Things have been kinda rough the last few weeks with Bill on the West Coast and me being on the East Coast. And things don’t look like they will be changing very soon. Plus, he has CJ and Sabrina and the orange tree and I have…the big screen tv? It’s really annoying when people tell you to “count your blessings”. What you really want to hear is “you’re right, it sucks, treat yourself to a mani/pedi” or “you know what helps when you’re feeling crappy, Cold Stone strawberry ice cream with double graham cracker crust in a chocolate covered waffle bowl.” But in the spirit of being positive, I will count my blessings:

1. I am lucky to have a job so that I can afford to treat myself to a mani/pedi.
2. And some new articles of clothing.
3. And shoes.
4. And fabric.
5. And yarn.
6. Bill was visiting this weekend so I didn’t have to get my own Starbucks.
7. I have good, patient friends and a slightly irritating but well-intentioned, loving, healthy family.
8. I’ve confirmed that I really, really love my husband and don’t want to trade him in for a newer model.
9. I have more free time on my hands to work on projects, read, relax and chill.
10. This is only a temporary situation.

Okay so maybe I didn’t take this too seriously, but at the moment it’s all I got.

I have been working on some new pillows for my living room. Here they are in progress. The finished product looks a little more interesting and hopefully I’ll finish them up this weekend. I’ve had a hard time picking out fabric to go with my chairs; I’m a little concerned that the cotton fabric is too casual for the chairs, but I think the green works well.

I also casted on a new project, Peony Knits’ circular shrug. I’m going to knit it in Sundara’s fingering silky merino. The yarn feels amazing and I LOVE the color (caramel apple), but I’ve been stressing that it is going to take me forever to knit up the vest in fingering weight yarn. I’ve been telling myself to enjoy the process and not focus on the result. If you see someone rocking back and forth chanting “knitting is supposed to be fun”, it’s probably me.

My mom and Jacob are visiting this weekend and I have brunch scheduled with the girls on Sunday.

Yes, I do have a lot to be thankful for.

So this post started out with my using the word “artistic” instead of drawing in the title of my post. And while I think it is a stretch to call me an artist, I do feel that I’m creative and someone told me if you create you are an artist. So I changed my title and am going with “drawing”. And I really struggle with drawing. Maybe if I practiced more. It’s just not something that comes naturally to me.

Anyhoo, I am obsessed with bed linens and furniture layout for my house in California. (Still don’t know when I’ll be going out there; fingers crossed that it will be soon.) If I had my druthers I would go with a new look (same furniture, different color scheme) but with the economy the way it is, it doesn’t seem responsible. And I really do like the linens I have. But it doesn’t stop me from wanting something new.

So what does this have to do with my drawing ability? I decided that I would be happy if I had a new pillow for my bed. Something pink to break up the black and white. Pink is my accent color, after all. But what kind of pillow do I want? Hmmmm… And then I remembered this post from ages ago and that sent the wheels a turnin’. I looked on-line to buy some patterns but couldn’t find anything that did anything for me. I did see some cute ones, but not for my bed. And then I decided to draw my own. (A scary thought.)

This gave me the perfect opportunity to try out my birthday present. Bill got me this pen because he remember that I had mentioned wanting one over a year ago. I certainly don’t need it, but birthday gifts are meant to be stuff you wouldn’t normally get yourself, right? What I was hoping the pen would let me do is easily upload my sketch to the computer and then I could manipulate it in photoshop. And yay! That’s exactly what I was able to do (after a bunch of practice sketches that I eventually ended up tracing with my pen).

So my little picture is part of the design for my new pillow. I know it’s not much, but I think when you see the whole thing, you will be more impressed (I hope). I will give you a hint though, those are love birds…

Have I mentioned that this is my first foray into embroidery? I do lots of other needlework, but never straight embroidery. This will be very interesting.

I hear a clock ticking, do you? It’s not an ominous 24 sounding clock. More of an insistent tick-tick-tick. I have to have two of these little guys done by Saturday…

This past weekend, Bill and I went to my friend’s sister’s house at the beach. It was the perfect time to go as it had gotten hot, Hot, HOT. It was a full house with the sister (Mary) and her husband (Ron), my friend Suzie, Suzie and Mary’s nieces Katherine and Emily, Ron’s son, Louie, and then Bill and myself. Oh, and don’t let me forget Suzie and Mary’s dogs, Isabelle and Sam. (Names have been misspelled to protect the innocent.) The photograph is the gift basket I put together as a hostell gift. I had wanted to put it in a sand pail but when you want to find a decent sized one, you can’t. All I could find were small ones. So I had to settle for a basket. I embellished kitchen towels myself with fabric. Bill made homemade granola from this recipe, and we put in some fresh fruit to round it out. I thought it looked nice.

