These are slippers from Kazakhstan. They belong to my new friends Michael & Irene. You can wear a pair when you visit for crepes and chats. Super hype. 

(For my readers outside Canada, do you know it's custom for our Finance Minister to get new shoes before delivering the budget? Maybe if Mr. Flaherty wore some snazzy Kazak slippers things would go better tomorrow for everyone . . . sigh)

Simplification Sunday: Week Thirteen

I don't have any good photos for you this week, so I share this one from WWF. This fella is a Rockhopper penguin, and is pretty much my favourite thing ever. I'm getting really jazzed to go and see his kind and more at the penguin habitat at the New England Aquarium next week. Hopefully a short excursion to Boston will sate the Wanderlusts . . . but probably not.

This week in simplifying I -

- finished a quilt that I'd had in progress for years
- finally closed my extra bank account! (If I could say Hallelujah at this time of year, I would, but I can't so I won't . . . but seriously Scotiabank, you don't make things easy!)
- and I had the great idea to set my egg timer for 30 minutes and just go through my house and throw out or add to the destash mountain anything I could think of . . . this led me deep into the recesses of  The Tupperware cupboard! Whoa! My last roommate was a bit of a chef and left me with about 37 lids and 19 bottoms, none of which were mated, none of which I'll ever use. So I recycled what I could, matched up a few to keep, and threw out anything that had to go.

I wish all my mistakes ended this well. I stupidly didn't check to see if I could send parcels on the train to Sudbury (the train station there is about 20kms into the bush and is not staffed), so I ended up having to bike another heap of distance down to the bus parcel depot. I was annoyed and tired, but all was made well with a picnic from T&T grocery store (the greatest place on Earth) and the view that you see here. Toronto wrecked it's water front by running a heaping mess of highways and condos between the lake and downtown, so it is easy to forget its identity as a port city on the Great Lakes. But when you do remember this, it can be pretty sweet . . .

Ah, this will be a good week for simplifying! I finally delivered a quilt 50 years in the making. My Great Aunt Verna used to clean homes for a living and salvage old clothes along the way. These were carefully desconstructed and carefully reconstructed into quilts, curtains, oven mitts, pillow cases, dresses, and anything else that could be sewn. She was very much a child of the Depression and never threw anything out. Her death left a lot of unfinished mystery projects that eventually ended up in my hands as the resident good humoured quilter in my family. After years of sitting on this project, I threw my energies into this quilt a few weeks ago and whipped up a basic, but pretty quilt as a surprise for my parents. It arrived in Sudbury this morning and my mother sent me a picture of the finished quilt on their bed and a touching note:

"I was so excited to see the queen size quilt with all of Aunt Verna's appliquéd pieces in it.

She will rest in peace now knowing her treasures were not thrown away."

Voila!

 

Ah! I've been looking forward to this!

The super talented and wonderful Rachel has finally taken the Etsy plunge and launched her shop with some totally love-worthy dolls. How gorgeous are they? I'm partial to the bright pink because, well, I'm partial to anything bright pink.

Go say hi to Rachel at Come Back Kids, and maybe give her shop or your favourite dolly a heart - or adopt one for yourself!

Simplification Sunday: Week Twelve

 First cone ever at Dutch Dreams! What have I been doing all these years?

 The ultra cluttered stylings of Dutch Dreams. Rock my socks, fellas!

 A fittingly blurry, hazy shot from a blurry, hazy dinner at Guu. This place is grand! Can't wait to go again.

And, yeah, that's a $14 cup from Anthropologie. If it wasn't pretty much the greatest cup ever I'd hate myself for spending $14+tx on a coffee cup from a Yuppie fest store in Yorkville. Gah!

This week was pretty much a week of anti-simplifying. As I knew full well, all my goals and rules fell apart by about 11pm on Monday. I said yes to more projects, started new crafts, signed up for workshops, played a lot with my friends, and brought more material possessions into my life! Whoumphf! And my few, paltry efforts to simplify fell flat because the bank lost some paperwork that I had to refile on Saturday. Oh, well! Onward and upward kiddos. My heart was made very happy though in all these moments of non-simplification. Doing new things makes me happy. I know this. Everyone knows this. So I went for the first time ever to the Museum of Inuit Art (nothing but incredible!), Dutch Dreams (deliciousness abounds!), Anthropologie (ack! I need a full time job to support this habit!), Goodwill in Roncesvalles (so not worth the trek!), The Workroom (curses! I do not need more fabric in my life . . . but oh the deliciousness that also abounds!) . . . 

This post comes a day early because I'll be at a JavaScript workshop tomorrow . . . maybe tonight I'll find a few small simplifying projects to work on. Here's wishing you happiness in your days this week, whether they be simple or something other than that . . . 

I'm pretty chintzy and stingy when it comes to dropping my hard-earned funds on material things. Experiences, yes! Sign me up! Plane tickets! Courses! Workshops! Dinner out with friends! Museums! Adventure! Yes, yes, yes. But if it's something just to keep, like this pretty fish here, I have a tough time. I like rock-bottom prices . . . even better if I find it by the side of the road.

So I really, really struggled when I fell in serious like with this gorgeous bit of tackiness here in Florida over Christmas. Yes, I had already dropped $400 on a plane ticket to go visit Miami, but the $6.50 on a candle holder seemed so excessive.

After two trips to the store and twenty minutes of pouting my mommy finally just bought it for me to shut me up.

Simplification Sunday: Week Eleven

Image Source, thanks!

