Bracelet break

I've been diligently working away at my copious amounts of school work.  [Two papers and a midterm due this week!]  I've also managed to make some more progress on the hexie front.  I've now got close to 100 little hexies all pieced together!  Mom and Flea have suggested that I not make an entire quilt top out of tiny hexies and that I make some kind of pattern or shape to applique onto a quilt top instead.  In the class the quilt will be for, we have a sort of class joke about trees.  So I've decided that the hexies are going to make a nice tree top.  The hexies will be the leaves and I'll free-motion quilt the trunk and branches.  Then to quilt the hexies, I'll quilt little leaf shapes over them... probably randomly.  Thanks to the interwebs, I managed to find a free graph paper generator that gives me 1" hexagonal graph paper.  I'm using this to map out what my hexie tree top will look like.  In the meantime, I'm also creating quite the large quilt-y/hexie pinboard with all things related to this hextra special project.

Not that my interest in hexie-making is waning or anything, but I have been thinking about making bracelets recently too.  This afternoon, I'm working on my midterm for my motivation class and decided I deserved a little break.  When T and I were on our honeymoon, I started collecting bracelets from the places we visited.  A nice old man gave me a simple bee bracelet at the honey farm we visited and that kind of started the idea.  A few days later, when we were in Nice, there was a cute little craft fair by the port and I bought some pretty fabric bracelets.  Again, they are very simple, and the old lady who was selling them was very cute and French.  Her younger helper (maybe her daughter or someone whom she treated like a daughter) explained that the bracelets are made from scraps of fabrics and beads and baubles the old lady has collected over the years.  None of the bracelets were the same.  It was really hard to choose which one I wanted, so in the end I chose two.  Since then, I've been thinking it would be fun to make some of these bracelets, so today I tried it!  If you're interested in a pretty bracelet that can be made in 15 minutes (if you have all the supplies on hand because you are me or an old French lady), here's a quick tutorial!

Supplies you'll need:
Fabric - preferably a lightweight cotton lawn type with a smallish print
Scissors
Iron
At least 1 bead with a big hole - the hole should be about the size of the hole in a pony bead
Tape measure (optional)

How to make it:
1)  Iron your fabric so it's nice and wrinkle free.

2)  Cut a strip of fabric that's about 1' wide by 10" long.  The length you'll need depends on the size of your hand (not your wrist).  To measure how long your strip will need to be, use the tape measure to measure your hand at its widest point when you put your fingers together as though you're going to put on a bracelet.  This length (mine was 8"), is the absolute minimum length you'll need.  Add 2 or more inches to this number to get your final strip length.

3)  Iron the two sides of the strip in towards the middle as though you are making bias tape.  In fact, if I had been clever, I would have used my handy Simplicity Bias Tape Maker for this project.  But that would have required me finding the appropriate tip and getting it all set up.  For a 10" strip of fabric, that seemed unnecessary.

4)  Fold the little strip of bias tape in half, as you would when you are using it to bind something.  Iron it.

5)  Here's the only slightly tricky part.  Start to twist the little strip you've got.  This is something like if you were spinning yarn.  You want the strip of fabric to turn into a round cord.  After you've twisted the first inch or so and it's staying put a little, iron down the length of the cord as you twist.  This way you're ironing the twist into the fabric, which makes it hold the twist better.

6)  Your bracelet cord is all done!  Now get that big-holed bead and string it onto one side of your cord.  String the other end of the cord through the bead in the opposite direction.  [Does this make sense?  It's like you're making a "x" with the ends of the cord and the center of the "x" is in the bead.]  Tie the ends to the cord in neat little knots.  If you had extra length in your cord, you can tie knots and cut off any excess.  If, like me, you made your cord exactly the length you wanted, you'll have to make sure your knots are very close to the ends.

 

7)  Ta-da!  Put on your bracelet and be the envy of everyone!

Year of the rabbit

Click to see more photos from our CNY dinner celebration

Thursday was Chinese New Year. Usually, being the rather un-Asians we are, we don't celebrate or anything. This year, we decided to change it up and have a little dinner party. It was a sort of last minute thing, but I think we did a pretty good job. T, Tuzi and I were joined by my two sisters, Mom, Feder and my sister's friend. So, we had a total of eight diners; quite auspicious! [Eight is an auspicious number in Chinese superstition.]

