My Weekend without Brad

Brad has gone out of town to visit some friends. I have the house to myself for a few days! So, what have I got planned? Well, yesterday I went into Vancouver for a trip to Fabricana with my aunt. It was great, I have lots of new fabric to play with. I'm going to add more Buttercup Bags to my Etsy shop, and expand it with a couple of yoga mat bags!

If you know me, you know how much I can't stand Hollywood comedies. The last one I went to in the theatre was Wedding Crashers and boy did it suck. That was when I vowed to never see another comedy in the theatre.

I. Just. Don't. Get. It.So I'm planning on watching these two movies this weekend:

Last night I watched Ruthless People - ohmigod that movie is hilarious!! I love Bette Midler, she has the best facial expressions....

Today I'm planning to dig out some of my old Sassy magazines (best. magazine. ever.) and read them on the balcony in the sun. Rawbean mentioned that she was glancing at hers the other day, it's made me want to check mine out too.

*I also watched The Eye, it wasn't great.

Leafy Hat

My latest knitting success. This is my first lace pattern and it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I can't understand though - why people prefer to knit toques from the top down. This is also my first attempt at this method and there was lots of swearing at the beginning.*


It's much more difficult to handle the double pointed needles when there is so little yarn holding everything together. When you knit from the bottom-up, you have the entire toque pulling at the needles, hence holding everything together.

Binding off was interesting too. Not hard, just - well, interesting. Anyway, it's a great pattern. I'll likely make more as gifts in the future.

*I'm totally stealing this term from the Angry Chicken website, it's perfect because it's exactly what happens!

Bitty Bug

I made a new pincushion. I've realized it's nice to have two floating around, one at the sewing machine and one at the ironing board. Free tutorial here, and it uses your smallest scraps that otherwise would go to waste.

The one thing I realized after finishing this little project is that I'm the worst hand sewer in the world. I can't do it, and I don't enjoy doing it. With this project all I had to do was sew up a thumb sized hole and I swore my way through it.

Which makes me have more respect for people like this and this.

Pins and Needles

5:15 am, I'm sleeping nicely. I'm gently roused out of sleep by a soft sound.....

*tinkle*
*tinkle* *tink*
*tinktink*
*tinkletinkle*

Suddenly I jolt awake, and realize I know that sound!!

I sit up in bed and this is what I see on the floor of my bedroom:

Our Bad Room Mate has jumped to a high spot in our kitchen, grabbed my pincushion and dragged it all the way into the bedroom where he is now sitting happily pulling all the pins out and spitting them all over the floor.

We leap out of bed, yell at him as he cowers off and spend the rest of the time until the alarms goes off searching for pins. We even found one in his water bowl.

The Phone from Hell

We have this cordless phone....

I think Brad won it at one of his Christmas parties a few years ago. As with most cordless phones in my experience, for the first year or so it worked great.

Now, the thing never works. Sometimes it will work for a grand total of about 3 minutes. Just long enough to scramble your way into the computer room to pick up the old school, reliable slinky-cord-phone.

But the worst thing about this phone? When it dies (which is a lot) it starts beeping.

Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.

It goes on and on and on and on and on until you put the thing back on the charger. You might think "Well, actually that's kinda cool. Then you know when your phone is dead."

Not when it goes off at 3:30 am.

Introducing my Etsy shop!

I've finally opened a little Etsy shop. It's called Jabba's Design Hut. I added it to my side bar, click there if you want to check it out!

I'll be adding new bags every few days, so check back if you're interested. I'm trying to make lots of different colours and styles. The one I have up right now is one of my favourites so far.

Get this - I've already made one sale! I'm so excited, I'm off to the post office this morning to ship it off.


So, right now I'm selling these little Buttercup Bags, remember them from this post? They sit just under your shoulder, I love them because they totally free up your hands and don't seem to slip down. Plus, the design options are endless!

Rae Hoekstra (the designer) started to sell the pattern to use for limited commercial use. So I jumped on it and have made 5 bags so far including this one, that I made from the Heather Ross fabric I ordered online.



This one isn't for sale.*

They are the perfect size for all your essentials - wallet, phone, Ipod, lip gloss, sunglasses...


*...But I'll make you one if you want, just click the "Request Custom Item" in my shop.

It's Wheat Day!!

Today I'm in heaven. (Refer to this post if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

I made fresh bread this morning and just finished a couple slices - warm from the oven.

Tonight we have pasta, I had a muffin this morning, and I'm on my way out to grab a ginger cookie from Starbucks - man those are good and I've been craving one for 4 months now.

Halloween Costumes Part 1

We went to Value Village on Sunday and found most of Brad's Halloween costume....right down to the white belt.


Remember, he's going as Herb Tarlek from WKRP. Now all we need to complete the look are white shoes, a pink shirt and a wig.

Beefy Beef Noodle

I went into Vancouver on Saturday to spend the day with IG. It was a much-needed trip as I haven't been over to Vancouver since April and I needed some serious girl time.

It was a great day, we had breakfast and coffee on Commercial, then headed over to Main Street for some shopping. IG gave me a gift certificate to Front, a super cool consignment/new clothing store. I bought a new dress and a much-needed neutral cardigan sweater.

We also visited Voltage, which is a fun store to poke through. A few months ago I visited Rawbean and we hit Voltage where I bought a Yummy Breakfast keychain. They are sold as blind assortments - meaning you pick from a couple dozen identical boxes, not knowing which character you will get until you open it up.


I got the coffee when I was with Rawbean and this time I got the pizza. Can you handle them? I can't.

I miss stores/restaurants like this one that I saw on Main Street:Beefy Beef Noodle? So awesome.

Anyway, we finished off our day with a visit to my old 'hood where I showed IG the super-secret walk from West 7th down to the sea wall.We got some cheap sushi dinner - seriously my dinner cost me $7. I miss those restaurants, although I haven't given up searching for one in Victoria yet.

Kickin' It, Victoria Style

Holy crap what a gorgeous day. What fabulous weather we're having! It's ridiculously hot today, so I got out and took advantage of it.

I put on a summery dress and drove to my "super secret parking spot" just across the blue bridge. Then walked downtown to Wildfire Bakery which sells freshly baked spelt bread and cookies. Tomorrow is "Spelt Day" which is similar to Yogurt Day from this post. I'm super stoked about Spelt Day because I haven't had bread since February. February people.


I'm planning on toast in the morning with jam and peanut butter, then a veggie sandwich for lunch and bread with dinner. I can't wait.

I also found a lovely fabric store downtown called Gala Fabrics. (There is also a location in Vancouver.) A lady at another store put me on to them for notions, and they had just what I need to make another Buttercup Bag. I'm gradually learning where to do my craft shopping in this city - other than FabricLand.

I got home and I'm spending the rest of this gorgeous afternoon outside on the balcony.

I'll be hanging out with some Crush freezies, my ipod, the cryptic crosswords and our herb garden. It's perfect in the shade....

When we moved over from Vancouver, we had to get rid of all my soil so the container garden this year is much smaller. But we have planted some herbs and they are doing really well.

Mint always seems to grow like a weed, and I'm afraid it's crowding out the rosemary so we'll have to have some tea soon. We also really wanted Italian parsley because we can never seem to find it in the store.

We planted basil from seed and I had my doubts, but it's super happy and growing like crazy.