29 October 2007

Weekend productivity

This weekend was a fairly productive one, as far as weekends go. We spent the better part of Saturday lounging about and barely getting some tidying done. Sometime in the afternoon we finally got into doing some useful things. We managed to get to Home Depot (third weekend in a row), stop off at my parents' house, buy groceries, visit Michael's, Joann's and get to the Galleria (the upscale half of the mall) all before meeting T's parents for dinner. T bought a nice, brown, courduroy blazer and I got 2 fun but work friendly pairs of pants from Anthropologie. It's amazing; I never can find something that suits me or that's my size in the regularly priced section, but can usually find something I like in the Sale.

Sunday was the day that made the weekend productive. We effectively cleaned out the whole "junk room" by getting rid of the big, uncomfortable queen sized bed and one of the 4 nightstands. Four! Sheesh. We still need to take a lot more of stuff out of there, but T managed to box up all the other junk which we'll take away this coming weekend. We quite easily got rid of the bed by giving it away to a very nice guy from work. He came to load it onto the car and get it around. Meanwhile, I was busy baking cookies. I found a great recipe for sugar cookies online and tweaked it only a little. I ended up baking a few over 4 dozen cookies; moons, pumpkins, witches, a few ghosts and one stegosaurus for T. I'd gotten some cute pumpkin shaped baggies at Joann's. I put 3 cookies in each one and designed some cute little pumpkin leaf tags. I'll tie those on tomorrow night. I was going to do it last night, but something made me think I'd regret it. Some photos, for your viewing pleasure.





Sorry for the somewhat boring post. More interesting ones coming, I hope.

24 October 2007

Rain or Shine

Tonight is the annual Town Halloween Parade. Since I'm now in charge of the coordination for the event, I have to be there, since it's rain or shine. T and I have decided to go as pencils. I made us some dunce-cap style pencil tip hats last night, which I laminated at work today to help them hold up in the rain. Now I just hope that we hold up.

I've also been thinking about the poor people out in California who are just waiting to hear if their homes have been burnt to the ground. I can't imagine what it must be like to have to start all over. I suppose it must really teach you about what is important in life, and that material things are not the most important things. I don't know what I would try to save if I were given 10 minutes to take whatever I wanted with me. My bear, Chocto, my sewing patterns, my sewing machine?

Anyway, here are some photos of my new craft room (so much for not over-valuing material things..). Hopefully after tonight, I'll have some good photos of the parade.

(Click for a larger image.)


22 October 2007

New crafting room to go with my new blog!

This weekend T (the boyfriend) and I went on an adventure to Ikea land. It's been something we've wanted to do for a long time now, and we finally got up the courage, did enough research prior to going and got paid in time to go. I'd already picked out a cool EXPEDIT bookcase to go in my crafting room and we figured there would be other smaller purchases. We went in my Prius (as opposed to borrowing a larger vehicle) to prevent us from making other large purchases.

We spent about 4 hours there total, taking in all the amazing designs and their very small price tags. We started daydreaming about spending a summer in NYC, and all the ingenious furniture possibilities. They even had an NY style, box apartment which we could totally see ourselves living in for 3 months. Right. Tiny space, with virtually no room for big crafting project. The whole space was like 82 square feet or something . We didn't buy anything from that section. We did get 2 floor lamps (which are about 2' shorter than we'd hoped, but they work out quite well in our bedroom), 4 FIRA drawer organizers (which took us the better part of Sunday to put together), some magazine holders and an awesome bean bag chair slip cover that looks like a hedge hog. Instead of buying the $10 air pouf thing that is supposed to go inside (instead of the traditional environmentally un-friendly styrofoam pellets), we brought it home and stuffed it with my fabric scraps. I've been collecting and saving those for a year now. I think I did throw away the ones I'd accumulated in Charlottesville... but I've been collecting them not knowing what I'd do with them, but knowing they'd come in handy one day. Now they fill out my super cute Hedgy MaHog.

SPeaking of Hedgy, I think we spent at least half of our time in the Children's Section. I love the inventive, fun yet practical designs they have for children. I like the small, children sized furniture that seems to me to be in keeping with the Montessori method of allowing children to explore their world on their level. I also like the way the toys and furniture invite imaginative play without bringing in branded characters and cookie cutter story lines. Even as much as I love Disney, I think children should be encouraged to play and create their own imaginary, silly and fun worlds rather than re-enact the situations they watch on tv.

In other only semi-crafting related news, I found out today that I will be in charge of the school's participation in the Town Halloween Parade. I will have to go early, check us in, find our designated staging area and help keep our group corralled as people arrive. All this in costume. A costume I don't have. I don't really like Halloween much. It can be a good excuse to craft, I suppose, but it is so often scary instead of fun, and I don't really like dressing up. Oh well, it might be fun. As long as it doesn't rain.

18 October 2007

Well this is it. For now...


So here's my blog. It's far from perfectly what I envisioned in my head, but it's closer than it was on my many other attempts. Hopefully I'll soon have some fun new crafted projects to share, but for now, here's a link to one of my accomplishments from today; an online photo tutorial on how to make a ship!

17 October 2007

Test Post

I've wanted to start my own crafting blog for a long time. Here's my first attempt. Now I just have to figure out how to make it look "me."