I made a very "semi-homemade" meal of nee gao (rice ovalettes with chicken and pea leaves), chicken stir fry (chicken, chicken sausage and baby bok choy; sauce based on this recipe), gai lan (Chinese broccoli), rice and long life noodle soup (lo mein style noodles with baby bok choy and mini dumplings in chicken soup). For dessert, I procured a dozen fresh dan tats (egg custard tartlets) and Mom and Sneetch brought a variety of ice cream mochis.

For other party fun, we had white rabbit candies, calcium fortified lollipops (donno, Mom found them), tangerines with leaves on, and I made each of our guests a hong bao (red envelope) filled with chocolate coins. :)

On the wedding front, no real crafting has yet begun. However, we did receive all the paper products for our invitations this week. The design is complete also, so this week will be invitation production week!

Homemade knifty knitter!

I just made a Knifty Knitter! Basically an easy to use knitting loom, Knifty Knitters are a great fine motor and concentration activity for children (and adults, too!). Ever since I saw this post on Craftzine, I've been thinking of ways to make knitted wrist warmers with my Lunch Bunchers at school.

Whenever it rains, I bring an indoor project for us to do together. It's gotten to the point that the children actually hope it will rain, and rejoice when it does, so we can do another project together. I will have to post some photos of our past activities. One of the first things we did was finger knitting. Only involving yarn (I chose some variegated acrylic to make things more interesting) and your fingers! The children loved the project, though they only made "bracelets." Since then, they occasionally ask me if I will teach them "real" knitting. I only have an hour in which to teach them a project, start to finish, including clean up time. So, I'm not sure we're quite at the point where I can teach them knitting with real needles. But Knifty Knitter, or loom knitting, we can do! I bought a GIANT skein of fun coloured, variegated yarn and am going to split it into equal balls so the children can make little wrist warmers for themselves. I'm more than halfway into my first one, and could barely stop to write this post! I think they will really enjoy this! Best of all, including the fantastic yarn, this project will cost only $1.25 per child. If you'd like to make your own knitting loom, here's a basic tutorial. I will post photos when I make the rest for the children.

Make your own Knifty Knitter
(for child size wrist warmers)

Materials (to make one loom):
5 Low temp glue gun sticks (the oval kind, about 5" long)
1 pvc pipe "hub" (hunt around at your hardware store, it's with all the elbow shaped sections, only this piece has no screw threads, mine 2.5" in diameter and about 1.5" tall)
duct tape (coloured would be fun!)
scissors
Glue dots (optional, but quite helpful)

Here's what you do:

1. Cut the glue sticks in half so you have 10 sticks, each about 2.5" long.
2. If you are using glue dots, evenly space 10 of them along one edge of the pipe. This will be the "top" of your loom.
3. Stick one glue stick half to each of your glue dots, leaving about 0.5" space at the bottom, so that about 0.75" sticks up beyond the top of your loom. These are the pegs around which you will wrap your yarn, so don't make them too short or your knitting will easily slide off. Of course, don't make them too long either or it will be difficult to actually knit.
4. Once the sticks are held in place by the glue dots, use the duct tape to hold them on tightly. I pressed in the edges to really prevent any wiggling. Align the edge of the tape with the top edge of the loom. You will only have about 0.5" to wrap under the bottom edge.
5. Wrap a second piece of duct tape around, this time aligning the edge with the bottom of the glue sticks. This will generate about 2" of tape hanging off of the bottom of your loom. Cut slits in this tape to allow it to fold nicely into the inside of the loom. Stick down each of these "flaps."
6. Make sure the tape is all stuck down so it won't catch on any of your yarn, and you're DONE!

If you make a loom, I'd love to see it and photos of what you make!

Busy, busy, busy

T and I have been quite the busy bees lately. Since we got back from our short break, we've been constantly working on stuff! We are preparing for my upcoming craft fair, the Downtown Holiday Market, which is in 3 weeks. Crafting has been going at a fairly steady pace, though it will be slowed significantly when we leave for our Thanksgiving vacation on Tuesday. Meanwhile, I have to prepare for my upcoming Montessori weekend seminar, and T has class all day, every day this weekend. Of course, I've also been working on lessons for the classroom and have plans for little "love leaves" as Thanksgiving goodies for the children.

This week, I created 2 new lessons for the children. A corn painting lesson is on the shelves until Thanksgiving break, and I prepared a special rainy day activity for the Lunch Bunchers on Thursday.
Corn painting involves a printout of a corn image, (with individual kernels), qtips cut in half, a green coloured pencil and a yellow stamp pad. The children use the qtip to stamp little yellow circles into each of the kernels. Then they colour the leaves green. If desired, they can cut out the whole corn shape, which can then be posted on our landscape bulletin boards as though it's growing out of the ground.

