I’m so inspired by people who create things.  I make things. There’s a difference.  To me, creating involves vision.  It’s seeing a beautiful picture in the midst of a jumble of things.  Or looking at a blank slate and seeing a thousand possibilities.  That vision is something I lack.  Actually, I’m hoping it is something I just haven’t developed.  Like my triceps.  But with some hard work and determination, maybe I can improve myself some vision.

1. forest love…, 2. Whooooos this wise guy?, 3. Half Square Triangle Quilt, 4. Felt embroidery, 5. Rainbow Mini Quilt , 6. flower4, 7. friends, 8. Hexillow, 9. rlynn

I started last night.  Inspired by this image, I decided to try and create a new throw pillow cover.  I’ve never done anything like it. I dug threw my scraps, cut strips, cut triangles, found some linen, and then sewed.  And sewed.  And sewed.  And voilà.

I’m really quite pleased with how the pillow top has turned out.  I cut the fabric for the back, and I know how I’m going to finish it, something I will hopefully get to today.

For my first foray into “creating” I think I did ok.  It’s not something that comes easy to me, but I’m going to work at it.  I think I’ve found another goal for the year…

These are two very different topics, but both have been on my mind the last few days.  Let me start off with milk.  I think I heard an ad on tv for skim milk, talking about how it has nine important vitamins and is great for overall health.  I’m pretty sure the ad said nine, but I’m not 100% positive.  Regardless, I think, wow, nine important vitamins!  Maybe I should swap out the soy milk in my almost daily latte and use skim milk.  I really do not like the last of skim milk.  Really do NOT.  I actually don’t like the taste of any milk, but skim milk especially.  Growing up, my parents me me drink a glass of milk with dinner and I am pretty sure I chugged it just to get it over with.  Soy milk I actually enjoy.  But I figured nine important, possibly essential, vitamins and fewer calories.  I can do it.  At my request, Bill brought home a quart of skim milk and I made the change.  Two mornings later, as I was eating my cereal (still with soy milk), I have a few minutes and decide to compare the labels of the soy and skim milk. Yikes!  I could not count nine vitamins on the skim milk.  I count five and that’s if you include the protein.  The soy milk I have is plain and has DHA Omega-3 and Calcium, and I get this kind because it’s what they sell at Costco.  This soy milk is 20 more calories and 5 grams of fat but has 15(!) vitamins, not including protein (which is actually two grams less than the skim milk). Plus, it has more calcium and Vitamin D than the skim milk.  And, I am not grossed out by the taste.  I found it to be an interesting comparison, and next time, I will do my research BEFORE making the purchase, and not blindly believing the advertising.

The other topic on my mind is Valentine’s Day.  It’s a nice holiday, a good excuse for dinner and possibly flowers, but I don’t really expect it to be the most romantic day of the year.  We don’t usually do anything special, and I have never decorated for it, but this year is different.  Partly because the house looked so blah after the Christmas decorations went down, and partly because I have this cute ornament tree, begging for adornment.  I bought some KnitPicks yarn last fall to knit hearts for the tree (actually planning ahead for once), but somehow managed to talk my mother-in-law into knitting the hearts for me!  There wasn’t much talking involved as she was between projects and glad to help.  And thank goodness Jeanne helped, because if I were knitting them, they might be done for Valentine’s Day 2015.  The hearts are super cute!  I hung them from my tree at least two weeks ago, and I love how they look! Feeling the house needed a little something more, I found this cute tutorial for a garland to hang over my mirror.  I think it’s sweet.  I used the felt I had on hand, and were I to do it again, I’d get a few lighter colors and I’d make the hearts smaller.  My large hearts at 5 inches at the widest part and that is too big.  I’d stick with the 2 – 3 inch hearts. I made two strands, with one hanging by my fireplace.  I have some extra knitted hearts which I put in a large jar, and they looked like giant size gobstopper hearts.  The decorations are cheerful and fun, and make me smile.

And that’s that.  The flowers in the first picture have nothing to do with the post.  I just wanted to use the picture.  They were an impulse purchase at Whole Foods yesterday.  I guess that’s me falling for the “advertising” again.

