How was your weekend?

It was Memorial Day weekend here in the US, a 3 day weekend,the unofficial start of summer.

Saturday I spent all my time from 1pm until 3am eating sushi, drinking wine and reading chick lit or watching Firefly. It was glorious!

The males went camping & I’m told it was equally glorious.

But really.

Sleeping in the back of a mini van, in the woods, with all the humidity & bugs versus watching Nathan Fillion in air conditioned splendor, lounging on your own tempur pedic mattress, while stuffing yourself with salmon rolls washed down red wine.

Who had the better Saturday?

Sunday afternoon the males returned and we cooked out but ate in because it was too damn hot to eat outside. The pool was filled and blasted with chemicals

Monday there was lots of outside play but none in the pool due to the chemicals and icy cold nature of the water. (This was a parental decree, the boys were perfectly happy to turn a really bleached out shade of blue if we’d just let them in the pool). Then we had a cookout with friends. The kids were off in the woods somewhere & we had wine. Then there were burgers and the kids appeared. More wine was had. The kids then flung themselves off of high trees and fought with sticks while the adults talked about this ‘helicopter parenting’ we’d heard tell of. Apparently it is a different approach than the “Don’t make me get out of this chair” parenting we do. It seems to involve putting down the wine and getting out of the chair and going over to the children and actually intervening.

Odd.

All in all we had a great weekend. It seems strange there is school tomorrow.

How was your weekend?

Weekly Winners

I am behind this week on getting the photos off my camera so I only have a few to share.

Batman has joined the Republic Clone Army

This guy needs to cut back on his caffeine intake

I love the colors in this bouquet

For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom

Star Wars Cookies

Yesterday morning the Big Brown Truck of Joy dropped these off on my porch

I was putting the dough in the fridge to chill as they arrived.

An hour later I assembled my stuff

I’m not Martha so elaborate icing is out. Colored sugar sprinkles are in.

I’ve got a couple suggestions for people using these cutters. There are many nooks & crannies in the images. It took me 3 trays of cut outs to get it sorted. The dough kept getting stuck in the indentations & the cookie would cling to the cutter.

1. Roll the dough out to a quarter of an inch thick. Get a ruler to check it. This is important for making the impressions properly.

2. Dust the cutters with flour or powdered sugar before cutting & pressing the cookies. Dust the dough too.

3. Press FIRMLY on the plunger, especially if the dough is very chilled.

4. You want the dough to be really chilled.

5. Roll it out between waxed paper right out of the mixing bowl and put on a metal cookie tray in the fridge to chill. Keep the dough on the bottom waxed paper on the cold cookie sheet while cutting the cookies to keep the stickiness down.

A deep impression is easier to decorate. See how the green sugar rolled right into the grooves?

A lack of brown or black colored sugar makes Darth decor a bit of a problem. Brown sprinkles just are not the same.

The Yoda cookies were the easiest to press out and the hardest to get off the cookie tray after baking. The Boba Fett ones were the hardest to press out.

The boys were thrilled.

This is my religion

The Holy Lunching Friars of Voondon claim that just as lunch is at the centre of a man's temporal day, and man's temporal day can be seen as an analogy for his spiritual life, so Lunch should (a) be seen as the centre of a man's spiritual life, and (b) be held in jolly nice restaurants~Douglas Adams-The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Yesterday was International Towel Day, a celebration of the life & works of Douglas Adams, my very favorite author of all.

I would dearly love to be a Holy Lunching Friar.

In the days before children I almost actually was.

We went out to lunch almost every day at my last work for pay job. Arbys and the Pig Pit don’t really count as ‘jolly nice restaurants’ because one is fast food & the other a pit BBQ place, but they were our only options besides Sheetz (a gas station that makes good sandwiches) and Mc Donalds.

I’ve always said that, apart from the money, it was lunch I missed most as a stay at home mom. The money to go out to lunch. The freedom to go out to lunch. Lunch with people who for the most part did not need me to order their food, remind them to keep their butts on the seat, stop making that noise, eat your food, no we aren’t going for ice cream.