For our rainy day activity, I made cinnamon clay for the children to make an aromatic garland for the classroom. I brought letter and leaf shaped cookie cutters and we spelled out "give thanks" with a few leaves for spacers. The children loved the activity (since we no longer have play dough out on the shelves) and it made the classroom smell delicious. Of course, the children took home the extra clay.

Cinnamon Clay Recipe

Ingredients:
2 bottles ground cinnamon
1 bottle white school glue
1 cup applesauce
1 cup flour

In a large bowl, mix the applesauce and as much of the glue as you can dump out of the bottle. In a separate, smaller bowl, combine one and a half bottles of cinnamon with about half the cup of flour. This will help make it easier to mix into the applesauce/glue mixture. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet. The cinnamon will cause billowing dusty clouds if you add too much at once. When all the dry ingredients have been mixed in, if it is still sticky, add more flour. Flour a clean surface well and knead the dough. It should be approximately the same consistency as Crayola Model Magic, only heavier. Separate dough into balls for distribution to children and pat flat with the palm of your hand. Use cookie cutters to make shapes.

I made a test batch of letters which were slightly less than 0.25" thick. They were a little brittle, so with the children, we made our shapes 0.25" thick. They are drying over the weekend, hopefully they'll be done by Monday so we can string them up!

A great day!

That's what T and I enjoyed for dinner tonight. Real Southern sweet tea, fried chicken, buttermilk biscuits and potato salad! We figured that since we're in the South, we should enjoy as much real Southern food as we can. We haven't had good, smell-it-from-a-mile-away fried chicken since we visited Charlottesville last.

We're in Raleigh because today was the Handmade Market. I have to say it was one of the most well-run fairs I've been in, which made it easy for us to do well. The Handmaidens did a wonderful job of making everything as easy as possible. Also, the fair was held indoors, at the Marbles Kids Museum in downtown Raleigh so there was a lot of traffic. They must do a fantastic job of marketing, because the people who showed up were also all prepared to buy! They were prepared with cash, too! A very nice Montessori teacher came by my booth and immediately picked up a Cording Star Kit and suggested that I try to get into a conference or catalogue. When I told her I'm currently a Montessori intern, she said she hoped to see me at the Boston conference. How extra exciting to meet a fellow Montessorian!

Raleigh itself is not a bad place to be either. It's about a 5 hour drive from home, but it didn't seem that bad. Our hotel is fantastically nice, and we were upgraded to stay on the Club Level. The area even has quite a nice number of consignment stores with men's and women's clothing! T and I are already looking forward to applying for the Spring Handmade Market. :)

Halloween Crafting

A peek at what I've been working on this week. Last night, Nicole came over and we worked on making 50 of the little Sculpey pumpkins you see in the dish at the far left. They're actually little pencil toppers, waiting to be popped onto cute Halloween pencils. Those will be our little gifts to the students in the art class we teach together. In the middle are pins backs, waiting to be hot glued to the backs of the wooden pumpkins in the bowl at the right. It was quite difficult to track down enough of those wooden pumpkin shapes at 7 different Michael's stores! I spray painted them orange first, then drew faces and details with paint pens and then finished them off with a coat of (supposedly) reflective spray paint. My hope is that the children in my class will be able to wear them pinned to their costumes for extra visibility and safer trick-or-treating. I've packaged them in little cello bags tied with twine and a tag explaining their purpose.

Also, a quick thank you to my goody goblins (Mom and Sneetch!) for delivering the goody gourds to GHS early this morning. I hear they were received well and enjoyed!

School bag

Quick post to share my latest creation (I have a couple to share actually). I made this bag, cut to finish, all tonight. I started at 7 and just finished, so 4 hours. Not too bad for a perfect, custom-made messenger bag! I didn't even go out and get new fabric. Everything I used was either from previous projects or stuff I bought on a whim. I pretty much followed this tutorial, with ideas taken from all over, plus my own additions (adjustable strap, vinyl bottom).

Here were my criteria:
Washable (although now I'm not sure with the vinyl bottom)
Big enough to fit my laptop
Lots of pockets for all my small things
Pocket for books (for spontaneous story time at school)
Adjustable strap
Wet/yucky stuff proof bottom
Able to stand up on it's own

I actually managed to fulfill all of my own criteria on the very first try!

Hooray!