We arrived late on Friday and after a full day of work, Bill and I hit the hay. Saturday started with a hearty breakfast and one of the neighborhood cafes. We were well-fortified for a kayaking adventure. And adventure it was. Bill and I had brought our two-man kayak with us. We rented to kayaks and a small two-person sailboat. And out onto the water we went. Bill and I ended up going our separate way, not for any particular reason except I was interested on what the shore looked like on the other side of the bay. So we headed straight across the choppy water. Suzie and Katherine caught up with us at one point to let us know that they had run over Mary on a kayak, but she was okay. The retelling of the story involved a lot of laughing so it hadn’t been serious. Then they went their own way and Bill and I decided to head back to where we started. Heading back, we were going into the wind and the paddling was a lot harder. We ended up taking on some water as the swells crashed onto us, and then we turned a little and the water started to swish in the kayak and a wave hit us and out of the kayak went me and Bill. We both knew it was going to happen, I was laughing and Bill trying to plan his exit so as to not get hit by the kayak, paddles, water bottles, sea turtles, etc. We had our life jackets on so there was no panic. But we did bob up and down for a good ten minutes not really knowing how we were going to get back to shore. The kayak was completely full of water and the only way to unfill it was to take it to shore and dump it. Shore was a good distance away and the kayak was not very dragable at this point. Bill tried to use a water bottle to get the water out and it worked for about two seconds until a wave hit and filled the kayak again. Thankfully, a guy on a jet ski came to see if we needed help (Yes!) and radioed for another guy to bring a rope to tow the kayak in. (Yay!) We got the kayak attached, Bill got on the back of one jet ski, leaving me bobbing in the water with the paddles and water bottles. (Thanks) I used the rope to pull myself to the jetski, got everything loaded on, pulled myself up and off we went. Well, off Bill went. The guy who rescued him was the guy who went around to tell jetski renters their time was up and they had to return the jetski. The guy took off full throttle and Bill thought he was going to die. His hat flew in front of his face, he couldn’t see, had no idea where he was going or who was in the way. On the other jetski, I was going a whopping mile an hour, towing my sad, water logged kayak. I thought Bill was going to get off his jet ski and kiss the sand.

We did make it back to shore and dragged the kayak on to the sand, talking about how everyone else was going to laugh at us once we shared the experience. Except that there was Katherine to tell us Mary and Suzie were stranded because the mast of their sailboat snapped and they were waiting for help. That help too an hour because the boat that was sent out to rescue them was breaking down and had to turn back and they had to radio for another boat. In the meantime, Emily is aiding in the rescue, trying to direct the cute rescuers to Suzie and Mary who ended up having drifted a great distance.

However, Bill and I were not at the beach where the car is parked. Bill was very prepared to walk to the car, but I thought we could dump the water from the kayak and paddle back to the car. He politely disagreed feeling that one rescue per day was enough. I thought we would be fine, giving him at least two reasons why I believed so. First, it took an hour for the kayak to fill up last time and we would only be in the water for 20 minutes maximum, and second, we would stay close to shore which we should have done in the first place so that if we filled up again (unlikely) we could this time swim to shore. He was not as convinced as I was, but got back in the kayak and you will be relieved to know we made it back without incident. I think he was also reassured because we had told Katherine if she didn’t see us in an hour to call the Coast Guard.

Once back at the beach where the car was parked, Bill, Katherine and I sat around for an hour waiting for Suzie, Mary, and Emily and eventually we were all reunited, exhausted from near-death experiences. The rest of the weekend was much less life threatening. We relaxed on the beach for a few hours Sunday, then relaxed at the pool, then went out to dinner, and then drove home.

Sadly, there are no pictures of the near death experiences. But it happened. And, I have to say that while Bill and I were spilling our of our kayak and bobbing hopelessly in the water, not a harsh word was said. Yay us!

I like to make gifts for the secretaries in my office for Administrative Professional’s Day. This years gift is courtesy of Martha Stewart – business card holders. My mom bought a bag of leather scraps and gave it to me, knowing I would come up with a use for it. And I have ideas, but when I saw this segment on Martha, I found a use for some of my leather.

These are super easy and they look great. The only hard part of finding the button stud with screwback also known as a Sam Browne screw. Good thing I bought them right after the segment.

We’ll see how the ladies like them. But if you are looking for a simple elegant gift, this I recommend.

