silver bells

christmas break! I think the one thing I'm going to miss about being a student the most is not having a luxuriously long break for christmas holidays. I've been spending my week sleeping in, being with friends, eating, watching a hundred episodes of Mad Men (I wish Don Draper was a real person, just so I could punch him in the face....) listening to christmas music and making christmas presents! It is so lovely.

Eric and I have made almost every one of our christmas presents this year, and I can't lie, I am pretty proud of us. I can't say what we made or for whom, because this is the internet and I love surprises!

It's our first christmas together in our own place, and I can't help but be just a little sappy about it. And I don't even care if I'm biased, I think our christmas set-up here is just the cutest thing in the world.

I don't know if you can tell, but I really like patterns. A lot.


oh and look! my first actually-finished-quilt! Baby due dates are a good motivation to finish the final steps on quilts. I made this for our brand new nephew Joshua who was born about two weeks ago. I hope he likes it.

sneak attack.

Day 1 of The Last Week Until Christmas Break. Today I finished my last project for Dye+Print class, photographed it (hurray for good natural lighting today!) and I'm now photoshop-ing the pictures and figuring out my presentation/lookbook. I'm really happy with how this project turned out. I love the fabrics I naturally dyed and I love the bag designs I made. That's just such an exciting feeling, so I wanted to share a wee little sneak peek of the photographs I took of my collection today. When I named this photo I was pretty sure I named it "sneak peek", but when I opened it on here it said "sneak peack". End of the semester brain. So here's one of my bags. It's one of the smallest ones, as it is supposed to be a clutch. HURRAY!

I like making things I'm proud of. Now on the finish the next project that I will hopefully be just as proud of. I'm feeling POSITIVE!

saturday night craft night.

Here's what my saturday night looks like: canvas, leather, zippers and rivets. For my final project in Dye and Print for this semester I'm making a collection of 5 naturally-dyed canvas bags with leather straps and lots of wonderful gold hardware. So far I've finished the two biggest bags (they are all different) and I can actually say I am really really happy with them. I am really good at picking out all the bad things about the things I make so it's pretty satisfying to look at something I've made and say "heck yeah, that is good." I'll post real pictures (the one above doesn't really show....anything) when I'm done. Maybe when this crazy last two weeks of the semester are over. There will be much rejoicing.

Anyways, see that furry head in the corner of the picture up there? That's Eric sitting across from me and just whipping up a pair of these bad boys. Aren't they awesome?

I think he's the coolest person I know. And he's definitely making a pair for me next.

Yesterday Eric and I went for a walk to Albion Falls on the Escarpment Rail Trail. I found a website called Hamilton: the Waterfall Capital of the World that lists all the waterfalls in hamilton and how to get to them, which is pretty neat. Do you know how a place defines itself as the capital of something of the world? I feel like a lot of places claim to be the capital of something of the world. Either way, Hamilton has a lot of waterfalls. I like waterfalls, and Eric really really likes waterfalls, as he has a serious love for flowing water of any kind. So we explored. It was nice.

somebody carved our initials for us. so sweet.

any ideas where this mean guy came from? We found him in the mostly-dried-up river bed. Eric deduced that is is a salmon. It was huge, seriously. It's a mystery to us how it got there.

This whole weekend was nice, actually. I find I can't help but have a relaxing weekend, even if the week before has been crazy and the week that's coming promises to be just as crazy. Even if I'm busy, it just feels weekend-y, so I just can't be stressed. I like weekends.

and now it's monday. Three weeks left in this semester and oh-so-many things to get done in those short three weeks. I CAN DO THIS.

(also: it's nice when you're sewing away and your wonderful husband brings you an ice cold tallboy of your favourite beer. that's all)

prints

today at school one of the art programs at sheridan (I don't know which one, I want to say print-making but I don't think that exists as a program) was having a print sale. I am a sucker for hanging things on walls. always. I bought two prints and I like them a lot.

old photographs + print = lovely. by Anonymous Sheridan Print-Maker. it's a good idea to sign your work, I think.

and who doesn't love a good treehouse picture? I sure do. especially when they're fantastic-ly UN-structurally sound. by L. Savoie ( I cannot read his/her first name.)

thank you, students of sheridan, you make our walls prettier! I think I'd really like to learn more about print-making. In our textiles program, we only learn how to screen print, which I love, but it would be fun to try other types of printing too.

