Saturday, June 30, 2012

June Monthly Recap

Recap:

Read:
1. The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett
2. Just Patty by Jean Webster
3. When Patty Goes to College by Jean Webster
4. The Next Full Moon by Carolyn Turgeon
5. Rubert of Hentzau by Anthony Hope
6. Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the U'bervilles by Kim Newman
7. Courtship and Curses by Marissa Doyle
8. The Jewel of the Seven Stars by Bram Stoker (1903/1912, revised version of book and the original ending)
9. Farewell My Concubine by Lilian Lee
10. Studio Ghibli: The Films of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahato by Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc
11. Cuore (Heart): An Italian Schoolboy's Journal by Edmonds De Amicis
12. Jerry by Jean Webster
13. King Solomon's Mines by Henry Rider Haggard

Stitching:
1. Started Peace Sampler by Carol Emmer

Crafts:
Lots of polymer clay
1. Cake
2. Lollipop
3. Two onigiri
4. Three bubble teas
5. Bunny sushi
6. Two tofu cubes
7. Two robots

A productive month with lots of polymer clay charms and reading through many books. Did I tell you that I have a Kindle? Yes, I know. I can hear the groans in the audience. A bookworm has converted to a Kindle! But no, that isn't the case. My sister's friend gave her a Kindle for Christmas, but she absolutely refuses to use it. She asked me if I wanted to have it as I was thinking of getting one. I use mine to read OOP/hard to find classic titles that my local library doesn't have. And the best part is the price.........absolutely FREE as they are old enough to be in the public domain.

With the copy of The Shuttle, it is still being printed today. I actually have a physical copy of the book, but the print was so small when I received the copy in the mail that I was glad to find an electronic version of it to read on my Kindle. If you love Frances Hodgson Burnett and haven't had the chance to read The Shuttle, I recommend it a thousand times over. It is a fantastic read.

I think the geekiest read over the month was The Hound of the U'bervilles by Mr. Newman. It is a parody of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels from the point of view of Professor Moriarty and his henchman Captain Moran.

The only disappointing part of the book is the fact that I don't think normal readers would enjoy the story and humor of the book if they haven't read the Holmes Canon or any other 19th century stories that were parodized in the book. Some titles include The Prisoner of Zenda, The Jewel of Seven Stars, and others. I did like the fact that after reading the book I wanted to read some of the other titles that were parodized as in The Jewel of Seven Stars.

Goals for July: more charms, which I hope to add to my Etsy shop. And hopefully making more progress on the Peace Sampler.

Until next time ^____^

Dracula's Bad Hair Day



Do you guys remember the Halloween grow-a-head kit that Amanda had sent me a while back? Well, I finally set him up and here is the progress. The hair is actually quite fluffy, but I had just soaked his head in water. His expressive eyes say it all, "I'm having a bad hair day."

Until next time ^_____^

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Courtship and Curses

Earlier in June, I was lucky enough to win a giveaway from one of my favorite history blogs on the nineteenth century, Nineteen Teen. On this blog, the lovely ladies, Marissa Doyle and Regina Scott, contribute various topics related to the history of the time period with anything from a butler’s role in the household, quirky slang words used in conversations, or fashion plates of the period.



I received an advance reader’s edition of Courtship & Curses, a door hanger, wooden fan, and book art magnet in the giveaway. As if I needed more luck!, I happened to finish a book the day before I received the giveaway goodies in the mail so after ripping through the package, I could immediately step into the world of Marissa Doyle’s magical London.

This story is a delightful romp through Regency England in 1815 with an interesting cast of characters from the young witch Lady Sophronia Rosier (Sophie for short), her incorrigible friend Lady Parthenope Hardcastle, and Parthenope’s handsome cousin Lord Peregrine Woodbridge.

Sophie attains her first ball of the London season hoping to avoid the populace at large by hiding amongst the other wallflowers, not to mention potted plants! Unfortunately, she can’t always have what she wants as her father and another member of the War Cabinet are attacked at the ball. As a witch, she can tell that the attack is magical in nature and she is determined to find out who is behind the attack and those to follow.

To complicate the matter, she is introduced to handsome grey-eyed Lord Woodbridge and his fun-loving cousin, Lady Parthenope. (A young lady who knows how to box and has a habit of teaching her parrot some very non lady-like language!)

With the help of these two new friends, Sophie is pushed headlong into an adventure that spans from London to Brussels in search of the culprit of the magical attacks and in the meantime learns that she is beautiful and capable of anything despite her injury due to illness.

