A lump of coal for me!

Let's just acknowledge that I get an F for blogging and move on with our lives. Okay? Okay.

In the plus column, I get an A+ for crafting. I have been very productive lately, making several Christmas presents. From Bend the Rules Sewing, I made a lined tote bag for my sister-in-law out of some very cute monkey fabric. I also made an apron out of a similar monkey fabric, and a very odd little trivet out of still more monkey fabric.

I helped the same sister-in-law make some very cute little teacup cozies for her mother, and then I hauled out the serger (rethreaded it myself! only took an hour) and made some coasters for the in-laws' rental properties. Many moons ago, I made a series of crazy quilt squares using four pieces of fabric sewn together and then cut with a 6.5" square stencil. Now I piled those together with pieces of flannel, old sweatpants, or old towels, traced a 4.5" square on them, and serged together coasters. It was extremely cathartic and highly addictive. Only two broken needles brought my fun to a stop... fifteen coasters later.

I'm also working on a quilt for a baby (6 months late--the quilt, not the baby), some totebags for the baby's big sisters, and some late Christmas gifts for a rather understanding segment of my own family.

I have to put the finishing buttons on an infant dress I made a while back, kind of for the heck of it--it's the perfect gift for a baby due any day to some friends in Europe. And I also took a look at my fabric stash yesterday and saw a lot of possibilities for some very hilarious baby dresses, which I will make for my own amusement and then put on Etsy or something.

As you can see, I've been fitting in quite a bit of workshoppy time, when I'm not working or taking the dog to the vet. Yes, I was tossing the tennis ball for Winston the other day, and it beaned him right in the face. His eye swelled up intermittently for the next 24 hours, always returning to normal the moment a vet visit was mentioned and then swelling up once the threat of medical care had passed. It turns out all that was needed to cure it was $81 and a useless half-hour at the vet's office, during which time they confirmed that absolutely nothing was wrong.

I hope you have all had a lovely holiday. Try to capture a bit of the Christmas spirit and take it with you into 2008. I'd love to say I'll be blogging again before then (and hey, you never know), but perhaps as part of my New Year's resolutions, I should try to be more realistic.

At any rate, I'll be posting pictures of many projects before too long.

On the third, fourth, and fifth days of Christmas...

...my true love gave to me... one liar lying.

Yes, yes, so I failed.

I thought about picking up with "three French hens", but when I tried to look up the symbolism, my sources said, "This probably refers to a variety of hens from France." FAIL.

Let me instead pepper you with excuses. The dog show is in full dog-show swing, and just yesterday I sent off the next revision of TGLL to the Delightful Editor, who apologized, saying she will not have a chance to read it until the day after Christmas because she has something else due on Christmas Eve. I am shocked! I can't believe these poor editors are working in sweatshop conditions. I always thought that scene in "Elf" where the guy (a publisher) has to work on Christmas Eve was a sick joke. But no.

Poor, poor Delightful Editor. I think it's for the best. Supernatural thrillers don't generally add to one's sense of celebration, although maybe she will read it and enjoy the gift of Not Having to Do Any More Notes.

Let us all add this requests to our letters for Santa, please.

In spite of my failure as a blogger, as a human, I am having a pretty good week. I hope the same for all of you.

k.

Megan, are you out there?

Megan, Alphaville-loving Megan, are you out there? Have you seen the new Futurama movie?

I saw it last night and thought of you.

(Warning: weird sounds will result from clicking on this link... don't do it if you work in a cubicle farm.)


That is all. Thank you.

Now I really really really need to get back to revising. Meh.

The 12 Days of Christmas: Two Turtle Doves

(First of all, you have to check out these free gift tags at angry chicken.)



Today: two turtledoves.

"Turtledoves" is one of those images that confuse the heck out of you when you're a child. Like thinking that "getting fired" means they set you on fire, and believing that the sewers are full of people's discarded pets (although growing up in South florida, I remember vividly one day when there really was a gigantic alligator in a drainage pipe near my house. It's nothing less than a miracle that no children slipped and fell through the one-foot opening.)

Turtledoves (or "turtle doves") are birds, not turtles (for the record, I know everyone already knows that). Some see their significance in the song as being representative of the New and Old Testaments of the Bible, which would be fitting in keeping with the religious theme of Christmas, don't you think? The turtle dove is seen as a symbol of constant love.

Speaking of love, I am really behind on gifts for people I love. Some are handmade, some are not, but in general I'm underperforming on this front. I'm no good with presents. Some commenters here can vouch for that, such as when I wait until a month after the fifth niece/nephew birthday of the year to send all the gifts for that year. But I do have some fun projects planned that I'm determined not to let slip by the wayside, even if, in some cases, the gifts end up being Boxing Day gifts or even New Year gifts.

