a monumental moment

i'm hoping to be a new car owner again in the next month. i can't believe i'm about to say this, but soccer starts next month and i need to be able to transport more kids. i am a soccer mom.

Making Pink

While Mia was away at Art Camp I did a bedroom remodel for her. The girls officially have their own bedrooms now and we no longer have a guest room. Mia's room was this awesome orange color when we moved in. It was peeling in several locations and had lots of scrapes and holes in it, but it was a great color and I wanted to live with it for awhile.

 

I gave myself a $0 budget to work with. You heard I'm not working this summer right? Money is a bit tight. So, zero dollars it was. Mia and I both wanted pink walls - and this is what I had to work with:

 

Here we have an almost full quart of the color I wanted that was leftover from a kung fu bambini tradeshow booth project, a full baby pink quart that I bought a few months ago at Home Depot for $1 in the mistinted paint section (LOVE the mistinted paint section!), a half of a gallon left over from painting Mia's room pink at our old house four years ago and an almost full gallon of a lighter version of the color I wanted that was also leftover from that same kung fu bambini booth project.

I did some crazy calculations using the formulas that were on the paints and came up with my own formula for what I'd need to add once I mixed all of this craziness together. I needed Exterior Red - and lots of it. So I took one of the partial gallons back to the Home Depot and asked them to add in 4 oz of Exterior Red. Took it home, mixed it up and whalah! PINK! The perfect melony pink that I wanted. Mia's room in Vancouver was a much more magenta pink. After all of that work to get the perfect color I dragged Justin upstairs, explained this to him and he shrugged his shoulders and said "that's the exact same color of her old room". P'shaw!

 

Anyway, it's perfect. Here is her bed being painted as well. That was a $10 find from the bins about a year ago that I finally painted and Justin helped me build the bed portion with pieces from an old bunk bed that we had in our garage. There's also a great antique nightstand that I got for $1 at the bins a few months ago and had in the garage.

SEE - reduce, reuse, recycle!

 

PURGE PURGE PURGE!!!!

I am a keeper. It's even in my business plan. You know, reduce, reuse, recycle. I can not bear to let things go. I look at every single piece and think - that has value to someone, somewhere - and then I convince myself that someone is me. The recycling part just takes so much time. And I don't love sending things to Goodwill. I do it. I send them LOADS of stuff, but I also shop the bins and I see how much of what they get just ends up as garbage. So, I try to send everything out to more local places and I try to divy everything out to the place that will best benefit from each thing. As you can imagine, this takes time. And partially contributes to what I call my crazy-factor.

Ze Closet Before
 

Ze Closet After
 

I have been so busy growing kung fu bambini for the last few years I became too busy to abide by my own mission and let stuff accumulate (although at least I didn't throw any of it away! THAT would be Violet-sacrilige!!!) And the accumulation DEFINITELY added to my crazy-factor. Part of this summer's sabbatical has included reducing that accumulation, in the best way possible. I started in my own closet after reading this article which I of course can't find now. Basically it said that you need to create flow in your life. For things to flow in, things need to flow out. Makes sense right? And it also said start in your own closet. I think it was right. Between that article and Fly-Lady's kitchen sink cleaning I'm building my arsenal for reducing my daily crazy-factor. Come to think of it, this whole sabbatical is simply that, reducing my crazy-factor. By George!

In case you were wondering....

This is where I've been:

 

Chasing two little mismatched shoe wearing princesses all over summerville. Aren't they the best?

I realized that I've been blogging in my head again. How can I keep doing that? I seriously blog in my head all day every day and then when I do finally go to sit down and really blog on my site... whoops, it's been three weeks. oi vey. So it's two posts a day for awhile until I get caught up!

