Pinewood Derby Stair Car Tutorial

Our ward had a pinewood derby race this past weekend, and David and I wanted to make a sweet car. We really like Modern Family, so we decided to re-create the iconic Bluth family stair car from the show.

We started with your basic pinewood derby car kit.

I took some scrap plywood and cut a few layers of it to stack up as the body, and I also cut an angle to the original block of wood we were given.

After gluing those together, I took some popsicle sticks and hot glued them on to be the stairs, I cut out some round pieces of cardboard from a cereal box and glued that on, ang glued on one popsicle stick for the front bumper. Then I painted everything white/red/blue/black/silver (except the logo, which was printed on paper and glued on).

Turned out pretty sweet.

Lace Dress

I bought this dress from a thrift store well over two years ago with the intent to re-furbish it.

 (Sorry for the awful quality of these phone pictures)

The dress was $6 and super ugly, but $6 is way less than the lace alone would cost, so it it was a steal. I wanted to turn it into something like this:

I finally got around to my re-refurbishment a month or two ago.

I ran into a lot of snags, such as there wasn't enough fabric on the dress to use any of the patterns I own, and unpicking the seams of this dress was a nightmare, and it was a v-neck when I didn't want a v-neck. Every step of the way went something like this:
1. "uhhhh, I'll sew it like this, maybe?"
2. "I don't even know if this will work."
3. *sews*
4. *tries on the dress*
5. "Yikes! Okay I need to adjust that"
6. Repeat steps 3-5 a few more times until it finally comes out okay.

Anyways, in the end it actually turned out pretty good.

I added a zipper in the back (which is totally crooked, by the way), and a waistband from some excess material I took off the skirt. The entire lining is made from scratch with fabric from JoAnns and without a pattern. I also took in A LOT of material.

I got more compliments on this dress than any other item of clothing in my closet.