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Happy New Year and Happy Chinese New Year! Yep, I have ‘t written a post since just before Christmas. Wow, looks like my goal to post more cleary hasn’t worked. I did try to post last week but it failed when I hit publish and I lost the whole thing. It being right before bed meant I didn’t redo it. Sleep is important, no matter how little I actually get. The post itself was more of a photo dump, so it probably failed because of the amount of photos.

I hope everyone’s year is going well. Things seem to be alright so far. Hubby’s getting over a nasty cold/flu thing. Thankfully neither Kara or I have gotten it. It’s nice that sickness doesn’t usually spread through the whole house as much as it does with most people.

I got a sewing machine for Christmas and it’s easily one of my fave gifts. I’ve made Kara a pair of capris and redashioned one of my old tops into a top for her. She thought it was the coolest thing to have clothes made for her. I have other projects I want to sew and you can bet there will be posts about them.

Kara modeling her refashioned shirt

We made Valentine’s for her preschool class, which took a while but she did enjoy making them. Hubby and I have never really celebrated the holiday but we do with Kara because she enjoys it.
Hopefully there will be more of a post this weekend, and there might be a few spelling and grammar mistakes in this post. It is 1:52 a.m. and I’m on my break at work.

Update: I fixed the picture sizes so now they’re actually viewabl. I don’t think I’ll be posting that late again. I don’t remember being able to change sizes in the tinydesk app, I’ll have to check that out before I use it again.

Posted using Tinydesk blog app

Excitement…

The excitement is really gearing up in our house for Christmas. Each day, when Kara does her advent calendar, she excitedly, adorably counts how many days there are left until Christmas.

Last Friday I picked up a gingerbread train kit from work for us to build together. Turns out it was a great idea, Kara and I had a blast. This is definitely something we’ll be doing every year. Kara thought it was pretty neat to build something she got to eat.

Oh, and we had a blue steel moment which was too cute!

On Monday we went to Airdrie’s Festival of Lights. It wasn’t too cold and we had the wagon this year so there were no grumpy complaints of being tired from munchkin. Visiting the lights is a tradition of ours, we try and go every year, unless it happens to be particularly cold that year.

We grabbed some hot chocolate to warm up with in the warm up tent. I started to blow off her’s so it’d be cool enough to drink. About ten minutes of blowing later I ask her to see if it’s cool enough and she tells me no, she wants it cold. I should have figured. She always wants it cold, she should really just drink chocolate milk. I think she only asks for it to feel a little grown up when we’re out drinking coffee. It’s cute, if a wee bit annoying. But I love her to death so it doesn’t matter.

Today I started making peanut butter cups using the simple, yet delicious recipe from radmegan. This is my second year making them and they always go over well. However, I’ve only finished the base chocolate, so I should go and do the filling and top pretty soon here. Or right now.

Well, I’m off to go finish those. xoxo

Whimmy wham wham wozzle!

Well, this post isn’t quite as soon as I’d like but, it’s still within the same month so it’s still pretty good. Still working on the whole time management thing. Anyways, back at the end of August, when I was still brand-spanking new to embroidery, I did a lot of browsing on the internet for tutorials and free patterns to try out (more on that in another post). I found lots of helpful blogs and this one pattern was the one I had to try first. This is the pattern from Badbird’s I used. I thought it was cute. I transferred the pattern using the tissue-paper method I found from here. I took it and the handy little case I prettied up from the dollar store to hold my supplies camping with me on September long.

I thought it would be fun to embroider it on this fun floral fabric I found, but I think next time I’ll do the pattern in all black on this fabric. It’s a little to busy I think. Either way, I had fun stitching it up and despite my colour choices I think it turn out pretty good. I’m not sure what I’m going to use this for though. I’m might do another one using the same fabric, just using black floss and maybe use it a part of a cover for a photo album or something. We’ll see.

I got the idea that I should definitely use embroidery to make presents for my friends and family. It was my sister’s fiancé whose birthday was coming up and I knew he loves Futurama so I looked up Futurama images. When I saw this Slurm’s poster image, I knew I had to do it.

To make a pattern, all I did was carefully, softly trace the image directly from my computer screen with paper and pencil. I took that, went over it in thin, felt tip black pen and placed the fabric over top to trace. At the time I didn’t have any fancy pattern transfer tools and it wasn’t going to be for anything that needed washing so I just used a Sharpie pen after I made sure it wouldn’t bleed on the fabric.

  Various stages of progress.

Slurm’s Mackenzie should’ve been a bit darker and a bit browner in colour but I just used what I had on hand. I didn’t have any dark grey (in fact, I had no grey at all) floss so I improvised his glasses by using white to add reflection light.

After this, I had two other birthdays I stitched something up for and I designed my own pattern (I’ll show you in one of my next posts) and then I started on Christmas presents. I’m so glad I gave embroidery a try, it’s fun, relaxing, I can do it while watching TV or a movie and it’s easy to bring along. It also doesn’t have to take very long to finish a project.

I hope all of your holiday plans are coming together and hopefully, if you have to brave the malls this week that all goes well and you don’t run into any grinchy-rude people. Until next time. xoxo

My newest hobby

So I’ve yet again taken my sweet time making another post. I’m going to work on that. Some consistency would be nice, right? We’ll work on time management.

