Falling Apart

My little lamp-shade smiley face at work was not looking to hot this morning when I came in. He's hanging on by the lamp shade rim and a piece of dust. Poor fella. Maybe it's for the better.

This weekend JoAnn started their new sale. Part of it included 1.49$/yard flannel instead of the regular price of 4.99$/yd. So, we bought a bunch. :) We bought about 45$ in flannel, instead of 150$ worth. :) How fun. Now I have a wonder 29 different colors to offer for custom plushies and bookends in my Etsy shop.

Speaking of which, I sold my first stained glass piece on Friday! Isn't that cool!

Crafty Weekend

It wasn't incredibly crafty, but I did to some crafting this weekend. Namely, I cut/grinded almost all of the pieces for my current stained glass project. Now, I have to do the background and then fine tune it so all the pieces fit nicely together. Then, it's off to black-backed foil tape and my solder. This will be my first patina project. So, I'm thinking it best to do a trial run before I do the real thing. We'll show picks of the tests.



I also stitched a little. I decided to make me some pants. Those are coming along OK. I need to fix the waistband so it doesn't look like I have lumpy hips, because I don't (or at least not as lumpy as the pants make me look). I also worked on Rhonda's dress and Jayme's dress.

Good times. I even got around to bruising my knee at hockey yesterday, taking a 3 hour nap, eating sushi, working on syllabus and the such.

"OH, working on syllabus?" you say. Yes. I am going to be a part time instructor at Tulsa Community College. I'm teaching 2 statistics courses. :)

Stained Glass Crest

I've been rather occupied lately. There's been work and work and visits and food and sewing and stained glass and lawn mowing... you get the idea, stuff.

But, last night I spent a good amount of time on my current stained glass project, a family crest. I worked on the pattern a while ago, got it OKed by the project initiators and then cut it out.


My mom brought up these groovy pattern shears meant for cutting out patterns. They have a middle piece that cuts out a thin strip. So I used them and they are really groovy. It's not a lie!

There are about 150 pieces to the design. Last night I cut out almost all of the blue pieces. It's so much fun to do stained glass. It's like making a puzzle and putting it together. Absolutely wonderful.

New Adventures in Stained Glass

Now that my mom's window is done, not installed yet, but done, I've begun working on my next project. Shannon and Rhonda have put together a series of pieces based on their family crests and I'm starting work on the first one. The small colored drawing in the book is what it will look like. The drawn white piece is going to be the size/pattern. The green glass rhombus is glass from the old First Baptist Church windows in Garden. That glass is going to be part of it too.

I also have a piece to make for Gary and Linda, but I don't know what size they want it yet, so I can't work on it. But don't worry, that'll come too!

Keeping My Busy

I've got the sew-bug again. I don't know what causes it. But there are just times when all I want to do is stitch something up. (This part is now irrelevant...There are pictures to go with this post, but they are currently trapped in my camera. So, I'll free them later.)



This weekend I remembered that I received a book from Newgen and Andrea for Christmas last year, The Tudor Tailor. So I decided I'd make something from it and see how it went. Well, I made the top to a fitted Elizabethan gown with paned sleeves. It was a lot of work, but looks awesome. The size of the patterns as-is is a tad bit small on me, but pretty darn close. I didn't make the skirt, because originally I was just playing around. But it came our really good and now I want to make the bottom skirt part for it. However, I don't have enough of the fabric, so I'll need to use something else. That something else won't be free.

I also found a pattern that could work really well for Rhonda's dress. So, I'll have to try that out and see what she thinks.

Plus I finished my stained glass piece for when work releases the new version of our software. Kind of a gift to our company, I suppose.


Oh, and I finished painting my Halfling BloodBowl team, 12 little guys and a treeman. Sweet. However, during the paint-scapades I spilt a good amount of red paint on our carpet. OMG, that sucked! Shannon and I spent a good 30 minutes scrubbing it out. Now you really can't tell, and it was bad! The secret, Spray 'n Wash Dual Power. Just be sure to get it all out of the carpet. Also, we recently purchased our first bottle of carpet cleaner.

Fairly Common Sensical.

Life has been pretty good lately. Shannon's dad, Gary, is visiting. He came in on Tuesday and is flying back out on Monday. However, Thursday night to Sunday night we will be traveling to Manhattan (with a little bit of Wichita). It's the first time he's been here since we've moved. It's kinda fun having him over!

In other adventures, I started to clean up our two little "gardens" last night. I did about 2/3 of the left corner...


...but none of the right corner. That'll come next week, maybe.


Also, Gary is trying his hand at some stained glass!

The Window

Next step, tape.

Crafty

I've been kinda down lately. So I've tried to work on fun/useful things while at home. Since this weekend I've...

• Packed up our Christmas decor. We have about 4x more stuff then when we lived in Jardine.
• Finished painting some Goblin-themed barricades. I built them a long time ago and just finished them this last weekend.

• Built a marsh and a swamp for Warhammer. The are at home now letting the "water" dry.
• Worked more one my mom's stained glass window. I have almost all of the glass cut now.

And to make things even more smile-worthy, I got a call from my littlest sister today. She and her buddy will be coming to Tulsa on Sunday. Because on Monday they are driving to go pick up her new puppy!! Aw!!

New Art

For my birthday my mom got me the goods to do stained glass projects again. I took a class 7ish years ago and said that when I had a garage, I would do stained glass at home.

Now I have a garage and I do stained glass at home. In the dinette area off my kitchen.

The first project on the list is an almost 3' by 3' window for my mom for above her garage. That's it about 1 week ago. I've got a lot more pieced cut for it now. My Aunt Diana might remember those beveled pieces.