Though the ice cream one always caused temper tantrums among my co-workers.

What can I say? They didn’t eat all their lunch. I’m not stopping for ice cream if you don’t eat the food you asked for.

The adult conversation. Questions of more words than just ‘why?’. The ability to bitch & moan about the job & other co-workers. Or even discuss world events.

The boys don’t understand the situation with Korea (and I don’t really want them to at ages 6 & 7) or the stock market or the fragility of jobs in the area.

Sometimes I manage to have lunch with DH if his work schedule permits and we do go to jolly nice restaurants like the sushi place or for Thai. But he’s been busy and out of the office a lot the past few weeks so no lunch dates for us.

Lunch alone is nice sometimes but I miss lunch with others.

Monday Potluck

 

Ah Mondays. Potluck is useful to me in so many ways this week. I have no idea what to post about and I have no idea what to serve for dinner either. DH is working 3 hours away from home all week, so he leaves at 6am and gets home at 8pm. Just me & the boys for dinner and I have a hard time cooking meals I know won’t be appreciated by boys (like steak & pierogies) when DH isn’t around to appreciate them. Perhaps I will get a rotisserie chicken tomorrow and serve it in various ways all week.

Rotisserie chicken, chicken sandwiches, chicken salad, chicken hash & eggs, and then chicken soup.

Actually now that I read it, it’s not too bad with the right side dishes.

 

Obviously I am not rocking in kitchen right now. I’m in a dinner slump. But I came across these on the web Friday and it was this major epiphany experience. I went from not knowing they existed, to knowing about them, to possessing them in less than 60 seconds. I couldn’t not buy them. (possessing in this case meaning I have paid for them, so they are mine, but I can’t actually touch them until the Big Brown Truck of Joy brings them to me later this week. They are exclusive to Williams Sonoma and the nearest one to me is 2 hours away)

 

Mayhem has a phobia that is hard for me to grasp. He is afraid to flush the toilet for fear it will overflow. Now, were he 3 and potty training & recently stuffed half a roll of toilet paper in the toilet, flushed it & had it overflow everywhere & seen me pitch a fit about having to go out to the barn & get the shop vac and drag it in the house & vac up all the nasty water, while shouting “FOR GODS’ SAKE DON’T PLAY IN THE TOILET WATER” several times – then I could understand the phobia. But while that did happen several times between the ages of 2 and nearly 5 it has now been well over 15 months since the last toilet overflow, so why suddenly start freaking out about it now?

 

I’m rereading a mystery series right now. The books are by Marshall Karp & feature LA detectives Lomax & Briggs. The titles so far are The Rabbit Factory, Blood Thirsty & Flipping Out, with a new one called Cut Paste Kill due out in a couple weeks. These books are why I adore my library. They are thrillers, gory, suspenseful & set in modern day LA. I would never in a million years have picked up one at a bookstore because they are so outside my comfort zone. But I pick up all sorts of stuff at the library. If 50 pages in I don’t like it I take it back & am out nothing. These books are hysterical. They are so funny & enjoyable, despite the thriller-ness of them. This is what Booklist says about the new one “Here’s something we’ve never seen in crime fiction: a hard-boiled scrapbooking mystery.”  Seriously, a hard boiled scrapbooking mystery. I can’t not read it.

 

I managed to use jejune in a sentence at the gym. Then I had to clarify what I said & what it meant. (it was noisy). This week I am going for disapprobation, which means moral disapproval or condemnation. There are several things that earn my disapprobation in the course of a day. This week I am going to express it.

 

 

Is there anything that cannot be served on pizza? Think about it. What wouldn’t be good on pizza, assuming you control crust & sauce choice as well as toppings? I spent my 12 minutes of bus waiting time Friday thinking of all the foods I like and debating with myself whether or not they would be good on pizza. The only thing that came to mind was cereal but since cereal is made into snack bars probably given enough time I could make a cereal bar type pizza.

