Birthday fun

Things have been a bit busy here in real life, so blogging has taken a bit of a back seat.  But P and J are with their Grandparents for a couple of days, so I'm hoping to catch up on a little bit of blogging.  First things first: the last of P's birthday presents.

The week before last (ie a week before P's birthday) I suddenly realised that I needed to sew all 26 of my fabric letters for her alphabet present.  This lead to a week of frantically sewing all evening to get them done.  In the interests of full disclosure, I do have to confess that sewing all evening means until about 9pm, and then I go to bed.  I read about women who stay up to the wee small hours to complete projects, but I just can't function on that little sleep (even when I'm not pregnant).

I had gotten as far as roughly cutting out the patterns, and pinning all the fabric together, when I realised that I would either have to a) cut all the letter patterns out much more carefully and draw around them before sewing or b) sew over the paper and hope I could rip the paper off perforation styles after sewing.  I think you can probably guess which solution I went with.  The sewing machine coped fine with the paper - it needed a little coaxing, but not too much, and surprisingly the perforated paper also came off really easily.

The only thing I would change about the alphabet is some of the fabric I used for the front of the letters.  Most of them are fine, but a few are too busy and detailed, which makes it harder to work out which letter they are.  If I do it again, I will go for more solid colours, with less details.

And a little alphabet trivia, which four letters can be represented by one symbol turned different ways?

b,d,p,q

I'd love to say these were P's favourite birthday present, but that would be a lie.  Her favourite present was actually her fishing rod, but more on the birthday stuff in my next post.