Holiday Walk of Shame

Okay, I was so distracted by the arrival of my beautiful and perfect niece that I did very little crafting this holiday season... and even less photographing of the crafting that did occur... and even less blogging of the few photographs of the tiny amount of crafting. I suck.

My shame is only compounded by the fact that, even with a newborn, all of my sister's Christmas cards were still homemade. Sigh, I made one stinkin' card:

Outside based on supplies from one of Emily's card swaps. She sent me all of the ingredients. I'm still exploring the wonderful world of pop-ups, so I put a tree on the inside:

The color was a bit nicer on the original, but you get the idea.

I did virtually no holiday baking this year. I caught a bad cold (excuses excuses) the week before Christmas, so I'm not sure anyone would have wanted anything I cooked anyway, but before that all I managed was a single batch of porn star cookies:

I try to keep this a PG-13 website, so I'll spare you the cookies with ball gags in their mouths. (can't wait to see what sort of google traffic we get now that I have typed that - ick) Sadly, my limited cookie decorating skills preclude them from getting too racy. Chaps are about all I can make.

The last of my conscience clearing pre-holiday crafting documentation was a teeny baby sweater. Alas, I only have in-progress pictures. Hopefully Miss Eleanor will be kind enough to model it one of these days. This is the almost finished knitting shot:

and the Sarah's first attempt at intarsia shot:

Can you tell I started this back when we thought she was going to be a boy? I found a little yellow dress, so hopefully she'll just look preppy in the completed ensemble.

It is a Debbie Bliss pattern from Special Knits. I used Bernat Baby Softee, because frankly, I have a boatload of it.

And this concludes our guilty conscience belated holiday retrospective. May 2008 be a year of crafty goodness and more timely updates.

Happy New Year y'all!

Trick or Treat!

Or, more accurately, a card with a trick.



I got it in my head that I wanted to make a Halloween card with a pop-up bat. Except, the only kind of bats I know how to draw are actually bat signals.



Having no immediate need for assistance from the caped crusader, the googling commenced.



I found this great website with directions for making pop-up cards that are surprisingly intricate and elaborate looking for being fairly straight forward to assemble. (check out the Frankenstein card - so great)



So, of course, I made none of them (not even the one with the bat), but I did rip off the instructions for making a mouth.



Hence, the talking jack-o-lantern card. Or at least, the lip synching jack-o-lantern card.



I'm fascinated with the construction of these, so I suspect I'll revisit the pop-up card genre come Thanksgiving or Christmas.



Happy Halloween, y'all!

Vicarious Card Swapping, Part 1

This is a pretty good scam - my sister (and occasional co-blogger) frequently organizes/participates in card swaps at her local scrapbooking store. I guess everyone brings enough materials that everybody can trying making everyone else's cards.

Or if you live in another state (like me), and someone doesn't show up for the swap, you get an envelope full of materials in the mail without having to make any effort whatsoever. See? Told you it was a good scam.

Em saved me the extra kits and mailed them down with photocopies of her finished cards.

I went on a cutting and pasting binge over the weekend. See? (I was out of control with the new camera battery, so this may end up being 2 posts)

I liked this baby card kit - in part because I am not any good with stamping, or inking, or tearing edges, or any of the other fancy things happening on the center panel of this one.

But conveniently, the heavy lifting was already done for me. I also liked that there seemed to be enough ingredients for a second card.

I didn't totally follow how this car card was constructed based on the photocopies, so I kind of made it up.

I also wasn't that sure on the intent - at first I was thinking the race cars were some sort of "I'm in such a rush, just a quick note to say hello" kind of greeting. But then I thought it would be kind of crappy if you spent so much time handcrafting cards that you didn't have time to keep in touch with your friends (not to say I haven't done it, I just think you have to be more subtle about it).

Conveniently, I find I have need for a "thanks for helping me replace my hubcaps after some @sshole stole them off my car in broad daylight while I was at work" greeting card this week. So that's what this will be.

New Toys and New Projects

My birthday was last week and I scored some fantastic new crafty toys. (I also scored tickets to go see Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello - thanks Mom & Dad!) Presents totally rule.

Check out the adorable stickers my friend Tammy sent:

So perfect for Maddie's puppy scrapbook. See the one of the little devil with the sock in its mouth? Doesn't it look like devil Maddie?

(Although Maddie seems to favor chewing on my new rug to chewing on socks)

And holy crap, look at the crapper keeper, I mean scrapping tote my sister and brother-in-law gave me! It's friggin' huge. The box was ginormous. So fun.

