Meet Pete.

First a bit of history.  When I found out that my second baby was going to be a boy (he is turning 10 this year) I decided to take up dollmaking as a way of injecting something girly into the house of males I would be living in. (this was a year or so before cardmaking, and then later scrapbooking, came into my life). 
A few years later I bought a pattern for "Pete's Garage" by Jane Coughlan.  It's like a soft sculpture dolls house which can fold away.  In the same series is Pete, his friend Pippi, and they both even have cars!!!  So my plan has always been to make the dollshouse, a boy and girl (adapt the Pete pattern rather than buy a separate one) and then track down one of the car patterns and make that too .
Well, finally, my children too old to play with him now, I have finished Pete.  See how tiny he is!  Apparently my sewing skills are a bit rusty as I forgot a few basic things like "right sides together", and his bum looks so strange he'll need to keep his clothes on forever, but I'm still very happy with him.  Will he ever get a house?  I hope so . . . I've spent quite a bit over the years on the bits and pieces for it and could probably make it totally out of the stash.  Maybe this year . . . ?

The other crafty thing I did today (my family's away remember) was to challenge myself to a scrapbook sketch.  About 18 years ago my husband went skydiving with some friends and sketch 237 from scrapbook challenges was perfect.  It has a bunch of photos clustered in the centre of the page, and cloud-shaped accents around the outside.  I haven't posted it because it has a whole lot of photos and names of people we haven't seen in years, but here's a little gllimpse . . .

I used papers, stickers and a tag from the oldest Basic Grey set I have, and made hand-cut clouds out of vellum, which I swiped a bit of white paint on the back of  for dimension.  I love using older products on older pages! I think that it gives them an appropriate retro vibe.