Yeesh, I can’t believe it’s that time of year again.  The good news is that I’m not feeling any older, but these numbers are not pretty anymore.  35 doesn’t sound bad, but 36 is starting to sound ugly.  I guess because I am on the dark side of 30.  Bill took the day off work and we went to Petaluma, CA.  It’s a cute town about 45 miles north of San Francisco.  I read about it the town in Country Living Magazine and wanted to visit.  Bill found a hotel that has two “rooms” that are Airstream Trailers so we stayed in one.  I really want an Airstream Trailer when I grow up.  I think it would be a fun way to travel.

It was good for us to spend some time in an Airstream, and see what it’s like to “live” in 16 feet.  It was cozy but not cramped. The one thing that I didn’t like was the navy shower.  The whole bathroom is your shower and everything gets wet.  I was pretty sure I didn’t like it, and it has been confirmed.  I would want to get a camper with a separate shower stall.  Definitely.

We spent the day walking around Petaluma.  I happened upon a knitting store, and originally wasn’t going to go in because I do NOT need any more yarn.  Of course I ended up going in, and found some beautiful yarn for two new projects.  Knitterly is probably the nicest knitting store I have every been in, and I’ve been in a few. It has a fantastic atmosphere, great yarns, super friendly staff.  It was a good sized shop with a couch for knitting or looking at books and magazines.  They had some great samples, one of which caught my eye and which I am going to make for myself.  It’s a shawl/scarf made with alchemy mohair yarn (rav link here, or you can see it here).  They had a beautiful selection of buttons and then a ton of vintage buttons.  I was in heaven.

Eventually I had to leave the yarn store, and we checked out a few antique places.  I like to find treasures, keeping my eyes open for buttons and lace and frames.  I did find a jar of buttons, maybe not a great deal, but I was happy.  And my real find was a milk glass owl from the early 1900′s.  I used some birthday money to add her to my collection and she was/is worth every penny!

The weather was fantastic and we sat outside and enjoyed a beer.  Bill commented that it was January and we were sitting outside!  We came home on Saturday morning and I hurried out to my last quilting class.  And today, we are going to enjoy some playoff football!  Go Bears!  I couldn’t ask for a better birthday weekend, but a win for the Bears certainly would be nice!

I have a couple of minutes to kill before I leave for a quilting class, so I thought I’d pop in here.  I’ve been meaning to for several days, but just haven’t done it.  Things are good.  I’m making progress on some long put-off projects.  For example, there’s a pile of fabric that I have been moving around my craft room for months.  At least since October.  I finally dealt with it.

I cut up most of it to make some tablet cases.

And then I cut the fabric for my new bedroom valances.  The fabric part was easy, the trim part gave me fits.  I was originally going to do some fancier kind of valance, like a bubble valance.  The more I thought about it, the more complicated it was getting, so I decided to do a plain old gathered kind of valance.  When I had bought the trim (about a week ago) I was only going to do 3 panels, but then I decided to make 4.  Back to Joann, where apparently everyone needed brown ball trim.  There was a little over a yard left, so I took it.  As it turns out, I was 4 (four!) inches short.  Ugh.  So after the gym on Thursday, Bill kindly detoured to another Joann to get the rest of my trim.  What should have been an easy trip took twice as long since Google Maps misdirected us.  In the end, it worked out because I was able to get a yard of the fabric at 70% off since it had already been cut.  That meant that I got 9 times what I needed for only twice what my 4 inches would have cost.  I was able to finish my curtains and I have a little left over trim.

This article on Apartment Therapy distracted me on Thursday.  I ended up tidying up my “junk” drawer.  It’s not really a junk drawer since it contains mainly office supplies, but I made a little more room for the hammer and scissors I keep in there which have been getting in the way.

The weather is beautiful so I have my sheets hanging on the line, and I turned off the heat and opened some windows.  Ahhh… fresh air.  I see a nice walk for CJ in our future.  I have my quilting class today, and then Bill and I are going to watch some football, and work on our bedroom.  Now that I have my curtains done, we’re going to hang those and pick up and reorganize a little.  I need to re-hang some pictures and just make it look a bit more inviting.  I’m changing the colors from black-white-pink to blue and brown, a transition that has been in progress for many months.  The junk drawer article has motivated me to clean out our bed side tables which have become catch-alls.  That’s what’s on tap for me.  I hope you all have some fun stuff planned for the weekend!  Or if not fun, at least productive.

Yeesh.  Today was my first day back to the gym since sometime around Thanksgiving.  It was ugly.  I knew it would be.  But I love the instructor for my Wednesday class and it was fun and I felt good afterwards.

