Update: Gabriella's Mural and birthday outfits

Hey, sorry to jam all this into one post, but I've been doing double duty this week trying to work on the birthday outfit and Gabi's mural. So you all are getting it double fisted today. Wow, that sounds dirty no matter what context it's used in.

First up, birthday outfit. Shrimp came over last week and worked on Echo's pants. I believe her exact quote was, "See, I AM good for something!". That remains to be seen. However, she did manage to make some major progress. Echo's ruffles are in the opposite order of baby Mary's ruffles on her pants:

Tres adorable, if I do say so myself, even though I had nothing to do with making this pair. I take credit for my mojo.

As you may recall if you weren't too far gone when you read the last update (I'm usually pretty far gone while writing these things), we had decided on this to be the basic design of the shirt:



Well, I just didn't like it. Sure, it's fine for Shrimp's kid, if you don't really want to put too much effort into what you child looks like. But for my goddaughter? I don't think so. I was lying awake the other night, tossing and turning, and this was just festering in my mind. I had this idea that was brewing and finally I just sat bolt upright, my head rotated 360 degrees, split pea soup.... oh, wait, wrong moment. Anyway, I got this other idea.

So I took this black ruffle off, cut it in half, then edged it in pink thread to have two of these going down both sides of the shirt:

Then I took apart the pink bows and stuffed them with netting to make them fluffier (again Erin, thanks for the fluffing advice), then layered them at the bottom of these ruffles with some pink tulle and black lace puffing out at the end. And I put the little black bow at the top of each ruffle. Here, it's easier just to show you.

I have to hand sew on the bows but then I'm done for the front. Almost finished; I have something really cute for the back of the shirt.... Oh, and I had to shorten the pants. They ended up being full length on baby Mary so I took off the rick-rack, cut off 2 inches, then sewed them back together and used the rick-rack to sew over the seams. Almost finished!

Now for Gabriella's Mural: 

I was able to work on this a few hours each night last night and tonight. Here was the progression.

Last night, I put blush on the princess but I didn't feel like messing with that ho any more. I wanted to do something big, like the tree. But before I could do that, I put up the star clouds up in case the tree went on top of any of them. I used 2 brighter shades of blue than the backgrounds and some purple, then painted in the tiny stars with metallic silver paint.

Then up went the tree. After I painted in the trunk, Krissi helped out by painting in the heart shaped leaves while I did the much easier to manipulate while drunk green leaves.

We decided to let that dry and packed it in for the night. Tonight, I painted in the details of the trunk (SUPER cool, I gotta tell ya), then added more leaves and some detail to the hearts.

First the trunk

Then the metallic purple polka dots on the hearts and more leaves

How pretty is this? I have to admit, I'm feeling pretty good about now.

The last thing I do for the night since the kids have this uber-supremacy 'bedtime' mandated every night is chalk in the mermaid and then put a base colour in her tail.

You can almost see the chalk outline here:

Then here is Jett modeling the tail:

God, how cute is this kid, right? So fricking adorable. But we are heading in towards the finish line. Once the mermaid is finished, it'll be about the small details like adding in the fish and some flowers on the grass and that's it. I can't wait to show you the finished product! Let's face it, I can't wait to see the finished product. Sober. In daylight. It's amazing what you can do in a blackout drunk phase!