Look at this beautiful little creation I got from Esther. She had a little blogiversary giveaway on her site, My Cuppa’ Charms. If you haven’t seen Esther’s site, check it out. She does awesome work with felt. I always enjoy checking in and seeing what she’s been working on.

I couldn’t keep Isabelle away. And who could blame her? Look at the embroidering and the little felt accents of the bird, dress, and boots.

I think Isabelle loves it as much as I do. I keep putting it up and she keeps reaching for it saying, “picture! Picture!!”

Thank you Esther! We love it! Even the packaging was a big hit in the house. I’ll have to get a picture of the tag. We’ve been wearing it as a necklace!

Posted in: Oops Didn't I Choose?
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Wedding anniversary at my favorite Japanese restaurant.

Posted in: Family, Food
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Today is our anniversary. We’ve been married for sixteen years! Anyone want to babysit Isabelle for us so we can go have a night out together, just the two of us, for the first time in two and a half years?

Just kidding. We’re fine. The three of us are going out to dinner at my favorite Japanese restaurant as soon as I’m done typing this.

Alan took a couple of days off. I took tons of pictures yesterday and loved so many of them. But I’ll only share a few here of our day.

Alan asked me what I wanted to do. Well, I’ve been embroidering super hamster here and there. It’s so nice to work on something small just sitting on the couch or on the floor with Isabelle. So when he asked me what I wanted to do I knew I wanted to go to Borders to look for Doodle Stitching. It isn’t available on Amazon and plus I wanted to rifle through the pages.

Well, they didn’t have it but I did find a very pretty sewing book which I did not buy from Borders. If it was a small bookstore I wouldn’t have felt bad spending so much but since it was a big book store I ended up getting it on Amazon instead. And that saved me $14! I’ll share it with everyone when it arrives. I can’t wait. I’m itching to make something from it.

While I was in the craft section, Isabelle and Alan were elsewhere. She is soooooo LOUD. I don’t know where they were in the store but I could hear her. And in this picture she looks so quiet.

Well, after the bookstore we went to an electronics store. Alan lost his SD card and needs to replace it. We couldn’t find one but we did buy a new kite. We already bought a new kite a month ago but I couldn’t help myself. It was only $4 and looks like a dragon!

Then we went to try to watch the The Wizard of Oz at the drive-in. It was a free night for the opening of the season. I’ve never seen it so crowded.

When we went in to get popcorn and drinks we spied a witch selling glow in the dark sticks. We bought one for Isabelle and snapped it on right away. On reflection, snapping it on right away might not have been the smartest idea. She really had no interest in the movie after that.

I wasn’t really paying that much attention to the movie either. I was too busy taking pictures, playing with my camera, leaving the shutter open, and experimenting with what I got.

Here are the rest of the SOOC (straight out of camera) photos from the drive-in. I really love them all. I didn’t have a tripod so everything is blurry and soft but I love how it captured the feeling of the drive-in where everything is dark and you can’t see the people in the other cars.

Or you can just look at all the kite flying and drive-in pictures. Ok off to dinner.

Posted in: Family
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A couple of weeks ago, I decided I wanted to post more pictures of Isabelle on here. Alan doesn’t download the pictures off the camera so unless they are on my blog or I show him, he doesn’t get to see them. Well you’ve seen how well that’s been going.

Even after Isabelle got back to her happy little normal self, I haven’t been in the mood to write or to even look through pictures. But today is different. We finally got around to taking our monthly family picture, over a week late, and I had to go through THEM ALL.

So, here are pictures from this weekend. We went to the Oakland museum with my friend Veronica to eat cake!

No. Just kidding. They did have cake there but we went to look at wildflowers. Here’s the description from their site, “Celebrate the coming of spring with California’s diverse wildflowers at the annual Wildflower Show. Create a child-sized flower bouquet, compose a mini-terrarium, check out the vital role of bees as pollinators, and more!“. I was looking forward to making a terrarium with Isabelle. I’ve been wanting to make a terrarium since at least February 13th. How can I be so exact on the date? Because that’s when I took this picture:

See how Isabelle filled it with what she wanted, her toys and a partly eaten cookie? It’s been sitting empty since then.

Yeah, so that’s the main thing I wanted to do, make a terrarium. And wouldn’t you know it, we didn’t get around to doing it. So what did we do instead? We looked at wildflowers. Me and Veronica laughed like little kids at the funny names of the plants like this one:

Still gives me a giggle.

And what else did we do? Make a paper flower hat!! A little hat made out of PAPER!! (You can click on each picture individually to see it larger)

It was a little challenging. Isabelle didn’t understand at first why we were putting this big piece of paper on her head. She kept ducking out of the way. I’m so glad Veronica was there to help take pictures. We needed both pairs of hands to get the paper on Isabelle.

And here is Isabelle showing it off when we were taking our monthly family picture today.

So yeah…let’s see when I’m in the mood to post again. Hopefully it’ll be soon.

Posted in: Family, Monthly Family Picture
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I just got a call that started like this, “What the hell? WHAT THE HELL? ” It was my friend Olinda. We’ve known each other for 30 years so I knew exactly what she was talking about without her having to say another word.

