New Year - Old Goals

Happy New Year everyone!

I'm not one for New Years resolutions - I've come to the conclusion that if I'm going to change something about myself or my habits, it's best to start trying RIGHT NOW instead of waiting for a kickoff date. But I know that they really work for some people, and I won't lie - I use January 1st as an opportunity to evaluate my current goals and adjust tactics.

So, in the spirit of reflection, let's take a look at one of my lagging projects that I finally finished recently - pillowcases!

For Christmas of 2012, I decided I would embroider pillowcases for some close friends and family. I successfully completed a couple and shipped them off to the recipients before I had a chance to take pictures, but here is one that I completed in time for Christmas and didn't deliver until November 2013:

Here are a couple that I completed late and delivered later:

And here's one that I didn't complete until just recently and was able to just hand to the recipient immediately:

The moral of this story? My goal last year was to get this blog up and running. This year, I'm going to be consistent about it. Fingers crossed, I'll get 52 posts up over the course of the year. The vast majority of them will be finished crafts. Dare I say that I will complete 52 projects this year??

Stay tuned - we'll see :)

Record Bowls

I had a realization about Christmas this year.

To be more exact, I had a realization about Christmas BREAK. This is my first year without a real Christmas break, so when it was suddenly December 23rd, I found myself without gifts to distribute. Until this year, I'd always had the week or so following Christmas to finish up the gifts for my friends and I would deliver them when I returned to school after the new year. Not so much this year.

Ah well, you live and learn, right?

So this year, I made a bunch of the same gift to distribute to people. I had some 45s sitting around that I never listened to, so I made them into bowls!

I followed this tutorial.

Start with some records. I used 45s, but this works for full-sized LPs as well.

Place them on an oven-safe bowl on a cookie sheet. Preheat your oven to 200 degrees. Pop it in. The tutorial says to set your timer for 8-10 minutes, but since 45s are smaller, I left them in for 5-8.

When the timer goes, pull it out. I used a different one of the same bowl to help with shaping. Watch out, they'll be hot, but they also cool SUPER fast, so some scorched fingertips were par for the course for me.

Voila! I learned that if you leave them in for longer, the vinyl starts to shrink, so you can make taller or shorter by adjusting the time in the oven.

I'm planning on covering the bottom with a neutral-colored paper. I'll add pictures when I've done that, but until then, enjoy!

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???