BTW, I'm off of caffeine. Started yesterday, Monday, August 11, 2008. May it go down in history. I detoxed from caffeine when I was in junior college a million years ago. At that time I had found out that I had fibrosis of the breast and that caffeine was making it painful. SO, I detoxed and it was hell and I had migraine like headaches for two weeks. For years I only drank non caffeine beverages and little chocolate. Slowly I started drinking caffeine drinks again and more chocolate and in the last couple of years it's been two to three diet Dr. Pepper's a day as well as a daily chocolate fix. THIS is going to suck.

I've been planning on cutting back for awhile and whenever I start to get pain in the boobage I back off, but I finally made the decision to do it this week when I woke up feeling like a sack of potatoes and then read The Dooce's post about cleansing in some serious ways. I want to cut sugars as well, but having a Diet Caffeine Free Dr. Pepper may be my only tasty pleasure left so I'm holding onto that one for now - but no more than one a day.

Anyhoo - I also have my physical and mammogram coming up in October so now seems like a good time to take care of myself - as if I can counteract all of the damage I'm sure I've done to the boobage in the last few years all in a matter of weeks. But I'm going to try. I'm also going to be back at the kung fu bambini office starting in September so I felt like I needed to do this now so that I don't end up screaming at sweet baby shoes for not tying correctly.

Get ready for the ride peeps. Going to go take some Ibuprofen now.

Where was this diaper bag when I had a baby???

 

My sister in law had commented that she likes my purse the other day and laughed "does it come in diaper bags?" Well, of course it does! I whipped this up for her the day of her shower. Nothing like procrastinating! It turned out better than even I could have expected. (if I do say so myself :)

 

Know someone that wants one? I just added it to the shop as a custom design!

 

The outside has a cell phone pocket on one end and a big folder style pocket across the back. You never know when that working momma is going to need to pack along a file or two! The inside has a big free-quilted zippered pocket along the back and several side pockets running across the front. There are two puffy pockets on either side end that are the perfect size for a bottle or pump.

Ooh la la!

 

Don't You Judge Me...

It's a work in progress. It's not supposed to look like a page out of Country Living Magazine. Yet.

 

And I can completely admit I'm just jealous that I don't have one of those blogs where every picture and every aspect of my life always look perfect. But I don't. That's my husband's laundry there on his side table - and those are extension cords that I fished out from behind our bed on mine... and yes, those are bare lightbulbs hanging out above our bed. The shades are in the process of getting a custom cover. In the meantime we read by MISMATCHED lightbulbs. If you only knew how bad it bothers me that they are mismatched lightbulbs. As if the bare bulbs themselves aren't bad enough.

 

I can tell you that once this quilt is done that room is going to be spectacular! I've raised the curtain rods up to ceiling level to achieve height. I used some basic IKEA curtains and added the 3" ruffle on the sides in Heather Bailey's Freshcut. I had a few of the prints that I wanted through wholesale and then planned to substitute in several other prints that I had in stock, but as I started cutting, I started craving the Freshcut prints for this quilt. They are so yummy and the prints I was subbing in just didn't feel right. And so I headed to my favorite source for buying retail fabric - Elinor Peace Bailey's ebay store. Beth Watts will most likely be the one to help you and she is the sweetest gal to work with.

 

I digress. As usual. SO.. I'm making the Freshcut Quilt which is Heather's free pattern. But I'm changing it. The original pattern is for a lap quilt and I'm making a big 'ole queen sized duvet quilt. I've adjusted the pattern to use a 16 1/2" square instead of a 12 1/2". I'm going to post the adjustments once I have this baby finished, but email me if you want them. What is a quilt duvet you ask? It's a quilt that has a duvet insert for the winter.


In a nutshell:

make the quilt top
sandwich the top, the batting and a plain sheeting back
quilt those three pieces
bind the top edge only
sandwich the previously made quilt and a duvet back
bind (with the awesome ruffles) the three unbound edges creating a duvet pocket.

This way I can have a nice quilt in the summer and can fill that puppy with my big fluffy duvet in the winter. I'm excited, are you?