordinating quilts. I'd post a pic of the beds, but they're currently splayed out in pieces all over the basement floor waiting for the second coat of paint to dry, so you'll have to be happy with what the tops are looking like so far. The one on the left is done except a border; the one on the right still has to be cut and pieced with white strips. (Please ignore the poor lighting - it's pushing midnight and the adorable paper star lanterns over my desk are on - beautiful if not always clean and bright task lighting!)

So our PCS (Army code for changing duty stations) this past summer was a bit bumpy. And then we camped out with family for the better part of two months (woohoo for summer on Cape Cod!). And then we finally moved into our new digs in September and I've been busy decorating and figuring how to stretch our teeny amount of apartment furnishings into filling up a whole house on a not very large budget. So that's why I have been MIA from work and growing my business and posting here, but even with some delays and speed bumps, I have been crafting!

In November I finished the memory quilt above for my friend, Crystal Clark, owner of Oh, Juniper, using fabric from clothing that had belonged to her parents. It was challenging to try and tie the colors I had to work with together; Crystal provide a few coordinating fabrics, but the shirt from her mother was a light aqua that required a little finagling to get to fit next to warm, deep reds and navy blues. Serendipitously I had purchased a delicious blue berry patterned piece of fabric for my mom's cherry collection just a few months earlier that I thought might work (a benefit to crashing with the 'rents - access to thousands of fabrics in my mom's sewing room - though I did have to replace this one since her cherry collection is the only hands-off part of her stash) and when I laid it alongside - voila! All of a sudden the aqua fit, and then the addition of the striped border really tied it all together. The pattern for the quilt is one I designed myself. 

One other fun thing I made in November - ears of "corn" for my daughter's Thanksgiving party at school. This is my first year having a preschooler, so I'm getting to try lots of fun new ideas : ) The recipes for the two types of corn are online - the "Indian corn" with dried fruit was definitely the better of the two - I used raisins, dried cranberries and dried mango. Yum!