Upcycling

Did everyone enjoy their Christmas weekend? We sure did! It was a very pleasant, relaxing weekend with very happy (and extremely well-behaved - wow!) children who got completely spoiled. Just as it should be.

Now that the big day is behind us I can take a breath and enjoy the feeling of being on top of things, if only for a couple days. With the New Year upon us you know I have a million projects, plans, and ideas swirling in my head. But for now I'll take the opportunity to share one of the projects I didn't get to blog about yet.

When my mom was here in October we were up late one night watching junk on TV and surfing pinterest and blogs. We kept seeing all these really cute girls' clothing items and thinking "oh we could make that!" And then we were off an running. Not wanting to make anything from scratch we decided to go the upcycle route. This is Kaitlyn's new dance outfit. I bought her the Hello Kitty shirt for her birthday along with some sweat pants, but the sweats drown her and are not dance-y enough. So we went on a quest to find some yoga pants. And when I say quest I mean it took us probably 10 stores to find something that we thought would work - crazy. They were either the wrong size, wrong color, didn't fit right, or way more than we wanted to spend on something we intended to change. But eventually we did find a good price on some black leggings with little rhinestones around the bottom. We got some pink striped fabric to pull in the colors of the shirt and sewed then into ruffles around the bottom, being sure to still show off the rhinestones. And we finished the upper edge off with giant rick rack. Kaitlyn loved them, and so did her dance teacher.
(bad photo quality I know, but it's hard to get this kiddo to pose sometimes and I've learned to take what I get)

We also dug through her existing clothes and pulled out quite a few of her older things that still fit her well but were just a tad boring. Kaitlyn is super-skinny so a lot of her clothes fit her for years and these were some she had had a while.

Some more fun fabric and ruffles and viola! She loves it and looks adorable. And she now has a completely coordinated, "new" outfit for school for just a few dollars.

I even whipped up a hairbow with the scraps.