Julia turns one

Julia turned one-year-old last weekend. It was great to go up and celebrate such a special day with everyone. That little girl has quite the fan base. And I got to hold her a little bit, even though both sets of Grandparents were there.

I stole a few pictures of the big day from Lauren's sister's facebook. Katie takes wonderful pictures. As evidenced below.

Blowing out her first candle with a little help from her parents. I am ded from teh cute. She also had that very serious look on her face for the entire weekend.

She started out very lady like, using her hands to demolish her cake. But then she started using her face. Yup, that is her about to go face first into cake (which was delicious, but don't worry everyone else shared a different cake, this one was just Julia's).

I was teaching her a healthy love of yarn. I had finished with it, I promise.

Julia's present was a little labor intensive. It involved a lot of felt, embroidery and sewing. But I definitely think it was worth it. I made her a Color Book. I'm not sure if the pages are in the order they actually are in the book, except for the first and last pages.

I did sketches for each page and cut out the felt based on those sketches. I tried to get a more cartoony basic shape for each animal. And I cut pieces so that I could layer them and they would have dimension.

Then I embroidered the felt onto the larger pages of felt. I used stuffing for some of the pieces to add more dimension.

I also embroidered details on the pages to make them more interesting and cute.

To do the lettering, I used water soluble interfacing. I slowly and neatly wrote the words on the interfacing. I pinned it into place and embroidered through it. Then I used water to dissolve the interfacing. Yay for perfect handwriting I couldn't do freehand.

Then I sewed the finished pages right sides together with my sewing machine. Then I turned them right sides out and Blanket stitched around the outside.
Then I sewed them all together at the spine and covered that edge with a ribbon. And Voila! All done.