Excitement abound! New reading week project!!

I'm generally not a crafty person. Sometimes I'll make something and it'll actually look good, and then it will fall apart a few days later. Usually when I try to cook a new and exciting recipe, I burn it. But I still dream about being able to create something beautiful, and those dreams are inspired by all the interior design and home improvement blogs I have been following lately. I think I'm ready for another attempt at craftiness this coming week. The following is a much better-looking version of what my Reading Week 2010 project will be:



And this is where I got the idea from. Manhattan Craft Room is a recent addition to my home improvement blog collection, and with this quilt tutorial, I think I am finally ready to attempt my long-awaited

Alpha Phi T-shirt Quilt!

Here's the background story: Throughout my four years at Wilfrid Laurier University, I was a member of a wonderful and prestigious sorority called Alpha Phi. I could go on forever about how the sorority came to be and what its all about, but I'll just tell you that it's probably the most fantastic thing I've ever been a part of. First of all, I met my wonderful boyfriend through one of my sisters. That in itself is pretty darn awesome. Secondly, I am using the skills and confidence that I cultivated by being part of Alpha Phi over the years to succeed in the field of Public Relations and Communications. Heck, if I wasn't in Alpha Phi, I don't even know if I would have paid attention to PR as a possible career path at all. To put it simply, Alpha Phi got me through university and made me the person I am today, and I'm excited for this project because it will be somewhat immortalizing the love that I have for this organization.

Since joining Alpha Phi in 2005, I have collected upwards of 20 t-shirts with my Greek letters on the front: ΑΦ. Now that I have graduated from WLU, I now have a ton of t-shirts that do not really have that much of a purpose anymore. I have a couple of shirts with just my letters on the front, but the rest are themed with whatever event they were made for, and so I cannot really see myself wearing them again unless they are underneath another shirt, which defeats the purpose altogether. So I am taking inspiration from a few of my other sisters who have done this, and I am going to make a quilt using the fronts and backs of all these shirts, so I can display them with pride and make use of them forever.

Now I bet you're wondering, have I ever made a blanket before in my life? An even better question I bet you're asking is whether or not I've ever used a sewing machine. Well, my answer to both those questions is "no", but there's no time like the present to learn. I won't be doing anything fancy like someone who has experience with quilting. This will be a super basic blankie but I'm going to use some fun materials, including my old hot-pink toga.

Oh man, SUPER excited for this. I'll be blogging as I go, just because I want to and I'm sure you're all just itching for me to get started on this so you can follow me on my journey.

Tonight: Wash and dry all my shirts, plan what materials I would need, decide what size squares I want to make out of my shirts. Talk to the mommy, who knows how to use the sewing machine and can therefore show me how to use it without sewing my fingers to my blankie.

Tomorrow: Visit a fabric store to find something awesome for the back of my blankie.

If you have experience making quilts or blankets, and have any advice at all as to how I could go about working with the t-shirt material or whatever, please shoot me a comment. I would appreciate the help!

Happy Thursday, everyone!

♥♥♥
Monica

An Exercise in Assessing the Self

This is the blog post where I tell you my life story. Maybe it’s because this blog is all about me, maybe it’s for a school assignment (hint: it’s the latter). But anyway, here is the “about the author” page of this great and epic internetual novel.

I was born on a rainy Monday in 1986. It was a good year, or so I am told, but I unfortunately was far too young to enjoy the neon-spandexed glory of the 80’s. So I had to settle for building most of my childhood memories in the 90’s, living in the same house from the day I was born until the day I moved out to start university. I grew up playing soccer and violin, eventually adding in flute and a couple of other musical instruments. Some of my other delightful childhood experiences included the following:





I was a true keener in my early years of my schooling, which is another way of saying that I was totally uncool. I wore pink from head to toe, socks over my tights, and my hair in a mushroom cut. I craved attention and obtained it by doing extremely weird things. You could say I was a bit hyperactive but I balanced it out by kicking butt in my classes. Back in those days, I wanted to be a member of several professions including medicine, teaching, and stay-at-home motherhood. Oh the ambitious days of my youth.

By the time I started university in 2005, I had cut medicine and stay-at-home motherhood from my list of career paths. I was really leaning towards teaching because, well, that was the only legit career path I ever thought I really had. I helped teach music in middle school, so naturally I wanted to be a teacher, right? And I was taking English and History in university so of course I wanted to be a teacher, right? Well, it certainly helps if you’re 100% sure and I actually wasn’t, and so towards the end of 3rd year I knew that I wanted something different out of life. I mean if you’re in a career watching over kids five days a week, you better darn well be positive that you are where you want to be, or you are going to be one awful teacher. Like my first-grade teacher who I’m pretty sure took her misery out on me. It could have also been because I preferred to finish my work early and do somersaults on the carpet while the other kids were still scribbling away. Elementary school was a cakewalk.

