Sewing Table

Have you ever been on the hunt for something specific, convinced that you could find it for a reasonable price, then be on the verge of giving up and spending a decent chunk of change on it, only to find a better deal than you could ever hope for just before you pull the trigger on your bank account?

It feels so good!

When I moved into my apartment, one of the cool features was a large closet. I live in a house that was converted into apartments - mine is the main floor. This closet is where the stairs used to go down to the basement, but now when you open the door there is one step and then floor. It looks like a normal-sized closet at first glance, but if you step down into it, you realize that it's actually pretty huge - it's about the size of a twin-sized bed!

When I was signing the lease for this place, my sister opened the closet, stepped in, turned around and said, "Do you think this is big enough to be a craft room?"

Cue me being excessively excited to move in. Couple this with the fact that my best friend's mother gave me a sewing machine, and I was one happy camper.

Here's a picture of the closet (after moving in and throwing sorting all my craft stuff into the room):

The idea was to put a small table along the back wall and drawers/shelves/some sort of storage along the right wall.

The hunt began for a table. I know I probably could have found a great one on Craigslist for almost nothing, but I don't have a car, so the chances of finding one that's still available after I reserve a zipcar and drive over seemed pretty slim.

Eventually, I got sick of never working on sewing projects because of the setup/breakdown time, so I went to Target. I found this one and was planning on buying it when the best thing happened: my friends had an estate sale.

They live in a house that was recently vacated by an elderly couple whose son wanted to get rid of some of the clutter, so they manned an estate sale for him. This are the same friends with whom my brother and I play board games with every Sunday evening. Two Sundays ago, when we arrived, everything at the estate sale was free.

FREE!!!!!!

I picked through their records, snagged a lamp and a bedside table, then was about to call it quits when I saw this beauty:



It's actually a sewing table! It has the fold-out leaves and space to drop in a sewing machine. Also, there's a thread spool holder in the top drawer, which I love.

Unfortunately, it wouldn't fit in the back of the particular zipcar I had that day, so I promised to get a different zipcar this week in order to get it out of their hair.

I'll clear out the craft room and put the table in soon and put up a picture when it's all moved in! Squee!!!

Kirby Plushie

And for my latest trick...

KIRBY!

Those of you who have known me for a few years know that I love love love crocheting plushies for the people I care about. I have to admit, though, that part of my love of plushie-making goes to the fact that I feel like I up my nerd cred by crossing over nerd categories. Here are two that I've made in the past:

Luigi, for my brother's birthday

Mew, for my dear friend Sera's birthday

Now, I have to come forward and admit that I didn't DESIGN these beauties. That credit can go to Wolfdreamer Off the Hook, who writes the most amazing patterns for video game plushies. Seriously, they're amazing and you should all go and marvel.

I should also note that I'm not responsible for the eyes, either. Up to this point, all my felt eyes have been made by my mother. Hand her a picture of the video game character and she can reproduce it in eerie accuracy in felt. It's incredible.

SO I realized Wolfdreamer OTH hasn't designed every character under the sun, which means that sometimes, a girl's gotta go off the beaten path and make one for herself.

Here he is.

This Kirby is made from the body and arms of King Boo (though, if I remember correctly, I elongated the arm flap a little to make them hang at his side. I also might have made the body bigger than the pattern by throwing in a few extra rounds. Clearly, this is not a tutorial.). I then added Sonic feet and made eyes and a mouth!

The body/feet have been done for probably about a year now, but I've been frozen in fear of making my own eyes. Finally, I realized in a panic that I didn't have a post written for this Saturday, so I had no choice but to pull out the hot glue gun and get going!

Here's my inspiration image (courtesy of Google Images). I'll post a picture of the recipient when/if he sends me one!

BOSTON!!!

So I've kind of dropped the ball on getting my regularly-scheduled posts out for the past week, but I feel like I have a relatively decent excuse: I was on vacation!

I have a couple of friends living in Boston right now, so I took advantage of my job's generous paid time off policy to take a long weekend seeing a corner of the East Coast I'd never seen before. You might recall from my goal list that I hope to visit all 50 states in my life, and on this trip I knocked a whopping THREE off the list!

I spent most my time in Boston, but went to Rhode Island for Corgi-palooza (a friend of a friend was performing and I wasn't about to pass up on that opportunity!) and Connecticut to visit a friend who is an RA at a summer camp there.

Here are some pictures of my adventures. Unfortunately, I am terrible about taking pictures, so I managed to leave without getting any pictures of me with my friends, but I did get some good shots of some historical places in Boston!

The East Cost has the most healthy hydrangeas I've ever seen. Look at the colors! 

Park St church 

The Old Corner Bookstore (one of the oldest publishing houses in the country) is now a CHIPOTLE.  Sad.

This is the guy who rode with Paul Revere. Frankly, I think he's bitter Longfellow's poem wasn't about him.

Ok, I lied. I got ONE picture with one of my friends. CHEESE!

This sums up Boston for me - history in the heart of a gorgeous city. 

