Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween friends!  We have been sick for a majority of October, so we missed out on a lot of Halloween events in our area. When holidays roll around, I love looking back at previous years and I thought it'd be fun to share some of Cora's old costumes.

For Cora's first Halloween, she had two costumes. She was 6 months old and it is so fun to dress them up in little costumes. She had the giraffe costume above (this is what Ida is wearing this year) and the owl costume below. Cora wore the owl costume over to my parent's house on Halloween. It was rainy so we hung out inside and helped pass out candy whenever a kid would come to the door.

When Cora was 1.5, we dressed her in a bee costume we got from my cousin. For some reason, this is the only photo I have from trick-or-treating that year. I promise she was thrilled to be hanging out. We only hit up a couple of houses and then we spent the rest of the evening hanging out at my parent's house (they usually have chairs and a fire setup in the front).

When Cora was 2.5, she really really wanted to be a cat. Last minute, we found some cat ears and tail at Target and this almost too small cat hoodie that she loved. I have no pictures from actual trick-or-treating that year, but his is from a trunk-or-treat at her school. The picture in front of the leaves is one of my all time favorite fall photos of her.

Last year, we really phoned it in and didn't even get a costume ordered from Amazon in time.  We lucked out and found the exact same costume at a Halloween store for $15 less than online. Cora immediately lost the tiger head at Home Depot. After a lot of phone calls and dropping by Home Depot, we finally got the head back a couple days later. She still dresses up in this costume and loves wearing it around the house.

This year we have three costumes to choose from. Our town had a little costume swap and Cora picked out a princess costume and a wizard costume. A couple of weeks later, I lucked out on our town's free Facebook group and got the cutest handmade little red riding hood. I'm pretty sure she'll wear the red riding hood costume, but she's always in to last minute changes.

I hope everyone has an awesome Halloween and gets lots of treats (and some tricks)!

Fall Family Outings

We've been working on having some family outings at least once a week/weekend. Two weekends ago, we came up with a couple of options for Cora to pick from... She picked Parky's Farm. She picked out her farm outfit and turns out we had an overall skirt for Ida too. These were the perfect coordinating outfits for sisters going to a farm and I love when Cora picks to match her sister.

We didn't get animal petting in like we have in previous visits, but we had fun walking around,  checking out their Halloween decorations, and playing on the playground. Cora was the sweetest older sister making sure to help Ida walk and play on the playground.

After the farm, we needed to stop by Sam's club for a couple of things.  As we were cutting through Winton Woods, Ben pulled over and suggested we check out the paddle boating... at least to check out how much they were. We spontaneously decided to rent a boat. The girls weren't really into it and paddling is exhausting work with a baby on your lap, so there was a lot of whining coming from our boat. We lasted maaaaaybe 20 minutes. It was a fun little activity and we'll have to try it again when the girls are on board.

We missed some of our town's Fall events due to being sick, but we did make it to the local church to buy some pumpkins. What is your favorite Fall outing? 

Grandma Flower Quilt

This quilt was one of my longest works in progress. I was feeling the urge to sew one weekend two years ago and broke out some of my grandma's old fabric. I picked some pieces from my stash and bought a couple more colors of fabric to coordinate. I spent one day cutting out and sewing the front pieces together.

I tried a new (to me) herringbone pattern to quilt the front and back together.  I love the double stitching and the pink contrast on the black fabric.  I'm pretty sure there is a way to do double stitching on a machine, but I just go over it twice and will learn how to do that some day.

This is where I got hung up for a while.  I didn't know what color binding I wanted to do and some other projects, so this project got pushed to the back burner. Recently, I had some downtime between projects and finally decided I should finish this piece. A pink I had in my stash was perfect for this quilt and I finished it in one evening.

I can't wait to see a little baby wrapped up in this quilt.