SEW much Fun!! What is better than Crafting with a Friend?!

Hooray for Friends...who travel 3 hours to come visit!!

The girls riding trikes in the backyard.

*You can buy a dress just like Em's in Shelly's Etsy store- Ribbon Candy.

Here's the girls with their "Pink Giraffe" and "Orange Lion" masks we made together.

I had an excellent time Thursday and Friday with my friend Shelly (her blog is "I didn't sign up for this" ) and her two kiddos. We've been friends since High School, but have lived in different states for many years now. It's a real treat to get to spend time with her. She's so creative and fun.  There are some pictures from High School where we made ourselves some tutus, one Friday night because we were bored. I'd post those pictures if it wasn't so embarrassing...for us both. :) Coincidentally, there aren't any pics of us together from this visit...ok, I lied there's one, but I pinky swore I wouldn't post it anywhere because we both look terrible. But I digress, as I was saying, She's so creative.

She brought everything we needed to make fun animal masks for the kids and to make felt food for the girls.

Getting ready for bed. Ella was so excited to share her "princess robe" with Emma. They had so much fun playing together. It was hard to settle down and go to bed.

We have such an easy friendship. We talk on the phone every weekday around 3 or 4 times a day. Adding up to we guess at around 2-3 hours of talking a day. We don't talk on the phone on the weekends, mainly because our husbands would go nuts. Its so nice because I know she understands me. She knows all my faults and loves me anyway (and vice versa). Friendship like that is hard to come by. I don't have to hide the fact that I have a pile of laundry overflowing my basket sitting on the washer. I didn't get the kitchen floor scrubbed spotless before she came and that was ok. We laughed, we talked, we watched our kiddos play. (Which, they did so well. Usually our girls tend to either ignore one another or have a hard time sharing. This visit they had SO much fun together. Which just proves that they are indeed growing up into little girls. We won't talk about the last hour or so when then my daughter had some major "No Sharing" melt downs... and subsequent time-outs.)

Ladies and Gentlemen, introducing Ella singing..."Jesus loves me".

 Emma is playing the part of the paparazzi in this pic. :)

 ANYWAY- We also got to craft together. Which we do vicariously through email pictures, but it was so nice to work on a project together in real time. Usually, I'm uploading photos and asking, "Now if you were me, what would you do here?" OR "What else do I need to add to this?"

We made some super cute FELT FOOD. So much FUN!!!

We made a stack of 3 pancakes, syrup, butter, and bacon. We also made 2 slices of bread, lettuce, turkey lunch meat, cheddar cheese slice, and a Swiss cheese slice- For each of our girls.

What is super funny is that both our girls thought the little pats of butter on the pancakes were cheese. Made us laugh. We don't eat cheese on our pancakes, gross! 

Ella also thought that the bacon was "mistake" (more commonly known as steak). 

I will warn you that the felt food making can be addictive. I'm already trying to think of what else would be fun to make. We tried to make everything easy and quick. We sewed almost everything with my machine. And we didn't bother turning things or making things double layered. The point here was to do something fun together and fun for the girls to play with. We weren't worried about perfection. The bread and pancakes we left the seams exposed and we thought it added to the fun texture of the food. We did stuff the pancakes and bread with a layer of batting. But the PB & J and all the cheese, lunch meat, and syrup were just a single layer of felt.

Yummy sandwiches!

making a PB & J

These last two pics are from today. Ella sitting down at her table for some "lunch". 

Wish I would have gotten pics of the girls playing with their felt food together.  

(Her "tablecloth" is a baby doll blanket that my great-grandmother made for my mom. 

I LOVE it so much. Its one of my favorite things that has been passed down to me.)

Thanks Shelly for coming to visit. I had a blast. We'll have to get together again soon!! Talk to you on Monday. :)

Oh, hope everyone has a very Happy Mother's Day!!!