Hot and humid though my trip might have been, I had a ton of fun and can't wait to go back!

Analytics Shirts!

During my first departmental meeting at my job, my boss brought up the fact that he had asked the design team to help bring his dream of an Analytics logo to life. The concept featured a capital letter A with super-ripped arms clutching fistfuls of cash, eagle wings keeping the A hovering over lightening-filled clouds, and a Latin motto overhead.

Shortly thereafter, we had a mock-up from a member of the design team, hopefully made outside of work hours. My company might just be the most delightfully ridiculous place ever. I love it.

At my company, every department gets a quarterly allowance to do team building activities. A while back, my boss approached us and said that for our next team building, he wanted to use our logo and make bleach-dyed shirts and that he wanted me to organize it.

Cue me getting very excited and throwing together a quick email with the different techniques for bleach-dying, complete with photo examples.

Here's how we made our Analytics logo shirts!

First, we gathered our supplies.

• Shirt
• Watered-down bleach in a spray bottle - 1 part bleach to 2 parts water
• Contact paper
• Cardboard
• Tape
• Box cutter/exacto knife
• Any other supplies you think you might need (tape measure, scissors, tailor's chalk, etc)

To make your stencil, sandwich a piece of contact paper between your pattern and a piece of cardboard. Tape the stencil to the contact paper and cut along the outside of your pattern. You have a choice of using the inside or the outside of the pattern. 

Then, you place your pattern on your shirt. Like I said, you have the option of using the inside (like this one) or the outside. With the inside, the design will stay the base color of the shirt and there will be a kind of sunburst around it of bleached shirt.

Here's an example of using the outside of the pattern. This way, the bleached part is the design.

You can see that the bleach has bled a little under the pattern. Spray sparingly with the bleach, because once it goes wild, it kind of ruins the outline.

Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of all of us wearing our awesome shirts... Maybe I should make taking more pictures one of my goals next month...

But I can say that you can see my boss wearing his shirt in this post of his blog! He and his wife are travelling the world right now. Lucky ducks. Oh, and I should probably mention that his shirt is the one that turned out the best. He really took his time cutting out the pattern and then waited to see how everybody else's shirts turned out before actually bleaching. I, on the other hand, rushed right into bleaching things and ended up saturating the shirt...

So what should I bleach next???

My Library Card

When I was a kid (which is weird for me to say because I'm still in denial about not being a kid), I loved the summer. I mean, what kid didn't? I loved the feeling of riding in our family van, sliding my flip-flops off and feeling the air conditioning on my toes. I loved going to the pool for swim lessons. I loved riding my bike all over my backyard. I loved jumping through the sprinkler.

But I especially loved the reading.

It was a rite of passage in my family to get our very own library card when we turned 5. I still have that card, with a sticker from every single summer reading program and the signature worn thin for the third time in the card's life. I used the number as my password for all of my accounts for years. I took it with me to Philadelphia for college, despite being around 2800 miles away from the nearest branch. That card is one of my most valued possessions.

My summer passport to the world

And I suppose it's because of the memories. Memories, not just of the wall of air conditioning that signaled entering the library, not just of searching for books and placing holds (our library was one of a pretty decent-sized chain, so I could almost always count on one of the branches having the books I wanted), not just getting to know the librarians through checking out books when I was young and volunteering at the library as I got older, not just growing out of the kids section into the young adult and finally into the fiction section: no, not just all that. I think the majority of my memories that are tied with my library card are not of the library itself. My memories are of the places that I took the books and the places the books took me.

It's the smell of chlorine, waiting for my brother to finish jumping off the high board after swim lessons. It's the feeling of air conditioning on my de-flip-flopped toes. It's driving to California for family vacations (to this day, I calculate travel time in potential read pages). It's being curled up in the cool, dark living room, hiding from the blazing heat of an August afternoon with my nose in a book.

9-year-old Kath in her natural habitat

But it's also the memories of crawling through the wardrobe with Lucy, moving the pencil with Matilda, flying to a mountain with Gwinna, stepping through the looking glass with Alice, finding the Sorcerer's Stone in my pocket with Harry, wishing for puffed sleeves with Anne, defeating the rats with Mattimeo, all of the adventures I went on with all the characters between the covers of a paperback.

I don't just read books: I get immersed in them. That's why when I read, I literally block out the world - family and friends have to holler to pull me back out (literally). I could go on and on about how I feel about books.

A few weeks ago, my parents and my brother and I drove to California for my grandpa's 90th birthday. I always have so much fun hanging out with my extended family, but I might have had an equally enjoyable time with my 30 hours of minimally interrupted reading time.

Outside: this. Inside: my nose in a book.

Admittedly, my reading habits have changed over the years. Instead of wandering out of a library with 7 books that I'll read over the next 9 days (at most), I tend to read longer books, more often than not on my Kindle (though I do read a physical book here and there)

But I have to say, though my library card number has changed and my mode of reading is mostly electronic, I  will never be able to shake the nostalgia and joy that I get out of sitting on the couch on a warm summer afternoon and cracking open a brand-new-to-me library book.

