Happy Blogiversary to me - 10 years!

I can't believe my blog is ten years old. My first post was on February 18, 2004 (the actual first was on the 17th but it was just a "hello world.") In that first post I lamented about having "so many projects", and I proceeded to list them. So let's see what happened to those projects:

Projects from the Past

First up was Burda 2560:


I remember this one. I made the muslin out of a striped cotton fabric from fabric.com - probably paid $2.99 for it - and hated the result. The fabric was too stiff and the stripes didn't help the look. If it's not in a scrap bag somewhere, then it went into the recycling bin. After that wadder, I didn't try the pattern again, but looking at it now, 10 years later, I think it could be really nice in a drapey rayon, sueded silk or perhaps a polyester blend or a lighter weight cotton.

Next was a fake fur throw. It was already a UFO then, and it remained stuffed in my closet for probably another 8 or 9 years. Pairing a long-pile fake fur with a short-pile fake fur was a mistake. The throw was very heavy and reminded me of those lead aprons they put on you in the dentist office. Not good! So I gifted the two fabrics to my sewing friends. It was decent fake fur but sometimes when a project doesn't work, keeping the fabric is just a sad reminder of that failed idea.

Curtains for the family room. Completed! But this was just a hemming job on purchased curtains. Plus I'm embarrassed to tell you that the hems were safety-pinned for a long time before I finally sewed them.

Pillows for the family room. I never made them. I still have the fabric. I still want to make those pillows...someday.

First Quilt. Nope. Never finished. Guess I'm not really into quilting. But I can't explain why I have a lot of quilting fabric in my stash. Oh, yes I can...so many cute prints. Plus I like the idea of quilting, but cutting lots of squares and strips and precisely stitching them with quarter inch seam allowances...not so much.

Cream and pink knitted baby dress. This UFO is still in storage somewhere. It has sentimental attachment but I think it's time for it to go. I am not a hoarder. I am not a hoarder. I am not a hoarder...

Off white cotton sweater. In 2004 I hadn't yet gotten into knitting like I am now, meaning that I think I had this sweater and one other UFO (from the 80's!) and a few huge cones of yarn from a store closeout. My knitting stash fit in one drawer. I did finish that cotton sweater about a year later, and it was a disaster. I only had one sleeve left to do but my knitting had changed so much that the gauge was way off. No amount of pulling and tugging and blocking could get the sleeves to match. I didn't even like the darn thing at that point so I frogged it. I recycled some of the yarn as warp for some cotton placemats that I wove. Oh yeah, the placemats aren't 100% finished either. Good grief, only one of these projects was completed!

But I have made plenty of things in the 10 years since then. I won't go into all of them - I'm not even going to list my favorites because it'd take a long time to go back over everything I've made.

Why I blog:

I started blogging back when there weren't many garment sewing bloggers. There were a lot of blogs by knitters, and there were a lot of creative young women making "softies" and other such insanely adorable items and blogging about it. I liked seeing their projects and reading about them so I decided to start my own blog so I could share my creations with others...and my mom, who reads this blog faithfully (Hi Mom!)

The blog has proven itself as a great record of my sewing and knitting projects and of other events -  when I blog about them. I haven't been a very regular blogger. Looking at my archive, it seems I started strong for the first five years with an average of 68 posts per year, but then I dropped off because the next five years only had an average of 28 posts per year. Work interfered, life got busy, and other things that I couldn't post online interfered. We did a lot of remodeling of the house and although I sometimes wrote about it, I didn't want to turn the blog into a home remodeling blog. Same thing with travel. 

I actually started "blogging" wayyyyy back in 1997, but it wasn't called blogging then. I had a geocities site. Remember those? I was in the Yosemite neighborhood because we sometimes went kayaking and skiing. I used the site to post photos - digital cameras were brand new then - and I started a journal to keep my family and friends up to date on what was going on in our lives. This was before Facebook of course! The name of this blog comes from that geocities site. One of my sub-sites was our "monkeyroom" - it represented the idea of a room we would have if we had infinite space and money where we could just collect ridiculous monkey-themed stuff. Instead I collected pictures of the ridiculous monkey-themed stuff and arranged them on "shelves." Another of my sub-sites chronicled my early sewing and knitting projects.

I get visitors!

My most popular post by far is the pincushion tutorial. Oh my goodness, that post has had over 61,000 views! At a very distant second place is my post on how to fix a retractable measuring tape, with 5289 views. I occasionally hear from people that they used this info to successfully fix their tapes - woohoo! But that pincushion tutorial lives on in links all over the internet and the world, and it's on Pinterest too. I didn't blog about this (though I meant to), but a few years ago I submitted the pincushion tutorial to a request for ideas for this book...

