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Hello! I'm finally feeling well enough to sit up and use my laptop.

One of the awkward things about foot surgery is that you spend most of the following two weeks lying down with your foot elevated -- which really doesn't leave much lap for your laptop. But now I can sit in an easy chair (with my foot propped up) and read quilting blogs. At least I can feed my sewing urge vicariously, because I have no idea how soon I'll be able to sit at a sewing machine. Using the foot pedal is not a problem. The surgery was on my right foot, and I'm already used to using the left foot when I sew. The problem is that I'm not supposed to let the right foot dangle down for any length of time. Bad for the circulation, I guess, and makes it feel prickly and swollen.

But as soon as I'm able to sew, I'm going to make McCalls 4547 (pictured above). While lying on my bed of pain, I heard from my daughter-in-law about how the three little granddaughters have been reading through the Little House on the Prairie books. Recently, they made ginger water from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Cookbook which I remember my own kids doing back in our homeschooling days. So I thought it would be fun to make sun bonnets and aprons for the girls so they could play at being pioneer girls in the back yard. (I figured that girls with lively imaginations wouldn't need dresses or pantalettes to play on the banks of Plum Creek or battle their way through the Long Winter.)

If I were making the dresses I'd be concerned about some of the construction details. For instance, the dresses are gathered at the neckline by putting a ribbon through a casing. That's all right, I suppose, for a costume which is only being worn for one night. But I can imagine that those ribbons would soon slide out of the casing or, worse yet, get pulled inside.