Quiltypost #6- Almost there!!

I am SO CLOSE to being finished my blankie! Which is awesome, because I am moving across the country in just ONE WEEK, so the sooner I finish my blankie, the sooner I can start packing for the move. Priorities, I has them.

Here are a couple of teaser photos. Since the last time I posted pictures, I have sewn all of the squares together and then sewn those squares onto a pink quilt backing that has batting in it (to make the blankie nice and warm). The remaining steps now are to sew the ribbons of material that I cut from my old toga onto the edges of the blankie as trim, as well as up and down the lines of the squares to hide where I obviously measured wrong and have miss-matching corners.


Casper informed me that he would in no way make it easy for me to do work on the basement floor. He sat, rolled around, and chewed on my blankie every time I laid it down to pin it.



Pagan did too, until i distracted her with a much more fun BOX to play in!



Excess backing material has been cut away to reveal the beautiful shape of the blankie!



Next step: Create ribbons of trim from my pink toga. For around the edge of the blanket, I cut 3" strips and for the inside grid, I cut 2" strips.

Tomorrow, I'll be ironing the edges of the strips under so that they make ribbons with even sides. If time permits, I'll start sewing the inner grid strips. Hopefully I'll have this done by Wednesday!

I haven't had much time to work on my Ultimate To-Do List yet, unless you count my to-do list for moving. I suppose that would be a good start and you better believe I'll be blogging about that. There actually isn't a whole lot for me to do before I leave, at least nothing that can't be done after I get there. Everything is happening so fast. I finish my Public Relations course on Thursday, my last shift at work is on Friday, and then I have Saturday and Sunday to finalize preparations and then I'm gone on Monday morning. Sayonara, Ontario! Kind of scary, but exhilarating at the same time. Maybe it's how those people who all of a sudden sell all their things and go live in the mountains feel. I'm not selling anything and I'm definitely not living in the mountains but the idea of dropping pretty much everything and moving across the country is a bit too big for me to handle right now. I will probably have a massive freakout the day that I leave.

I really shouldn't be blogging right now. I should be studying for my test tomorrow morning or, better yet, SLEEPING. Oh yea, I am getting a horrible cold and I just know that despite my best efforts, it's going to get way worse before it gets better. Okay, I'm not in a great mood right now (9 hours at work in a mall on a P.A. Day will do that to you), but I'll be much much happier once my blankie is FINISHED!!

Goodnight!!

♥♥♥
Monica

Quiltypost #5- Birthdays are good days to get stuff done.

I'm almost done my blankie! I have sewn all the squares to the backing, so now it's just finishing touches like the trim! I'm super excited to finally be done. I hope I can find room in my suitcase to bring it to Fort Mac!

I took pictures of the progress I've made today but I won't post it until it's all completely done. I'm also way too tired.

It's my 24th birthday and I'm going to bed before 10 pm. Don't judge me.

♥♥♥
Monica

Someday...

I think the first thing on my Ultimate To-Do list is to visit Paris. I haven't even been off the North American continent before! (Unless you count the time I was pretty far from the coast of PEI for deep-sea fishing)

As I was reading my favourite blogs on Google Reader before class, I found this wonderful photographer's work posted on Design Sponge:

Marc Olivier took about ten years to compile photographs that depict letters of the alphabet throughout the city of Paris. If I wasn't completely in love with Paris before, I am now. Check out his work, he also sells his prints. I can't wait until I have disposable income so I can snatch up a bunch of his work. I would post a couple of teaser pictures on here except he very understandably has his work copyrighted.

So someday, folks. Someday I'll make my way to Paris, and I will visit every location where these photos were taken (if I can find them!). Dream big.

Have a great day!

♥♥♥
Monica

Excitement abound! New life project!

So I watched Julie and Julia with my mom yesterday, and at first I was depressed because the movie made me want to blog but I realized that I don't really have much to blog ABOUT. I mean yea, I'm blogging about my quilt and stuff that makes me laugh but what about AFTER I'm done my quilt?

