Suggestions for Europe

As many of you know, Tony and I are taking our first Jacob-free vacation (thanks Grandma and Grandpa P.!) at the end of June.  We are going to Amsterdam!  Hooray!  Tony has a meeting for work there and then we have a few days to explore the rest of the Netherlands.  I am just wondering if anyone has traveled to that part of the world and if so, do you have any suggestions for things to do that are a little less touristy.  We are planning on seeing some of the standards like the Anne Frank museum, Van Gogh, and Rembrandt. We are also going to rent bikes and cycle around the city.   We are willing to travel to Denmark, Belgium, and Germany, but we don't want to spend our entire vacation on a train.  So if any of you out in bloggerville have some interesting suggestions we would really appreciate it.

Sewing Question

Recently I have been on a sewing kick.  I guess I was inspired by Tony's cousin, Shannon Y., who recently opened an Etsy shop (click here) full of cute dresses and skirts for the toddler/young kid crowd.  My sister Megann has also given me lots of great ideas for sewing the last few months.  Anyway, I feel that I have been pretty successful at making simple things like Tag blankets (see example here...these aren't mine though) and customized burp cloths (see example here) (I actually got this idea from Shannon V. who gave me some fabulous burp cloths when J was born).  So I guess my success had to run out sometime.  I decided to try to make this super cute skirt for my niece Marley in the hopes that it would turn out beautifully and that I could then move on to making a couple for my nieces Ava and Brooklyn (Lisa, don't tell them, I would like to surprise them).  

Once I had the skirt put together and was trying to feed the elastic through the waist casing, it was abundantly clear that it was not going to work out as I had hoped.  The biggest thing is that the circumference of the skirt was much too large for a 12-month old size skirt.  I couldn't get the elastic to make it around the skirt.  Yikes! 

So my questions for all you seamstresses are:

Did I make the circumference too big by not following the instructions correctly?

 I measured just like it said and cut on the fold...

Are the instructions just really bizarre?....almost 72 inches around for a toddlers skirt.

Anyway, I ended up chopping circumference of the skirt in half and making a less fabric-y (is that a word?) skirt.  In the end, I still think it is a super cute skirt, just not as twirly as I had hoped.  I will post some pictures later, but I am baffled by this skirt.

Here are the pictures as promised

Here is the final skirt after the removal of the excess fabric.

And...here is all the excess fabric.  Like I said, YIKES!

Paper saver

I recently found this really amazing website that helps you save paper when you are trying to print out information from a  website.  It is called Print What You Like (www.printwhatyoulike.com).  

It allows you to select only the text and/or pictures you would like to print from your favorite website and eliminate the advertisements and other junk.  As you can imagine, you can save tons of paper this way.  You don't have to download a program or do anything special.  You just go to printwhatyoulike.com and type in the website you are interested in.  Then it will navigate you to that page and a sidebar will show up in your browser.  You pick the parts of the webpage you are interested in and tada!  That's it.  It also allows you to save your new document in pdf or html format.  The website also has a short tutorial to help you get started.  I really like this program because it allows me to create pdf versions of my most recent posting on my blog without the sidebars or main photo.  I can then save them in my journal or use them in iphoto.  I know that you can make a book out of your blog with blurb, but for me this seems to be a better choice.