If you follow me on twitter or instagram (or you’re my friend on Facebook), you probably saw more than a few pictures of embroidery. It’s my newest crafty hobby and I have done so much since I started at the end of August. It all started with a post I saw on Design*Sponge (here). I had a hoop from a box of old craft stuff and a couple skeins of floss from when I used to make friendship bracelets and I’ve always had various sewing needles and scraps of fabric about, so it wasn’t going to cost me a thing to try it. Here’s a pretty bad, taken in the dark with my phone, instagram pic of that first attempt.

It was an alright attempt, but it was enjoyable and relaxing, so I was hooked. I was browsing the craftgawker site (at least I think it was) and saw someone was embroidering the soft kitty song and I immediately thought I had to embroider the song for Kara. There were a couple of plain, white pillowcases in that old craft box so I figured I’d make her a soft kitty pillowcase. She loved the idea.

Update: I found my inspiration from here

All of this started something awesome because I haven’t stopped embroidering since. There will definitely be more posts about my embroidery journey. Though I can’t guarantee on the frequency, though I promise I’ll try.

What I’ve been up to the past few months

Whew, it’s been two months since I’ve posted again. But I’ve had ideas for posts the entire time, I just haven’t had the desire to write. It seems as though I’ve gotten my writer’s desire back and hopefully, it’s here to stay.

We moved in with my dad and brother. It’s been good. I’ve been embroidering a lot. And it’s great! I’ve already gotten nine Christmas presents done. But I’m saving that for my next post. I thought I’d share some of my favourite pictures from the past couple of months.

We were at the local car show and I decided to take some snaps of Kara while she was eating. Clearly she was annoyed with me. Oh well.

Here’s a sunset from on our way home from visiting mom in August (don’t worry, hubby was driving).

We went camping in Lake Louise on the Labour Day weekend. We went for long walks and on one of them she got so sad because no one would carry her. But other than that she had a great time.

Halloween was cold and snowy so we only hit up maybe 10-15 houses but she still managed to get a shopping bag full of candy. This was her all ready for her preschool Halloween party.

I turned these little pumpkins I found at the dollar store (above pic) into these cute vampire pumpkins. I can’t find the original post/picture I saw that inspired these guys. If any of you know please leave a comment below. All I did was cut out the mouth shape and scrape out any extra styrofoam to fit some cheap glow-in-the-dark vampire teeth (also from the dollar store). I painted them with black craft paint. Then I took a couple of red glass head pins from my sewing stuff (plastic would have been just fine too) and stuck them in.

I haven’t even bothered to put away any of few Halloween things I have out, I might but I do love Halloween a lot. And they kind of go with my Monster High doll collection, lol.

My next post will be my newest hobby, which is pretty close to being my favourite hobby of mine. It’s second only to gaming now that I think of it. Yeah, anyways, until next time.

‘The Timey-Wimey Stuff of Doctor Who’ is distracting

Yes, I am writing (attempting to) this post while watching the BBC America special The Timey-Wimey Stuff of Doctor Who’. Yep, totally counterproductive, but it’s Doctor Who! I couldn’t resist and I needed to do an update. It’s really something you shouldn’t do when blogging, but I missed it the other day and don’t have a pvr anymore. So onwards.

We couldn’t find anything in Airdrie we could really afford to rent, so we’ve moved in with my dad and younger brother. And we are very grateful to have this opportunity to get caught up on our bills and to start saving to buy our own house. With how high rent has become in the city, there was never going to be any way we could get ahead, or possibly break even. It’s pretty ridiculous.

Moving was a little crazy with sorting things between what we needed/wanted at Dad’s house and things we had to put into storage. A little stressful. (oh look, the DW special is over) Some things got a little haphazardly packed near the end and now there are items in storage I could use. Not a big deal really, I can go get them if I really need them.

Figuring out our bedroom was a little tricky, with combining items from our living room with our bedroom. We did manage to make it work. And I managed to make it homey within a few days. All in all a tiring process, with having to go to work and moving afterwards. This week I’m going to rearrange Kara’s room so she can actually play in it. All of her stuff kind of just got shoved in. I mean, there is room for her to get into her dresser and play with her toys, but it’s not organized very well. I asked her if she wanted to help me by telling me where she wants things. She said she wants me to do it. So I guess I am.

This past month hasn’t been all hard work and stress. However, I think I’ll leave it for another post. Until next time.

Summer heat

So, it has been really hot these past few days. Unbearably hot. I’m the kind of person who prefers spring and fall weather to scorching summers. I really rather it rain instead of being this hot. At least today there is a nice cool breeze, much better compared to yesterday with it’s warm wind. Blech. Not fun, especially trying to sleep and then trying to work in this heat. The A/C at work only seems to be effective if you’re not doing a lot of moving, or working in the freezer section. And then, you freeze. Not so good.

Not much has been going on. I have been working on embroidery and my current geek project – a plush TARDIS for Kara (I’ll have to make one for myself later I guess). I only have three sides of panels left to embroider and then I can finish it off. My poor hand isn’t going to like it. It’s been too hot to do anything outside, though inside is only a tad better.

Ugh, I am so tired from waking up multiple times these last few nights just because I was too hot. I literally feel like I was up all night looking after a new baby, which I would rather. I’ve been mixing up words, forgetting what I was doing. Is it really too much to ask for it to cool off enough so I can grab a decent nights sleep?

Well I think, seeing as I am on the computer, I should go edit some more photos. There is still lots to do.

Stay cool.