Thank you Holly for hosting the potluck

 

Weekly Winners – self portrait edition

Once a month, on the 20th, I take a self-portrait.

This month proved to be a challenge. I was up for a quick – hold the camera up and shoot- type photo.

My camera though had focusing issues

I couldn’t do this deliberately if I tried

So then I held the camera sidewise thinking it would give less non-face space to focus on.

But I leaned too far back and took the shot too early

Oh hai

Finally I got a decent shot

For more weekly winner please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom.

Thanks for stopping by

It’s a blog hop!

A couple of weeks ago my friend Mel at I Speak Melsh signed up for an All About Me class at Big Picture Scrapbooking. It’s a free class. She thought it might be fun if a bunch of us took the class too and then posted out projects online.

I checked the class out.

It’s paper.

I’m digi.

I am always reluctant to confront my nemesis – The Scissors. I’m even more reluctant when it’s likely to involve his sidekick Mod Podge and his little glue stick minions.

I lack basic kindergarten craft skills. Give me a computer program of any sort and I am all over it. Scissors and glue are much too complicated for me.  Last time I had the Mod Podge out I glued my pants to my leg, then glued the cutting board to the desk.

Plus, I didn’t understand the instructions for making the fold out album. It seemed fraught with peril.

So I thought maybe I’ll just do a single page or turn the project into a couple pages for the AAM album I am working on all year.

Then I remembered I owned a Maya Road layered chipboard album. I had bought a couple of them a year or so ago in a fit of optimism. I wanted to make DH a Father’s Day gift. That would be the aforementioned Mod Podge incident.

But leaving aside the glue issue it was a fairly straightforward assembly. Create the pages in PSP, print them, cut them out & glue them. I’d used a box cutter & ruler instead of scissors. This could work again.

I am 75% more likely to cut a straight line with a box cutter & ruler than with The Scissors.

I am also 75% more likely to cut myself with a box cutter & ruler than with The Scissors but with all the Mod Podge everywhere, probably it would stop any bleeding and seal the wound.

So I pressed on. I used Eva Kipler’s Annabella kit. Available at Sweet Shoppe Designs.

There are rounded corners, so I can’t escape The Scissors entirely. One of the reasons The Scissors are my nemesis is I can never find the damn things when I need them. There are at least 5 pairs of adult sized, long pointy scissors somewhere in my house and several small embroidery scissors but when I need to cut something the only pair I seem to find are kiddy safety scissors I can barely get my fingers around.

Then I glued them to the chipboard with the Mod Podge. I also glued the brush to the sanding block and later glued two of my fingers together.

 

Because I would fail arts & crafts class in kindergarten, I cleverly disguised my cutting & gluing inadequacies by sanding down all the edges and then over the tops, for that ‘deliberately scuffed & worn’ look.

 

I couldn’t decide on one quote so I put one on each page.

Then dug out some photos I thought went well with them and told facts about me

The dinos insisted they be included.

On the back is my favorite poem Desiderata.

All in all I am pleased with it.

If you are blog hopping your next stop is Enjoy The Ride Today!

If you are one of my regular readers & don’t know about the hop, jump over to I Speak Melsh where the hop begins. She has a list of everyone involved. Check them out. There are some really neat albums out there.

Thanks for stopping by!

Priceless?

School photos… a rant.

They are not my favorite thing.

The boys’ school has 2 photo sessions every year. One in the fall & one in the spring.

The one in the fall requires payment upfront, before the photo has even been taken.

Who pays for photos that haven’t been taken yet? Still? In this day and age? How does that business model even work anymore?

Frankly given digital technology I expect them to email me my kid’s photo for my approval within minutes of having taken it.

OK, I’ll give them an hour or so to get enough photos for a bulk download and email.

Heck, I’ll give them 2 days to retouch and then email.

