prepping for christmas

the days leading up to christmas were a whirlwind of activity.  not only did we have all sorts of stuff to accomplish, but i had the bean underfoot the whole time since she was on winter break.  i felt bad because i spent a good chunk of time sitting at the sewing machines to finish up a bunch of those mermaid tail blankets, leaving her to entertain herself.  luckily she's at an age where that isn't all that hard to do, but still.  and when i was finally done, i'd filled this entire tub with blankets:

i spread them all out so that i could see all of the labels of who they belonged to and started folding them into tissue to pack them for shipping.

and i managed to add a few tweaks to the pattern to make sharks, turning to one of my favorite models to get this picture:

this is the one and only mermaid tail i made with printed fleece.

oh - also?  don't wait till the week of christmas to decide that the whole family needs matching pajamas.  the pickins were slim, but the old lady and i managed to scrounge up a bunch of semi-matching t-shirts and found pajama pants on sale at old navy for $5 apiece.  there were none left in kids' sizes though, so we picked up the smallest pair we could find and brought them home for me to alter.  a little snip snip here and a bit of sewing there, and i managed to get 'er done.

i busted out the die cutting machine to jazz up our plain red tops a bit, too.

aaaaand pixie spent her last few days of 2015 doing some rather boring, uninspired things.

and everyone (sans the hub, who was happily out running errands) had to hug her goodbye.

 even mollydog.

her face kinda says it all, amirite?