Dress Fundraiser

Now that we have an approximate date of when we have to come up with the rest of the money needed to bring Layla home, we're making a final push for raising monies.  The t-shirt sales went really well.  So we're off to selling little girl dresses now! These are two of my absolute favorite prints....  Dresses can be made in any size.  The bottom two shown below are Newborn.  Dresses will start at $15 a piece and will increase slightly in price depending on how much fabric is required.  All dresses are double layered and double stitched.  I make my dresses with pleats instead of a drawstring or elastic.  Any dress can be customized. 

Size 2T

Medium Rose pink

Olive Green.  The lighting doesn't do it justice.

For my Pro-Life Friends....

I ran across this article regarding adoption and being pro-life and had to share it.  I sincerely hope that this will help open our eyes to the need to take action and not just judge others for making a decision we don't agree with.  Check it out: Pro-Life=Pro-Orphan Care

Little Layla! The Match is Made

Last Friday Ryan got a phone call from our agency saying that a we'd been chosen.  I didn't want to get my hopes up about this precious gift because we still needed to speak with the mother ourselves before we were matched.  We were given her intake form on Monday.  Wednesday at 3pm we had a conference call with her.  We absolutely loved her!  It was like a match made in heaven (of course it was.)  The conversation was easy, despite my being extremely nervous about it.  God's hand was all over the whole thing, all the way down to the last tiny detail.  We've been praying so hard for this babe and so hard for her mother.  When E (the Birth Mother) told us that our adoption verse had helped her see that there truly is a reason for all of this, I almost broke down in tears.  That verse means so much to our family and all I could ask is for it to touch someone else the way it has touched us.  So, without further ado, we're officially MATCHED!

Now to talk about Layla:  She's going to be a beauty.  Ryan is already preparing to prevent all small male children from entering our house.  She's due on July 17th, the exact same day that Ryan's cousin is due to have her little girl.  We get to take a peek at her from the latest ulrasound this evening!  She's healthy and LOVES moving around.  God has been so gracious and has blessed us immensely with giving us a mother who truly loves her baby and is 100% confident that she wants us to be the parents. 

So now.....bring on the questions (because I know you all have a million)!

More Dresses!

So I've decided that I absolutely love sewing.  When we do get a referral and eventually find out if we are going to be adopting a little boy or a little girl, you will be able to find me hunched over my sewing machine creating billions of tiny little outfits.  Secretly, I hope that we have a girl so that I can make a tutu dress that looks like this:

Of course, she will have one of every color and will always be in a tutu, no matter what the occassion.  OK, so maybe God shouldn't give me a little girl to play dress-up with....

Regardless, here are a couple of the dresses I made this past week.   

Lady Violet's dress (2T brown with torquois birds)

Miss McKenna's dress (5T Pink with white polkadots)

Cutting out the dress

I LOVE PLEATS!

Little Dresses for Little People

And the wait continues..... 

I stumbled upon this verse yesterday: 1 Samuel 1:27-28 "²⁷ I prayed for this child, and the LORD has granted me what I asked of him. ²⁸ So now I give him to the LORD. For his whole life he will be given over to the LORD." While John 13:7 is a verse that means a TON to our family, I feel like this verse specifically means a ton to me.  This child will be a child of my prayers and of my heart, not of my body.  And I need to constantly remember that he/she is God's child and is only given to me as a blessing.

I'm anxious and impatient to meet our little one, but I'm not even sure what I'd do if we actually got THE CALL.  I mean, honestly, I have practically no idea what to do with a tiny baby.  I've been talking to friends, and my mother, and everyone I can think of about how to care for a newborn, but I don't feel like I am any closer to having it figured out than when I first began.  For instance, how do you give a baby a bath and cut their fingernails? How often do you give them a bath?  Do all of the answers change if you have a baby of a different race?  There is so much to all of this and sometimes I get the feeling from people that it's all just trial and error....

While I'm not trying to get our nursery, or my brain, ready to have a baby in our home, I've been working on some crafty projects.  I told some really good friends like 6 months ago that I would "try" and make both of their daughters pillowcase dresses for this summer.  After going over how this was going to work without a pattern a million times in my head, I finally just started cutting.  I used an old garnet pillowcase that I hardly ever use as a trial dress.  Pictures of the completed project are below.  It turned out so well that I went ahead and added some ric-rac to this dress and gave it away.  Now that I semi-know what I'm doing, I started working on the dresses with the good fabric (pictures of this fabric below).  More pictures to come shortly, as I'm trying to make sure I document each step.  

Finished: mini-gamecock dress?

Bright pink polkadot material for Miss McKenna's Dress

Brown and turquoise bird pattern for Lady Violet's Dress

Lastly: I found this ridiculously cool charity that takes pillowcase dresses(which are super easy and inexpensive to make) and sends them to Africa for the little girls to wear.  Most of these dresses end up at the orphanage where the kids don't have a lot of clothing.  Check it out! 

Little Dresses For Africa

I'm Asking.....

I was talking to a co-worker just yesterday about our t-shirt fundraiser, and after buying 7 shirts (yes, you read that right, 7 SHIRTS), she quoted me some scripture: James 4:2 "You have not, because you ask not."  First off, this is not the first verse that popped into my head when I was thinking about fundraising, etc, etc.  I assumed that by letting people know that we needed money to finish our adoption, that they would automatically get the hint and just give it to us.  Turns out, she's been listening to me talking about this for months now, but I had never come out and asked if she could help, so she never gave me anything.  Apparently a lot of people are just like her.  Since I gave all the money stuff to God and confessed to Him that I had no way of coming up with this money on my own, he has showed up in HUGE ways.  I'll provide you all with a brief list of the events that have occurred over the past week.

1) We recieved a rather large donation from a highschool friend of mine and his lovely wife literally an hour after I posted about how I was giving the money problems to God last week.  This gave us just enough to write a check to our agency to get current on our fees.  HUGE RELIEF!  Ryan and I were not at all expecting to get such a gift from these friends and we are soooo thankful for their support and prayers. 
2) We recieved a call from Project 1:27 (check them out here: http://www.projectonetwentyseven.org/ ) informing us that they were going to be giving us their adoption grant.  We are so blessed to be part of a church that really values its role with widows and orphans.  We are now ahead of schedule with our fees! 
3) We got in touch with Ben Walker about creating adoption t-shirts to sell.  Ben works here: http://www.imageinksc.com/.  He's helping so much with making sure that the shirts look amazing and that we can make as much money off of them as possible.  He gave us tons of advice about how to sell them and for what price, etc.  I've never made shirts before, so I'm really glad that he's helping with all of the little details. 
4) We've had a ton of people order shirts!  It seemed that all we had to do was actually tell people that we needed help with this, and simply ask if they'd donate or buy a shirt.  We've also had a lot of people just give us donations.  After only 2 or 3 days of advertising, we have 40 or so shirts sold!  It's been such a blessing to watch God work.

T-Shirt Fundraiser!

We need your help! We've raised half of the money needed to bring Baby Shumpie home, but still have a long way to go. Please let us know if you would like to purchase our adoption shirt. They are $15 a piece and 100% of the proceeds go directly towards bringing Callen or Layla home.

The shirt will be based off of the painting I made after our first miscarriage with John 13:7 on it. We'll be selling both Yellow and Charcoal Grey shirts. If you're in, leave a comment with the color shirt you'd like to order and shirt size! You can pay using the donate button on the side of the blog, or just pay when we distribute the shirts.