Fuck Off

No, that wasn't meant for you directly. It's for all the freaks who read over my shoulder on the BART train. I may or may not secretly do just this very thing to others when I have forgotten my book and have nothing else to read, but since it's a huge pet peeve of mine I either need to keep that part quiet, or just proclaim myself a big hypocrite.



Here's another peek at the fuzzy bear I'm trying to finish.



And a token dog shot (Bella and Moose hanging around) and food shot (baked ziti). I hope someone else out there shares my love of food pictures!





I was thinking this weekend that it's about time for a dose of bunny love around here. And since just tonight I picked up the new toy I've been dreaming about for months (Nikon D50 baby!!!) I figured my sweet rabbits would be a good choice for some test shots.

Exhausted

My goodness! Kids and puppies are the most tiring little things on earth! I haven't had a single moment to myself since Monday, and any second now I'm afraid I might slip out of this chair and fall alseep in a puddle on the floor. Moose arrived last Friday and our our friends on Monday and it's been nonstop ever since. Greg and I are enjoying both the pup and the kids (and our friends themselves, though they're not as cute) tremendously, but it's hard work keeping up and it's hard not having any personal time. I never realize how much alone time I need until I don't get much, and then it becomes all too obvious!

But look how cute:







Karina at Ocean Beach tonight for the sunset.
Sagea and Karina at the San Francisco Zoo.
Bella and Moose enjoying a sunny day.



And another shot of this little guy who was doing good with his potty training until today when he's decided he's too lazy to go outside to pee, and that it's much easier to just go wherever he's standing on our rental home wall-to-wall carpet.



These are from the Tuesday farmer's market at the ferry building and made me happy that I live in California right now. Locally grown tulips in January!

Heart apron

Saw a pack of two cute Valentine-themed aprons at Ross for $2.99 this weekend and knew they were screaming to be made into an apron. With a little embroidery trim I'd been saving and some pink canvas ribbon (from a secret swap project I can't share for at least another month) I came up with this. Turning dishtowels into aprons has to be one of the easiest and most rewarding projects!





And two sneak peeks at other things I'm about to finish - my first needlework/cross stitching project (not even sure the correct term) which some of you may recognize (I'll give you the details along with the finished piece), and the fuzzy bear I've mentioned already.

Cutter Collection

I'm posting my cookie cutter collection to make Nicole feel better about hers! I mainly started collecting cutters when I got into baking homemade dog treats a few years ago. I even turned it into a little business, Red Rover Treats, for a while. But I've always loved looking for unique shapes and some of my best childhood memories are of making Christmas sugar cookies every year for the holidays. I grouped together some of my favorites, a mixture of old ones from when I was little, a few of the little mini cutters that I especially love, and a few cheapo plastic ones you can get everywhere now. On ebay you can find metal cutters in the shape of many dog breeds and I have a dream that someday I'll start a collection of those and display them on a wall in the kitchen.




And, in case you were wondering (just pretend, ok?) how Moose was doing. . . he's great!





And also - do you see what Greg is holding in his hand there? If you know don't know what that is then I envy you! I wish I didn't have one in my house. It's the controller for the new xbox 360 game system, and Greg "surprised" me by bringing it home yesterday. I think he said something like "since you got a puppy I figured I could get myself something. . ."!

Meet Moose

I promise not to turn this into a puppy blog (even though Moose is the cutest thing I've ever seen, and Bella's perfect mini-me!). I have real crafts in the works to share soon, including my first fuzzy teddy bear.

The pitter patter

of puppy feet is what I'll be hearing in the house tonight after we pick Moose up at 7pm! Now if only I weren't coughing up a lung things would be swell, but at least I'll have that adorable little face to make me feel better.

This is Bella when we first brought her home at 8 weeks old. If Moose is half as cute as she was we're in for a treat! Already he's much larger than Bella. Bella was about 14 lbs when we brought her home as a pup, and now she weighs about 120. Moose is already 20 lbs and a few days shy of 8 weeks still!

Sick day

This is what I'm doing today: Lots of tea, tissues, water, reading, and medicine. And now I'm boiling water to cook myself some plain pasta for lunch. Fun day!



This is what I wish I was having for lunch: dinner and dessert from Monday evening. Mini biscuit pizzas (yes, they somewhat exploded while baking, but still tasted great) and salad, and Trader Joe's chocolate ice cream for dessert.



I also just made the donations for my de-lurking week promise. I decided on roughly $5 per commenter (there were 15 of you) and split the total between the House Rabbit Society and Golden State Greyhound Rescue - the two organizations suggested in the comments. So they each got $38 today thanks to you guys!

Look Ma!

I can quilt! (insert loud and hilarious cackling sound here)



How do you quilters do it? This thing is as small as humanly possible and it was such a pain in the butt to make! Of course, I don't know the first thing about quilting and had to make everything up as I went along. It might have helped tremendously if I wasn't such an instant-gratification kind of girl and took two seconds to look online or in a book for some pointers, but no, not me. Instead I got the idea to make a mini quilt of holiday fabric scraps I spotted in my stash and needed to finish it all in one sitting. That means one day I need to ask a quilter some important questions like what the hell do you use for binding? Is there special quilt binding stuff or do you make your own? I obviously just threw together a few strips of fabric and stuck it on. And what do you do with the corners? Those were hard. And the rows, my god the rows! By the third one I wasn't going straight so how in the world do you do a whole quilt and keep them straight, not to mention keeping the front and back pieces lined up while you're quilting?! I had them pinned of course but when sewing the rows everything kept getting out of whack and in the end I ended up with a much smaller quilt because I had to cut down the sides so much where they were off! (I can almost feel you quilters cringing and getting sick to your stomach just reading this.) I do give myself credit though for adding two tabs in the back for use in hanging once I get some sort of dowel in the right size for it.



