belle epoque

I hope you’ve already heard that the divine Susan Beal has a book coming out in March. It is called Bead Simple, and it is chock full of original, creative projects. Susan designed all of the pieces and then got a ton of cool crafty people to do their own spin on each one (full disclosure: I was absolutely tickled to try my hand at one of them too, and it is in there).

I got a sneak peek at the book in person recently and people, it is BEAUTIFUL. It is encyclopedic in scope, and artistic in presentation. I’ve seen a lot of beading books and I have to say, this one blows them all out of the water. Click on the image above to go to the Bead Simple site for more details and serious eye candy.

Now that we’ve established that you need this book (really, you do), I’m going to attempt to make it even sweeter. I’ve been doing a major de-stash of my crafty space, and I have a passel of beads to pass on to a fellow crafter. Pop over to Amazon or Taunton and pre-order Bead Simple, then come back here and comment, and one week from today I shall randomly pick a name from the comments and send her (or him!) this grab-bag assortment of beads, all packed into a priority mail box (’cause these babies are heavy!):

You don’t get my glass jar of lavender or my cake stand, just the assortment of beads (which will arrive in the boxes and cylinders you see them in). They are mostly seed beads, but there are some findings and other surprises in there too. I might even tuck a bit of other handmade goodness into the box if there’s room.

To make it even more exciting, Susan has generously offered to send the winner a beautiful Bead Simple Vintagesque Necklace Kit

AND some fantastic vintage lucite beads too!

So, let’s re-cap: you preorder the amazing Bead Simple, you comment here by February 6th, and you get the chance to win all the loot you see above. And really, you win no matter what, ’cause you’ll be one of the first people to enjoy Susan’s awesome book as soon as it is released! Yay!

*Misc Details: In case you’re wondering, I am not currently an Amazon affiliate and do not receive a penny if you click over there from here and order the book- it is just a convenient place to send you! I will not ask to see your e-receipt for the pre-order if you win, but please do play fair and order the book before entering. And I’m sorry to say I can only send within the U.S. Because of how heavy the beads are I’m afraid the shipping would be egregious to send them elsewhere! Any questions? Leave ‘em in the comments and I’ll update this post with the answers.

You might remember, if you’ve been with me on this blog for awhile, that I used to sew myself lots of clothes. Perhaps it is superficial, but I LOVE clothes– looking at them, thinking about them, buying them, making them. While I am absolutely aware that there are tons of wonderfully chic and stylish pregnant women out there, I just haven’t felt inspired to sew for the past few months–particularly the last month or so has felt like a bit of a style-free zone around here. The urge to make some clothes, combined with a bit of boredom hand-quilting the wall hanging (after just thread basting it I was ready to quit), came together in a burst of crafty creativity to make Claudine. Who goes to ballet class:

Then goes visiting

and stays to tea with her best friend

She is not a toy for a small child (her hat is held on with pins!), but one for me to dress and make clothes for until I am back to slightly more normal proportions and can make some new spring/summer clothes for myself. I’ve a collage of pictures of skirts and dresses from magazines and catalogs, and have already begun plotting how to spend baby’s naptime in front of the sewing machine!

But before that, there is much nesting to be done around here, so no more non-baby diversions! Well, at least not too many…

*Update* I just found out that the lovely Phoeknits did me the honor of nominating me among her ten top picks for The You Make My Day blog award! I am so flattered, thank you Phoe! You totally made my day. I’ll be following the rules and nominating ten of my favorites very soon, promise.

Despite moving a bit more slowly these days and halving my to-do list much of the time, I’m so inspired by the many fun, crafty groups/challenges out there to join! Two of them fit in with what I’m already doing, so I felt ok about joining up- namely, Quilt Month over at Sew Mama Sew (the button on the left will take you over there) and The Dinner Challenge, which I found out about through Linda (whose risotto recipe looks so good!). The Dinner Challenge was originally 5 days long, so is officially over but looks like it is informally continuing on the flickr group. The chilly winter weather had me longing for comfort food, so I got everything together to try out Ina Garten’s Chicken Pot Pie recipe on Friday night. They turned out very pretty

They were also pretty delicious. However, I started cooking around 3pm and dinner wasn’t ready until 7, and the recipe was so rich, and made SO MUCH that we could barely finish our two servings, and neither of us really are in the mood to have any more, though there are about 4 more servings left in the fridge. I’m thinking about freezing the sauce, as the pastry is fairly easy to make, which would decrease the 4 hours of cooking time to more like 1.5 for defrosting and pastry-making.