I got in! I got in to the Handmade Market. It's a huge craft fair held in Raleigh, NC, twice per year. I'll be in the one this fall, on Saturday the 7th of November. I'm so excited! I have probably enough inventory at this point to take down there, but I am hoping it will be a really successful fair, so I will try to build up more inventory. I was also accepted to the Downtown Holiday Market which will be in December, so I need to get cracking! I hope to have some Montessori materials there as well!

Keys

I feel like I have officially changed schools. I received a pair of keys to get in to MSM yesterday. In honour of the occasion (and also because we have to carry our keys around all the time), I made the key holder pictured. It was pretty simple to make and after testing it today, I think it's also good at serving its purpose. The idea was for a key holder that would be easily accessible even when my hands are fairly full and could be worn unnoticeably even if I don't have pockets. The holder is attached to a belt loop with the snap strap on the back. The keys are attached to a hair tie which is anchored to the holder by being sewn into the seam and also by the little felt stopper at the back. Finally, the holder is lined with felt to silence the keys while they're not in use.

More Montessori goodness

I've been getting increasingly excited about my Montessori training program. Classes start in just about one month! I preparation, I've already bought (and started reading) my books. I've also been thinking about lessons and doing a little making. As part of my cleaning and packing up my crafting room process, I've decided that I need to make some things to use up those awkward pieces of fabric. You know, those pieces that you *can't* throw away, but aren't big enough for what you really want to make? I have a lot of those. Many I have already 'gifted' on to other crafty friends. Here are two projects I made recently for my friend Allison's Montessori classroom.
The first is a fabric matching lesson. I found four fabrics of different textures and colours. I cut out small rectangles from each (traced a box of chalk as a pattern). Then, I cut out rectangles of a tan twill fabric and sewed them together by edging with some twill tape. There are 4 pairs of little matching rectangles which can be placed with the tan side up for a simple matching activity.
The second is a plant watering apron. The idea came from Montessori By Hand; a wonderful blog full of Montessori ideas. Her apron is beautiful, but I was concerned it was a little 'girly' for the boys' taste. So mine is hopefully more gender neutral, though it uses the same basic ideas. Each morning, the teacher uses the blue flowers to mark plants who need watering. The flowers have a loop of elastic on the back to fasten them to the green straw 'stems.' When a child chooses the plant watering activity, they put on the apron, (which has velcro closures at both the neck and waist straps) and fill the watering can (not pictured). The apron has slots at the top for red "I've been watered" flowers. When the child has finished watering a plant with a blue flower, he can replace the blue flower with a red one. The blue flower can be placed back in the slot on the front of the apron to leave both hands available for carrying the watering can.

Little things

Sometimes, when the weather is dreary, you have to focus on the little things to keep away the grouchies. Take this photo for example. This orange thing is a little piece of plastic that you pull off of an ink cartridge before you put it in the printer. Doesn't it look so happy? It's like a little orange guy, so happy to have a function in life; even though he'll probably get tossed in the recycling bin.

In other news, I've started to feel like my crafty mojo is coming back. It got pretty "quashed" for a while there when other things were occupying my time (and mind). Even though the past few days have been rainy, it's been good for crafty ideas. Besides that, T and I bought some really wonderfully scented candles at Anthro over the weekend which have been making our house smell like spring.
Anyway, here's one of the fruits of my newfound craftiness. Sorry for the less than lovely photos; it's naptime so I'm working with less than lovely photographing conditions. A little bunny pouch for storing goodies and keeping bags tidy. I borrowed the tail idea from this great pattern. I made one of those pencil pouches for Madre's birthday last week. It turned out quite well. Unfortunately, the lining of the pouch is pretty small so it doesn't hold a whole lot of pencils. I made another one last night for my friend Emily, and I tried to fix that a little. I made the ears little pockets, with opeinings at the top for storing all important chapstick. :) You get a sneak peek of something else I'm working on too; see it up there in the top right corner? Any guesses?

I made a new ironing board cover for myself last night also. The old one was pretty yucky. Somehow it acquired brown stains which would occasionally transfer themselves to whatever was being ironed. Besides that, the padding was pitifully thin causing the grid underneath to show through with vigorous ironing. The new cover is made completely with thrifted materials; pretty (partially sun faded or bleached?) pink print decorator's fabric and some kind of cotton string. I'll have to get a photo of it tonight.

Finally, as promised many moons ago, here's a link to our photos from Disney. I'm working on grabbing the professional PhotoPass ones from the Disney site.

5 days!