I had been keeping relatively active during Christmas.  While my mom was visiting, we went for walks almost every day.  Bill gave me Fitbit for Christmas.  It’s kind of like a fancy pedometer, but it does a little more.  It tracks my calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, and also my sleep quality.  Yup, it tells me how long it takes me to fall asleep and how many times I wake up during the night.  I’ve warn a pedometer before, but never really stuck with it, mainly because I found it wildly inaccurate.  I sort of tested the accuracy by doing the math on my stride length and number of steps and it’s on target with the distance I walk  which I know because I’ve mapped it using My Tracks on my android phone).  I think the difference in the distance  on Fitbit versus My Tracks is due to my stride length.  I think my stride lengthens after I warm up and it’s amazing how much of a difference even an inch will make over the course of 3+ miles.  (BTW, if you have an android phone, My Tracks is awesome and I highly recommend it.  You can use it to track your biking, hiking, walking, etc. routes and it’s free!!)

I’m trying to get in at least 10,000 steps a day and I’ve found that I have to log in at least an hour of exercise or I don’t come anywhere close to 10,000 steps.  I might if I was running a lot of errands, but I don’t do that very often.  Anyway, it’s pretty cool. I’m finding it to be a big motivator.

I thought it was a very thoughtful Christmas gift.  Not everyone would agree.  Bill knew I’d been working hard at the gym and he knows I like the toys.  Plus, I had expressed some interest in another system that an instructor at the gym uses (BodyBugg), but after doing some research and decided FitBit was a better choice.  We’ll see how it goes, and if it helps me lose 5 pounds this month.

Bill had one more day off of work and we made the best of it. We had the best of intentions and were planning on going to the gym, but that darn Rachael Ray just sucked us in.  We relaxed, watched some tv, ate breakfast in bed.  Then we saw the sunny skies and got motivated to go for a bike ride.  Yeesh.  I haven’t been on my bike for at least six months and my tushie was feeling it.  As were my legs and lungs.  But it was a lovely ride.

Once we were showered and clean, we decided to run a few errands.  We first headed to the bank to open a new California account which is something we’ve been meaning to do since we moved here.  Mission accomplished.  Then we went to the furniture store to check out a dresser that caught my eye, pet store to get food for Gracie, and then we tried out Pinkberry! Pinkberry is my new favorite!!  It’s yummy frozen yogurt which awesome mix-ins and I am in love.

After that, we came home and did some laundry.  I put away my yarn stash which is a wee bit larger than I imagined.  I have 364 skeins of yarn.  Is that a lot?  It seems like a lot.  I’m going to up my goal and am going to have 122 fewer skeins at this time next year.

So anyway…  that was my day.  It was really, Really nice to have Bill home this one last day.  It was a regular, boring, unspecial day and I loved it.  Of course, the Pinkberry helped, but I think the company is what made it so delicious.

What a year!  2010 was pretty darn good to us, but I’m looking forward to 2011.  A fresh start, a new year full of promise and potential.  I was thinking about my goals for the upcoming year as I walked this morning.  It is kind of a gray, rainy day, but beautiful in its own way.  There are low-lying clouds hanging around the mountains which I enjoyed watching, and things smelled fresh and cedar-y.

I’m going to do my goals a little differently this year.  I have a couple of overall goals for 2011, but I’m also going to make monthly goals for myself.  For the year I want to:

1.  Use, donate and purge!  I want to reduce my yarn stash by at least 45 skeins from what I have now.  I want to clean out the closets in the extra bedrooms, and we need to create a bit of space in the garage.

2.  Read!  I have 78 books (plus a few that I got for Christmas) in my queue of books to read.  I want to get that down to 55 by the end of the year.

3.  Live a healthy lifestyle.  Exercise, eat nutritious foods, live a more active lifestyle.

My goals for January 2011 are:

1.  Lose five pounds.

2.  Figure out how many skeins of yarn I currently have.

3.  Finish Amy’s quilt.

4.  Finish Bill’s mittens.

5.  Finish green apple cardi.

6.  Read 2 books.

7.  Finish ’75 and ’76 photo albums.

8.  Clean out closet in Bill’s room.

9.  Get to halfway point on basketweave afghan.

10.  Make master bedroom valances.

I’m excited.  I think this is an ambitious yet achievable list of things to accomplish in the month.  I better get to it!