Yesterday was spent cruising around in the car and doing baby-type-errands, including buying the all-important car seat/travel stroller thingy. Moondoggie spent the evening doing an awesome job putting together the crib, which now has a pink polka-dotted sheet on the mattress. The room is still rather bare, but once I’ve framed all of the pictures to go on the wall, and finished the wall hanging and a few other crafty baby items(quilt month, yay), I’ll take a picture to show you.

We’ve been back in San Francisco now for nearly a week, but an icky head cold, two days of dental work (fun!), nasty rainy weather and general almost-8-months-pregnant laziness set in to keep me away from the craft room! I finally felt better today and got started on a project I’ve been wanting to make for months. I think the next 6 weeks or so will be taken up with larger-scale baby-centric projects like this one, so I’m going to break my rules about showing works in progress, as if I don’t, I won’t have anything to show you at all! I’ve started with my take on the Someone To Watch Over You wall hanging in Last Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts. Due to the aforementioned terrible weather, the light was no good for a picture, and since it is just the pieced top of the quilted wall hanging, you can see the upholstery of the window seat through it (sorry).

I am not sure I love the fabric combination (the background is white with pale pink polka dots, if you can’t tell), but I think the pattern is just beautiful, and totally worth all of the fiddling with the bird applique. I made some serious measurement errors somewhere, so it is not as long or as wide as it is supposed to be and I had to fudge it a bit. I’m still blind stitching the bird applique to the trunk and background, then have to quilt and bind it. If you have any suggestions about binding fabric, please share– I had a little fantasy of a pale beige stripy seersucker binding, but that involves going to the fabric store, finding just the right thing and then prewashing it when I get home. Which in my current state of laziness and i-will-melt-if-i-go-out-in-the-rain-again means the hanging may NEVER be finished. And then the second large-scale baby project would never even get started. So, I may end up just binding it with something pink I already have. I hope to finish quilting it this weekend and will make my final binding decision once that is done!

p.s. If you haven’t seen it already, there is a set of photos from our trip to Hawaii on Flickr– there are lots of sunrises, sunsets, pretty views and sea turtles, along with a bunch of killer shots of Moondoggie riding the waves!

I had a copyediting teacher who said that she took issue with restrooms labeled “ladies” as they seemed exclusive. I’ve always considered myself a lady so that has never made me feel unwelcome. However, I think the sign above would be a perfect solution to the dilemma of how to mark restrooms without resorting to the clinical sounding “female” or excluding youngsters by labeling them “women.” Or maybe I was just a little too tickled by a bathroom sign at the mall.

But I did learn something crafty to share! Moondoggie and I went to a cultural/historic dance presentation yesterday where we learned that the term “bark cloth” comes from the ancient practice of making cloth from the paper mulberry tree in Tahiti! Women would beat the strips of bark until they were soft and came together in sheets, then make clothing from it. Kings would get dyed and painted cloth. Who knew?

I am having fun trying to find things to photograph with the iPhone that turn out ok enough to show you. But I will post pictures from my real camera on flickr when I’m home!

From penguins to sea turtles! Moondoggie has whisked me away to paradise for a prebaby trip, and all I brought was my iphone and fun novels (no craft projects! Gasp). So it will be quiet around here until I get home again! Not that i think you guys sit around wondering why I’m not posting, but just in case, I thought I’d pop in. This is actually my very first totally mobile blog post, so I hope it looks ok.

Mahalo for your lovely comments on my last post! Each one made me smile.

