Simple Black Cat Costume

Well the plan was to get this post in before the end of October but I missed it by a day.  Oh well! I hope you all had a Happy Halloween!  Today I am here to share the simple Halloween costume that I made for my daughter.  Last year for her first Halloween Lyla was an owl.  You can check out how I made that costume in this post.

Owl Baby Costume

She's just changed a little bit! ;)  This year I decided to dress her as a black cat.  She loves kitties and one of her first "words" was kitty.  I say words in quotations because it was mostly just a "k" sound followed by hissing sound.  Now she can say it so that it sounds more like the actual word. I knew that this would be the perfect costume for her. This costume was so easy to put together and it was cheap!

I have the "paws" from her costume in the picture above but I never put them on her because both times that she wore her costume it was unseasonably warm.  I will start with how I made the tail.  The tail was made with a feather boa that I purchased at Joann Fabrics.  I attached it to a Kam pacifier clip which you can purchase here.  I tied it on and then put a dab of hot glue to secure it. I had to cut it of course so that it wouldn't be too long and trip her.  She was just starting to walk when I started making the costume but I knew that by Halloween she would be walking well so it wouldn't get in her way. Here a really blurry picture of the clip attached to the boa, sorry!

The paws were just a simple pair of mittens with extra pieces of boa glued around the wrist part.

I cut the ears out of black felt.  I didn't use a pattern at all, I just eyeballed it.  I used some gold glitter heat transfer material for the middle part of the ears and attached it to the felt using the package directions.

I attached the ears to metal hair clips with hot glue.  I then tied some ribbon that I had on hand into bows and glued them to the ears.

When I dressed her in her costume, I put her hair in pigtails on the top of her head and just clipped the ears to the pigtails.  Super simple and cute.

Her tail was clipped onto to her black leggings.  The rest of her costume consisted of black leggings and a black shirt from Old Navy, this cute skirt from Macy's, and a pair of hand-me-down boots.  The above pictures are from Boo at the Zoo.  The picture at the top of the post is from Halloween and she is wearing a this cute Cat & Jack sweatshirt from Target.  This costume even survived the day at daycare yesterday!  Everybody commented on how cute she looked and I loved that it took me about 15 minutes to put together.  

Monthly Baby Photos: An Update

So back in September I wrote this post on the photos that I would be taking of my daughter each month.  I was inspired by the vintage travel elements in her room to make a vintage travel setup for her monthly photos.

You may remember this sweet photo from her one month shoot.  Well she is now 19 weeks old and will turn 5 months on Christmas Eve.  Where is the time going?!?  Anyway, she has had 3 more monthly photo shoots since that September post so I wanted to share with you what the last 3 months looked like.

You can see how much she has been growing and changing! Here are my favorite shots from months 2, 3 and 4:

I think each one captures some of the milestones that she has reached each month.

Over Thanksgiving break, I decided to get started on the digital baby book that I am making for Lyla's first year.  In the future I will make sure to work on each month right after it happens because doing 4 months at once was a lot of work!  Here is a sneak peek at what the pages with her monthly photos look like:

I am using Mixbook instead of Shutterfly for this project which I will explain in the future when I write a blog post on it.  I am so excited with how the book looks so far but I have got a lot more things to put in it!

Well I hope you enjoyed the little update.  I hope to have a post on another sewing project soon.  I also have a post on Christmas cards and our new style of Christmas letter waiting in the wings so keep checking back!

Deck the Halls

I really love Christmas.  It is a busy time of year especially for a music teacher at a Christian school but I still love it.  This year I was really excited to decorate our new house for Christmas.  Most of the stuff that I decorated with I had on hand.  I did buy some sweet apothecary jars at T.J. Maxx.  I love that they can be changed up for any season by what you put inside them.

The larger one is holding some natural looking objects.  Not blatantly Christmasy but goes well with the other two.

 I love the pattern on the one with the candy canes.  I was going to put pine cones in the other one but I decided to trim add some trimmed branches from the Christmas tree instead.

Next I decorated the piano.  I swapped out the candles for gold candles, added a few fake branches around the lamp, and filled a vase with mini ornaments and fake berry branches.

Oh and that little snowman guy was a present from a student a few years ago.  He is kind of cheesy but my piano students enjoy pressing the button and making him play.

Next I filled a few more vases with fake snow and mini ornaments.  I have a lot of these cylinder vases because they are from the centerpieces that I made for my wedding.  They were filled with paper dogwood branches that I made.

I also set up a creche on the bookshelf across from the piano.  This is the one that I had growing up.  I bought some ceramic tealight holders at Target.  They are cute when lit up because one has the three wise men and the camels and the other has a nativity scene.

 

Last year during our city's spring cleaning week, we decided to set my thrift store artificial tree out on the curb.  We always had real trees at my house when I was growing up.  It turns out that using real trees is a more environmentally concious choice than using fake ones.  Also, my cat likes to eat trees and he gnawed on the fake one constantly (and climbed it).  I worry about him ingesting plastic so I would rather he eat actual pine needles.  We picked up this beauty on an extremely cold day in Fargo from a Boy Scout troop.  

I have also been enjoying some holiday baking and I should have a post on that soon as well.