Crocheted Tie

Do you ever have projects that you had SO much energy to work on for the first 2/3 and then.... just fizzled? I have about five of those waiting to be finished up. I guess you could call them Bruin Projects.

But I'm proud to say that that number used to be six, but I've recently finished this crocheted tie!

Last June (see what I mean about fizzling?!), I had a friend request a crocheted tie. Now bear in mind that I have a personal aversion to ever telling anybody "No," especially when it means I get to go yarn/fabric/craft supply shopping! I promptly bought the yarn (in brown, 5), I found a pattern (my first adventure with reading crochet charts), and off I went.

The pattern calls for you to crochet it double-width and then sew it up the back. After crocheting the agonizingly small 200+ rows, I stitched up the back and found, to my horror, that crochet stitches are very stretchy and therefore it was nearly impossible to get a good knot in the tie.

Well, I suppose that's why we craft, right? To find creative ways to solve problems.

After some discussion with my mother (she fixes all my craft-related problems), I decided I just needed to iron in some interfacing. A few measurements, some frustrating sewing, and a few minutes with the iron, aaaaand....there was something stuck to the front of the tie.

Apparently there was something sticky on the ironing board cover, which transferred to my beautiful, darling stitches. Cue me freaking out, yelling a little bit, then stomping downstairs to dramatically present the damage to my mother. It was back to the drawing board in late September.

I'm not ashamed to say my mom fixed this one, too. Seriously, the woman could probably get 2000 year old stains out of Cleopatra's clothes. She's that magical with fabric.

By this point I was just sick of thinking about the stupid tie. I couldn't muster the enthusiasm for a third wave. So it sat in my to do queue until I finally stitched it up in April. But was it done? Oh-ho, no way - now it was too short.

See, the recipient has a self-professed absurdly long torso. So I had my brother try it on so I could maybe get an idea of where to put the loop in back and it was clear that it needed a couple more inches. So finally, in May, after 11 months of hanging over my head, the tie was complete.

If I did this project over again, I would definitely have measured the tie before I tied off the yarn. Also, when lining it, I would have layered the interfacing, fusing them together instead of trying to stitch pieces end to end. And I'd probably give it stripes or some sort of pattern.

Regardless, it is sent! And when the recipient receives it and takes pictures of himself in it (which I mandated via a card that simply read "PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN), I'll post them here.

What was the last lingering project that you've finished? (Or are there any you'd like to confess to?) Let me know in the comments!

First Monday Post!

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was going to start blogging twice per week. This was to give me more structure and to encourage myself to spend more time working on my blog (for example, I really hate the color scheme, so the more I look at it, the more I want to change it!).

My Monday posts are going to be more of my self-help stuff. I'm a 20-something college grad who has very little idea what is going on in her life; I'm happy to report that I have a job that I adore, but that's about all that I have figured out. So this is going to be a way to prove to myself that I am slowly but surely "figuring it out."

It's lucky that this first Monday post has landed on the 1st of the month, because I've decided to start setting monthly goals! (Edit: Turns out, even if you have a post scheduled to publish, it won't publish if it's set as "draft." Eh, you live and learn, right?) There is a lot of research on how important goals are to a person's well-being, so in the wake of my post-graduation collapse (of body and mind, I must say), I realized that unless I set goals for myself, I'm going to just stagnate.

So I have a list of discrete goals for myself that I'm trying to work toward, but those are more long-term. I need short-term goals to keep me going. To that end, I'll be setting three goals to focus on over the course of the month. Analyst that I am, I'll have metrics by which to measure my success so that at the end of the month, I can say whether I succeeded or failed in a given month. Oh, and there's also going to be extra credit for each goal. Because I like bonus rounds.

So happy July! Here are my goals:

• Get in the groove of posting on your blog
• There's a reason that you started this blog. Don't give up on it!
• What does success look like? The August goal post being the 10th post since this one.
• What does failure look like? Fewer than 8 posts over the course of July. Shame.
• BONUS: Travel posts from California and Boston!
• Get back on board with Couch-to-5k
• I started this program in May and loved it, but then I skipped a couple work outs, and that was the end of that.
• What does success look like? Completing Week 5 of the program by the August goal post.
• What does failure look like? Failing to make running a habit over the course of the month - not getting through 5 weeks of the program
• BONUS: Do research on/register for an organize 5k.
• Budget budget budget!
• I am kind of a failure at personal finances right now. I mean, I'm not totally broke, but I find myself running thin or relying on my credit card near the end of a pay period. I can do better.
• What does success look like? A written list of every expenditure over the course of the month  (extreme, yes, but I'm sick of feeling poor when I make a comfortable amount of money). From this, I should be able to draft a reasonable budget, complete with timeline within a month. 
• What does failure look like? A credit card bill with the same balance as last month.
• BONUS: Allocating small amounts to save toward larger purchases (dresser, drill, bedroom rug)

So that's what I hope to do with the next 30 (Edit: 29) days. I'll let you all know how it goes. Wish me luck!