hubby turns 30

Well, it happened. Joel turned 30! We had a great time celebrating this weekend and I thought I would share some pictures with you.

On Friday night we went out for dinner to Charcut. Yum! They are a fairly new roast house type restaurant located in a new boutique hotel downtown called Hotel Le Germain. Decor was a great mix of modern and rustic, with lots of leather and wood and glass everywhere.



We ordered a wide variety of things off their ever changing menu. There were warm soft pretzels with homemade mustard, shaved lamb with grated gruyere, pickled heirloom carrots, cucumbers and beets, roasted chicken and charred vegetables, prawn fetuccini and duck fat fried poutine with truffle gravy. Needless to say, by the time we were done with all that we had no room left for dessert, despite the fact that a friend of ours there is one of the dessert chefs and has an original recipe on the menu.

Saturday was the main event and Joel's actual birthday. I got up and went to the grocery store despite the 10cm of snow on the ground that had fallen the night before, and bought some fresh french bread and lots of fresh fruit. We had a delicious breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast and fruit and then I spent the rest of the day getting ready for the party.

We decided to host a Gentleman's Evening which if you think too hard sounds a bit like strippers and beer, but trust me, was waaaay better than that! 20 of us gathered at our house, decked out in our finest. The boys played in a poker tournament while the girls provided wait service for the evening. Thank goodness I have girlfriends who are willing to regress a little and spend the evening serving the men while they smoke cigars, drink scotch and play cards! It all felt a little Mad Men.





There was for food than 50 people could have eaten, and a VERY well stocked bar. Joel and I worked together to come up with a drinks menu for the guys to order from, including some signature highballs and martinis.



Since we had to split the group into two to play poker, after both tables had dwindled to 4 people we took a bit of a break. The guys (and Mel!) stepped outside to smoke their cigars, which were Cuban because well, we can have those in Canada. After that we cut the cake (complete with 30 candles) and enjoyed a few pieces. The cake came from Marble Slab Creamery and was beyond delicious! Chocolate Amaretto with Skor, Krispy Krunch, Reese's Pieces and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups mixed in. SO decadent!



We had a blast! And as far as I can tell, so did everyone else. No less than 4 guys at the party said they wanted to repeat the event at their own birthday. Even all the hard working ladies said they had a great time, and it was fun to watch the men "get manly" for the night.



Of course there had to be some birthday kisses too!



I do wish I had been able to snap some pictures before the party instead of after. When it was all set up, the place looked fantastic. Call me crazy, but I ended up disassembling our 110" long sofa with two chaises and moving all the parts to different places in the house all to make room for the second poker table. I hung paper pennants (made for his party last year) in different directions all across the kitchen, living room and dining room.



I also added a Happy Birthday pennant banner on the short wall by the front door.



Like I said above, we made up some drinks menus that we printed back to back and cut in half to make them long and skinny. We hung a full page version with extra info on the cabinet door above the bar counter.



I was so happy to be able to give Joel such a fun party. 30 is definitely a milestone and everyone should get to ring it in with a bang!

There is actually going to be one more part of his party which will come in a month or two. We are planning a white water rafting trip with about a dozen on our friends. We just need to find a date that works for everyone and book it! I have to say, I'm looking forward to that part a lot less than I was looking forward to the party.

busy work

I've mentioned before that I am a nanny. One of the perks of being a nanny is a lot of down time during the day. I have a few things that I do to help out around the house while the kids are sleeping like tidying up the kitchen and putting some laundry through. There is still a lot of downtime during naps or when the kids go to bed at night and I am staying later. Most often during my downtime I will read or maybe watch a tv show or movie, but I've temporarily fallen out of love with reading, and tv is boring so I had to find something else to do.



Enter hexagons. As most of you know, these little babies have been popping up everywhere for quite some time now, but I have yet to make any. So the other day when I had to make a car service appointment (that's going to last 3 freaking hours!!!) I thought, "I need to find something interesting and productive to do while I wait."

So today, I found a pile of scraps, made myself some templates and I am set. I'll bring them with me to work tonight so that once the little cutie goes to bed I have something to keep my hands busy, and I will definitely bring them with me tomorrow while I sit in Toyota's customer service lounge drinking stale coffee for 3 hours.

giveaway day

It's here!  It's here!  It's finally here!

I am so VERY excited about Sew Mama Sew's Giveaway Day!  Not only do I love going through the dozens and dozens of blogs for inspiration (and of course a chance to win something awesome) but this year I am finally hosting a giveaway myself.  It's such a fun idea and I love creating for other people, so why not?

Without further ado, let me introduce you to the prize:



A Buttercup Bag (made of course, from the pattern by Made by Rae).  Exterior fabric is my fabric home decor weight Ikea Bladd fabric in grey, and interior is a hot pink "Bubbles and Blooms" print.



And for an extra special treat: 2 fat quarters and a .4m piece of fabric!  The prints are: Heather Bailey Pop Garden Swirlybuds in turquoise, Amy Butler Midwest Modern 2 Park Fountains in yellow and Gail Kessler Summerhouse Collection Butterflies in purple.