...and it was accepted. But the submission request was only for the bonus patterns for the special edition book sold only by Barnes and Noble, so it's not in every book. I couldn't find the special edition on the Barnes and Noble site so I don't know that you can even get it anymore. After my tutorial was selected, I was sent fabric from which to make the sample pincushion, which they photographed for the book and included with all the other one-yard creations on the book tour.

I thought I took a picture of my pages from my copy of the book, but I can't find any. I don't know why I didn't blog about this when it all happened in 2011. But looking back, that was a busy year - busy at work, overseeing some major home remodeling, and we managed to squeeze some travel in too.

Speaking of travel, I've been very blessed to have the opportunities to travel like we have. Not just while we're living here, but over the last 10 years as well. I hope you've enjoyed seeing some of my favorite photographs from these trips - at least the ones I've blogged about.

Future

I intend to keep blogging on this site and I hope you keep visiting. I know some people have switched over to Facebook or Instagram to showcase their creations, but I'm not interested. Facebook is great for short and quick posts, and that's where I usually post my travel photos first, but I only sometimes post pictures there of the things I've made. Besides, it's much easier to find my old posts here than on Facebook. I haven't explored Instagram but I don't think my brain can handle another site for sharing and organizing pieces of my life. Let's see, there's Facebook, Flickr, Ravelry, Patternreview, Twitter, LinkedIn...

But that reminds, me. I need to back this blog up. I wouldn't want this documentation of 10 years of my creative life to vanish!

Hopefully I'll get to some sewing tomorrow. I have a jacket for my nephew almost complete, and I have fabric washed and ready to cut out to make myself a robe.





Happy Blog-Birthday to Me!

Five years!

It's very late and I'm just getting this birthday-blog in under the wire!

I'm sorry that I haven't been a very good blogger lately. Sure, I have excuses: I started a new job, my mom visited, I'm a terrible procrastinator, it's raining... I do want to continue blogging because it's been a great way to share what I make. My tutorial on the pincushion sewing kits is still finding its way into blogs and boards and I'm amazed by that! I also find this blog is a great way to document the things I've made and also some of my other projects, like gardening. But I know that I first have to actually write a blog entry about the stuff!

Ah well...here's to more years of blogging!

And no mom, your visit did not keep me from blogging. In fact our visit to the YSL exhibit would have been a perfect subject to blog about and I just didn't do it!

A New Year...again

A few other bloggers are revisiting their resolutions from last year to see how they did, so I thought I'd take a look at mine.

1. Blog more often - In 2007 I posted 64 entries and in 2008 I posted 66, not counting this one. That's not blogging more often. At least it didn't go down! I blame part of it on Facebook. I joined it this year and sometimes updating my status on Facebook trumps updating the blog.

2. Lose weight. Meh. I stayed about the same but I didn't work hard at losing weight. Without a 9-5 job, I really should get to the gym more often. I did go a handful of times in November and December. Maybe I'll make it more of a habit in 2009.

3. Embrace my hobbies. Without that 9-5 job, I certainly am embracing my hobbies. Although I sewed about the same number of garments as last year (8 this year, 9 last year), most were completed in the last few months due to that lack of 9-5 job thing. I did knit a lot more but I still have the problem of not actually finishing the items. Gotta work on that.

4. Think before I buy. I've done relatively well with this one. There's still too much stuff in the house but I think I've done well to keep shopping to a minimum and only buy what's needed. My fabric buying was down this year except for two bouts of travel-fabric buying, one in D.C. with fellow patternreview sewing friends and one in NY because what sewer can resist an opportunity to shop in the NY Garment District? My yarn buying was not so restrained but I knit a lot more things this year so that's good, right?

5. Find the good in my work. Well, the J-0-B ended and I have my sanity back. It was tough in the last few months but I dug my heels in, went to the office every day (instead of hiding out at home and telecommuting), and finished up the work I needed to finish. On my last day my co-workers took me to lunch and the manager even gave me a memento of the project. The lay-off from the contracting company was partly voluntary and I know they would have wanted to keep me if there had been suitable work. So it's all good.

6. Nurture relationships. I think I did ok with this one but I know I could do better. There's always room for improvement here.

I think I'll just repeat these resolutions for 2009, except #5 becomes slightly modified into "Find good work" And I really want to keep the word "good" in there because I don't want to find myself in a difficult situation again.

It's been a week already?

I know I wanted to blog more this year, but gosh...time flies.

Since last week, I

• Traced off Burda WOF pattern #119 from the 12/2007 issue, realized (sadly) that I didn't have enough of the fabric I wanted to use but I "managed" to find a candidate or two, or three...or four in my stash.









