Like many people, I enjoy inspiring quotes. I have a collection of a kajillion Stickies on my laptop where I paste random quotes from famous people. I don’t know why I started putting them there. That is going to be hard to transfer whenever I upgrade.
My favorite inspirational quotes are from unexpected places. For example, Tracy Jordan on 30 Rock admonishing a bird: “Stop eating people’s old French fries, pigeon! Have some self respect! Don’t you know you can fly?” Seriously.
Some other gems I’ve come across recently:
Jimmy Kimmel gave parents a challenge to give their kids a horrible Christmas present and record them. Most of the kids act pretty spoiled, but a few were just happy to have gifts. Like this kid. His brother is crying about how mean their parents are but this little boy is SO HAPPY with his potato that his brother was jealous. I need to be happy like that.
I love the cartoon Adventure Time. I like that it is a little Calvin and Hobbes-y, has great music, and is full of good morals (if you don’t mind cartoon violence). Jake is always giving Finn good advice like “Didn’t you eat your breakfast?! You’ve got to eat your protein!” Or, when Finn was feeling like a failure he gave great advice that is applicable to everyone:
This chat from my brother makes me laugh. It just reminds me to be more confident:
And every Facebook post by my 14-year old cousin Kennedy is a keeper:
My friend Jo and her quilt shop Suppose are always doing something fun. She is in charge of the blog for the Utah/Idaho/Wyoming Shop Hop and asked me to design a blog header. This is the result:
I designed and printed some Christmas wrapping paper this year!
It was a fun but challenging project. Mostly because it took me about a week to get the screens to burn correctly. It took a Christmas miracle, but in the end it all worked out.
The finished sheets were 25 inches by 19 inches. My one regret is using water based ink. I thought it would be easier for cleanup, but as I was wrapping my Christmas gifts, some of the ink was transferred to my hot little hands. So if I sent you any of this paper, sorry about that.
My brother had me take his engagement photos and design this announcement for his wedding. Congratulations Drew and Morgan! Both of my brothers got married this year which has really thrown off my Christmas shopping. I normally only have to buy girl presents for my mom. Now there are more girls than boys. Crazy!
This is a quick logo I made for my aunt. Apparently one of her coworkers was frustrated and called their boss’s boss a slacker-loser to his face. It has become a big joke and her cuss word of choice. So if you happen to enter a certain government office and the employees are wearing shirts that say slacker-loser, do not worry. They are not slackers nor losers. They are just funny.
One day I woke up and just needed to make some hats. I think they turned out fun! I just put them in my etsy shop. Check them out!
Special thanks to everyone who let me take pictures of them, and to Casey who took some of the pictures himself! You guys are the greatest!
This is a quote by Hannah Harte I read (then carved into leaves) from Tomboy Style. Totally agree.
Now I need to make 100 copies to hang up around my apartment and my mom’s house. That sock has to turn up somewhere…
Last week my dad went out of town and I went home to Rexburg to help cut the hay. I like helping out on the farm, although I don’t get to do it very often. It is nice at the end of a day of work to be able to physically see that you have accomplished something. It rained two of the days I was supposed to be cutting and I had one semi-serious breakdown, but luckily my dad got home just in time to fix it. The field I was cutting is near the river and the sand dunes and nothing else so there is a lot of wildlife. I saw seven moose at one time. Seven! My brother and I ate all the corn we could handle and then I helped my mom freeze a bunch. It was a fun week.
At the beginning of the summer I found this list of sewing tutorials. I felt like all of the tutorial writers were always making cute skirts with fabric they just found around their house, so I decided I would only use fabric from my stash. Which means I now have a Shirred Pocket Skirt that looks like an orange muppet (I can’t totally remember why I bought orange fuzzy fabric from the DI), a “Where’s Waldo” colored Paper Bag Skirt, and a Pocket Skirt made of purple velvet that was leftover from a dance dress my mom made for me when I was in high school. I would recommend NOT using really thick fluffy fabric for either of the pocket skirts, unless you want them to be kind of unflattering. After struggling with the velvet, I really admired that my mom had made a full-length long-sleeved normal-looking dress out of that crazy stuff. The tutorial for Paper Bag Skirt recommends a thicker fabric, I happened to buy some almost canvas type stuff from the DI which worked perfectly, although it did not say how long of a zipper to buy and I ended up with one that is wayyyyy too short and I have to carefully squeeze it on and off. I’m glad I practiced on fabric I didn’t care too much about messing up. One of these days I need to get myself to Suppose and buy some nice breezy cotton and make some skirts I can be proud of. You know, now that summer is ending.