Summer bounty

One of my favourite things about summer is the huge variety of delicious fruits! We've been visiting a couple of farmer's markets weekly, which has been fun; a great way to start the weekend. But even more fun is visiting a pick your own farm. This weekend we visited Butler's Orchard in Maryland. It's a mere half hour drive from us, which seemed almost too close to "civilization" to be a good farm. We were a little skeptical. But once we got out to the gravel and then dirt roads, we knew this place wasn't going to be a little garden plot. It's a very well organised place which uses a collection of signs to direct people to their picking destinations so that the staff can man the shop. We went for the blackberries, but also picked some red raspberries and could have enjoyed blueberries also. I was under the impression that I didn't like blackberries and was originally just going to pick them to use them for dying fabric. But I tried one straight off the vine, and was quickly hooked! The taste is something like a grape, but sweeter, with some little seeds and more fun. Each berry is like a bundle of tiny balloons filled with deliciously sweet (and pretty purply coloured) juice!

For more photos: Berry Picking on Flickr!

Shop mode

I haven't updated in a while. But that's not because nothing's been going on! There was the end of school (which is always a crazy, hectic time), the start of summer, my agreeing to work an extra 40 hours (plus a little more, as always seems to be the case) and Silver Lining inventory production! Way back in May, I'd made weekly schedules for myself, including 5 solid hours of production time, time for exercise, inspiration, design all that good stuff. But as summer actually began, I have not only lost the sheets of paper I drafted those optimistic plans on, but have also not even attempted to dedicate 5 hours/day to building inventory. All this will come back to bite me on Friday if I get into Crafty Bastards (they let us know on Friday!). But, on the bright side, I will still have a whole week to work like a crazy person before we go on vacation!

For your photo today, a cute one of our little Tuzi playing with a prototype lime green, linen bunny:

New car CD!

As opposed to N-E car CD. :)

Back into the world of technology!

So I definitely have not been keeping to my new year's resolution of blogging once a week. My new resolution is to start blogging weekly once school is out and I am officially working on Silver Lining.

Since I last updated, I have returned to the wonderful world of technology. I've finally traded my PC/IBM ways for a shiny, new Macbook Air. I have to say this is pretty much the coolest computer I've had yet. My past computers really didn't have anything particularly cool about them, though. Having my own computer (that can tag along everywhere with me!) is really opening my mind up to more crafty possibilities. This lean, green machine can run both Illustrator and Photoshop at the same time! With this new found power, I've started seriously looking into digital design classes (I even paid the $50 app. fee for GMU!). Plus, I'm learning all about this new OS and finding all kinds of cool ways to personalise my computer and make it really me. All this computer time has definitely pulled me away from sewing, but I'm hoping it'll come full circle. Now that I can have more than one Firefox window/tab open, I can search the way I like, with a million windows open and essentially dipping my fingers into loads of sites and blogs and whatnots.

Today being Mother's Day, I'm working on a little project for my grandma. I got the base cutting and sewing done and have spent the last 2.5 hours (yipes!) "researching" ways to finish it up. In my (clearly not very well focused) search, I came across a super cool blog widget:

Enjoy!

Our family grows!

On 4 January, our little family grew by one little fluffy bundle of fun. Meet Louis Kablouis the Lapin! He's a Dwarf Hotot rabbit, and is already as big as he's going to get. After lots of research, wanting, calling, wanting, emailing, wanting and waiting, we finally settled on this cute little guy.


He was surrendered to the Humane Society of Fairfax County only a few days before we came to pick him up. His previous family had kept him as their favourite and cherished pet, until it was discovered (or admitted) that someone was just too allergic. Apparently his previous dad was sobbing as he dropped him off with enough supplies to sustain him for at least a month. Melissa, the super nice lady at the Humane Society felt it was important to make sure he found the perfect forever family. I guess we were just right!

Originally, he was named Olee, but he seems more like a Louis to us. A few days after we got him, we noticed a pretty distinct change as he started getting puberty-ful. When we got him, we had to agree that we'd bring him back for his neutering appointment. After the tiny taste of his crazed "burrowing," nipping, circling and biting, we were more than glad to gave made that agreement!

Yesterday, was his appointment date, so I dropped him off with Melissa in the morning and picked him up at the vet in the afternoon. The vet people weren't terribly nice, and didn't seem to want to answer any questions really. But they did read my note about concern over what seemed to be a decent amount of fur loss and poops strung together. Turns out he has a parasite! EEsh! It's something that buns usually have, but he just has a lot of it, so we have to feed him medicine twice a day for 7 days. Today we just barely got by getting him the proper amount. I think we're going to end up having to go for 8 days just to be sure.

Today, 24 hours after his surgery, he's definitely more energetic. He still stretches out his back legs as though he feels stiff and licks his "wound" occasionally. He's eating more though, and is still using his litter box for peepee. A couple poopies didn't make it, but as they are strung together, I think it's not entirely his fault. I mean, he can't help it if he thinks he's going in the box, but they stay stuck to his butt. Right?

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.

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.)

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.

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!

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."