I’m feeling inspired again. I have wanted a storage case for my iPhone and earphones. I bought a cute new acrylic case but wanted a little more padding for when I carry it around. It took me awhile to come up with a design but I have not only one design, but two. The case in the photograph is my closed case with a flap that covers the cell phone pocket and the earbud pocket. There’s an open design where only the earbud pocket closes. I’m still working out the kinks on that one. So far, I am loving my storage case. I like having a place to put my earphones so that I always know where they are. It will help keep me from leaving them at home. While specifically designed for an iiPhone, it will also fit an iPod or other larger cell phone. It will also fit a cell phone with a relatively small bluetooth headset.

I am going to make a couple of the cases for my etsy store.

Here are my little birdies, patiently waiting to be finished. Bill helped me stuff them, all they need is to be sewn up. The pattern is from Last Minute Patchwork & Quilted Gifts. So far I’ve only done one project from this book, but I plan on doing more. I highly recommend the book, it is absolutely beautiful and the instructions are well written. And I’m not a very experienced sewer (what do you call a person who sews?), but the birdies look the pictures in the book.

I’m a little under the weather, so this is a short post. G’night.

I was referring to the weekend, but it made me think of one of my favorite movie quotes: “We went like this, he went like that. I said to Hollywood, where’d he go. Hollywood said, ‘where’d whoooooo gooooooooo.” Any idea what movie it came from?

What a wonderful weekend. After a long week of work, I was ready to relax at home on Friday night. Plus, I had an IDEA that I wanted to work on. I got home and put on my jammies and sat in front of the sewing machine (and the tv). Oh the fun I had. I got up relatively early on Saturday and tinkered with my IDEA for a few minutes, but then I got ready and ran out of the house to run a couple of errands and meet friends for lunch. It was nice to catch up and we were totally girly, shopping for make-up. I had to make it an early afternoon so that I could run up to the Bead Shop in Frederick. Then I went home and got back to work. I had some pouches to make and an IDEA to finish.

I certainly enjoyed my extra hour this weekend. I actually spent it awake. All that awake time paid off as I perfected my new IDEA. It’s a coffee cozy. Bill and I were talking about Christmas presents for our administrative help at work. I am going to make my secretaries some quilted coasters from Last Minute Patchwork & Quilted Gifts. (Thankfully I am planning ahead and the hope is that these will not be last minute.) Bill said he was just going to get them Starbucks gift cards. And it hit me, a handmade coffee cozy. I thought it would be a great present (along with a gift card to the local coffee establishment) for a baby sitter or pet sitter, administrative assistant, coffee lover, etc.

I’ve posted 3 of them in my etsy shop. Now that I have the design and the right thickness, I can make some more. And some that would be male appropriate. I’m really happy with the design, especially how the two ends come together. Bill thinks it looks like a mistake, but I think it adds some interest. I am waiting for my mom to take a look and let me know her opinion.

Believe it or not, I actually had some time to sit down and relax with my knitting and time to clean up my craft room which look like it was in the path of Noel. So that’s how I spent my weekend. Hope you enjoyed your 49 hours too!

On the weekends, I prefer a bag/purse that I can wear across my body. It’s easier for running errands and shopping. I have a couple from Vera Bradley that I like, but if you’re wearing a patterned shirt, wearing a busy patterned bag can sometimes be too much. Plus, I like a generously sized bag so I can put a lot in it and keep my hands free.

With so many requirements, it’s nice to be able to make my own bag. This bag was made with all those criteria in mind. I took it for a test run at the Sugarloaf Craft Festival. It worked great! It’s got a magnetic snap closure. It’s pretty deep too so I think it would be hard for someone to try and lift my wallet without my noticing. I tend to buy lots of little things at craft fairs and I could put those things in my bag, no problem. Big things I give to Bill to carry. I like the neutral color, and I’m not against fun patterns, so I put a nice one on the inside. I dressed it up a little with a pretty pin. But this way, my bag doesn’t take away from my Bears t-shirt, and my Bears t-shirt doesn’t clash with my bag. Oh, the things I worry about. If only I spent the same amount of time addressing global warming.

Finally my post on my completed Cozy shawl. I’m super pleased with how this turned out. As I posted originally, it was very challenging in the beginning. But once I got the hang of it, it was very fun to work on.

I started the project in March, finished it in August. I did put it down for a couple of weeks at a time. I also went on a big cross-stitch kick so Cozy didn’t get much attention.

I knit it up in Rowan Classic Yarns Luxury Cotton DK in the Marble using size 7 needles. The Luxury Cotton is beautiful – 50% cotton, 45% viscose, 5% silk. It took about 8.5 skeins. When I bought the yarn I was warned ahead of time that there had been some frustration with the yarn because it is stranded and that caused problems for some people. I did end up ripping out about 10 rows because I saw where I had a stranding issue. But otherwise, it wasn’t much of a problem for me. My only complaint with this project is that I wish it was a little wider.

As you can see, CJ approves.