And it can be low res and have SAMPLE printed across my kid’s face in watermark fashion to make sure I don’t sneakily print it out myself for nothing.

I would pay for that service. That would be worth the price these companies charge for photos.

There is no reason on God’s earth these days why anyone should find paying for photos sight unseen acceptable.

So I don’t. And I write my my reason why I don’t in large friendly letters across the top of the order form.

“THIS IS BOGUS! NO WAY AM I PAYING FOR PHOTOS WITHOUT SEEING THEM FIRST”

Because I think companies benefit from knowing WHY they are losing a sale.

The spring session lets you see the photos before paying for them. They send home 6 sheets of 2 poses in assorted sizes plus one ‘collage’ sheet.

OMG!

I realize that as a digi scrapper I am biased but GEEZ! It’s 3 photos on one 8x10 page with ‘blended’ edging around them.

Regularly $45!

But if you buy all 6 of the other sheets, it’s only $25. ACK!

The sheets themselves start out at $15 for one, $22 for 2, etc and the whole lot, with collage is $75.

You see what the envelope says?

Priceless? Really? I can get mediocre shots of my kids at home for free.

Granted I don’t have a stunning faux garden backdrop and fake fence like they do.

But still, I have currently several thousand photos of my kids. Many of which are posed and posed better. I have a perfectly good grey fleecy blanket to use as a backdrop should I want that ‘professional portrait look’ and unlike the school photographers I have endless time and only two kids that I can bribe or threaten endlessly so I can take all the shots I need to get a good one.

Don’t you love the look on Mayhem’s face?

And that was the better of the two poses. He looks quite pissed in the other one. And I suppose in it’s own way it is somewhat priceless.

Havoc’s is decent. But I could get an equally decent one from Wal Mart’s photo center and for $22 could have all 6 sheets and several poses.

But not the collage.

Last year I didn’t buy them. I only bought the class photo because that cannot be duplicated and really is priceless in future years. This year the boys were all “Can we get all 6 sheets? How about the collage?”

I love my kids but I’m not paying $150 for mediocre photos. We compromised on 2 sheets each and 8x10 each and one with different sizes on it to give to my parents & brother.

How much do your school photos cost? Are they really worth this amount of money and I am just cheap?

It’s ok, I don’t mind if you say I am cheap. I can be quite cheap about some things.

The idea person

That’s me.

I’m full of ideas that would be wonderful for other people to carry out.

I can’t carry these ideas out for a variety of reasons. Mostly variations on incompetence.

Someone ought to drag our deck back 3 feet so we have more room for the pool this summer (the deck is freestanding). I can’t do this because I have no idea how leverage works & would chain the wrong part of the deck to the wrong part of the tractor and end up breaking one or both of them

Someone needs to get cracking on building that mud room off the kitchen we’ve been talking about. I can’t do it because I am spatially and algebraically impaired and figuring out things like square footage of siding versus the amount of 2x6s for framing is beyond me.

And I am afraid of the circular saw.

But hand me some precut boards and tell me where to hammer them and I’m all over it.

Someone needs to sand down the wooden top of the island in the kitchen so it can be resealed. I can’t do it because I get carried away with making everything smooth and level and end up sanding away far too much wood. And the sawdust sets off my asthma, even with a mask.

I am great at sealing though.

Someone ought to finish that quilt I made as a wedding gift for my brother & SIL.

In 2002.

I can’t because again, the spatial impairment makes it almost impossible for me to figure out how to fold up the sides of the quilt while machine quilting and yet still get the material to fit under the arm of the sewing machine and around my lap at the same time.

Speaking of my brother…

This July is my parents 45th wedding anniversary. That’s a big one really so SOMETHING needs to be done. I have an idea, but due to circumstances, my brother is better placed to do all the work.