I put the button on my sidebar but never mentioned that I’m participating in the very gentle Creative Every Day challenge this year. Yes, I realise I’m having a baby in two months (give or take), which will very likely put a cramp in being super duper productive in terms of quantity of projects, but the guidelines of the challenge are kind. Yesterday I came up with a new breakfast:

Plain yogurt with dark sweet cherries (my new favorite frozen fruit) from Trader Joe’s, and figured that was my creativity for the day (according to the challenge, culinary creativity totally counts. i also made risotto). But Susan reminded me that I was slated to submit a tiny softie pattern to CROQ Zine, and thus out of excitement and renewed crafty inspiration was born Petey:

A pattern for his tinyness will appear in the February issue, so grab a copy when they go on sale (if I find out when, I’ll remind you, don’t worry)! I’ve already drawn up the pattern and how-to, and it is in Susan’s hands, so unlike some of my tutorial promises (I promise, I’m still working on them), this one is for reals– even if for some reason it doesn’t end up in CROQ, it is already all written and photographed so I shall post it up here lickety split, pinkie swear.

It has been a wet and blustery couple of days in San Francisco, inspiring lots of snuggling in and reading books and making warm, hearty meals. But today the sun has made an appearance, so I am coming out of my cave to show you what I’ve been making:

A flock of frocks from Alicia’s pattern in the book Softies. They are gifts for some lovely people I know, and I can’t tell you more than that without ruining it for the recipients who read this blog! I think these two are my favorites frocks:

Now, you are probably also noticing the FABULOUS fabric behind the little flock. Well, the kindness of bloggers never ceases to thrill me– you may remember that I got a square of that loveliness in Alicia’s Santa Lucia Doll Kit, and promptly became obsessed with finding more. I visited many Joann’s and despaired, but the lovely Jen saw my plea in the Santa Lucia Doll Flickr Pool and got in touch to say she too had been so enamored of that fabric that she bought bolts of it and was willing to send me 1/2 yard of her remaining stash! Isn’t that so generous? Thank you so much Jen! I vow that it will be used for good.

Also in the picture above is a book I’ve been coveting for ages, after reading many glowing blog reviews– Apples for Jam by Tessa Kiros. I was planning to use a nice Christmas gift certificate to Barnes & Noble to buy it, but on a chance trip into Anthropologie found it on the sale table for half off! Yes! $15 for that gorgeous, fat, colorful, inspiring book. I made the beef stew from it for dinner last night, though skeptical that something with so few ingredients could have much flavor. I was SO WRONG, it was DELICIOUS, basically just as written. I have always wanted a go-to beef stew recipe and now I have one! If you try it– instead of thyme I used a bay leaf, and I threw in a chopped sweet potato just because I had it in the root veggie bin.

Now I’m going to go out and soak up the battery-charging rays of winter sunlight!

holidays, New Year etc! I’ve had such fun catching up on all of your wonderful holiday projects and New Year’s reflections and resolutions. I didn’t expect to take SUCH an extended break, but it was lovely. I went to visit my family in NYC where I bought fabric and yarn

visited favorite places with favorite people

saw LOTS of movies, namely The Golden Compass (good), Sweeney Todd (better), and Juno (best), and read a bunch of very good books, though the one I was utterly taken by was Susannah Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu, which was a Christmas gift from the fabulous Lauren (who, by the way, is going on a book tour for her latest book beginning in February–I’m super excited that she’s coming to San Francisco, and I urge you to see her if she’s in your town too!).

Then I came home to sunny San Francisco for a few lazy days with Moondoggie, who got me an iPhone (among other very nice things) for Christmas! So now I’ll be able to browse blogs and send e-mails no matter where I am (given decent WiFi and a strong AT&T signal!). Very exciting. I also got my hands on the latest Marie Claire Idees and had to immediately make the darling patchwork star ornament, despite being post tree-decorating time.

It is a great use of favorite scrappy bits (the pieces really are tiny), and I’m thinking I might like to make a stack of them and then just put them away to give as gifts next year (when, I imagine, having a 9-month-old might complicate handmade holiday plans a bit!).

I am feeling and looking more like Tweedledee every day, and getting inexplicably, yawningly tired after doing very little indeed, and starting to feel anxious about buying and assembling baby furniture (we have exactly nothing at the moment). But I shan’t let that stop the crafting around here– I am determined to at least make the quilted wall hanging from Last Minute Quilted and Patchwork Gifts for the baby’s room asap!

I hope your New Year is starting off well and happily!