One thing I'm a litle bummed about is Christmas cards... last year we had these really fun custom cards printed, but this year, with everything being so hectic, by the time I got around the choosing a photo and Photoshopping my crows'-feet out of it, it was too late to place the custom order. So that makes me a little sad. I'll have to figure out what to do about holiday cards. I really like sending them out, and frankly, I don't need 80 holiday-theme stamps just taking up space if I decide not to send out cards. Maybe Kinko's can help me...?

I'll wrap up this random ramblefest with a link to a recipe for a super-easy version of those turtle candies people go insane over: Rolo Pretzel Turtles.

Have a wonderful day!

Previous "12 Days of Christmas" posts:
A Partridge in a Pear Tree

On the first day of Christmas...

(I began this post yesterday and I'm finishing it this morning. I have regained feeling in my hand, you'll be happy to know.)

Okay, so starting today (yesterday!), I'm going to post in one or both of my blogs every day until Christmas. True, it doesn't make any sense. I'm really busy and I just get crankier all the time and right now I can't even feel my right hand because I was applying Ben-Gay to the husb's poor aching back (Guitar Hero really does a number on those of us with largely sedentary lifestyles).

But I love this season so I'll give it a try.

And what's more, I'll use that song to add a challenging theme to my posts.

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me... (one numb hand) ...a partridge in a pear tree.

Okay, a little Googling has revealed that everyone wants to claim the song's meaning for their own purposes. The prevailing theory is that the partridge is Jesus and the pear tree is the cross. But there are bird watchers who claim the first line is actually "a partridge in a [bastardization of the French word for partridge]". So now we have songs about bird pregnancy to warm our hearts this holiday season.

Well, speaking of bird pregnancy, let's reflect on one of the most precious and heart-rending experiences of my 2007: the house finches on the balcony.

In March, we hung up some hanging plants and soon realized that a pair of house finches had chosen one as their home (we realized this when the husb tried to move the plant and a bird flew out at his face, ha ha ha). They laid some eggs. The eggs hatched to babies.



All the while, things were getting kind of dire because we couldn't water the plant and it was starting to get leafbare (new word alert!). That was also during the time of massive windstorms sweeping through Southern California, and as we are on a hillside, we watched the hanging plant swing and twirl in the wind with a great deal of fear in our hearts.

Finally, we completely rearranged the balcony furniture so we could hang the plant from the tile-top table, from which we removed several tiles to make this work. Then we sat and watched for the agonizing few minutes when the parents sat on the railing, looking up at the spot where the plant had hung. They searched the entire ceiling of the balcony. It was the cutest and most suspenseful thing I've ever seen. Finally, the mother was like, "Oh, DUH!" and flew right down to the plant in its new lower spot.



In the new location, I was able to wait until Mum and Dad were away and snap some very good photos (one of which was on another Animal Planet show my company produced, although they had to say it was taken by "Winston Schmidt", since they'd already used another photo I took, although apparently Jeff Corwin made fun of the first photo when he had to introduce it... it was a picture of a lizard).



But I digress. (That should actually be the name of this blog.)

Anyway, the ending is sad. Too sad for Christmas. Let's just say that thanks to a nasty scrub jay who'd been terrorizing the backyard (including the hawks who'd nested in the Eucalyptus across the street), I came home one day to find no partridges in my pear tree.

I learned a lesson about hanging plants: don't have them.

In fact, that's our moral today: hanging plants will always break your heart.



Happy holidays!

PS - Delaying this post a day brings us down to 11 days of Christmas, so maybe I'll run over into Boxing Day.

A change is in the air...

...Do you feel it?

I changed the name of this blog. It was called "Katie's Awesome Blog". In the interest of defending myself, I never meant for that to be visible anywhere. I just had to give it a name, per Blogger, and that's the one I picked out of mid-air. However, given the existence of my sewing blog, and also the crushing shame of seeing myself listed in other people's blogrolls with such a self-satisfied name, I thought it was time to shake things up.

I'm less grouchy today, hurray!

My dog is a grouch and so am I.

Winston and I are in a funk.

You know how you'll be at the store and see something you desperately want, and then you're like, "Oh, but that costs $75 and I don't want to spend that kind of money! I'm saving up for [a rainy day/groceries/gallbladder surgery/a trip to Hawaii]."

And you're all good and feeling great about the money you didn't spend, and then you go home and the plumbing in your kitchen explodes and it costs like $500 to fix it? And you're like, "Dang, I could have afforded that thing at the store after all... of course, I really can't buy it NOW."