This book is scheduled to hit the shelves in August. If you are a fan of Regency England, magic, and romance, this book is a winner! Definitely a worthy addition to the author’s other YA Regency books, Betraying Season and Bewitching Season.

Until next time ^____^

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Cross stitching weekend!







This weekend I made a lot of progress on the Peace Sampler. I don't care much for the lettering throughout the sampler so after stitching one line of it, I skipped ahead and counted down to start the bee motif blocks and alphabet lettering line.

I hope to get this part finished this week if possible ;)

Until next time ^_____^

Robots, tofu, and bubble tea!

More charms this morning. With these charms I had a failure due to my dismal drawing skills and two charms that didn't turn out well. But that's the okay, just means more work with clay!

Here are my successes ;)



I love these robots. I used red glitter and blue glitter Premo polymer clay and instead of drawing on eyes, I used a tiny bit of black clay. I switched up their hearts to give them a different color.



Cute tofu cubes with green leaves. I made these using translucent and green translucent polymer clay. For these charms, I used acrylic paints for the details.



The tofu cubes are mesmerized by the bubble tea!



The robots love it too :)

Until next time ^_____^

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Too Cute!

I found a moment to gloss my charms! So here are the photos ;)


Swirl lollipop


A gentleman onigiri


A happy onigiri


Bunny sushi bum O_o"


Bunny sushi


Bubble tea #1


Bubble tea #2

Working with polymer clay, I've figured out a few more things:

1. Baby wipes are great for cleaning your work area when switching between colors and not to mention your hands.

2. Wearing gloves when working with white clay is great to get spotless clay. I had trouble with white clay the first time I worked with it as everything that could get in it seemed to be in there like lint or dirt even when I thought my hands were clean!

3. Practicing with paints, Sharpies, etc. on paper before drawing faces or details on your clay is a good idea.

4. My favorite type of clay is Premo as it is ready to work with out of the package. Sculpey isn't bad, but needs conditioning. Kato is the worst type of clay to buy. I had bought a pack of the brown clay to make icing for a cake, but after 10+ minutes of trying to condition it, I give it up as a lost cause.

I can't wait to work some more clay this weekend ;)

Until next time ^____^

Birthday fun!

Good morning! I thought I'd post some more birthday goodies today. My friend Kristina's birthday (another fellow 30 year old!) was on Saturday and since both our birthdays are so close, our friends celebrate them together.

This year we went by our friend Candace's house to celebrate. We ripped through wrapping paper for our gifts (or at least I ripped through them!) before we had Chinese food and watched an anime movie called Red Line.

First off:



From Bonnie I received a manga that I had on my wishlist. I used to collect quite a few series when I was in undergrad, but after being in England for a year, I got out of the habit because I didn't want to lug everything back with me to the US! So now I'm down to maybe three or four series that I actively collect. I also love to collect illustrated adaptations of literary classics.

She also got me a lovely puzzle of an English village!



Candace also got me two things from my wishlist, The Jane Austen Cookbook and The Inheritance DVD. I can't wait to look through the book! Have any of you tried any of the recipes in the book? The DVD is a film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's book The Inheritance. Do you remember when the book came out several years ago? It was quite good ;)



Lots of goodies from Kristina!~ A star ice cube mold (perfect for resin work!), Once Upon A Time collection of fairy tales, a Hello Kitty keychain and notepad, and a book of Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes.

As a lot of you know, I love to collect fairy tale books especially vintage or antique ones. Kristina found this collection of Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes while she was on one of her trips for her archiving job. Each page it read vertically with an illustration and English text in the center and the Chinese characters running down the page on either side.

In my wrapping frenzy of Kristina's gifts, I forgot to take a picture of them! Silly me! But I got her a cross stitch magazine (the same one that Amanda sent me!), a Japanese language learning CD, a Russian nesting doll of a Japanese geisha, a black ceramic good luck kitty, and the K-Pop tote bag that I had made. My friend Amanda gave her one of the cute amigurumi fortune cookies, the pale pink one, as a gift ;)

As if gifts, yummy food, and movies weren't enough, Kristina wanted to go bowling for her birthday. She was hoping to go midnight bowling, but with work looming at 6am, we decided to go bowling for a couple of hours.



Do you love our shoes? LOL We had finished putting our shoes and I looked down and thought what a great photo it would make so we all got in a circle for a photo ;) Talk about Ronald shoes for sure!

We had so much fun goofy off and bowling that we will definitely have to do it again, but for the midnight bowling, which is a better deal for the price!!