• I made cupcakes








• I did some spinning with friends (sorry no picture, although I did bring my camera, I forgot it in my purse!)



• I did some knitting. I'm still plugging away at Lara, otherwise known as my big orange sweater. Yikes!



• Bought more yarn. Ugh. But it was on sale. And it was Rowan tweed. My favorite.



• Watched movies. Sadly, nothing memorable.

And now for your enjoyment, here is our silly Ella. She's an 11 year old "kitten" who still chases her tail. And she falls off the chair in the end...intentionally I'm sure. (for some reason you have to click on the play button twice)

A New Year

My first resolution of the year should be to blog more often. Believe me, there are lots of blog entries that never get from my brain to the internet.

Christmas came and went but a good time was had by all, which means me, my husband, and our four cats. I had 2 weeks off from work (woohoo!) so I tried to do everything I've always been meaning to get to but in the end I mostly watched movies, knitted, and relaxed. Not a bad way to spend a couple of weeks. I did accomplish some things, like decorating the house for Christmas, spending the day in the city with my friend spinnity, swatching and packing some fabric away, and baking Christmas cookies. But the vacation just flew by. As it does.

As far as resolutions for the new year, I mainly just want to be happy. But here goes:

1. Blog more often - see, it is first! What I really want to do is use my blog to communicate to friends and family. I want to document the things I've made and share them with others. So I will try to get the blog ideas out of my head and onto the internet.

2. Lose weight. Oh yeah. This is on most everyone's list and is on mine every year too, even when I don't make a list. We have a gym membership and we bought Dance, Dance Revolution for the XBox 360 (yes, we did!) so maybe I can dance some pounds away.

3. Embrace my hobbies. I get frustrated because I have so many interests and not enough time to enjoy them all. But I need to let go of that frustration and just enjoy what I do. I should not fret that the spinning wheel is sitting idle because while it sits, I'm sewing or knitting. As long as I am enjoying what I'm doing, then I should not feel bad that the supplies and equipment for other things are sitting idle. They will get used eventually.

4. Think before I buy. I've already been doing this although it's really tough when it comes to fabric and yarn, but I have shown restraint. When faced with tempting purchases, I try to summon up the little voice in my head that reminds me of the materials I have at home that are unused. The little voice also reminds me that I don't need more things in the house. I have to ask what the purpose of possessing the object is and if it is really worth taking up valuable space.

5. Find the good in my work. I'm talking work-work here, as in J-O-B. This is a tough one. I have issues I can't go into here. Suffice it to say that I need to hang on for the next 7 months to a year (hope it's not that long) until another contract job comes along. I don't want to leave the company I'm with but leaving the contract job at this time would not be good for my company.

6. Nurture relationships, be they friendships, family, or my darling husband. Good relationships can't be one-sided so I need to do my part in order to keep them good.

And now to put #1 and #3 into practice. One of my neglected hobbies has been machine embroidery. When I first bought my Pfaff, I thought I'd be embroidering lots of things and I did do some embroidery early on and had fun with it. But over the years I've only been collecting designs and expensive software and not much has been embroidered. We recently upgraded our home computer operating system to Microsoft Vista and that prompted me to find a way to get my embroidery software (VIP) working again. With help from my husband and the internet, we found the right drivers for the dongle and the correct type of cable and I'm back in business. Even though I had sewing, knitting, spinning and weaving I wanted to do, I took time out to embroider some Christmas designs I've been meaning to get to for a while now. These are from a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer collection I bought a while back. I intend to make them into ornaments, which is why I embroidered mirror images. I stitched them onto felt and used tear-away stabilizer on the back.

These were taken with my new camera, a Nikon Coolpix S200, which my husband gave me for Christmas. I asked for a small camera that I could slip into my purse and take with me to make snapshots of friends or things I make. It's a great little camera. It doesn't replace my Nikon D50 SLR of course but there are plenty of times when I just want a picture and don't want to deal with the lenses and stuff. My husband also got me a small camcorder, something else I asked for, so that I can take little videos of things. Here's a boring little video of my embroidery machine in action, taken with my new RCA Small Wonder. I'm sorry I chose to video when it was stitching white thread. Oh well, I'm learning!