That's how I feel on the time management front. I never knew how much free time I had until NOW. I never thought, during all the time I spent sewing skirts and tiny quilts for dogs and even a very low-cut yellow and orange cocktail gown, that at some point that ceaseless supply would dry up, but here we are with a dog show to produce, a manuscript to revise, hundreds of loads of laundry to finish, and thousands upon thousands of special edition holiday calories to consume.

And I have no time to sew. Or to read, really. I get to listen to podcasts in my car, but that's pretty much it. At work, I'm -- how unfair is this?? -- working all day. On the weekends and every morning at 6 am and every evening after I get home, I'm finishing up revisions.

And when I'm not doing all that, I'm obviously whining about it.

Phooey. Winston and I need a week on the beach in Hawaii. With a sewing machine.

Thith oneth for you, Tom.

Tom, 365 days seems like a really long time to do something without being certain of the results. Perhaps I'm just lazy (or maybe I'm biased). ;-)

So anyway, there is zero craftiness happening in this home right now. The pants were a total bust, in that I didn't finish them. I think they'll be fine, except that the crepe-backed satin doesn't sit flat at the seams, so the pant legs look like they're collapsing inward on themselves. I'm thinking about ironing on some hem tape to hold them flat.

In other news, Winston is sick. He ate something over the weekend, and as I was in Long Beach for the dog show, no amazing hydrogen peroxide trick was employed. So he'd been a little sick (upset tummy) all week, and on Monday, the vet told us to give him antacids, but yesterday things came to a head and he was admitted for some more x-rays (I will have a glowing green dog by the time they finish all of his x-rays) and for fluids, because the poor baby was very dehydrated.

I'm waiting to hear, but it's looking like surgery will NOT be necessary, which is good, because not only is there a dog show to be produced (post-produced), but there is a manuscript to be revised, and sanity to be maintained. Barely.

I made a discovery the other day: I can go without craving craftiness for weeks, but the second I'm supposed to be revising my book, I start immediately trying to procrastinate by sewing. Unfortunately for Evil Katie, Virtuous Katie put her foot down in this instance.

Oh, Lordy, I'm tired. I'm so behind on blogs, but I promise I'll catch up.

Hope everyone is well!

PS - I didn't re-sign-up for this round of Wardrobe Refashion... more on that later.

Tired now!

Okay, I'm so behind on blogs it's not funny. But I'm going to start catching up soon.

Thanks for all the comments on the last post. (I'm putting the replies at the end of this post.)

The show was super fun, although it's a lot of work. It's broken up over two nights, so we taped Saturday, went to bed, and then had to get up Sunday and start over again. I woke up Sunday feeling like someone had beaten me up. It was a feeling I only recognized from the same thing last year (only last year I'm sure it was much worse).

I won't say what breed won the show, although for the curious, that information is readily available all over the internet.

By Monday morning, after a wrap party (which is funny because we still have to actually edit the show) that went until 5:30 am, I was ready to go home. I was missing the husb and Winston very much. Winston isn't feeling terribly well.

In book news, Delightful Editor called yesterday (and had to deal with incoherent sleepy me) and said she likes the revision, and we have minimal changes before we get to copyedits. Yay! Now I'm really going to have to focus on the next project. That's going to be a little rough going at first, because I have 12,000 words of it written and I know I don't like the beginning. So I'll have to decide if I'm going to revise now or just keep going.

I hope you can forgive a few more days of erratic posting and blog visiting. I'm still a strange combination of frazzled and exhausted. I had a dream last night that someone gave me a foot massage! (Also that a delicious pastry shop opened up across the street from my house.)

Hope you're all having a great week!

(comment replies...)

Christy, this is the show that was live last year. This year it wasn't (as evidenced by the lack of nervous breakdown on my part). It's going to air February 2, the night before the Super Bowl.

Eileen, as it turns out, I didn't finish the pants. Thank goodness I stocked up on long shirts, because the super-low-rise pants a co-worker gave me worked out fine. And my thrifted black faux-velvet Old Navy blazer worked great for Sunday, when things get a little fancypants.

Mary, there were dogs in my hotel. The owners seemed very careful. One thing I've learned about dog show people is that they're resourceful. They know how to find places, show up on time, carry all their own stuff, and clean up after themselves. A scrappy bunch of people.

Maggie, it's never too late to learn! I just started sewing last May. It's actually fairly easy once you get into it. Of course there are fabrics and patterns that are more challenging, but in general it's quite simple!

Lisa, thank you! It was. Especially when I got to sneak away from the office and go pet some dogs at the Meet the Breeds exhibition.

Robin, it was a lot of work. It made me realize that I'm kind of happy I don't travel to all of our shows. Kicking back at the office with Winston is a lot more relaxing than running around at a busy dog show. But once a year, it's not so bad. There's definitely an adrenaline rush.