I did that to him for their 40th wedding anniversary too. I thought having a big dinner party at Oglebay for all their friends would be nice. But I live 6 hours away. And my brother does business with Oglebay so he could get a deal. And he knows my parents friends better than I do being that he stayed in our home down and I left when I was 18 and rarely returned for more than 48 hours. So he was in a better position to know what sort of dinner would be best & who to invite

So naturally it made sense for him to do most of the leg work of organizing & planning. I sent out the invitations.

I feel guilty dumping the work on my brother but really, my idea this year needs contacts, just like last time. I don’t have contacts in my hometown anymore. At one point a large number of my brother’s friends did not even know he had an older sister.

That is a measure of how fast I left town & how well I kept in touch with people.

I want to do a professional family photo session for my parents in July, up at Oglebay. (Our family photo from 1983 was taken there. I was married there. My brother had his wedding photos there. Lots of stuff in our lives happened there) We’ll all be in town for 4-5 days then and I think spending a couple hours getting individual, group & family photos would be a great gift. My  idea is that my brother & I pay for a large canvas of the whole family (or whatever size my folks want) and to have a bunch of photos of the kids and us for them and for us.

But my brother has to find the photographer. I know diddly about photographers in my hometown & being my brother probably he can get a deal on the cost.

I can’t do it because I am incompetent at the people skills the rest of my family enjoy.

But I am damn good at ideas.

Potluck Monday

I’m enjoying the randomness on Mondays. Takes the pressure off having to come up with a coherent post.

From jumping around other potlucks I’ve seen some topics I want to use & have some of my own so I made little buttons to remind myself to keep my randomness from getting to random as it were.

 

I’ve been doing more baking this week. I made more peasant bread and I came across this post at Bakerella and immediately got up from the computer and made them right then. This week I am going to make this chocolate cobbler recipe which I came across while the cookie bars were in the oven. Otherwise I would have gotten up from the computer and made it right then.

 

 

You may have read earlier where Havoc accidentally brought a toy gun to school & was suspended for half a day. Yeah. I am still in a full on panic about that. I keep constant track of all the Nerf guns in the house now. Even when I know they are not in his backpack I still have to go around and find them all before I can relax. 

Mayhem has finally broadened his tastes. He has finally decided on something other than peanut butter for sandwiches. For reasons unknown to me, he tried a ham & cheese sandwich at Subway last week and has developed an affinity for them. He’s had them for  dessert twice this week.

 

 

I’m reading a mystery novel written in the early 1950’s. It is full of the most amazing language. The sleuth is an Oxford don so he is very wordy in an erudite way. I have an index card full of multisyllabic words that I have only ever encountered in books, never heard spoken in conversation. My goal is use some of them myself. Right now I am deciding which I will try to use this week – peroration, a verb meaning to conclude a speech with a formal recapitulation or jejune, an adjective meaning dull, insipid, immature or lacking experience. Personally I have no idea how I’d manage to get peroration into a sentence let alone a conversation, so I’m probably going to go with jejune.

 

 

The boys’ bus is often late in the afternoons and I get anywhere from 2 to 10 minutes to just stand around at the end of my driveway and let my mind wander. Sometimes I’m not sure how it ends up where it does. One of our cats is named Smoke. She’s all grey & fuzzy so it was an obvious choice. So from time to time people no doubt hear me calling “Smoke! Smoke!” in a loud voice when she is outside. What if she was an orange cat? What if I had named her Fire? Legally, can you yell “Fire! Fire!” where other people can hear you, even if you are just calling a cat?

Weekly Winners

I’m behind on getting my photos out of my camera so I only have a few this week

I baked some bread

It rained

And some toys were left outside

For more weekly winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom

Thanks for stopping by!

Distraction.

When I posted the last post yesterday, one of the You Might Also Like options at the bottom was for a post i did on Mayhem’s 5th birthday last year. I clicked on it because I didn’t remember what I had written. In it were these two photos

Mayhem on his 4th birthday

And Mayhem on his 5th birthday

Then I clicked over to his 6th birthday post with this photo

He is wearing the exact same shirt in each photo!

