Finally Back to Normal

It has been a really busy and fun filled month of December. Now that I have reached the Epiphany though, the tree has been put away, and new places have been found for the last of the gifts that arrived today. I made quite a few gifts this year and will be showing them off in the next postings on the blog. Some things were different this year, like my swag over the hutches went from colored lights to white since I broke the colored strands when unpacking them.



I also went on a trip for Christmas with Dan's family. We went to Colonial Williamsburg for the holiday. It was quite delightful and full of fun. The historic houses were all decorated, and we went to see many traditional concerts and ate a ton of traditional meals. I of course was so wrapped up in having fun that I did not remember to take many pictures. I did however, snap a picture of one of my favorite houses on the way down Duke of Gloucester Street.



The weather was actually quite pleasant for the majority of the time we were there. The only day we were rained on was Christmas proper, and most of that day was spent inside of buildings and not walking around outside.

Dan and I then came home for two short days, and then we were off to Las Vegas for a week to celebrate the New Year. Here again I did not remember to take pictures as there is just too many other things to keep your attention. I did snap this picture of the conservatory in the Belliago hotel of their Christmas display.



This year is already off to a quick start. I have been invited to dance with a group at the Rakkasah bellydance festival, so I will be spending a lot of time in the studio over the next few days. I also have a custom order I am working on along with some more personal goals for this new year. I have decided to try to work on some of my own projects this year. Along with working on some new plans for both Fabulous Pants and the yet to be revealed second project, I am determined to learn the harp more this year and to also finish a long lingering embroidery project. Needless to say, I am going to be busy. I am hoping to eliminate some of the unnecessary television and internet surfing to try to get things done. Here is to hoping it works!

I am however, glad to be back to the quiet house and settling back into a normalized routine. I am planning the patio garden for next year, and thanks to Annie's book, I am learning quite a bit about container versus ground gardening. I am also ready to tackle cheese making with her in the next few weeks and months. There is so much to learn! I cannot wait. Well I am ready to get down to the sewing machines again. I am going to follow through with my focus on self plans a bit here and finally sew up the machine covers I keep promising myself. Pictures when they are done! Tune in Tomorrow for day one of the Holiday Wrap Up 2009!

The Fruitcake is In!

The fruitcake was made this past weekend, and it is now swaddled in its wrappings waiting to come out on Christmas eve. Being from a fruitcake eating family, I never really got all the jokes about hating it until I had a really awful factory one. The light bulb was lit then. I have decided to continue making my own from scratch even though it requires up to four hours in the oven. This year I decorated my top and it turned out nicely. Now, in three weeks I can tell you how it fully turned out for taste this year.

Start on Christmas.... Yes, Christmas

So in an attempt to not be a mad crazy woman around December 20th, I have been very determined this year to finally start my Christmas crafting well ahead of schedule. Right now I can hear the groans and moans. "But it isn't even Thanksgiving! We haven't even gotten through Halloween! Why are you rushing things!." For those of you who hate the pushing up of holidays to unrealistic selling schedules, I am right there with you. I hate seeing Christmas stuff in stores before Thanksgiving. I think it is totally inappropriate and hated it when I worked in retail in high school and college. However, when you hand make a majority of your gifts and have a big family, it is a necessity to start early, and that is always my goal.

I always intend to start the minute I see Christmas and winter themed items in the fabric stores. This, however leads me to a depressing idea that I am starting Christmas way early in the summer and not long after the last birthday gifts for the nieces and nephews are finished. Usually I then avoid working on planning, purchasing, and crafting until around October, when I start to say, "Hey, I really need to get on this!" By then I realize that I can still put it off further and wait until the beginning of November. That still leaves me with two months right? Once November hits, I usually find myself suddenly prepping for the Thanksgiving dinner we usually do at our place and wondering where all my time went for starting the Christmas present making. Then I decide that I need a few more days of recovery after the party and find myself on December 1st really up the creek!

This year, finally, is different. I have started my planning now, in September! I have also made several purchasing trips. This is nice because I can actually look for sales and use coupons like I always plan rather than panic buying. What a concept! It is one I have wanted to follow through on for a while, and this is the year! I even started one of the first gifts yesterday.



I thought it was oddly appropriate that we are around four months out, and I was doing numbers that counted down to four. Today I need to finally get around to finishing up the choli I am making for myself. I would love to have it for class tonight. I need to focus on finishing up all these projects I pick up and then drop quickly, so the tassel wrapping is also on the list. Those need to hang, so I can trim them and get that belt finished. Those are the goals. short and sweet for today.

Tomorrow is another canning party with Annie. We are looking to do pickles, peach and lavender jam, and perhaps some plum or pear. I am voting for plum as the season is just about over. I will take pictures as usual and give you the update.