Excited?  To enter, please leave a comment on this post telling me where you're from, and either what your favourite thing to sew is, or what fabric you're currently obsessing over.  I will leave comments open until Thursday, May 20 at noon (Mountain Time) and choose a winner by random number generator after that.

Good luck!

what i've been working on

This is what I've been working on lately. Another commission, this time from a friend in Ontario. My friend ordered 2 happy birthday banners for her 3 children. She has two boys and a girl and so she wanted one banner in boyish colours and one in girly colours.



The challenge was that the little girl likes bugs and pink and purple. How would I ever find fabrics to suit that?  Enter "Flora and Fauna" by Patty Young!  What a triumph this was for me because not only did I find an amazing sry of fabrics for the banner but I even found it at a reasonable price and at the hated Fabricland of all places!  (Have you noticed yet how much I hate Fabricland?  From what I can gather, I feel about Fabricland the way many people seem to feel about Joanne's in the States.)

The point is, I found great fabrics for the girl that I feel will suit her now but are also sophisticated enough to grow with her.



The boy fabric didn't feel like such a triumph but I am happy none the less. The boys got a bright colour palette and some "manly" fabrics. A plaid, a semi-solid, a blue with little camping line drawings and a faux bois print in green. I went back and forth on wether I liked the fabrics because they didn't seem as special as the girls but I think it works well.

Each flag is 5x7 and double sided so it reads HAPPY BIRTHDAY which ever way you look at it. I made my own 2" double fold bias tape to string up the flags and the total length is just over 11 feet including 24" on each end for tying.

I just have to make up a couple of quick bags to store them in and they can go in the mail. Good thing I'm almost done too becuase 2 of the 3 kids have their birthday next weekend!

I learned two lessons with this project.

1.  I HATE making double fold bias tape and I should have just bought some!  In the end, making my own meant the perfect colour match and saved me about $10 in materials per banner. (Which means that unlike my first commsission I actually made a decent profit!)

2. I should really stop trying to make little lined bags. I get it wrong everytime!  This time I resewed 3 times only to find out I had measured wrong and the banner didn't fit. I guess I have a cute little bag now. Oh well!

windy girl in the mountains

drawn on Facebook for Hubby

100 ideas so far

The cover. I stiched 6 groups of 5 pieces of paper together to make a journal with 120 pages. Then I decorated the cover. All while watching Scrubs on DVD.Day One: #90. Draw or write about some of the doors in your life.
I came across a couple of photos of pages that Keri Smith has done, and this was one of them. I decided to copy it into my book because I thought it was both interesting and true.
Day Two: #85. Cut a random shape out of several layers of a magazine. Make a collage out of the results. These shapes were all cut from a copy of PhotoLife Magazine. It is 5 pages of a story about Rural China.
Day 3: #34. Fill an entire page of your journal with small circles. Colour them in. Well, it's not an entire page, and they're not all coloured in, but I like it. I did most of this while I listened to our Pastor on Sunday.

Well, there you have it! The first few entries in my 100 ideas: A Work in Progress Journal

finding inspiration can be frustrating

I would describe myself as a very creative person. But for some reason, for the last few year I haven't done much that I would consider creative. I don't know why, but since I graduated high school (2004) my "creative activities" have all but dwindled away. I used to paint, draw, make slideshows and movies, play the flute, dance (mostly by myself) and now...nothing.

I have been overcome with the urge to be creative again in the last few months. I supposed it started a while ago, or maybe it's always been there, but a few months ago, I started to become interested in sewing. I have a few friends who are avid sewers and incredible quilt makers and their work started to awaken my creative side again. For my birthday, my husband bought me a gorgeous Janome Quilting and Embroidery sewing machine and again, my creative side was woken up a little more. Then, a few weeks before our first anniversary, as I was pondering (again) what to give my hubby, I couldn't ignore it any longer. "BE CREATIVE!" It seemed my soul was actually yelling at me!

Finally, I remembered a painting I had started 4 years ago. My husband is actually the one who asked me to paint it, even though at the time we barely knew each other. (Long story). I decided I would give him the completed painting as an anniversary present.

Since then I have been trying to find the inspiration I so desperately need to be creative. I read blogs and search random things on the internet hoping to find something that will spur me into action. I finally came across it the other day. 100 ideas - a work in progress was created by a woman named Keri Smith, who I now owe dearly for wonderful inspiration.

100 ideas is designed to be used with a journal and to me it is becoming an exercise in creativity. Each day I will pick one of the 100 squares and do what it says. I decided that if I was really going to force myself to learn to be creative everyday I should make a journal instead of buying one. So last night, for 3 hours I sat in front of Scrubs and sewed 120 pages into a book, decorated it and dedicated it to my 100 ideas experiment.

This is a pretty big commitment in my mind, because I'm not the most disciplined person, but I really think that this is just what I need to get out of my creativity slump and back to creating on a daily basis. The thought has even crossed my mind that it would be interesting to do the same 100 things every year in a new journal and watch the progress over time...

Today is day one. "#90. Write about or draw some of the doors in your life."

I've got three so far. The front door, the Yaris door, and the fridge doors. I'll post it when it's done.

For now: THIS IS...What's on my desk.