After I made a little blender breakfast, I headed right into my craft room to get some sewing done. I didn’t dare turn on the TV or computer for fear that I would lose precious sewing time. I also had plans to watch the SuperBowl in the afternoon, even though I don’t really like or understand the rules of football. I watch it just about every year and mostly just to see guys getting tackled. I like contact sports, I guess.

Anyway, I got a few more 10 X 10 squares done. At this rate, I will be filling the walls with all my squares. I just need to pick up some more flannel. I’m getting great at sewing straight lines, over and over on paper. If it’s true that you need 10,000 hours to become an “expert” at something, I’m well on my way. I’ll be a master at straight line sewing in about 6 or 7 more years.

Also on my To Do List are to send these back to their rightful owners:

I took these little Polaroids at the dinner I went to a couple of weeks ago, and I want to turn them into nice little tags, similar to these ones I have hanging on my decorative branches. I’ll get cracking on them this week.

Any time I’m in my sewing room, Oscar is right there with me.

In between the times he’s biting at the thread on the sewing machine or sitting on the fabric I’m trying to sew, he looks out the window, and then will start to meow at me as it gets closer to 5:00 – his dinner time.

Donner comes in for a visit every once in awhile, but if Mike’s home, you can always find Donner hanging out in Mike’s office. He hangs out on his desk when he’s playing games. Mike put a little bed right on his desk so Donner can just sleep and every once in a while, will try to put his paw on Mike’s snacks. Sneaky kitty.

Around 2:30 this afternoon, the fog lifted and I started feeling perkier. Hooray! The dark, cold cloud had passed and I’m back to work tomorrow morning. With my new-found energy, I put together a Valentine themed photoshoot for February’s desktop calendar. I picked this photo off the cutting room floor and put a frame on it. If I’ve learned nothing from those wedding photo books, I will always remember the, “Put a frame on the photo and call it art.” advice. It totally works.

I thought the main focus for this photo would be those chalky candy hearts with the messages on them. I had two boxes from last year I unearthed from somewhere in my craft room. It wasn’t until I dumped them out on the top of the dishwasher that I became pretty sure I got the reject hearts. Hardly any of them had messages that were readable and some of them didn’t have a message. Outrageous! See if I EVER buy candy hearts from the Dollar Store ever again! Hrumph!

Also in my energy spurt I crocheted these Mr. Spock ears for a trekkie at my office. Now, I can’t promise you’ll see them on his ears or anything, because I didn’t want to treat the ears like a conditional gift – I’ll give you these if you let me take your photo with them on. It didn’t seem fair. And Mike Browne flat out said NO before I could even ask if I could take his photo with the ears on, so I’m not feeling like we’ll see them in action. Also, they’re not very exciting on their own.

If I don’t get out of the house, I’m afraid I’ll be staring in my own show on the TLC channel called, “My Strange Addiction to the TLC”. I watched so much Toddlers and Tiaras, Next Great Baker, and Hoarders that I started seeing repeats of the same shows. Of course I want to see the next season of “My Strange Addiction” they’ve been advertising so I can see the lady that eats more cat treats than people food and the guy that makes out with his car.

I need to know these things. I think should just rename that channel, “You’re a Nosy Neighbour for watching this stuff”. It’s a stretch to call that channel “The Learning Channel” at this stage of the game anyway.

I got invited to a crafty weekend by another internet friend! My twitter pal and snowshoe friend, Moniera, invited me to make make cards and use her fancy stamps and paper punches. I made two more friends at the card making party, drank tea and ate snowflake cookies – a lovely way to spend the afternoon.
This crafty meeting gave me the opportunity to break out a box of papers I haven’t opened in YEARS. I didn’t realize just how many stashes of things I have in my craft room. Mike keeps telling me I should just make a project out of all this stuff I’ve collected with the purpose of making things out of them. Sometimes I wonder if my hobby is making stuff, or just collecting stuff to make stuff with.