In other news, it snowed today and it was wonderful. I am blogging in order to procrastinate all the homework that I should be doing. This is kind of giving me a sick feeling in my stomach, so here I go, it's homework time.

spinach and cheese always wins.

One of the cool things about having a blog is that I get to decide whether something is blog-worthy or not. I deem these muffins blog-worthy. Eric made them while I was gone this evening at my work placement. I may have found the recipe on Pinterest and left it open on my computer with a strong hint that he should maybe make them while I was gone, but let's just go with Eric is awesome, because he totally is

Feta Chedder Spinach muffins.

buttonhole books

Yesterday in my dye+print class our teacher did a workshop with us on buttonhole book binding. It was hard to be excited about it at first because spending class time on things that are kind of just for fun/interest sake is hard to do when you have a bajillion projects/papers/assignments due in the same week. However, it's hard not to be happy that you go to a school where you get to do things like this in class time and it's completely normal. Plus it was way more fun than writing a paper.

I had some leftover japanese paper from the paper place (one of the most dangerous stores....) with pretty cranes on it, so I made my buttonhole book with that. Our teacher is an incredibly sweet, patient woman and it ended up being a pretty great way to spend the afternoon.


you can ignore my less-than-perfect buttonhole stitches and just look at the pretty japanese paper.

I'm currently listening to the hair dryer propped up in the bathroom trying to dry out a rather unfortunate wet felting project before it is due in roughly two hours and trying not to eat all the chocolate chip cookies that Eric and I made last night. Since getting married and moving in together, I'm pretty sure our combined sweet tooth has become a much more powerful force. bad news.

knittin'

Colder weather always makes me knit again. I've never been able to keep up with my knitting in the summer, it just doesn't seem right to me, but every fall I pick it up again.

I really really really like knitting. I remembered this lately because in the past couple of days it's kept me busy during business class (it helps me listen, really!) waiting in line to pick up osap and loads of other times where I just want to do something useful. Plus, it's always nice having something to do so you don't feel like such a bum when you'r procrastinating by watching episode upon episode of community online. yeah....

I've wanted to make a coldweather headband (is there a name for that?) for a while and I had a huge pile of delicious colours left over from my embroidery project so I made this:



tada! perfect solution for the battle of frost bitten ears vs. hat-head. making this was fun, so I made another.

and then I just got carried away.

and now I have a lot of headbands. The brown-ish one is for my friend Keisha who saw me making them and wanted one.
do you want one? if you do, let me know and we could probably work out a deal.

happy weekend everyone!

blog beginnings!

So, I've started a blog. I've been meaning to start one for a while now, so here she goes! The goal is to make this blog somewhere where I can share what's going on in my life, mostly focusing on what I'm working on crafty-wise. A place to share my work might just encourage me to make more work! Yep, this blog is probably mostly selfish-ly for myself, which I think is a-okay.

to begin! Here's a project I've been working on for my Dye+Print 3 class that has taken all semester up until now. It was handed in and critiqued yesterday and it went well (I think!) , so I'm feeling pretty relieved about it. The project was to create 6-8 pieces for fashion using hand embroidery and other embellishing techniques and then photographing them in the way which you see them being used. I really like embroidery. and I now have a new-found love of (amateur) pattern drafting and garment making. also natural dyeing.

I made 7 pieces-two dress/tunics, three shirts, one tank top and a wrap obi belt. Everything that I didn't leave it's natural colour I dyed using natural dyes-sumac, goldenrod, logwood, turmeric, cochineal and cutch. Then I had a photo shoot with my lovely friends Amy and Kira. The pictures didn't turn out perfect as the lighting in my apartment wasn't ideal and I un-wisely chose to shoot them in front of a window, but I used them anyhow and put together this look-book. ch-ch-check it.