The decision to abandon teaching left me scared and confused because I literally had no path to walk on after graduation. Real life was approaching quickly and I was so not ready for it. What the heck else was I good at? I started to make a list. Hmmmm well I like to talk. Great. That’s a starting point. I talk a lot. I ramble, even. Assuming you’ve read my other posts, you know that I enjoy a good ramble. This post in itself is another case in point.

Next, I looked back at the things I enjoyed doing when I was a kid. Creative things. Reading, writing, making things up for the whole world to see. I had such a crazy and imaginative mind when I was younger, what happened to all that? I came to the realization that academia more or less stifled my creative spirit. Everything always had to be so formal, so strict, so structured. That’s completely fine if you can thrive in that environment and if you see a worthwhile future in it, but what I really needed was to be able to start doing those creative things again in order to feel fulfilled in my career. That’s how I came to discover Public Relations.

So here I am now at Mohawk College, studying PR and actually enjoying what I am learning for the first time in years. I love coming up with innovative ways to communicate. I love that I can finally bring a little bit of my personality to the table. I’ve learned skills that are actually applicable to a real career path, which is completely different for me. Towards the end of university I felt like I didn't know what I was there for anymore. But now, for the first time I feel like I’m heading in a good direction because I WANT to be going there, not because I don’t know what else to do.

In one year I want to be working as a public relations professional, preferably doing something that involves a lot of writing. Maybe internal/employee communications? PR is such a broad career field, which is kind of daunting at times but usually very exciting since I know I will be able to find a job that suits my skills and interests perfectly.

In three years I hope to be in some sort of leadership role, perhaps running a team or department that deals with communications for a company or government body. It sounds super ambitious for someone who doesn’t have a whole lot of experience eh? Well where I’m hoping to go (Fort McMurray, Alberta, where the wonderful boyfriend lives) I know that there will be a ridiculous amount of opportunity for me to advance in my career quickly.

In five years I would like to be living back in Ontario, or at least thinking of moving back there soon. I’m sure living in northern Alberta will be sweet and all, but I definitely don’t want to be away from my family for my whole life. But by the time I get back to Ontario, I will have a wealth of knowledge to bring with me to my next job.

Finally, in 10 years I want to be a millionaire with a rollercoaster in my backyard and my own personal McDonalds. Lindsay Lohan will be BEGGING me for PR advice on how to break back into movies when you’re 33 but looking like 50. I will be sipping my first martini at 11 am and I will have a bodyguard who follows me everywhere carrying my cat.

Just kidding. In all honesty, all I want is a job that challenges me and sends me different things every day, yet is still stable enough for me to settle down and have a family. As crazy as the PR biz seems to be, I don’t think that is too much to hope for. Full-time motherhood might make an appearance somewhere in there too.

The End.

No one can ever call me lazy again!

Happy Monday, everyone!

This has been my most productive Monday EVER! And that's even with the fact that I woke up at 11 AM. Why? Because I took it upon myself to clean my ENTIRE kitchen! It took me over 6 hours of solid back-breaking and foot-aching labour to clean that darn thing and I'll be so cross if it gets messy again tomorrow. So here's how it went down.

I fell in love with the Design Sponge blog, which has a lot of really awesome DIY projects, crafts and general cool stuff you can do for your house and I got THIS idea for organizing all my takeout menus:



Cute eh? So my first step was to pull all of the menus out of one of the kitchen drawers. That drawer has generally been a complete mess since forever so naturally the menus were all over the place. But as I kept digging deeper, I began to find some really appalling things and that's where it snowballed. I ended up taking EVERYTHING out of the drawer, washed all of the utensils (it was more or less being used for the barbeque accessories), washed the drawer itself, and then put everything back in, but in a nice order. And I threw about half of the stuff out in the process. I also found about $66 worth of Canadian Tire money. Yay me!

But then I realized that it could not stop there. If THAT drawer was in that disgusting state, that means the OTHER drawers must need some loving too. And so for the next several hours I went drawer by drawer, taking everything out, washing everything, then putting it back in a more coherent order. And now everything in my kitchen has a designated spot, I can see the back of the counter again in one spot, and I found about 30 pens that I never knew I had.

After all that was finished, I was finally able to make my takeout menu binder, which my brother promptly used to order Chinese food. Yummmmmmm. And I'm thinking of taking the Canadian Tire money as a commission.

So that was my productive day. I realize now that I probably should have channeled my productivity towards my homework or better yet, my pigsty of a room, but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

♥♥♥

Monica


p.s. Taylor Swift beat out Beyonce and Lady GaGa for Album of the Year at last night's Grammy's. Suck on THAT, Kanye.