Elena’s Present

My five year old niece, Elena, started her first day of kindergarten 2 weeks ago and I wanted to make something special for her.  I was browsing through Craftster and came upon the cutest little art bag I’ve ever seen.  So after some thinking and drawing, I came up with an idea for her bag.  Chong and I went shopping at Jo Ann and we picked out all the fabric (Chong was a great help!).  I cut everything out but had to wait two weeks to finally sew everything together because my parents were remodeling their house and I couldn’t get to her sewing machines.

I had planned to do most of the sewing by myself and to only ask for my mom’s help on certain areas but it turned out that my mom did all the sewing on her straight sewing machine while I watched.  (My mom has 3 big sewing machines–a cover stitch, a serger and a straight stitch–and I’m only experienced in the serger.  Plus, she was in a hurry and wanted to finish everything before she left so instead of teaching me, she sewed the whole thing in 1.5 hours.)

This is what I started off with–pieces of fabric

Bear pencil holder (Elena calls it a kitty)

Mom sewing on the first “E”

Her name

Bear and name sewed on

Finished!

Inside the bag

We stuffed it with goodies

Color pencils & a pencil

The whole package

Her art bag

Two Kanzashi hair clips I made

Here she is sporting her new bag

All in all, everything turned out pretty well.  The bag turned out smaller than I expected/wanted but it fit everything so it’s no big deal.  Also, the straps were a bit longer than I wanted but there’s nothing I can do about that now.  Elena loves her new bag so that’s all that matters.

Quinceanera

Sorry for the hiatus, everyone.  Here are some pictures from the awesome quinceanera Chong and I went to a few weeks ago, as promised.  We had an awesome time.  Great company, good food and a wonderful experience!  Thanks to Patti and Aimee for sharing this experience with us!