Happy Birthday To Me!

I'm having a wonderful and relaxing birthday so far!
I slept in, and then read some fun birthday wishes from friends on my phone, came into the living room to find two birthday cards from my fantastic husband, ate lunch with said fantastic husband, and am now getting ready to head over to our friend's house for game night!

I'm going to leave you with a picture of my latest craft: a red felt poppy.



I was inspired to make this by my memories from London two years ago. Veteran's Day there is known as Remembrance Day and people wear red poppies to remember those who died in the war. It's a beautiful tradition and I hope that my poppy honors it.

Craft Tool Wishlist!

These are the tools that I would love to have when I have my own crafty space!



1. Hot Marks Tool- I really want to try wood burning, and this seems to be the beginner tool most often recommended. The project that I most want to do when I get this tool is to wood burn a coffee table when we move into our next place. I think I want to see if Joel (a family friend) will refinish the table we have now and before the final varnish (That's the last thing right? Like the sealing part?)I'll burn a design around the edges on the table top.



2. The Cricut- What crafter doesn't want a Cricut? You can do anything (okay, maybe not anything) with this little machine! I see many beautiful cards coming out of the combination of this machine and me!



3. Gocco- This machine caught my eye while I was planning our wedding last year. This little screen printer can print onto pretty much anything. Unfortunately, Riso (the company who produced the Gocco) has stopped production on the Gocco machine. Bummer. So, odds are good that I'll have to try to find something similar from a different company, because the supplies are getting a little difficult to find for the Gocco (from what I can tell). One of the things that I considered doing for our wedding was screen-printing on the vintage handkerchiefs (we passed them out to all of our guests before the ceremony) our names and wedding date. Eventually I decided to not do so, simply because the technology was not easily accessible and it would have taken quite a bit of time and money that we just didn't have.



4.Light Box- These are amazing for tracing. And I do a LOT of tracing for my embroidery. This would make it so much easier to trace things onto fabric and to trace things flipped if I need to. I kind of think that I would like to build one of these into a table. I think it would be pretty easy to do. If I get a glass topped table I could attach two bright lights underneath and voila: awesome amazing light-box-ness!



5. Whiteboard- A HUGE ONE. I want somewhere that I can just kind of draw out my ideas in a way that's easy to modify. I just want to hang this up and be able to go to it as soon as I think of something I want to make.


I already got one of the things that used to be at the top of my craft tool dream list: My sewing machine! I know that I've mentioned it before, but I really love it. It's just right for all the things that I want to do with it. It brought me one step closer to my dream craft space :)

*** Oh,my, goodness. I just found something so cool! There's paint called "IdeaPaint" which is whiteboard paint! I could just paint the whiteboard right onto the wall! I already knew that they made chalkboard paint, but I had no idea that this existed!***

Time To Open Up Shop!

An Etsy shop I mean!




I think it's time. (Well, doesn't that sound a little omnious?)

I'm going to take a few more weeks to get stuff made and all pulled together, and to create the shop, but I can't wait to get it up and going.

This is something I think could be really good for me. I love making things, and I love it when other people love handmade things!

Hopefully I'll get a lot of inspiration this weekend at the Renegade craft fair in San Francisco.

Right now I have plans for some pincushions, embroideries, ipod/iphone cases, maybe some felt flowers, and button hair pins.

I'm going to create my plan of attack tonight and head on from there! I'm so stinking excited!

Anniversary!

This past Sunday marked my and Nathan's one year anniversary.
It's crazy to think about this past year, it seems like it flew by so quickly. One year ago today we were on our honeymoon in Hawaii, and now we're living in beautiful Monterey.

We ordered, and ate, some petits fours from Dragonfly Cakes, just like at our wedding.

Tonight we're going to go to Benihana's for our anniversary dinner. Should be a lot of fun. Neither of us have ever been there before, and we're both excited to watch them make the food.

The last year has been wonderful, and I'm so looking forward to the rest of our years together. I cannot wait to see what the future brings us.

Making...

Bread!
Baguettes, specifically.

This is my first attempt at making bread, so I hope it turns out well. I found the recipe in a book, and thought "Why the heck not?"

Right now, the dough is rising, and in about forty five minutes, I'll go in and punch it down again, divide it into four pieces, then let the individual pieces rise for another hour. Then it's baking time!

I'm so excited about this!

Inspiration!

I love this idea! The use of embroidery for this was a stroke of GENIUS! I'm definitely going to be doing this sometime as the headboard for our bed, but I think I'll do it a little differently.

For one, I think I would back it with plywood, and quilt batting (for a bit of softness). The plywood would keep it flat, since it would be stretched over it.

I may even try to do it in a color, or on a print. I think that might looks pretty cool.

This is going to take a while though, to make design decisions, and then just to make. After all, our bed is king sized, so it's going to have to be way bigger than the one here is (I estimate that the bed this was made for was a full).

I can't wait until we get to move into our next place, where I can do all the things that I imagine and more! I would start doing them all here, but we're going to move in a year (well, less than a year now)and what we have now is good.

Maybe some more inspiration later!