I didn’t make cards. Instead, I made some labels, or maybe they’re bookmarks? Or maybe they’re decorations for my Skully Jr. tree? I do like making them. They’re a good size for a quick project.

I also found my old stamp collection in that box of stuff and used this Romanian stamp I found in the collection. I also found stamps from 1986. Did you know it cost 17 cents to mail a stamp within Canada in 1986?

In other news, we’ve been having our share of pink and blue sunrises and sunsets. It must be all the chilly weather we’ve been having.

We had snow off and on all weekend. That’s plenty for us. Man, if it snows during the work week, people really panic around here. No one wants to leave their houses or even attempt to drive in the snow. That’s probably better, because a lot of the time the people who want to drive are sliding around and smashing into stuff. It’s just better to take the bus.

Let’s just hope the light flurries predicted for tomorrow don’t even happen.

It was a rainy one today. I took this photo in the car tonight after a visit to a fabric store I don’t usually go to. When I was 16 years old, I worked at McDonald’s. I know. I hated it. But I was saving up to visit my buddy in Maine and thought that was a good way to go. I was making $3.30/hr and I was sour. So sour, one customer said to me, “Hey, if you don’t like your job, go get another one.” What he really should have said was, “Hey, if you’re going to be a grumpy customer service person, why not get a job at a fabric store?” Maybe neither customer service people didn’t like blue camouflage.

The good news here is that I completed another small sewing project. This is good news for Mike because he doesn’t have to take his lunch to work in a Safeway grocery bag anymore. Huzzah!

I made a lined lunch bag with gussets (that’s just making a triangle at the bottom of the bag so it sits flat, thanks to the fabric) AND grommets (round metal pieces hammered through the fabric) – to thread the handles through. I used the same fabric for the lining and the outside, so it’s blue camo inside and out. It was either this camouflage or red flames for the lunch bag – I didn’t see many grown-up man type fabrics with patterns where I was. I was tempted by a bucking bull fabric, but decided since Mike’s not a cowboy, I’d pass. Wait. He’s not in the military, either, so my logic makes no sense.

I used this pattern by Oh Fransson. She has all sorts of great patterns on her site. I was able to follow along easily for this project. Hooray!

But then there was this situation…

My first 3 10×10 inch squares? None of them were 10 inches. One was 7X7, and two were 8 inches square. What? What’s that saying about measure twice and cut once? LOLS. I blew that. So it’s back to the drawing board for that project. Maybe I should just practice cutting 10 inch squares. That would be riveting blog reading, I’m sure.

Hey, wait a minute. That would imply I once had quilting groove, wouldn’t it? That’s a little braggy. I’m sorry about that. I woke up this morning at 4:20…I couldn’t sleep. Time to get on the sewing machine. Really? These pot holders woke me up before the birds? Yup. Yup they did.

I made these using this technique – you sew on paper. I loved it. You sew the strips diagonally on a 10X10 square piece of paper and then pull the paper off after. Very cool! I love how it turned out. I then cut the square into 4 equal squares and then sewed them together. They made wonky (on purpose!) patterns. I then sewed them together sandwich style and hand stitched the opening closed. There are two layers of stuffing inside – a cotton layer and then a heatproof layer. Safety first!

Okay. One more photo.

In even better news, the swap partner crisis has been averted! Thankfully Krista was able to piece together the things I remembered about my partner – pretty much everything except her name – and one thing I remembered identified her immediately. I am so relieved, I can’t even tell you.

I can rest easy tonight.

Man. I spent this morning and part of the afternoon working on some potholders for a swap I’ve got to have done by Wednesday.

It’s not going well. I’ll leave it at that.

I’ll keep at it and make something work. At this point, it will have to be scrappier because I’ve cut the cutest kitchen fabric that Cynthia designed into various bits.

Wish me luck! I’m going to need it. My poor swap partner needs it, too.