And.

That shirt?

Belonged to Havoc for 2 years before Mayhem got it.

This means one of two things. Either I am hopeless at getting clothes that fit for my kids, or Mayhem just hasn’t grown that much in three years. It still looks too big on him. Look where the shoulders are. But he has grown 6 inches in that time! And it doesn’t look any bigger on him in the first photo. How does that work?

And what about that Wal Mart quality? Yes. That is a Faded Glory brand shirt in it’s 5th year of small boy wear.

Breaking News update!

Had the meeting & it went well. Apparently we were lucky to get the meeting today because it will be late next week before everyone can meet again & Havoc would have missed 7 days of school, putting him over the 10 he is allowed to miss & still pass 1st grade.

The school system has a zero tolerance policy but they also have a sense of perspective.

Havoc very honestly admitted the toy was his & was in his backpack & that he hadn’t brought it to school intentionally, it had just been left in there from the weekend.

This apparently made all the difference.

The whole situation was gone over in the meeting, everyone agreed with the series of events as related. They explained to Havoc why toy guns are not allowed in school, his perception being that it’s just against the rule, with no understanding of why.  I think mostly they were concerned that a rumor would go around that some kid had a gun on the bus and parents would be calling them up freaking about it (Naturally enough. I certain would had I heard that).

Havoc was allowed back to school right after the meeting, so he had a half day suspension. He’s has to meet with the guidance councilor to go over again the reasons why he shouldn’t bring toy guns, knives, swords etc to school.

Even lightsabers. This is not the Jedi academy.

I think I managed an air of suitable seriousness and gravity the whole time. Very hard for me because there is nothing like needing to be grave & serious to make me bust out in giggles. Nervous giggles. The bane of my existence. I’ve laughed during funerals. I can’t help it. It’s embarrassing. But my mind copes with stress by finding something funny & it’s very very good at finding funny things.

I was deeply concerned someone would mention Havoc’s ‘permanent record’ because for long & involved reasons I find those two of the funniest words in the English language and I know I would not have been able to stop myself giggling.

And you can’t explain believably that you are taking this seriously while you are giggling.

Plus I didn’t want Havoc to get the wrong impression. This was my first encounter with a disciplinary committee and I want it to be the last.

Havoc seems suitably impressed with the seriousness of the situation & I’ll be going all TSA on him in the mornings before he leaves the house. Hopefully it’s over, done with and we can all look back on it as a strange aberration in our lives that makes an interesting story some day.

I’m just waiting to see if the rumor of a gun on the bus gets started.

Breaking news

Havoc accidentally took a toy gun to school Monday among all the other toy crap in his backpack. The backpack is a bottomless pit (or was until about 5pm Monday evening). I don’t know how he or anyone else finds a damn thing in there, but apparently some other kid was digging through his backpack on the bus ride home (why?) & found it & then the bus driver saw and that sort of thing can’t be ignored.

He went to school Tuesday & the principal called me to tell me about how there has to be a disciplinary committee meeting & I’ll be getting a letter. At the very least he is suspended half a day today. We go to the meeting at 11am today to find out the full punishment. They understand he is a first grader & it was unintentional but policy must be followed. Probably he won’t be expelled but he could be suspended for a week.

I’m waiting to see how it goes before I have any reaction.

Because my gut reaction is humor and it’s no joking matter.

This is serious.

But I can’t help it, inappropriate jokes are all that are coming to mind right now.

It’s my defense mechanism.

 

More later as this story develops.

Monday Ramblings

It’s Monday and I am so wishing it was another weekend day.

DH went camping Saturday night and I never sleep well when he is gone. The boys were up at 6am as usual. They made me breakfast which was really sweet, but I didn’t actually get up until 7am, so that  was some soggy cereal.

I should plan my weekly menu but once again I am just not feeling it. I know I want to make lasagna one night & steak and pirogues. Havoc wants tacos too. Probably I should make something with chicken one night but I am so tired of chicken.