As if that weren't enough, when you opened it up, there was all this too:

Honest to God scrapping supplies - not flip flops and whatever else I usually decide to chop up and glue to a page. I'm so fancy I can hardly stand myself. The nice thing is that now I can keep my toys some place accessible, yet still packed and out of the way if I have people over. (quite the upgrade from my current strategy of having papers and markers and gluesticks exploding all over my bedroom)

I keep putting all of my toys inside and the pulling them out and rearranging them and putting them back inside. It's like an anal-retentive field day.

As for actual crafting, I've started to work on some Cascade Fixation ankle socks designed by the lovely Turtlegirl. Since I went with solid colors instead of self-striping yarn, I thought they wanted a bit of a contrast color for the heel and toe. So, pink and orange it is.

A few hits and one major miss

(insert excuses for my lack of knitting progress here - I won't bore you with my need to re-read books 1-6 before the 7th Harry Potter comes out later this month - I'm such a nerd)

I have knocked out a couple of quick projects though. First the successes...

Quickie Head Band

I'm not sure where I got this ribbon, I'm sure it was tied to something. But for the past few weeks it has been sitting on top of my desk. I keep looking at it and thinking it would make a good headband. Finally got around to actually making said headband.

Ingredients: length of ribbon that will more or less fit around your head and one generic hair elastic.

I started out thinking I would measure things. My hair elastic was about 2.5 inches unstretched, so I would subtract 3 inches from the circumfrence of my head to cut my ribbon.

But that just seemed too fussy, so I sewed up one side, wrapped it around my head and winged it. If I knew how to take a photo of the top of my head (and don't think I didn't try), I could show you that we're calling this project a success. But, you'll just have to trust me.

Running Scrapbook Revisited

I had been making a scrapbook for the half marathon I "ran" back in April, but since I hadn't made much progress on it since the race. Much like my training regimen, it was pretty much shelved.

I pulled it back out yesterday and knocked out a couple of pages. I also figured out the cover.

I had purchased this album way back thinking that the little window would be a cool place to affix my finisher medal. But when I actually got the thing, the way it hung off the ribbon was the wrong dimensions for the window. So I had to improvise a bit.

I took the medal off the ribbon and just hot glued it in front of the ribbon. Otherwise, the red really wouldn't have shown up. Hopefully no one will notice that it isn't really hanging from the ribbon.

And for more MacGuyver-esque scrapbooking, I made these pages of our adoring fans.

The background papers are actually 6x8 sheets spliced together to make an 8x8 page. I needed something to cover the line where the papers switch.

Enter the flip flop.

Emily and her husband Chris - who both friggin' rule by the way - not only drove all the way to Kentucky to cheer me on during the race, but brought me a fun pedicure kit for afterwards when my feet were sore.

Although I have used most of it for its intended purpose, the kit came with those little disposable flip flops that they give you at the nail salon. Well, at my house I can just wear regular flip flops, which leaves these guys open for crafting.

Doesn't it look like it was meant to be scrapbooking supplies?

The flowers came from the signs that Emily made for me (I love that I have a crafty sister - ours were the fanciest signs on the whole route). You can see them in the finished pages...

So, I'm calling those the "hits." Which brings us to one serious "miss"

Gardening Disaster

This year, I decided to "garden" by purchasing two already planted flower boxes for my balcony. How could I mess this up - someone has already done all of the actual gardening for me?

Turns out, I can still totally mess that up. One flower box was doing just fine.

Almost everything had died in the other.

So, I decided to dig up some of the petunias from one box and move them to the other, to even things out a bit.

Oops.

That would be my downstairs neighbor's patio. That would also be the flower box that was alive. Of course the one where I had killed nearly everything wasn't the one to fall to its doom. Nope, all of the healthy, pretty flowers. Sigh.

More fun with scissors and paper

I finally gave up on a perpetually unfinished knitting project last night. It was quite satisfying. I've already started a new project with the newly liberated yarn, so knitting related updates are coming soon.

In the meantime, I've done a bit more scrapbooking. A page for Maddie's puppy album and two more pages for my running journal (one of which is still really about my dog):

Like mother, like beagle. I used to sleep with a security blanket every night too. Of course, Maddie has 4 security blankets, but then, she's kinda spoiled.

Training Partner #1: Peggy
Likes: Hugh Laurie Doesn't Like: pulmonary hypertension

Training Partner #2: Mads
Likes: belly rubs Doesn't Like: baths

I could go running...

or, I could play with paper and scissors.

