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Once I got beyond the trauma of my little baby turning 3 last week, I did manage to make her her annual kitty cake and dress.   The child has adored kitties since before she ever saw one.

Being that I was too lazy busy to make a kitty shaped cake like I did last year, I opted for a cake decorated with toy kitties.  It was really quick to make and in the long run makes more sense because now she has the kitties to keep and play with whenever she wants.

After wandering the grocery store for 30 minutes trying to come up with ideas on how to decorate a cake with kitties on it I ended up with a cake that consisted of green icing with coconut dyed green for the grass.  Pretzel rods and marshmallows (dyed green again) for the trees.  A few nilla wafers for a path and yogurt drops for flowers or rocks or something…I don’t know, but they looked nice.  

My favorite part was the mice made from licoice gum drops with little tails and ears made from pieces of cut licorice and glued on with black gel icing.  If only I was smart enough to have taken a close up picture of them.

The result was that Alexandra actually squealed, “kitties!” when she saw the cake, which was adorable, but meant I probably could have placed the toy kitties on a plain cake with no icing on it and gotten the same reaction.

Oh well.

Making a dress for Makenna’s First Holy Communion with her help was a good plan…I just should have started a little sooner.

Since I didn’t, I spent Saturday afternon making ‘yo-yo’ flowers at Jarod’s baseball game, and stitching them on the dress while watching an Indy car race on tv at 11:00 Saturday night.  Which was ok, I guess because it actually gave me a reason to sit.

The fun part was having Makenna help make the whole thing.  The cutting, the sewing and even the ‘designing’ since I decided not to work from the pattern we bought (because I’m just not very good at following patterns.)

We made a simple pillowcase dress out of a 22″ by 29″ (length) piece of eyelet fabric.  The armholes were cut in 6″ and down 4″.  The straps were made of more eyelet fabric.   And the belt and bottom ruffle trim were made with plain white cotton.

For the embellishments we made lots of pretty white yo-yo flowers and then stitched some pretty beads in the center of each.   They worked great at the top front to cover the area where the straps were sewn on to the dress, but we didn’t like just two flowers and decided to add five total to make the flower ‘necklace’ that you see.

When the ruffle trim turned out to be too long, we gathered it up in a few places and added the flowers to cover the stitching there too.   I love those flowers.

The final touches were more flowers sewn on her shoes and on her headband hairpiece.

Makenna really loved it, and she was so proud to have helped make it herself.

And since we had the fabric our only expense was about $10 for the headpiece base and beads and ribbon.  Yeah!