Wine and a Running Start

This weekend, Dan, Annie and her beau, and I went out to the Livermore Harvest Wine Celebration. Needless to say, I forgot to take any pictures of the event since I was enjoying myself so much. We got to taste wine from many different wineries both at the fair and also at the wineries themselves. While the wine was not necessarily in my favorite types, it was wonderful weather with beautiful scenery and great friends. We also attended The Shotgun Players version of Animal Farm. It was another wonderful production with imaginative sets and musical numbers. This one was full of rap stylings and step style dance. The movie marathon also went on with a movie last night of "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium," and earlier in the weekend we watched "Boiler Room." Both were pretty good, although "Mr. Magorium" to us was lacking. It felt like the cutting room floor took too much of the movie, and the message was too dumbed down and simplistic.

I also worked more on the hand sewing on the elephant and peacock belt, and it is coming close to completion. I hope to get some early Christmas present supplies today or tomorrow. I am very intent on getting things done earlier this year. Well I want to get a running start on the short week, so I am off to get some last minute laundry into the system and finish off a personal choli that has been lagging around. Then an afternoon trip up to the fabric stores and perhaps the yarn shop, but that may wait for a trip with my knitting coach! It is much more fun going to the shop with her.

Holiday Wrap Up Day 2

After an interesting return to the computer yesterday, I am beginning to wonder how I ever functioned with one screen. Having all this room seemed kinda like overkill when Dan showed it to me, but now it is so nice, and I believe there is no going back. I got some cleaning done including the most dreaded thing for me, the shower. It is not like I leave the thing to get too grungy, but once I start in on a shower, I am almost obsessive about scrubbing every single inch of the thing. Even Dan, a child of an admitted cleaning addict, came in to tell me to stop cleaning the thing last night. I made a killer dinner last night, getting rid of some more of the Christmas Eve ham left overs. I even found something to do with the sage I cut from the window box. I know that you need to cut herbs periodically to keep them growing and producing, but I always find it hard to throw the stuff out. I always want to only cut when I need things, but that leads to some bad results in the past incarnations of the herb garden. I am trying to learn my lesson. I also got a lot of computer organization done for the shop. There is more to be done in the coming days and some website redesign issues to be tackled, but I think that will come after my trip. If you have stopped by the Etsy Shop lately and read the shop announcement, I have said I will be out of town for a week in January. I will be flying out to Delaware to visit my sister and her family. It has been two full years and lots of change since we have seen each other, and I am really looking forward to getting to see all the family but especially the kids. On the note of the kids, I figure I should jump into a holiday wrap up posting to show one of the projects I did while taking a month off from the blogs and pants.

After getting Brenna's felt board done, I decided to start on her Christmas present next. This present was a tag team effort, and I tweeted about it once in a while on my twitter stream. I decided to make her a tipi, or tepee for your less formal types. I asked my sister what Brenna's favorite color was, and it turned out to be green. So, my search began for enough green fabric to make the tipi. It turns out that even though it was the Christmas crafting season, green fabric is kind of hard to come by. I ended up settling on some lime green fabric with different colored green polka dots. When I measured out the yardage, there was not enough of it to make the tipi. Only enough to make half was in the store. I decided to not hunt all over the Bay Area for more, so I looked for a solid lime green counterpart. Here is what I ended up with:




It was a pretty quick sew seeing as there were mostly just straight seams to make. The hardest part was dealing with the unwieldy amount of fabric I was having to sew. It ended up using around 10 yards of fabric. I did also have to make some adjustments. I did not have quite enough width on the lime green solid fabric after prewashing it, so I added some polka dot fabric strips in to cover the seam allowance and act like seam binding.





Once I got it all sewn up, I boxed it and sent it off to my Dad to have him build the PVC pole components for the tipi frame. I think it went pretty well. The top is gathered with a ribbon through the poles and wooden beads as spacers.



It ended up being overall way taller and bigger than I had originally thought it would be. I guess once totally set up, an average height adult could almost stand up in the center. During the family Christmas call, I found out that it was a hit. Kids were in the tipi, adults were in the tipi, kids and adults were in the tipi. We were running around, in, and out of the thing.



I guess this also could not have come at a better time since Brenna was out growing another tent that my sister had bought for her. She was just getting too tall for it. I cannot wait to see it in action when I visit them in a couple of weeks.

Well since this is a late posting, there is not a lot left on the slate for today. I was debating making English muffins today, but I think that will wait for tomorrow. I will finish all the cleaning that needs to still be done, and I am going to at least cut out the next tutorial project I will post for the blog after my trip. There is still some major work to do on Da's present still. Yikes more than I thought now that I am reading that over. I guess I should get down to it.

