Christmas is coming...

Well, Christmas is sneaking up on me faster than I imagined. It's a weird dichotomy, because on the one hand I need more time to finish up the semester but on the other hand, I want a vacation! (Although I think I would be perfectly happy if I could fast forward time to the last day of school). I'm still trudging along on all of my papers; I've found no matter how early I start it I will always need right up to the night before it's due to work on it.

Yay for the long weekend for Thanksgiving; I was thankful indeed. It gave me a chance to work on some of my amigurumi and I had the opportunity to sew two more clutches. I felt like I needed to make more stuff for my etsy because right now my shop is filled with practically all custom orders (which are like the ultimate teaser, especially since I have a "no custom orders please" announcement in my shop). Also, I realized that I don't have any Christmas items! So this weekend I made an icicle bearlet (blue stripey fur), a glitter polar bearlet, a buttercup leaf bearlet and a christmas pack of berries.

I thought the berries would be good for Christmas ornaments; I also have three holly berries that I have to manufacture still.

My polar bearlet was partially inspired by the ice in my sprite cup (since that is usually the closest to snow we get in Hawaii!) I was really pleased with the way the glitter polar bearlet turned out; he is made with a yarn that has a silver thread of glitter running through it, so you get little flashes of silver in his white fur. It was kinda hard to make all the snowflakes float around him, but I ended up using chopsticks to hold them up! Hopefully, a lot of the new things I made will be in my shop tomorrow (so that people will have time to buy them in time for Christmas!)

Hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving! And for everyone who doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving today, Happy November!

Office and paper work

Well, today I took my sister to her exam (pedagogy for educators?) which was conveniently held at UH where my office is, so I went in to write my paper. For some reason I have been suffering from brain block (instead of writer's block), probably because I spent all summer writing and researching as a job. So now, when I have a paper due for my own class, I find that I just don't feel like writing. I got lots done today though, right now I have about 13 pages of my 20-30 page paper, and I find that the closer I get to the deadline the better my quality of writing (how's that for procrastination?). Suprisingly, a lot of people were in their offices too, so it was like a work party where everyone was writing papers!

Here are some sprinkles which are my office mate's ( I was looking at them all day trying to figure out if sprinkles could be substituted for lunch) and my cacti who I have named fluffy 2. Fluffy the original was a really cute succulent cactus that I got in Target when I was living in California, but I couldn't take him home to Hawaii with me so I planted him on my college campus and hoped the janitors would take care of him. fluffy 2 is from my mom, like an office warming present!

Other than that, I've just been finishing up some custom orders. I'm also trying not to buy more fabrics online, because I'm running out of room (right now I have a lot of my craft junk on my little sister's bed; she's away at college). But it's so hard... I feel like there are so many cute fabrics out there!

I can't wait for Thanksgiving break... I'm going to need it to catch up on my crafting!

Shop preview

Happening now... shop preview! I've been like a little busy bee, sewing and sewing! I have a bunch of new pouches from kawaii Japanese fabric and clutches which I am going to list slowly, and today I went to the beach and photographed some of my new earrings. The earring photos turned out really nicely... it's amazing what you can do with some leaves and rocks and a picnic table! I am still loving my camera which is amazing for macro; you can get as close as 3" away from the object. I got it about 2 years ago because I needed a digital camera when I went to China; it was okay for scenic faraway shots but it rocks with the light on for macro shots! It is a Panasonic Lumix with a Leica lens, and it works absolutely fantastically. I take a mess of pictures (items in nature usually sell well) and then I edit them (enhancing color, lightening and darkening, cropping) in Microsoft Office picture manager (which works extremely well for the minimal tampering I do.) I have photoshop, but it's on my old computer which overheats after about 30 minutes. I probably spent a total of 5 hours photographing and editing all my pictures, but now I'm finally ready to list some new things :) PS. I'm trying to post more frequently... we'll see how it goes!

Happy Anniversary to me!

Huzzah! I have reached my 1 year anniversary (Nov. 8) and boy does it feel good. :) I have sold over 280 items and gotton more than 700 hearts... I absolutely feel loved, and there is now way I could have done it without each and every one of you, thank you soooo much! To celebrate my anniversary, I am going to give a free button with every purchase, made with a new stock of super cute Japanese papers I ordered from shopkawaii. I was also developing small amigurumi berries that would be available for my anniversary, but I haven't gotton around to finishing them... as always I am bogged down by custom orders. It's really great, because one of the custom orders is for seven different bearlets for presents for bridesmaids... very cute!

And here is a tote my mom and sister got me from the mall... it's a tote with french fries saying "bon jour" and a taco saying "hola." Haha, guess they know I like cute things...

Farewell days of my youth

Well, it has been another crazy week... our home computer crashed! Many of my photos, all of my music, and some of my files for school are now gone. Forever. It's okay though, because I mostly learned my lesson from the first two times our family computers crashed and I now keep mostly everything of importance on jumpdrives. The only bad thing is that some of the photos I had for my etsy are gone, and now I have to reshoot them (which takes me kinda long time).

We had a very fun party at work (aka the University), where a whole wing of the History Department (basically all the Teaching Assistants from the A wing) decided that we would have trick or treating for our undergraduate students and then have a "grown up" party afterwards. You know you are truly a geek when you and your fellow teachers decide the coolest thing ever to do on Halloween is to have a party in a narrow hallway and to sleepover in an office. Despite elaborate attempts on our part (with games set up in our offices like "go fish" for candy)Approximately 5 undergraduates students came to get free candy all day. No matter, after our after seminar we broke out the booze! Each office had a themed drink; my officemate made "butterbeer" like in Harry Potter (really just butterscotch schnapps and vanilla cream soda) and I made appletinis. Yum yum, like liquid apple jolly ranchers. I'll put up a tutorial on how to make those yummy appletinis later! It was actually really funny; I don't have a shaker so I used a guava jelly jar to shake up the drinks (talk about your poor college student). They turned out quite good, actually; for future reference, jelly jars make excellent booze shakers.

I found out my alcohol tolerance level has been SEVERLY diminished; I probably only had about two shots of vodka the entire night and woke up in the middle of the night with a splitting headache and a mild hangover this morning. Does that sound possible?

I also decided to play hooky from school today; I skipped Hawaiian and US in the Pacific. It felt sooooo goood! I took some of my amigurumi mushroom sets to the park and photographed them au natural for a change.

Well, I've got lots of orders to do, and I was hoping to finish 1/2 of one of my huge papers this weekend, so we'll see how it goes!