A love affair with a breakfast smoothie

I wouldn't have pegged myself as a creature of habit. But that's what I've become with this smoothie, which I've had for breakfast since march 2011. That's right folks, for about one and a half years minus a month long trip to India. The assorted days I missed, I just skipped breakfast.

Here's the recipe (makes two tall glasses)

1/2 cup frozen blueberries
8 frozen strawberries (or 6 if you are using humongous ones from the big Dole bag at BJ's/Costco)
one banana
1 cup vanilla almond milk (I like Almond Breeze)
2 tbsp ground flax seeds
1 cup (or as needed) of vanilla soymilk or chocolate soymilk or vanilla almond milk

I microwave the almond milk for a minute since I'm not partial to brain freeze, but you could skip this step. Add the milk to the fruit and blend. Add the second cup of milk, blend and pour out into glasses. Add a tbsp of ground flax seed in each glass and mix really well. I could blend it with the fruit but clean-up becomes painful so I do it this way. If you have a vitamix you could probably add whole flax seed.

I'm drinking this as I post, it's truly yummy.

p.s: I have substituted a mango for the banana and that was good as well.

What else but..a dress that re-uses a t shirt

This dress has been made by everyone who sews, I think. Cut a t- shirt at the waist or wherever you want the waist to be, make a skirt out of some fabric, attach the two and voila! you have a dress.
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This t shirt fit me but was short enough to make me think twice about wearing it. I had a remnant from Joann that I thought would work well.. It was not quite as quick as 'et voila!'.. The seam ripper dealt with a zig-zag stitch multiple times!












It looks..OK at best. One of those garments that don't fit ' the way it's supposed to' but is too comfortable to stop you from thinking twice about wearing it:-). I will reach for this dress again (and again).

The 'popover sundress' assembly line

I needed to make an easy dress for my niece.. and only a vague idea of the size (she's slightly smaller than my son?) . It had to be something non-fitted around the arms, neck, waist etc.
This popular Oliver+S pattern for the popover sundress seemed to fit the bill nicely and was free (what's not to love?) .

The instructions were simple and well written. So simple that in fact, I made the same dress in sizes 8, 2T for another niece and 4T for DD. When I made a muslin in size 8, I thought the straps were not long enough and increased it to a little over 3 times the pattern piece instead of twice.

I decided to add a border, just to break up the busy tiny floral print..which led to a frustrating time trying to match up the stripe, but thankfully not a seam ripping one. I attached the border in the same way as the yoke.

The 2T and 8 side by side. DD didn't want to model hers.. wow that print *is* busy!