She’s jonesing for Isabelle pictures. So why the silence for a week? Well, I’ve had my hands full. On Friday I went to San Francisco to see my sister (Helen) and her friend Christina. Christina was interested in hiring me to sew up a prototype for an idea she had. So Isabelle tagged along and got to play with her cousin Ebow.

We were at Helen’s work. Downstairs they have a day care and that’s where the kids played with this little kitchen.

The kids had so much fun. There was only one unhappy moment where Ebow wouldn’t share a chair. He pushed Isabelle away saying, “go away!”, which made Isabelle cry. But beyond that they had fun throwing balls, playing with window shades, driving little cars around, and playing make believe. Ok ok. I know, Olinda. That’s a blurry picture of Isabelle. That doesn’t count. So here, they were pretending to drink tea and eat pizza:

So, have I been sewing the prototype and that’s the explanation for my absence? Well no. I turned down the work. I decided Christina deserved to have someone with more sewing skills who could do a better job.

And I guess that’s a good thing because I’ve had my hands full with Isabelle. It was noticeable the very next day, on Saturday, when we went to the store. She was so cute in this picture: sitting on the little kiddie lawn chair and wearing kiddie sunglasses.

Then she turned and became a terror. She threw a tantrum over I cannot even remember what. Alan took her crying out of the store. She’s NEVER done that before.

The past few days she’s been difficult, hard to please, and short tempered. Alan notices that she gets this way whenever she sees Ebow. Maybe that’s just a coincidence…

So yeah. Hands full of temperamental toddler here. Oh wait. Hands full of temperamental toddler and tissue paper. My allergies are kicking my butt. What am I allergic to? The outside! I’m allergic to trees, flowers, and grass. So yeah, allergic to the outside.

With the combination of these two things, I’m just worn out. No sewing. No drawing. I’ve read my favorite blogs but I haven’t even looked at the rest of them. I have 856 unread items. I have had no energy for writing. But today’s call, “what the hell?“, has made me get off my tired butt and post some pictures. And oh my gawd it took me over two hours to write this between Isabelle’s whining.

So, will that last you another week Olinda? or until whenever I feel like posting again?

Posted in: Family
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Lately whenever Isabelle brings some pens over, asking me to draw, I find myself drawing this little guy. He sort of reminds me of a hamster.

Then I remembered, when I was little, we had a hamster. I can’t remember his name. I can’t remember what happened to him. But I do remember I used to take him out of his cage, hold him in my hands, and “fly” him around the room saying, “Super Hamster!!”.

And seeing as the topic for Illustration Friday is “save” I thought I’d share.

Posted in: Illustrations, Illustrations - Illustration Friday
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I’m having one of those days where I didn’t get much done. I thought about doing a lot but that’s about as far as I got, the thinking part. BUT I DID scan in the pictures from ISBN 9784579110438.

Here’s the picture from the book of the tank top I showed yesterday. I’ve altered it since then and…it’s so depressing, I’ll write about it tomorrow.

No. Actually, I’ll write about it now. The test tank top in muslin (thank goodness I made a muslin) as I mentioned before was pushing down on my boobs.

The empire style (is that what it’s called) part of it was sitting in the wrong area. It’s supposed to sit right under my boob but my damn boobs are so big I had to mush them in and it wasn’t fitting. The bottom half puffed out unattractively making me look pregnant. I didn’t take pictures of a side view because, oh my gawd, the horror! The picture, from yesterday, didn’t look that bad but in person, YIKES! So I altered it.

I thought I would add three more inches to the top half so there would be more room for the girls. Well it doesn’t smoosh my boobs down anymore. And it doesn’t make me look 8 months pregnant. But it’s still a little tight, just a tad. Then it dawned on me, to measure my chest. That’s when I realized, I’ve gained weight since I first purchased the book. Or to be more accurate, I’ve gotten bigger.

That’s why it’s so depressing. That’s why it doesn’t fit! I made the largest size, 13, and it still doesn’t fit!! Aaaarrrgggh!!!

So now I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I should alter it more to actually give me more inches around or just give up and try a different pattern.

But what’s the point? Maybe all the patterns from this book won’t fit since the largest size is 13. I really wanted to make pattern #13, the one above on the left, but it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of room in the chest area.

Maybe pattern #10, the one above on the right, has more room? I don’t know. Maybe I should measure the patterns.

Man, I’m bummed. I look at pictures of myself and am sometimes surprised that I look bigger than I imagined. Is that a weird thing to say? Well turns out I am bigger.

So yeah…don’t know what to do now. Oh I almost forgot the whole reason for my post. I got distracted by lamenting about my weight. Here’s what I meant to link to, the rest of the pictures from the book.

Oh I hate being pathetic. I had to give myself a laugh. I looked up “I’m too sexy” on youtube and sang “I’m too big for my shirt, too big for my shirt…” with a little head shake and everything. Yes I’m a goober, a big fat goober.

Posted in: Books yum BOOKS, Finished Project, Sewing
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