Oh man. Ugh. Not such a great week in the simplification department. While I did manage to do some organizing and purging, I don't know that it was really the best use of my time or did very much to bring about simplicity in my life. Oh well. Onward and upward. This was a week of all about the beads! This, in my life, was an inevitability . . . 

- brought some stuff to a destash party with work friends . . . though I came home with three new shirts  

- I had friends over for a beading party and they helped use up some of my beads into a nice heap of creations. I was so sincerely happy to see my beads get out of the containers and into jewellery that will be worn with pride and great style

- This party prompted a total purge and organizing of ALL my beads. Whoa. Talk about long over due. I threw out three Pyrex mixing bowls of bead related junk. There was some stuff that was just never going to see the light of day . . . gonzo. Then sorted everything by colour and managed to get everything into five fewer containers than I needed before. Success! 

- I either finished or cut apart all my beading projects that were in purgatory. There were doing no one any good sitting in a box broken and unfinished. 

- I donated three finished pieces to the silent auction at school. Gonzo! 

I have such a terrific fetish for Tibetan beads (see photo above), I've never been able to source them at a good price . . . anywhere. So I may settle on trying to make a necklace this week that looks like this. Okay. Gotta get my head on straight and be productive. Today is a glorious beautiful sunny day, so I am sad to be at the computer working. 

I work with some seriously hype people who all work for a seriously great organization. I am totally in love with them and my work. Today is International Women's Day (the quotation below came through my inbox from Rachel, who is so cool). So we had cake and flowers at 2pm to celebrate. And Alfredo brought his guitar and serenaded us in fantastic El Salvadorian style. The morning also saw us flock (pun intended) to Sara's office to participate in the joyous return of our kestrel. It's nice to have a mid-morning birding break at work, don't you? She is a beautiful bird and it was great to have this shared moment with my colleagues, who are by any account an interesting lot of people. The satisfaction of  a good working life is pretty awesome.

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. 


 Arundhati Roy, War Talk

By very interesting coincidence five of my favourite people in the world are all leaving for big trips within a 24 hour period this week. They're off to Colombia to get married, LA & Solomon Islands for fun and work, to Tokyo for adventure, to Boston for nerding, and to Vancouver for work and family time. Very cool. I am trying not to be jealous of their travels, which is working most of the time. And besides, I get to bike by a CASTLE on my way to work in the morning. Today was another no-winter kind of morning. I didn't even wear mittens on my bike ride. It was beautiful and sunny. Next time, I will wipe the fingerprints off my camera before taking a picture, but for today, maybe the gauzy, blurriness works just find.

Tell me about your next adventure! Or your commute! What is your commute like?

Simplification Sunday: Week Ten

Despite all the good intentions I have in my heart, I still couldn't resist starting new projects this week. Sigh. I really can't help it. At least this was a quick one, and one I had been planning for a while, and it is already done. People with cats will find this familiar - I was sewing buttons onto this blanket (in lieu of quilting it) and in the span of a quick bathroom break my dirty, ugly fluff ball took up residence on it . . . cats have such a magnificent radar for fresh projects in need of their help.

Once I finished it, I folded up and put it on my desk so keep it safe from cat gross (it's going to a home populated by at least one person allergic to kitties) . . . and well look how well that worked out. She is most definitely NOT allowed on my desk. I just laughed and took her picture and let her be. I haven't been very good to her lately and I know she has a sore tooth, so I just let her indulge in a bit of bad behaviour. If I really wanted to keep the quilt safe, I should have put it in a bag, and set it away in the closet.

And here it is sans Fattie. It's made from glorious panels of wool that I found last year at the Textile Museum sale. I bought them with this quilt in mind and am glad that it panned out so well. Super cozy. And the whole project only cost about $25-30.

So for this week in simplifying, I:

- finished the top of my quilt! Started in 2010, but then I hit some mistakes and gave up on it for too long, but I bit the bullet, fixed the mistakes I had the energy to fix, sewed the rest of the mistakes into the quilt . . . it's a blanket afterall, not a work of art . . . geeze. Once I find my next payday, I'll buy fabric for the back and finish it up. It's pretty great. I find finishing the top and flattening out on your bed is such a great moment in the process.

- put a few things out by the side of the road for other treasurer hunters to adopt, which felt pretty good

- hit pause on my academic/nerd blog because, well, I discovered that I don't really like or get very much out of blogging about my research. I definitely don't need that outlet, so I'll just leave that website be for a while until I feel energized to start a new project over there.

- and I have found the energy and interest to peck away at a knitted blanket I started a year ago, I'm really going to try to plow through that . . . my needles are too small, rookie mistake, but I'm in very deep so I gotta finish it. Blech. :D

I think tonight after church I'm going to make a to-do list or a schedule or something. I am not so good at them, nor am I good at being focused on goals, but I should try to take a stab at figuring out what would really make things simple and happy-making for me this week and maybe this month. Have you done anything lately that has made your life simpler/happier/easier/more streamlined? I'd love to hear about it.

I'm a little bummed out that my cell phone takes better pictures in low light than my (5 year old) digital camera.

Such is life, I suppose. I've long said that when I finish my PhD I'm going to get myself an SLR and a black lab. Now I'm thinking that I'll be too poor to afford the first and likely too itinerant to warrant the second. Someday . . . until then, it'll just be me, Fattie and her hobo bag on a stick, and grainy, gritty pictures.

This is my friend's rooster, Handsome Pete. I just think he's a pretty magnificent bird. He lives in Australia and is apparently a bit of a hit with the lady fowl in the neighbourhood.