Birthday Tablecloth

This is going to be a lot of work when she starts having lots of kids to her birthday parties.  For all three of her birthdays I've had everyone at her party sign a 12in x12in piece of white muslin with her age appliqued on it.  Then I stitch over the names with embroidery thread and will someday (soon) assemble them to make a tablecloth for her to have at all the parties and keep and love forever and ever.  (We will never serve red Kool-Aid.)

This year there were quite a few more signatures.  I'm going to have cramped fingers.

We seem to have survived this round of sickness.  She did, however,  climb into bed with us at five this morning just in time to puke on my pillow.  Which was awesome.

She's gotten a lot of ibuprofen this time around, and with both Mr. V and I giving it to her I was concerned about overdoing it.  Here is my solution: I taped some paper to the back of the bottle (not the front so we can still read the label) and we wrote right on the bottle whenever we gave it to her.  We didn't have to go out of our way to write it down (at three in the morning) and we couldn't lose the paper we wrote it on.  I'm not suggesting I get a Nobel prize for that but, it worked for us.  On second thought, nominate me!  Seems like they are pretty easy to get these days.  :)

Now we rest...

Yesterday I spent the morning finishing a lunch bag I designed for my father-in-law's birthday present.  I wanted to make it large enough to fit the left-overs containers he takes, some snacks and a drink, and to open into a placemat so he can have a clean place to eat on the road.  I also wanted it to be wipe-down-able which presented some design challenges.   Here is what I came up with:  


(Pardon the pictures... I didn't have time to make them pretty.)  Also, don't zoom in too much.


I used faux wood oil cloth that I got here.


I took pictures of the process for a future tutorial, but that will have to wait until kid and I are over this flu.  We're in day three now, and she is still getting fevers of 102.  Poor kid.  Fortunately, I think we have a quiet stretch coming up, here, so we should be able to rest and recover.  And maybe make a tiny dent in the looong list of projects I have managed to accumulate.