I hereby dedicate this photo to my buddy Lysa, over at the Red Spotted Patch, because I know she likes bum shaped fruit just as much as I do. I’m pretty sure you could imagine my delight when I found this little bum apple at the Red Apple Mart on Saturday afternoon. I could barely contain my excitement as I found it in the pile of red apples. We haven’t eaten it yet. I think I’ll save it for a special occasion. An occasion like having a cleaned up craft room maybe? Hellz yah! I got it all cleaned up!

You may have remembered the “BEFORE” photo. Shameful, I know. It actually went from bad to worse this afternoon when I emptied out the closet. I found 2 spiders in there and a huge bag of scraps of fabric I have somehow collected…since who knows how long? I found a bag of Halloween stuff I bought over a year ago and completely forgot about. And I found a bag with 2 skeins of Noro yarn in it and a pair of socks. My pair of socks. How did they get in the same bag? How did they get in my closet? I must be sleepwalking or something.

But, despite finding spiders, spider webs, random socks and a fabric steamer I forgot about, I did get the room all cleaned up today!

Here’s the “AFTER” photo:

Tada!

I even hung up my sewing bunting that Amy Dame made. I won it at September’s Quilting Bee. Delightful and cheerful, isn’t it?

And the closet…it’s pretty snazzy, thanks to the $20 shelving unit I put in there.

I was so happy to be able to access my sewing machine that I whipped up this little Christmas Babushka to celebrate. I picked that up in a kit from HappySewLucky last week.

Best of all, I believe Oscar approves.

I’m going to make a concerted effort to keep this room clean…I’ll try cleaning as I go and all that stuff. Apparently that’s what really organized people do.

It’s been awhile since I’ve given anything away on my blog. That’s about to change! If you like Santa, and you like Christmas, I think you just may like a package of my special series of cards. I call them, The “You’d Better Watch Out” Pack.

This series of photocards was photographed on the North Shore Mountains on a cold, wintery day. Each package of cards contains 1 of each fine art print – for a total of 5 cards per package. I also used my favourite Christmas tree stamp and stamped the inside and the envelope for each card. And that’s good – for goodness sake.

So, if you’d like a pack of cards, I’m giving 2 packages away! You can leave a comment and I’ll do the randomizer thing and give the packages to 2 lucky winners. I’ll keep the comments open for 2 days. And the winner should have his/her cards in plenty of time to send away for Christmas.

Ready? Set? Go!

Quilting Bee was a smashing success tonight. We had Berene from happysewlucky come speak to our group tonight! She create cute little stuffies and adorable Christmas ornaments and happy skulls for Halloween. She brought her son, Noah, he’s about 12, I’d say, and he designs fabric, too.

As per usual for Thursday night after Quilting Bee, I am SPENT. It was a glorious evening. I have many photos to post. And tomorrow I’m on card making duty, so I’m excited to get that done and done. The craft fair starts tomorrow night.

I’m making some stickers with my sticker maker. I had no idea there was such a thing until I read this tutorial from photojojo. Really? A sticker maker? Cool. If I had that when I was a kid, our house would have been FULL of stickers. I loved them when I was little. Grape scratch and sniff ones were my favourite.

I didn’t make scratch and sniff stickers, I made stickers out of some 35mm film (as directed). I think they’ll look better tomorrow up against the window. All my negatives are very dark, even against the white paper, so it’s tough to see the little images. I’ll stick some on the window tomorrow and see if I can get a better view.

Something else I made today? Roasted pumpkin soup! It’s a perfect afternoon at home soup. It’s not hard to make, just time consuming. I roasted the pumpkin, added fresh squeezed orange juice…it was very delicious. Mike’s not a big soup guy, but he gave this one a thumbs up. Good thing. He’s got to take it to work for lunch tomorrow.

I followed this recipe, but omitted the chipotle cream at the end. I also substituted whole milk for full cream. Very lovely!