Seeing as I can’t really purchase any more furniture until we move in, I’ve moved onto smaller things. Today – pillows!

I need a large variety of awesome throw pillows. Fancy pants ones for downstairs which I will make, and fun ones for upstairs for two different areas. Today, I focused on upstairs.

I found coucou salut on etsy – located in Montreal, this gal makes beautiful silkscreened pillows with repurposed fabrics. I found three must-haves today, and I look forward to watching her shop for new items to add to my collection.

Here’s a peak at one of my new pillow covers!

Late night, little sleep, up early, tiring day. I’m exhausted and going to bed early. Goodnight!

- Client area couch purchased. Woo! We’ll have it early December.

- MOST FABULOUS PIECE OF FURNITURE WE’VE EVER OWNED purchased, also for delivery early December. But this one is a secret. You will love it, as will everyone who comes to visit. It goes upstairs. It will be fought over. You will want to touch it.

- We were hoping to purchase some of the cupboards in our new place off of the current owners, but they aren’t selling the ones we want (only the ugly, mismatched, useless ones). This is OK, but it means we’ll have to do a large Ikea trip when we move in. Assembly party, anyone?

Furniture shopping list:

• 8 mis-matched wooden dining room chairs with character, to match the fancy new table. We’ll see how this goes.
• Upstairs couch (sectional) or couches (couch + loveseat). This needs to wait until we move in and have our other pieces so we can fine-tune layout and confirm available space
• Upstairs and downstairs coffee tables, once everything else is in place
• Client area wall/cupboard/display unit thing. Need a row of short cupboards for storage ie: 1 1/2 feet high, then open so we can put albums etc. on top of that, wall space above that for canvas/display prints, and a final set of cupboards above with lights pointing down and glass doors with internal lights to display more stuff. At least, this is my current working theory. Hello Ikea!
• Multiple Ikea Pax cupboards. 3 door unit for the entry, mirrored, as the previous owners had. This one is for shoes and garage type stuff – tools, camping gear, etc. Two more are needed upstairs one each for our closets. Then we need to take stock and figure out what we need to do my integrated craft area with the wall of cupboards upstairs and what the downstairs office organization stuff looks like. All of which needs to happen once we’re in and can see it in addition to measure it.
• So many colorful pillows! At least 2 or 3 turquoise roll pillows for the client area downstairs and a pile of pillows upstairs – bright colours, a couple patterns, both for the yet-undecided couch and the SECRET.
• Depending on layout I think I might also recover our wooden stools and put them along the railing upstairs looking over into the kitchen. This seems like fun, and a good place for them.
• I keep flipping between thinking we probably have more space than we think we do and thinking that we probably have less space than we think we do. Until we get our stuff moved in we don’t know, even though we have measurements and such it’s not quite the same. I can’t wait!

(yesterday: purple; today: black and white. two more to go them I move onto the clocks.)

Breakfast: Deacon’s

Weather: Monsoon (both wind & rain warnings in effect by environment canada)

Snack: Trader Joe’s chocolate covered pretzels

Purchase: OMG I shouldn’t be allowed to look at furniture because we end up buying things. The two chairs for our client viewing area have been ordered and they are GORGEOUS. One red, one light blue/aqua, both leather but in different styles. Loveseat for the client area is also picked out but is a US order/delivery only, so I will need to find someone who loves me with a garage in Seattle or area who can take delivery and we’ll come pick it up when it arrives.

Other decor updates:

- After turning our noses up at available dining room chair options we are going under a working theory of finding old mismatched wooden dining room chairs to go with our table. Of course, any time you set out to find something specific from flea markets/antique stores/etc. you can never find what you’re looking for, so this plan may change. It also means that we won’t yet have chairs for our parties (yes, plural, we are having two very large parties 4 days after we move in), but that’s OK.

- We are both closer and further away to/from finding the perfect couch. Upstairs is very mid century modern with my new sideboard, the orange TV, the new pink chair, the turquoise chair, and related accessories. The couch, however, is a challenge. I want to have space for at least two or three people to lay down at the same time, which means either two separate couches or a large sectional. I am also cheap, so options are limited. I like upholstery and this is easier to pair with the theme, but Reilly wants leather. We can do leather but then it needs to be fairly sleek, not overstuffed at all, and ideally button tufted to best fit in. We will see. There are all sorts of gorgeous repro couches that would fit, but most are either crazy expensive or not available in Canada which means we can order to someone’s place but sight unseen, which isn’t ideal.

- kayaks are decor, right?

Well, crap.

I was doing fairly well with the whole daily blogging thing, and here we are on the 14th and I have nothing to say.

Breakfast with our houseguest this am, then hung out on the couch doing nothing until our wedding. Picked up Shari and headed to our 4 hour reception with Rob & Andrea – we’d never shot a wedding they’d worked before – so that was fun.

Cupcake by cococake, now home and waiting for Private Practice to download. It is flipping between 8 minutes and 52 minutes remaining, it can’t decide which. There is a crazy person in the alley below us singing apparently, or at least I think it’s supposed to be a song. This is keeping me entertained for the moment.

Tomorrow: relax. Well, final inspection and upload of a couple of albums, then relax. Reilly is planning to go snowboarding with Josh and Shan on what will be the 3rd open day of the season, and I will alternate lounging with cram crafting. Well, alternate or just simultaneously craft and lounge at the same time, depending on what I’m working on.

6 minutes it claims now for the download, and the singing has died down. Kind of like waiting for a kettle to boil.

Cheerio!