Back to the Blogs

I can hardly believe it has been a month since I have written in the blogs, but it has been a fun and work filled month. The house seems extra quiet after the holidays, especially since my husband is back at work for the first time in two weeks. The machines are quiet after a month of toy and gift production, and any noise from the animated tree ornaments has now gone back into the holiday boxes for the year. This posting marks a couple of firsts. It is the first posting for the Fabulous Pants studio of 2009. It is the first posting from my desk that was abandoned when our office became a dumping area for still unpacked boxes. It is also the first of my December in review postings. Many things were accomplished last month, including making almost all of the gifts we gave to others and getting them out on time. Only one gift is unfinished, and I am planning on working on that like mad for the next few days to get it finished up and out the door to my father-in-law.

It was a good holiday season here. Dan and I decided to spend one Christmas with just the two of us. It was relaxing, and a tiny bit lonely with out all the family around. I did make my first attempt at my Mom's Christmas coffee cake. I did it a bit differently than she does because I had the luxury of time and a house that was not going to be filled with a zillion family members. I did all the beginning steps of the recipe like she does up until the second rise. After all the shaping, I place the cake into the fridge for an overnight slow rise. It did a great job and turned out perfect and hot on Christmas morning. (My mom bakes hers all in one step the day before Christmas.) Here is mine right before I frosted it and seconds later it was demolished by my husband and I.



So to begin the monthly catch up session, I thought I would let you in on the few things that I did that were Fabulous Pants related. I worked on several sheets of wrapping paper in case of any last minute holiday orders. I have found that making my own wrapping papers is not only relaxing but very satisfying. I like the mindlessness of stamping over and over again for designs. I usually do very regimented stamps every so many inches because I found that my attempts at randomness did not work that well. That problem may have been solved with some of the reading I did over the break for learning new techniques for the shop. I am a subscriber to the magazine Threads, but I never seem to get time to really sit down and read any of the issues. I finally did that a bit, and they had a great technique for creating randomness when making designs. They suggested pitching pennies out onto the work surface and placing your designs where the pennies fell. I am going to hopefully give this a try in a few days when I catch up on other things to see how the technique works out.

One of the biggest projects that I did this break was going through all the fabric I own and organizing it. I have gone into all the big bins and refolded, photographed, organized, repacked, and written a file up on all scraps and pieces. It took me three days of lighthearted effort to get it accomplished. My work on organization motivated my husband to finally tackle all his boxes and items that needed to be put away in the office area we share. We both took all the items off of our desks and decided to start fresh. We filed papers, placed items in order in boxes, and played keep toss with other things. One of the things we decided to toss was my old computer, so I am now writing to you on a lap top that we bought for the both of us to use. The hubby is now on his new and much improved laptop we got him for Christmas. It is nice to be back on my split keyboard with a real mouse and for the first time dealing with dual head monitors. I think I am going to get used to this set up! :) We even hung some new lighting in the office area that was basically unusable at night due to it being a dark corner away from any light sources in the apartment. It is now so inviting and nice back here I cannot see myself working anywhere else when doing computer related work.

Another shop related thing that was accomplished was the tune ups of the sewing machines. While attempting to see what happened to make the serger needles and throat plate not line up, we found that the needle clamps were actually broken inside the housing. Needless to say, no pants can be made until the replacement parts show up sometime in the coming days. It was somewhat upsetting, but I am glad we figured it out now rather than trying to limp the machine along and having something very catastrophic happen to the loopers or other parts of the machine.

On a happier note, I got a some very awesome presents this year. Dan completed my Tori Amos catalog, which makes me a happy girl. I do not have all the singles, but I do finally have all the major albums I would want. He also got me an AeroGarden. Now I know that it seems kind of cheesy, but he and I have joked about getting one ever since we saw one in the SkyMall catalog when we where headed out to California for the first time to see where we would live. For a long time, he joked about making it my housewarming present. Well he finally made good on our joke and got me one. It is actually a pretty neat hydroponic kind of plant system. I of course could not just do the easy thing and plant one kind of pod like you are supposed to. I of course wanted to mix and match even though they make it seem like you cannot. I decided to use some of my lettuce packs and two of the three tomato packs.



The seeds that we bought were out of date by a year, but I thought I would toss them in and see what happened. They did in fact germinate, and in the time that was stated on the pods. I ended up doing one of each starting feed in the water, and when the first feeding comes up, I will do the same with the regular feeding packets since it seems to be working. I do have the lights and water circulation meeter set to the tomato setting and not lettuce. Here is a picture of the garden up close after a week.



The one pod with the plastic lid off is lettuce. It has grown the fastest even though it was not the first to sprout. The back two pods are the tomatoes. I will take more pictures as things get bigger. I look forward to this continuing science experiment in the kitchen. It even makes Dan happy as it reminds him of the Land exhibit that used to be in Disney World. I guess they used to do all sorts of food hydroponics in this particular display, but he seems to think that it is not there any longer.

Well I guess I should get into some other work now. The house really needs to be cleaned after some major neglect from me, and while it is wonderfully organized right now, it is also rather dusty. I also want to get some more work done on the computer with the Etsy store to prepare it for my next time away. More on that soon.