I've also been debating whether or not to make the move to Wordpress so I could have maybe a more sophisticated coded layout. I was talking about this with the wonderful boyfriend and we actually came up with an awesome idea for a new blog! I am going to create a massive list of things to do, see and try and I am going to blog about each thing I accomplish on the list! I googled blogs with this theme and surprisingly, there isn't really much out there with this specific purpose! There are blogs that post lists, but that's really about it.

I created my blog today over on Wordpress, but it is still under construction:

The List Goes On

How cool is THAT for a name?

Now don't worry, folks. I'm not abandoning this blog just yet. I will still be blogging here while I finish my blankie and find funny stuff on the internet, but The List Goes On will be the blog just for this specific project. It will also take a long time for the blog to actually get up and running because I don't even have my ultimate to-do list compiled yet! I have a list of lists to incorporate:

-recipes to try
- movies to watch
- books to read
- musicians to listen to
- museums to visit
- destinations to visit
- games to play
- alcoholic beverages to try
- miscellaneous things like random life goals and whatnot.

If any of you have ideas of what to include on this Ultimate To-Do list, please comment and let me know!

It's now 1:30 AM and I can't feel my face. Time for bed!

♥♥♥ Monica

p.s. Hope everyone had a very nice Easter weekend!

Quiltypost #4: Monday's are not lazy.

Usually.

But yesterday was definitely a very productive day! I FINALLY got all of my quilt squares sewn together! I had to wait an extra day because my last machine needle broke, so I had to wait for my mom to pick me up some more. But yes, the squares are all sewn together and it looks FANTASTIC!!

Next step now is to go to a fabric store and pick out something for the back side of the quilt, as well as picking up some batting for inside the quilt. Unfortunately due to work and the mommy's work, I'll have to wait until next week for that. But that's okay because they way things are moving now, I could potentially have this thing done by April 10th! That's definitely what I'm aiming for anyway.

In other news, I got an awesome job lead yesterday and I'm super pumped and excited and optimistic about it! In this job, I would be doing communications for an event management company in Fort Mac! Sick opportunity! It's very easy for me to get my hopes up. So I have. They're right up there now but I'm still keeping my cool and looking at other opportunities as well. Gotta be optimistic but realistic, you know?

I haven't done this in a while, but since I haven't had anything visual in my blogs lately, here is a list of my favourite things I've seen on the interwebz!


My friend Scott send me this! So great!


Do you remember AIR PLANTS? Those things were so cool!!


Apartment Therapy
My new favourite blog at the moment. Still lots of mid-century ugly modern crap and white walls, but at least there is a LOT of variety of other things



Using dice on a letterpress!
I'm not a big fan of the orange, but I'm digging the prints that Stukenborg is producing for his Etsy shop.




How pretty are floating shelves? The place I hope to move into when I get to Fort Mac is super small, so I'm going to have to maximize my storage space without buying a lot of furniture. Shelves will be key.

Too tired to go on. You get the point, I think a lot of things are cool and I'm getting way too excited about moving to Alberta. If I don't get this job, I will cry for a week.

Goodnight, folks!

♥♥♥ Monica

Quiltypost #3- Peacetime

Huzzah! The grandmother's sewing machine is in fact of a much better quality than my mom's! I have gotten more done in the past couple of days than I have in the past three weeks! This is a great feeling. It's so much easier to sew things when the sewing machine works. Whee! I have the backing sewn onto all of my squares, I have numbered them in order of the colour pattern that I want, and I have sewn the first row together! Yayyyyy!! If Ashley doesn't call me soon so we can go get drunk, I might just sew into the wee hours of the morning.

Oohhh I was so tempted to take pictures of my squares all laid out and show it on here, but I decided against it. From here on in, I'm going to keep you in suspense.