Thanks for the great birthday celebration!

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Hanging Charms

Good morning....soon to be afternoon! Yes, you read that correctly, hanging charms. While I was at Michael's yesterday I saw something in the cake section that would make a good hanging apparatus for my charms so I had to get it.



It is actually suppose to be used for hanging gum paste flowers when making cakes, but it works so well with my charms while they are drying from applications of clay gloss or acrylic paint ;)

This morning I made the following charms:

2 onigiri
2 boba tea drinks
1 bunny sushi

I've been watching video tutorials online. I saw a cute one on making a cat sushi using cold porcelain and thought how awesome it would be to make one out of polymer clay, but making it a bunny instead ;)

I love boba tea (i.e. bubble tea) so I had to make a few of those charms! It's a darn shame that we don't have a shop that sells boba tea here! I always have to drink my fill of it when I go out to CA to visit Amanda. She would be sad if I said it was the only reason I came out to CA.....she knows that isn't true, but it is a plus ;)

Right now, my charms are drying and I still need to add a coat of polymer gloss so it will be a while before I take photos of them completed.

I hope you are enjoying the day with your family on this Father's Day!

Until next time ^____^

Thursday, June 14, 2012

♥ ♥ ♥ Bunny Package ♥ ♥ ♥

Hi, again! I received a birthday package from my friend Amanda yesterday in the mail ;) It was full of bunnies and crafting goodies!



First off, a super cute bunny birthday card and stationery with the initial R.



A geeky bunny shirt! LOL



A set of bunny plates and portable chopsticks. The chopsticks come apart and can be carried around in the metal container. (I think my friend is secretly telling me that I need to practice my chopstick handling, which is quite horrible....just so you know!)



I'm not sure where she found this, but it's cute! A bunny night light. Does a 30 year old need a light? Absolutely! Especially when you have a cat that loves to sit in the hallway at night and blend in to the carpet!!



A Ty bunny, a beautiful Swarovski crystal Thumper charm, and a bunny girl cell phone charm ;)



Bunny girl cell phone charm close up!



Halloween necklace (too cute) and some pineapple cakes ;)



Crafting goodies! A UK cross stitch magazine, a size G crochet hook, and some knitting/crochet markers.

All I can say is THANK YOU! And that you certainly know how to spoil someone ;)

Until next time ^____^

The Big One!

This week I celebrated my 30th birthday! Say Woot! Yes, indeed.



My coworkers apparently couldn't resist doing something for my birthday even though I said it wasn't necessary. I received a box of orange chocolates from my coworker in my office and then a card (with a creepy clown inside!) and a pack of crackers from my other coworker in another office. LOL She said she was being cheap so I got one of her packs of crackers as a present :P

After work, my family and I went out to eat at Cracker Barrel for dinner and then headed home to destroy wrapping paper! Sweet ;)



I think the cards are the best part, especially when you have such a range of card buyers. My mom and aunt always buy the heartfelt, warm and fuzzy ones, while my sister always goes for the horribly funny ones. Her card this year made note that she was thankful that I planted the redwood trees! LOL Thanks a lot ;)

My mighty haul of books/DVDs!


An assortment of books!


Amigurumi books ;)


Embroidery history and polymer clay and felt craft books!


Fairy tales: two more Andrew Lang books to add to my collection (I can't afford the lovely set from Easton press!) and a set of Hans Christian Anderson's animated fairy tales!


It wouldn't be a celebration without some Sherlock Holmes....


And a bunny!

My aunt got me this cute little ceramic bunny. He is perfect because I have a tinier one on my bookshelf. They are rather cute together because they look like they are telling gossip. I think the gossip must be that I'm thirty ;) Not pictured is a really cute coffee mug that says 'Thirty Flirty!'


Birthday cake from Marble Slab Creamery! Yum!

Do you love the cake? I didn't think I was going to have any cake. I made the mistake of going in the kitchen to get something to drink out of the fridge and I didn't see any cake in there. No, really, I swear that I wasn't checking out the fridge to see if there was cake! But I was thinking to myself that I was glad we didn't have a cake because we ate so much at the restaurant.

Later on after I finished opening presents and was talking to my aunt, I could hear my sister and mom giggling like mad in the kitchen. They came into the living room bearing this cake. I could hardly blow out the candles because I started laughing over the candle in the middle, I was like, "Is that a question mark?!"