So much to do, so little time

Even with the extra hour this weekend I still didn't get everything done that I wanted, but I did quite a lot though:

- watched a few movies I had recorded
- cheered for my football teams (Penn State, 49ers, Eagles)*
- baked bread
- joined friends for a spin-in, dinner, and a movie
- worked on two knitting projects: Jaywalker socks and a scarf in a simple stitch
- caught up on some recorded TV shows
- did a load of laundry
- bought snow peas, cabbage, broccoli, lettuce, dill, and cilantro plants and actually planted them (instead of leaving them in their plastic nursery pots to wither and die)
- planted pansies in the front window box
- read the Sunday paper and relaxed with the cats
- made chili with tomatoes and peppers from the garden
- slept in with the kitties

One of my big to-do projects is to clean up and organize my sewing/knitting/crafting rooms. Yes, plural rooms. My hobbies have expanded into the second bedroom that is sometimes known as a guest room. I have most of my fabric swatched and stored in plastic or canvas bags but I have not been so diligent with my purchases from this past year. I also want to catalog my yarn stash on ravelry.com, which will take some work.

* I "power watch" football on TV. I record the game and then use the 30-second fast forward button on my DVR to skip the between-play chatter. If you hit the button as soon as the whistle blows on a play, you can skip ahead to the next play. Deletes a lot of time off a football game but watching it recorded can have a downside if you accidentally see the score on live TV.

My neglected blog.

I've been neglecting this blog. That's all. I'm not sick (except for a slight cold) or buried under my work. Life is going on as usual and I just haven't been writing about it. I was on travel for work last week so my personal time took a bit of a hit. The travel didn't keep me from knitting though. I had lots of time to knit on airplanes and in my lonely hotel room...when I should have been going to bed early to rest up for the 10-12 hour days. In the last few weeks I have (almost) finished a Clapotis shawl out of oh-so-soft alpaca, knit 2/3 of a scarf in baby alpaca using a stitch pattern I found in my trusty Vogue stitch dictionary from the 80's, and started a pair of Jaywalker socks in some Socks that Rock yarn. I also have been shopping (surprise, surprise). I bought 18 skeins of wool for a sweater, 8 oz of alpaca/mohair roving, sock yarn for Penn State socks (no lion motif on them, it'll just be the colors), more wool roving for spinning, cotton for my first weaving project, two knitting books, four sewing patterns, cotton printed with silly sheep on it, and three pieces of fabric from Gorgeous Things (she had a sale and I caved).

What I haven't been doing, besides writing in this blog, is finishing to sort and caption the pictures from Paris. And I haven't been doing too much sewing. I made some cloth grocery bags a few weeks ago, but they deserve a post all themselves. The other thing I haven't been doing is taking pictures of my projects. Sigh.

So I apologize for not blogging. I just haven't been into it lately.

Silly quizzes, but they seem to know me!

J'étudie déjà le français! *

You Should Learn French

C'est super! You appreciate the finer things in life... wine, art, cheese, love affairs. You are definitely a Parisian at heart. You just need your tongue to catch up...

What Language Should You Learn?

*I am already studying French

Bien sûr!

You Belong in Paris

You enjoy all that life has to offer, and you can appreciate the fine tastes and sites of Paris. You're the perfect person to wander the streets of Paris aimlessly, enjoying architecture and a crepe.

What European City Do You Belong In?

Tagged

Janet tagged me with the "6 weird things about." Actually I was tagged with this before by Tini and I let it slip and didn't play. I'll play this time.

1. I can put my arms on backwards. Well not really but it looks that way. I'm quite flexible and can put my hands on my hips and rotate my elbows out in front of me until my arms look like they're on backwards.

2. For an entire year I was obsessed with doing the LA Times crossword puzzle everyday. So much so that if I didn't do it during the day I would do it before I went to bed. I was obsessed I tell you! I even caught a day where they re-used a puzzle they'd already run.

3. I have coughing fits for no apparent reason. This, like the flexible joints, is an odd trait I share with my mother and sisters. The coughing will just happen, sometimes while eating and sometimes not. People think I'm choking but I'm really ok, just coughing.

4. I can write backwards really easily. In 8th grade my best friend and I used to exchange notes to each other all written backwards. It's probably because we're both left handed. Leonardo di Vinci also wrote backwards and he was left handed.

5. I must drink chocolate milk with my breakfast. I mix one teaspoon of Nestles Quik and one teaspoon of Ovaltine in a tall glass of skim milk. I've even gotten my husband hooked on this one except he generally only indulges on the weekends.

6. I "see" words spelled out in letters when I hear them. This is probably why I'm lousy at listening and interpreting speeches, lectures, or even when people speak to me. I'm busy reading the words and not really interpreting them. I'm also having a tough time learning foreign languages. I don't know if it's possible to train myself to not do this but I wish I could.

I'm not going to tag anyone with this. If you want to play, please do! But I know many of the blogs I read have already done the "6 weird things."