But anyway, it's done and I survived my first quilting project and when everyone's drunk on eggnog next Christmas it will look stunning hanging on my wall. And now so you don't kill me for still posting Christmas stuff, here's something for the current holiday theme to show you I'm able to look back and forward with my crafting!



A simple little Valentine's Day garland I made since I'm feeling sad about the lack of decorations around here in the wake of all the holiday sparkle. I was 100% inspired by Amy's fabulous glittery creation, though I wasn't bold enough to battle glitter so I stuck with plain hearts cut from two fabrics I've had folded together for months hoping to think of a way to use them together.

Take a peek

I like the "blog project" where people share little peeks into their homes - special corners and crannies and nooks that have so much personality. I love these photos and am all for sharing more photographic evidence of our daily lives.

Two peeks from my home: First, my current hallway wire+clip set-up. I've shared it before when filled with photos and postcards, and for the holidays I hung ornaments and Christmas cards. Inspired by a photo from the above blog project showing beautiful linens on a white rack display, I thought I'd try to show off the gorgeous napkins I received from a friend. Seems to work perfectly.

The second photo is of our toy shelves. In flickr I added some notes about the contents. Greg and I are big toy collectors but this is pretty much the only place in the house we have them on display. That means we have boxes and boxes of toys stored in our garage. Someday when we own a home we hope to create a good way to show more of them off.




Lastly a big thank you for participating in de-lurking week! I'll post later with my donations. I loved this idea and think it would be great to do again sometime.

We're up to three times a year

Until now it was only on my birthday and my blog-anniversary that I could shamelessly ask for an extra dose of lovely comments here. But now, now there is de-lurking week!

I won't directly ask this time, I'll just say it would be oh-so-nice to hear from you before the week is over. Just a little something - a question for me, a request, an interesting bit about yourself, something we have in common, a suggestion of a good travel/vacation destination, your dog's nickname, a book recommendation (I know I desperately need to update my book list), whatever you want. I'd especially love any requests you may have, like "hey - I want to see/read about gourd crafting" (although that topic is already on my list to post more about someday soon) or "more rabbit photos!" or "why don't you think up some valentine's day decorations and then show us what you made even though that holiday is lame". Things like that would be cool.

And hey! To make this deal sweeter, I'm going to copy Brit and donate some amount of money (yet to be determined) which correlates to the number of people who leave me a comment by this weekend to some organization (also to be determined) that helps needy animals. So you could also comment to nominate a place that's devoted to a worthy animal cause. See, so much to comment about!

How could we say no to this?

3 weeks


5 weeks

Moose will be coming home next Friday, the 20th!

Slowly, but surely?

I think I'm starting out the new year running at a snail's pace. I haven't been unproductive necessarily, but I also haven't had the physical energy to keep up with all the things in my head that I want to do. I just feel tired. I hope if I can let myself get the rest I seem to be craving that things will start to pick up soon. Greg is a bit out of whack too (actually fast alseep on the couch right now) so maybe it's just from our trip still. Here my NY's resolution was to be motivated and every day since I've been so far from that!







*I did a bit of paper crafting tonight - something I am really not very skilled at, but enjoy nonetheless.
*A peek at an actual project I've started in 2006.
*Our cute label whore. I wanted to throw away this t-shirt of Greg's because it had a small hole in it and naturally he tried arguing with me that he could use it for the gym (the same nonsense he always uses as a (weak) defense whenever I want to toss his old shirts), so I decided it could be Bella's as a compromise.
*Holiday swap with sweet Sandrine in Belgium - check out my goods here!

Visual recap of our trip

In short: I fell in love with the lights, the colors, the boats (especially houseboats), the markets, and that everything seemed to have so much character.

Brugge









Amsterdam







Brussels




A few more on flickr if you click through. The first Amsterdam photo shown here is my favorite of the whole trip; we woke up early to try and make it to the Anne Frank house before the line was too long and the walk from our hotel to the museum was so incredible in the early morning light and with the fresh snowfall.

In order to move on with the show

I'll start by showing you what I bought in Belgium, so that I can pack it all up with the other holidays decorations headed for the garage today.

Lucky for me we had so much fun on our trip that when I spotted a whole store filled with original handmade wooden Kathy Wohlfahrt decorations in Brugge, Greg was in such a good mood he let me go nuts!






1. Greg choose the little butcher guy, and I choose the wood elf man with his basket of mushrooms. There were walls filled with hundreds of characters, each so detailed and amazing I wanted to just move in and live in the shop forever. 2. A real pyramid! I can't wait till next Christmas to light the candles and watch the little carolers spin around. 3. Shepard and barn ornament. On the other side there is a little black dog too!

I have Hillary to thank for opening my eyes to these wonderful wooden toys back in Christmas '04. Ever since I've stalked countless ebay auctions and searched the internet looking to buy, but it's all so expensive and without seeing it in person I've just never had the guts to do it. Walking into a store was a different story, as you can see.

I got a few other things too:




1. In both Holland and Belgium most of the homes decorated their front doors with a single small natural wreath; hanging from a piece of ribbon or cord they were just beautiful in their simplicity and earthiness. It'd be so easy to make but when I saw this one for sale I thought it'd be a nice reminder of our holiday trip when we hang it from our door each year. 2. Gorgeous straw angel ornament. 3. Glass and feather clip ornaments. They look vintage to me, but I don't know if they are.

So now it's time for me to haul away all the holiday decortations (and take down our poor tree before it catches on fire, it's that dry) and unpack and think about going back to work and jumping into 2006.

fresh start

happy new year!

here's to 2006. i'm hoping it's a year filled with inspiration and joy, and motivation to create both not only for myself but for those around me as well.

cheers everyone! i'll be back from this winter wonderland in a few days.