They said they couldn't find a number 3 candle and saw the question mark and thought it would be perfect. And I must say that it is perfect ;)

Thanks everyone for making my Big One special >____<

Until next time ^____^

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Peace progress




My slow progress so far ;)

Until next time ^____^

Charms

Good evening! It has been raining cats and dogs here for several days now. I won't complain too much though as we have been needing some rain for a while.

This morning I thought I'd have some fun with polymer clay. I've been watching tutorials online all week, marveling at all the wonderful things you can make from clay ;)

Here are my first attempts:



I was a bit too enthusiastic when I was twisting and rolling the layers together on this lollipop O_o"



I was going to make a rainbow layered cake, but I decided to go with red cake layers instead since I already had one layer of red cut out. I definitely needed to needle the red layers to give them more texture next time.

All in all, I had fun with this charms. It was a great way to spend a rainy morning.

I had picked up a lot of different colors last year for a project that never panned out so I didn't have to buy much else, but the sculpting tools, etc.

A good many of my clay packs are Premo brand, which I like a lot better than Sculptey even though they are made by the same company. The Premo brand is easy to use straight out of the package, while Sculptey takes a lot of conditioning to make it workable for sculpting.

I might play with some more clay next weekend. I'll have to run by Michael's and pick up some Sculptey gloss glaze and some Premo white clay.

Until next time ^____^

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Peace Sampler

As promised, photos of my progress so far.




Design: Peace Sampler by Carol Emmer, JCS May/June 2012 issue
Fabric: 32ct cream Belfast Wichelt linen
Threads: DMC
Start: 5/29/2012


I wasn't kidding when I said that I didn't have alot stitched on this design. You know what I'm talking about if you've seen the design in that issue of JCS.

Until next time ^_____^

Kawaii

Good afternoon! I hope you are enjoying a wonderful day with crafting or spending time with family, etc.

Today I decided to make a tote bag. I used a pink tote bag, iron-on transfer lettering in glittery blue, and iron-on crystals in a peacock color that I got half-off at Hobby Lobby.

Viola! Kawaii if I don't say so myself. Though I wish I knew the word for 'cute' in Korean because that would be more appropriate since it is a Korean pop music tote bag :P


The photo is cute dark, but the color is the same as the Tree Star tote bag I made last month!



I didn't have any dashes in the letter set for 'K-Pop'.....and now that I think about it, I could have just cut one of the letter 'I's in half. LOL Don't you just hate it when you think of something after the fact!?!?! Oh, well. I think it looks good all things considered.

It took me a while to make the tote bag. You wouldn't think so, but I had a hard time getting the lettering to stick to the fabric. I had to repeat and let the lettering cool several times before it finally stuck.

The same thing happened with the crystals. I was using a thin dishcloth, but that didn't work (even though the instructions said to use a thin cloth). I ended up using a thin layer of paper towels and that seemed to work a lot better with only a few of the crystals not sticking and needing more heat applied.

What are my plans for the rest of the day? I think I'll probably cross stitch a bit and see if I can make enough progress to post about ;)

Until next time ^_____^

Saturday, June 2, 2012

May Recap

Recap:

Read:
1. A Magnificent Obsession by Helen Rappaport
2. Bewitching by Alex Flinn
3. Timeless by Gail Carriger
4. Book Girl and the Corrupted Angel by Mizuki Nomura
5. Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans
6. Rebel Fire: A Young Sherlock Holmes novel by Andrew Lane
7. Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster
8. Dear Enemy by Jean Webster
9. Nobody's Girl by Hector Malot

Crafts:
1. Gentleman Monster amigurumi
2. Bunny blob amigurumi
3. Cupcake amigurumi
4. Good Luck Neko amigurumi

Wow! It's amazing how fast the year is going by or maybe it just seems that way because I've been busy.

What's up for the month of June in terms of craftiness? Right now, I'm working on a sampler that my aunt wanted me to cross stitch for her ;) It's going a bit slow so I won't show a picture of it until I have a few more motifs stitched on it. I think I jinxed myself by saying, "Oh, that's easy. It won't take that long." I had completely forgot about the fact that it was stitched on 32ct linen which takes more time for me than the larger 28ct I'm used to.

I know, I know. There are some of ladies and gents who stitch on higher counts like 40, etc., but I usually use what types of fabrics that Hobby Lobby carries so I don't even have to contemplate using a larger count!! Woohoo for me! Just kidding ;)

I hope you enjoy your weekend. We have a cold front of some sort coming through the South so it feels absolutely amazing this morning. You would think it was the end of the summer and you felt the first signs of fall. But that's just the weather playing tricks on you!

Until next time ^____^