Aprons and Snickerdoodles

{Disclaimer: my children do not always look like this when we bake together. Furthermore, we don’t bake together nearly often enough, probably because I often make the process un-fun with my obsession over measuring accurately, not spilling, and other such standards that are ridiculous to demand from young children… I’m working on that.}

I did enjoy this particular baking session, making Snickerdoodles, which we “had” to do after Sophie and I made the apron I alluded to at the end of this post about Ken’s rainbow cake. (Apron we made is shown above; the snowman apron was a gift from our neighbor a few years ago.)

Once the batter was all mixed, we set up a nice assembly line: I made the dough balls (shown below left) and then the girls rolled them smooth, covered them with cinnamon sugar, and plopped them on the pan.

Back to the apron, it was a McCall’s pattern (M5997) that caught Sophie’s eye last time we were at the fabric store together.

Cutting, pinning, fitting pieces together, I explained things as we went and she seemed to understand and picked things up quickly. For the sewing parts, she operated the foot pedal and usually did the back tacking at the beginning and end of the seams; I did most of the guiding of the fabric under the presser foot, though she was doing some of that too (when I wasn’t being obsessive about straight seams… I’m working on that one too).

One small irritant: when I held the bodice pattern piece up to Sophie, it looked too wide. Did I alter the pattern and cut the fabric piece to be more narrow? No! And sure enough, when the apron was all done, it was too wide for her little torso. Grrr!

So following the advice of a friend, I just put some gathers into the waist area. The vertical gathers don’t play real nice with the horizontal gathers at the base of the V neck, but it’s good enough.

Most importantly, Sophie loves it.

So why did we have to make Snickerdoodles next? Specifically Snickerdoodles, not just any old cookie? Because Sophie likes to follow the “constructions” on the pattern.

And those cookies in the pattern picture sure do look like Snickerdoodles! I love discovering how her mind operates. : )