at home work attire

It's been a good week of posts on Offbeat home - here's one that totally applies to the grad student types - what do you wear when you work from home??

http://offbeathome.com/2011/05/a-freelancers-wardrobe

I'm a jeans (only those that are already on their way out) or carhartts with a t-shirt, hoody (or some other large and comfy sweater) and often a tuque (not always because i'm cold...sometimes i just like wearing a tuque) kindof girl.

What do you think...does dressing up increase at-home work productivity? Or do pajamas keep you comfy and therefore productive?

a.

Love Letter Quilt, check.

Rain over May Long certainly helped me be productive... on my hobbies. I finished my second quilt! It measure 87" by 84". I was thinking I may have to ship it out to be quilted, but I had a hard time swallowing the cost. Fear Not!! I pushed that sucker through the sewing machine. The quilting isn't amazing, but it works.

I definitely had a lot of assistance from the blond girl who tends to be very helpful. Here she is helping me pin fabric together.

My red-headed step child is less helpful. He just makes himself quite comfortable on any project I am working on.

I can't believe I didn't take more photos of the creative ways I tried to hold up the quilt while sewing various parts. Here is a picture of how it was positioned while sewing on the binding. I need a bigger table.

Here she be! The brown is really not that dark. I am not quite sure what happened in this photo.

A view of the back.

Here it is on my bed. I am now in desperate need of pillows. Lots and Lots of pillows. Beautifying the rest of my room will have to wait until I own a house. 

So, who is up for a summer project that is still around Edmonton? I am reupholstering a chair and really have no idea what to do. I am going to rely on online tutorials and perhaps buy a book. If anyone wants to help or wants to have a "reupholster old furniture" weekend, stop on by.

Home ownership...

Hey friends,

I just read this post on offbeat home: http://offbeathome.com/2011/05/what-to-know-buying-a-house

it's got a few good tips on things to think about for all of you who are venturing into the world of home ownership. I don't pretend to be an expert...but i thought she made some good points.

Also - for all of you who have bought fabric online, but haven't responded to my post about fabric shopping...tut tut tut. If you do so soon, I will no longer name one of our meat chickens after you...and we all know what happens to meat chickens...

upon answering my post, I will return to Dustin's name suggestion for the meat birds of "Delicious".

A post about "how to buy chicks before the chicken coop is done and your life turns into a whirlwind of chaos, so I left to go to Prince George for a committee meeting to let Mark deal with the disaster, and stink-eye (the sick) chick died, and that made me sad" to follow....

A.

Fabric shopping...

Alright. So in case you guys don't know, I live in a pretty small town, that although beautiful in so many ways, lacks in the funky fabric department (read: wolf howling at moon and fish jumping). There is one local online fabric store from a nearby town (which is awesome: Fishskin fabrics - have I mentioned she's a former fisheries biologist who has taken on this new career...hint hint...any one of us can quit science at any time to make beautiful things fulltime...well - in theory!), but so far she hasn't been stocking a lot of the fabrics I'm into.

Basically, wedding season is about to begin, I have a new niece and a home to make things for, so I need some fabric shopping advice that won't put me in the poor house. To date, I've ordered from Sew Mama Sew, Hawthorne Threads and the Purl Bee, depending on who's got a sale on or who on any given day, for whatever reason stocks the exact same fabric, at a totally different price from the other sites!!!! wtf my friends. That's right...wtf - I said it.

Here's my questions to you:

1. Where do you most often buy your fabric online?
2. Have you found any one site that consistently has better prices?
3. What about shipping?...they all seem to vary in how much they charge to ship to the great white north
4. Are there any awesome sites I'm missing out on?

Many thanks in advance for helping me out with this hugely important, internationally significant issue.

a.

For the mamas (and all the to be mamas) amongst us...

... love all of the biologists amongst us... :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osWuWjbeO-Y&feature=share

A quilt, some trivets and some decoration

Hey Hey,

So, I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but sadly have been distracted by stats...yup - there's that science component of our blog again! So I've got a few things to show...

First I made some trivets. Are they amazing? not really. Perfect? far from it! But they were completed :) I also apparently forgot to take photos of the completed projects, so here's a few of the process:

The first one is a needle felted trivet. I made it by hand felting raw wool around a polyfill inner that I also needle felted to stick together. This basically involved squishing it all in hot soapy water and letting it dry several times until I figured out how to do this. First time...


Then I needle felted some pretty squirly strips of alpaca fleece (not seen here).
The second trivet was linen with a stipe of cotton fabrics.


I've decided linen is difficult to work with, and yet I'll love it anyways. Here's a pic of my very first homemade bias strip:

Next up, I added a fabric border to a mola I bought years ago in Panama and mounted it on canvas. I should have taken a picture of where it now lives in our house, but sadly, it's been living on the floor against the wall that I'm pretty sure is where I want it...for about 4 months. Gotta get on that!

Here it is. I can't take any credit for the design...all I did was add the blue fabric to the outside.

Did I attach the fabric to the canvas with duct tape? yes indeed. In my defense the duct tape was blue....

Lastly, my first quilt!! The only person worthy of this is my beautiful brand new niece Evelyn! She was born April 9th (a few weeks early), and I was lucky enough to meet her on my way through Vancouver this week. I hope it keeps her warm on those dreary Vancouver nights.

I went with a simple blocky pattern, and had the wonderful plan of free-motion quilting. Needless to say that didn't work out so well (you can ask Linnea - she got the panic call a few days before I needed to get it done!!)

Here's the layout

Making my first quilt sandwich:

The world's best model holding it up after it was all done. I quilted beside each square, and at the ends, just "made" squares freehand. Worked out ok...


I went with a fleecy purple back and plain yellow for the binding. I figured this would work for a spring baby...also I can't handle too much pink:)
Here it is all ready to go. Card curtesy of Unik printshop - as usual!
I've gotta run...hope the spring is bringing in some sunshine and new outdoor crafty activities!!

a.