Today is the last day of Spring Break Camp. Sorry I've been MIA a long time, while the auction took over the world. Let's just say it was rather intense there for at least a week. I had a week to catch up on sleep and get my health back in order before Camp started. A week to plan the camp, which I had only half-planned during the onslaught of auction tasks. But now, on the last day, I'm feeling quite good about it. I had the good sense way back in January to plan for an outside group to come in to entertain the children. After some struggles with my first choice, I found a suitable alternative, which as turned out amazingly well.

We've had a lovely lady come in each morning to entertain the children with hands-on Mad Science. She teaches them real science while keeping them involved and engaged via really cool projects and activities. This is just the way children should be introduced to an academic subject, I think. She has the children so interested in learning, the camp has actually become educational! While she runs her program in the morning, I have plenty of time to get myself organized for the afternoon.


I can't help but want to have equally cool (if not as educational) fun projects for the children on my end. We started the week with a pillow case decorating project. This is the second year I've done this same activity, but learned from last year. Last year I made throw pillow style cases for each of the children, out of very nice (but not see-through) Osnaburg fabric. I bought many, many colours of Sharpies and fabric markers and expected the kids to go wild drawing and decorating their 20" square blank canvases. The whole project took them about 20 minutes. Many of the children just scribbled colours (and these were not our youngest ones!) and declared themselves done.

This year, I made regular, bed style muslin pillowcases and by accident (my fabric wasn't wide enough) had to add on a strip of green quilter's cotton. The green was a lucky, perfectly sized remanant which fairly accurately matches our school's shade of green and the main fabric is the cheapest muslin available. The benefit of the cheap-o muslin is that it's see-through. So I printed simple, generic pictures of animals, dragons (our school mascot) and other child-tracing-friendly images. The children slid the drawings into their pillows and coloured them in, some traced the images first, others just coloured. Both ways, they turned out beautifully. The younger children drew free-hand, their imaginations uninhibited. The oldest children chose more intricate images to trace carefully and then colour in, sometimes complete with shading! The first day, I gave them 20 minutes to work on their pillows which turned out to be way too short. They've been working on them during down time all week long!

What is the purpose of the pillows? Each day, we have "rest & relaxation" time while they watch a movie. The youngest children really need this time because they are keeping up with the older ones all day long. We set out gym mats on the floor, let them take off their shoes and lie down to watch. The pillows provide an obvious boundary so they don't crowd each other, can be sat upon, rested on or used for a clandestine nap.

Buttons, buttons

We celebrated Valentine's Day at school today. The children were all excited for the special day. I think they were as excited to give out the goodies they'd brought as they were to receive. It was nice to see that. They really were delighted to go around and pass out their little cards, placing each one into someone else's bag.


For my part, I came up with what I wanted to make for the kiddos just 2 days ago... Not the best plan given the rest of my schedule for the week. T very graciously helped me when I was still not done in the wee hours last night, buttoning and snipping loose threads.

The idea came with a bit of an ulterior motive. Few of the children in my class are able to button up their own pants after using the bathroom. I wanted a goodie for them that didn't involve food, and while playdough was going to be it, I decided that was a bit lame, and I'd have to buy some kind of cute containers anyway. So the fact that these Tic Tac Toe boards are totally buttony (including the button closure on the pouch), is really my way of getting them to learn how to button. Hopefully, it's a cute and fun enough way and maybe they'll just enjoy putting them on and taking them off. Since it's usually a 2 player game, it has the added (potential) bonus of getting them some quality time with someone, too.

Big Apple

We spent a long weekend up in NYC for T to compete in a Moot Court. The weather was great, considering it's early February. It was a little chilly on Friday, but much nicer than our last visit when it rained (poured) and T bought a faulty umbrella. [Longish funny story, email or comment if you're interested.] I was not allowed to attend the Moot Court proceedings, so I had quite a bit of time to myself. Though I'd had my doubts about our travel and hotel arrangements, things turned out reasonably. Our bus was about an hour late leaving DC, which left us standing in the cold, but such things happen I suppose. The hotel made up for it; the Sheraton Manhattan. It's on the very edge of Times Square as you'd picture it in your head. The rooms were a decent size, check in was painless and prompt and best of all, it was clean; no mildewy bathrooms (like at the W we stayed in last trip)!

While T was away, I pounded the pavement around the hotel. I probably walked a good 5 miles, we suspect. I think I saw everything on Madison, Lex, 5th and Ave. of the Americas, plus a lot of the in between streets from 41st all the way up to 68th. I plotted a course to hit Japanese book stores (searching for crafting books) and Japanese groceries which are quite plentiful actually. It was very fun to see all the "real" Japanese goodies as compared to the primarily Korean and Chinese stuff around DC.

