Tara Miller Designs

SHORTS!

I have been on a Oliver+S roll lately. I guess I just love their patterns. They are excellently written and the design isn't one you can walk away from. I first saw the Class Picnic Shorts, I heard a squeal of delight in my head. The top is great too but those shorts are out of this world. When I ordered the pattern in the Spring, I cut 2 sets right away. The pattern was easy but a little longer than I had anticipated but WELL WORTH it. These shorts are darling, fit very well and work great with my daughter's wardrobe. I used lightweight quilting cotton from Moda's Sherbert Pips and Heather Bailey's Nicey Jane for the light blue shorts and Sherbert Pips and linen for the red shorts. I think the red are her favorties because she loves the little dogs. 

She doesn't stand still for very long or very often for blog pics.

Sun Hats from Christmas

We went on a beach vaction early in April with extended family including some of Devon's cousins. I gathered since she was gettting a cool new hat from my Oliver+S book gifted to me over Christmas, that I should put my rotary cutter to the test and cut out 4 (1 for D plus 3 for her cousins) and set to work. The cutting was the easy part and making Devon's was super easy too. Her medium size hat went together like pie (hmm, I could go for some pie!) but the 3 larges didn't. The hang up was stitching the top of the sides. The top of the hat was just too big. So I grabbed my medium pattern piece and it fit perfectly. Not sure how this mix up happened but in the future I marked the medium piece: "Med/Large". Once I had that figured out the rest of the hats fell into place. The results were amazing and an equally big hit.

The red and pink is one hat and the dark blue and light blue are another and the spider/octogon are the last of the cousin hats. The last is Devon's floral and sort of abstract in green and pink. She wears it all the time and I can honestly attest to that considering I made them over a month ago!

Devon's New Romper

I just finished this pattern for Fabric.com. It is their newest free pattern download and I love it. I didn't think that I would but let's face it- it's pretty darn cute. I made alot of modifications for my 3 yr old. It turns out that the pattern as written is not very toddler/pre-school kid ready. If your child can't tie then try out my modifications which make it easy for the little one to undress or go potty. Plus I added some gathers at the waist to rudeuce the bubble butt look (which you can do with the belt provided in the pattern, but I only wanted to wrestle her into one garment, not 2). Check out my full review and a walkthrough of my modifications over at Fabric.com's blog