Got in contact with Ashley. Further sewage (hahahaha words) will have to wait for tomorrow!

♥♥♥

Update from the battlefield

I don't know if I have lost the war because I am giving up on my sewing machine, or if I've won it because I'm taking the high road and walking away. I guess it doesn't really matter, because my sewing machine is an inanimate object and therefore does not have feelings. I do, however. I was at my wits end tonight trying to sew more squares. I bought this big spool of heavy-duty thread only to find out that it was too big to fit onto the top of my sewing machine! It wasn't rotating properly, which was causing the thread to snap. I almost snapped.

So my mom, hearing my cries of frustration and rage, called my grandmother and she's going to pick up HER sewing machine tomorrow. I'm going to go ahead and assume that it is a slightly better quality, or at least not worse. If it's the same quality with the same problems, I'll just have to deal with it I guess. If it's better quality though, that would be ideal. Cause you know, I'd like to finish this thing before I move out of the province...

In midst of duking it out with my dollar-store sewing machine, I had a bit of a breakdown and convinced myself that if I couldn't make a sewing machine work, I couldn't do ANYTHING. The wonderful boyfriend cheered me up later,though, explaining to me that I am in fact good at many things including baking and conversation. He can always cheer me up. ♥

So yes, the blanket is still a work in progress but at least I haven't set it on fire. Yet.

♥♥♥

Monica

Quiltypost #2- This means WAR

I have declared war against my sewing machine and thread. Honestly, it shouldn't be this difficult. I'm not a totally incompetent person. Sure, I often look at crafts other people make and think "Wow, I could do that!" and then they fail miserably, but this is just ridiculous. It doesn't help that my thread came from the dollar store (and it feels like the friggin' sewing machine did too), it breaks every few inches and for some reason the machine is staining my thread SOMEWHERE, so it is coming out grey. I have a total of six squares sewn, and I've been at it all afternoon. And they're a mess. I'd take a sewing course at the local college but I'm pretty sure they'd kick me out on grounds of utter failure at life.

It doesn't help that I've been feeling pretty stupid in general lately. Nothing seems to be going my way. Looks like I'm destined for flipping burgers. But I haven't tried that yet, and I'd most likely suck at it anyway.

Ugh. Tomorrow I'm going to buy some GOOD thread that costs maybe more than 69 cents, maybe this one wont break every few inches. Of course if its the sewing machine that's the problem, then good thread wont matter anyway, the project's in the shitter.

Might as well go do some homework before I fail out of PR too.

UGH.

Monica

Yay for progress!

I'm finally ready to start sewing my squares together! Things are finally starting to come together and I'm really excited about this. Hopefully I'll have my squares nice and sewn by next week!! If I didn't have work, school and homework, this would be done a lot sooner.

Side note, I'm drinking champagne in class. Who cares if it's non-alcoholic? Celebrate today!

♥♥♥

Monica

Hello Hello Hello!

So I FINALLY got around to doing some work on my blankie today! I'm still just in the process of sewing the little cotton backings onto my squares to keep them from stretching and moving around too much when I sew the actual squares together. Hopefully that process will be done in the next day or two and the mommy can finally teach me how to use the sewing machine. Silly things like school and visiting my friends got in the way of me getting much more progress done but I'm confident that things will really get rolling once I learn how to use that darn machine.

Another silly thing getting in the way would be my job search. I'll be graduating from my PR program in something like 6 weeks (eek!) so I've been applying to jobs like crazy! No word back from them yet though, which is a bit disappointing but I know how long it takes to get a job anywhere nowadays. I have a couple of good ones that I'm going to apply to tomorrow so I'm hoping that I'll be able to get out of this dusty old town upon graduation. Whee!

Just so you have a little bit more than a mundane update on my life, here is a list of animals that I have every intention of having as pets someday:

10 Weird Miniature Versions of Normal Animals

And as a preview:



Lofty dreams have I.

♥♥♥
Monica