I ended up spending a lot on crafting books, as is to be expected. I found a really cool one for Mom with charts for all kinds of different, very intricate and complicated looking knitted patterns. I also found a "find the differences" book for Sneetch which is comprised of pretty difficult pictures in all kinds of illustration styles. I ended up getting 5 for myself. I will get some pictures when my camera is recharged. I think my favourite is one called Make a Box which comes with a CD of .eps files so you can put your own designs and logo on all sorts of printable packaging templates! I have dreams of making something supercute for the babies, since Valentine's Day is upon us. I'll get photos of that too, if it happens.

Sorry about the blurry photo, my camera seems to dislike me more and more each day. T and I have been contemplating splurging on a nice SLR (I still don't know what that means, and haven't had a chance to research it properly). The idea is that if we had a good camera, we would take more photos. At all the craft fairs we go to, we both see photos and other 2D art we like all the time. But, one of us (ok, me) always points out that we could make it ourselves and it wouldn't cost $x00000.00. So, we don't buy the art, but we also don't make the art and our walls are still bare.


Speaking of art, I come to the only other photo I took that came out well; a giant statue of Miffy. She was standing with some other notable kawaii friends; Hello Kitty, Pochacco, Keroppi, amongst a group of skateboarders doing tricks on their pedestals. An interesting joining of cultures.

Still no snow. It's been getting progressively colder, and we are supposed to be getting the coldest air of the season this week, but no snow. We're hoping for "flurries" tonight and "possible light dusting on Sunday." But no real snow. Meanwhile other parts of the nation are being buried in snow and can't seem to shake it. Too bad there's no giant blower device that could blow the snow clouds our way.

In other news, T and I invested in a new bed which has been absolutely wonderful. It's got a 3" pillowtop and we bought 2 sets of new, super lovely sheets. Getting into bed is like climbing onto a cloud. Even T agrees that it's worth every penny. Since getting the new bed last week, we have spent 90% of our time at home in it. The other 10% is reserved for showering and occasional cooking. We've gotten hooked on the show NCIS which has only compounded our desire to never get out of bed. The show itself is pretty good, but the fact that we were able to watch almost all of season 6 on Netflix instantly helps a lot. Speaking of tv, we got a new one to go with our new bed. With the bed being taller and all, we needed a bigger tv so we'd actually be able to see it. SO, now we have a new tv to watch from our new bed. And, since we've figured out how to hook up our wireless speakers to the computer which can be connected to the tv, good luck getting us to do anything outside of the bed from now until... until we finish watching every episode of NCIS I guess.

Not to worry, though. I am still being crafty and productive. I finished my awesome mittens using the pattern and beautiful yarn my sister (Flea) gave me for Christmas. One of these days, I will get a decent photo of them for you. I have knitted 2 presents and am working on a third. I have organized my entire yarn stash (minus some leftover pieces I brought home from work yesterday - working on it) and have been cleaning up photos to be uploaded to Etsy any day now. All I need is to be able to continue along in this mode of relative stress-free crafting for about a month and I think I'll have all my crafting loose ends tied up! Cross your fingers...

Carving away my time

My sewing machine is sad. It's been doing such a lovely job helping me with all my crazy projects. But all of a sudden yesterday, the top thread tension got all out of whack. No matter what stitch I use or which way I turn the tension dial, the top thread is always too tight. As a result, my trusty friend is going to the shop this afternoon, for the first time ever. Fortunately, wonderful Tran has already called the shop to explain that I have a craft fair this Saturday, so I need my machine back as soon as possible. He explained the problem and it seems we should be able to drop it off this afternoon and pick it up tomorrow! How swell!

So, since my friendly machine is out of commission, I needed something else to occupy myself last night. I recently ordered some new Japanese crafting books. One of them is full of hand carved stamp designs. I love those sorts of books for the inspiration! So I spent the evening last night carving some stamps. I carved a happy cloud, an envelope (sealed with love), the little penguin above and a Silver Lining return address stamp. I did the three little ones first to practice and get myself "in the groove." The return address stamp is pretty awesome also, if I do say so myself. But the penguin one saved me money. I saw this little guy on Etsy a while ago, but decided to wait to buy it. Of course, it sold. So last night, when I was feeling like carving, I knew I had to make him.

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!