Yeah, paper and scissors. I finished a few more pages for my running journal with the scrapbooking toys Emily sent me.

This is the first page of the album. A washed out picture of the women's winner from the 2006 MiniMarathon, when Peggy and I stood on the sidelines and said "Hey, we should do that."

Technically it wasn't the winner that inspired us, but the regular people who finished an hour or so later. If they could do it, so could we - or at least that was the thought process at the time. Anyway, that's why I went with the washed out picture - I wanted it to be a little non-descript.

This page was a lot cooler in my head. I made the scale out of cardstock then added the vellum overlay. In the category of superfluous details, you can spin the arrow back and forth from "in shape" to "out of shape." I don't love it, but it details the bet Peggy and I made. Whoever could lose the most weight at 3/6/9 months got a mani/pedi/massage.

This page and the next one I'm pretty pleased with though. I love the yellow running-themed paper Emily found. This is the couch-to-5k training program we "followed." The eight week program took us way longer than that, but eventually we got there.

I'm not sure if it is because I am cheap or impatient, but I didn't have any black cardstock when I was working on this and really wanted something to make the 5K stand out. So I colored a piece of seafoam green cardstock with a black marker to make the starburst and little dots.

This page is part of the reason the couch-to-5k thing took so long (the other part of the reason is because I was much more fond of the "couch" part than the "5k" part). Anyway, Peggy got sick. Scary sick.

But she's better now, so I can joke about it. Actually, I joked about it when she was sick, but I'm a fan of gallows humor.

The "seriously?" title probably reflects the influence of Grey's Anatomy on my use of slang, but it kind of fits since the heart/lung image is from the 1918 edition of Gray's Anatomy. (the cartoon swearing is probably the influence of Beetle Bailey in my life. what can I say? not eveything has to bookend together)

Things I did this weekend instead of laundry...

Tried to turn Maddie into an agility dog using the box for my Christmas tree. Check out that form! I wonder what I have lying around the house that I could fashion into weave poles.

Finished stringing the beads for the fringe on my pretty pink scarf. Now I just need to make it into fringe.

Started playing with my running journal using all of the fun toys Emily sent me. I made these pages for Race for the Cure, which was our first 5K. I don't have any photos so I pieced together the Komen logo out of cardstock. I've decided that hidden tags are a good way to record the embarassing details (e.g. our finish time).

At least, that was their logo. They recently changed the name and logo for the foundation (the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation is now Susan G. Komen for the Cure), I don't know if the race logo will change as well. I hope not - that took forever to cut out.

This next page isn't all that exciting, it is just the page opposite the one above. I decided to make this an 8x8 album. Since I won't have many pictures, I thought it would be easier to fill the smaller pages. The flip side of that is that souvenirs like race numbers pretty much eat up a whole page. Que sera...

I have a few more pages partially completed, but there's no sense posting them until they are done.

(ed. note: For the record, I managed to get all of my clothes washed and dried, but none of it is folded. I keep moving this colossal pile of clothes back and forth from my bed to my ironing board. Pathetic really)

A little Valentine's Day love...

How awesome is my sister? So awesome.

She sent me the cutest handmade Valentine:

mmmm...cupcakes. I love that she even has crinkly paper for the little paper cupcake cup.

And because she is the greatest sister ever, she also sent new scrapbooking toys for me to play with:

My friend and I have started running - er, trotting and wheezing, whatever, tomayto, tomahto - so Emily sent me all of these great papers and embellishments for a running journal. I'm not buying the whole running = fun thing yet. It still kicks my butt every time we go out, but playing with paper and scissors = fun. A little injection of craftiness can only help with my motivation.

(I'm a little nervous that she gave me a pack of "2008" rub-on dates. Does this mean I'll still have to run a year from now?)


On an unrelated note, but since red things seem appropriate for a Valentine's Day post, I found a use for the red cotton yarn I had leftover from my toddler vest:

Fetching! Still a fun pattern the second (third?) time around. This time I tried the picot bind off. Or, at least something resembling the picot bind off.

Magically, Lion Brand Wool-Ease, Rowan Calmer and mystery-brand mill end cotton (post washer and dryer) all gave me the correct gauge for this pattern on size 6 DPNs. Maybe some day I'll give this a go with the cashmerino that is recommended in the pattern.

We'll see. This pair is beagle-approved and off to Michigan. My aunt subtly hinted that she would like a pair, so hopefully she'll like these. And hopefully Michigan will get some fingerless gloves weather soon (a bit too chilly this week).