In baking news, Saturday I made the Pioneer Woman’s chocolate sheet cake. (I’m too tired to track down a link but it’ll pop right up if you google it). It was really good but apparently ‘sheet cake’ is a different size in her neck of the woods. Where I live it means 9x13 pan. Other places it means more like 12x15. So consequently l had to cook it twice as long.

It was still delicious though.

I made butter cream icing which I hadn’t had in years. The butter was too cold to cream with the sugar though so actually I had butter granule icing, which still was quite tasty.

Mayhem had gotten used to his shoes & they still fit.  He wants me to buy him some Star Wars toy or other but when told he had to be good a WHOLE WEEK to earn it promptly fell into hysterics because there is no way he can be good a WHOLE WEEK, the best he thinks he can manage is one afternoon & probably dinner.

Havoc now calls everything ‘Marmaduke’ instead of ‘hippie’. Apparently they have some sort of rota going in first grade for insults. He’s also reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid and had to be reminded not to call people ‘morons’ even if they do in the book.  But he understands that all sorts of things are allowed in fiction that would never pass muster in real life, so it’s not that big of a deal.

On the crafty side, I made a camera strap last week. I posted about it Saturday so if you go to my full feed and scroll down it should be there, if you are interested in my latest battle with my lifelong nemesis – the scissors. It’s a nice camera strap. I am going to make a couple more for gifts as soon as I buy a new rotary cutter.

We are halfway through re-watching Babylon 5 season 3 from Netflix but I keep forgetting to get the discs in the mail so it’s taking much much longer than watching Seasons 1 & 2 did. We own those. They were $20 a season when I bought them. Now, 5 months later, the exact same discs are selling for $52 a season. I would have bought the whole 5 seasons in December but I didn’t want to drop $125 at once. Now I wish I had because it will be another $150 to buy the remaining discs.

I’m off to the gym, grocery store, library & to pay the electric bill. Hope you all have a wonderful week!

Weekly Winners

For Star Wars Day (May 4th) we had blue milk with dinner

 

General Grievous tried to take over the train but the dinos were having none of it

And the Jedi took to the high seas in search of separatist pirates.

For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom.

Thanks for stopping by!

Sewing Saturday

I had another encounter with my nemesis the scissors this week.

I decided it was time to make a new & better fitting camera strap.

I used to be a quilter. I had a rotary cutter, a large cutting mat, several large quilting rulers, all things to make the cutting of fabric as easy as possible.

It’s been 5 years since I last made a blanket and 7 months since I cleaned the junk room.  I can find the mat & I can find spare parts to the cutter. But I cannot find the rotary cutter itself or any of the rulers.

I have to use scissors to cut anything & that is always a recipe for disaster.

But surely even I can manage two 12 inch cuts and 2 3 inch cuts right? Especially if I use a regular ruler to draw the line and then pin the fabric together.

Then I sewed the two strips together and ironed on some fuseable fleece for padding

Can I just say that the lighting in my craft room sucks? There is the bright light over the craft table that makes you cast shadows on what you are trying to see and then the bulb in the sewing machine died & I can’t find a replacement (it’s a freaking Singer! there should be replacement bulbs everywhere!) so I have to use the only desk lamp I have, which is actually intended to help you cross stitch and is technically and ‘overhead’ type and gives this light because there is no way to angle it.

But I persevered!

I hemmed the edges of the strap & then sewed the sides closed. I even added a pocket

The pocket is about an eight of an inch too small. (note to self 3.5”x3'”, not 3x3 next time) but you can get the cap in with a bit of work

the finished product

I like it better that my previous one which was pretty much a tight fitting badly hemmed tube.

I was going for a less girly strap. Plaid is manly right?

Apparently not plaid with pink stripes.

So I will be making a second one, if I can find a fabric in my stash DH approves of.

Possibly leopard print.

But first I am buying a new rotary cutter & quilting ruler.