- Button necklaces have been moved to production! I have already removed multiple steps from the process to create them, making them faster to make with each new necklace. I currently have 6 in the works, and might add a couple more. I still don’t want to sell any of them.

- I have no idea how to package these necklaces. They are made on a necklace wire which is pre-formed, so they take up about 6″ round, like a dessert plate. Must get creative. They are fairly durable but can’t be crammed into a small space, either.

- VanCityAllie had her birthday today, and along with it a huge party with tasty bites and much liquor. Reilly is friends with her on the internets, which works for me as I got to go too. We met a number of great new people who have been facebooked and such, and will be on the list for our housewarming. Yay for new people!

- And, on the topic of new people, I walked into the party only to be greeted by a friendly albeit almost forgotten face of an old coworker and friend from Edmonton, I had no idea he was even in the city. I love it when the world is smaller than it seems.

- Our hippie hostel is in full force and John is spending the night. I am distraught that I don’t have any extra toothbrushes, but otherwise this is a good thing. Yay for random houseguests!

- Breakfast in the morning. Mmmmm, breakfast.

- HOLY CRAP WE MOVE IN TWO WEEKS!

- Wedding reception tomorrow night with Rob & Andrea, which will be fun as we haven’t done a wedding with them. AND, Kathy just booked one of our clients so we get another wedding with them early next year. Good times.

No bad iphone photos today, that’s all folks!

Productive day!

- Work day in the studio, so edit edit email edit email album design

- We were interviewed on camera for a documentary on cross cultural weddings. Being on the other side of the camera is hard enough, trying to sound intelligent and coherent at the same time is entertaining

- Shot an extended engagement session with a fun couple whose wedding we have booked in May

And, on the crafty front:

- made 62 scrabble tile pendants

- cleaned and polished 147 gungy old typewriter keys with steel wool so they are new and shiny, ready to be made into bracelets

- Modified my button necklace prototype successfully and made what I hope to be the first of my production run on these. Only, it’s so darn pretty I don’t want to sell it. The price will reflect this fact.

You are coming to Got Craft! aren’t you?

Got Craft? Holiday Show

When: Sunday, December 6th, 2009 from 11:00am to 5:00pm

Where: Royal Canadian Legion 2205 Commercial Drive (@ E.6th Ave), Vancouver

Admission: $2.00 (kids under 10 are free)

http://gotcraft.com/

I will be participating in my second show this year, and will have many crafty things on sale! Complete & mid-production items include typewriter key necklaces, typewriter key bracelets, scrabble tile necklaces and test tube necklaces. On the list for crafting are button cluster necklaces and vintage book clocks, both of which are still in prototype stage but close to moving to production.

I craft for fun, but I seldom have time for fun so I end up cram crafting, which I actually don’t mind. I find it more productive to get lots of things ready and to sit down and make a bunch of stuff at once rather than doing a little at a time, which is probably a good thing as I have lots of crafting to do in the next 3 weeks!

At the Vancouver Craft Mafia swap/craft along tonight I came home with a whole pile of buttons mostly courtesy of the lovely Andrea so I am ready to craft my merry little self into oblivion with button necklaces. My prototype passed the test of being worn in public, I was asked by a stranger where I got it. Perfect!

Another iphone photo for you:

Yay! Tuesday! Work Day!

Well, you know…

Today was good. Fairly productive, it was our employee’s birthday so we took her out for lunch, and then I headed to the US for underpants with a pile of girls.

The trip was productive: Trader Joe’s, Lane Bryant, Mi Mexico, and Target were feature destinations and we left with tasty snacks, oversized packages of candy, a new shirt, happy handsoap, bellies full of delicious mexican food, smelly things, and piles of underpants.

That was, of course, the intended purpose: underpants. This was successful, and I have many new fancy underpants to show for it.

On the topic of devices, mine hate me. My iphone stopped working a couple weeks ago for 2 days and the day I was going to take it in it started to work mysteriously. It’s still weird though and today neither wanted to turn off nor turn on when it was time.

My work laptop has also been complaining about needing a new fan, with the old one making horrific noises worse with each passing day. I have an external house fan running over it to help as much as possible as well as have it sitting on a laptop cooler, and I have a new fan on order to replace this one as soon as possible. Only, I just got home and my laptop was off and is now refusing to turn on. Ya. Thanks for that.

I think Reilly may have sabotaged it on purpose as he wants me to go to mac, but seriously, I don’t have time for this!

This is definitely a Monday that feels nothing like a Monday.

Woke up to waves crashing on the rocks in front of the cabin, which is what I love about Tofino at this time of year. Packed up our things in a relatively relaxed fashion and hit the road, catching the 3pm ferry after dropping off Amanda in Nanaimo so she could spend the next couple days with her aunt and uncle before heading back to Calgary.

While in line for the ferry they had a bomb sniffing dog checking out all the vehicles in the rows next to ours. Nothing like uniforms and excited dogs to make you paranoid you’re doing something wrong! With all the fireworks shot off this weekend I was nervous about them coming near our truck as we most definitely would smell like gun powder, but luckily they didn’t do our row. I was too tired to deal with that, especially with a truck packed literally to the roof with bags and guitars and things than an overzealous cop might want to search through.

Other than that, today is a day of naps and relaxing in anticipation of tomorrow which will involve actual work.

In other news, while I’m normally fairly upbeat and chipper about the whole broken leg thing, sometimes it really really fucking sucks. Today is one of those days. Coming to terms with the concept that you are essentially disabled to some unknown extent for life is not easy.

You can still be cool rocking a rascal in middle age, right?

*sigh*