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toaster - pejorative term used by Humans to describe Cylon centurions.

Here is just a quick post to show off my latest crafty adventure. I started making soap. In reality, I didn’t actually make the soap with lye or human fat ala Fight Club. I take a clear “melt and pour” soap base, melt it, add color, scent, and toys, and pour it into a mold.

It comes out like this:

This is blackberry soap that I made for my friends’ band We Wrote the Book on Connectors. They sell it at their shows. The WE and the mustache in the center of the soap is made out of felt.

I also made ginger lime soap and embedded homies in the middle. I gave most of these bars away to friends.

Anyway, if you have any ideas about cool stuff to embed in soap or if you want me to make you anything in particular or have a desire for Homie soap, let me know.

Now that March has come to an end, it’s time to review the February and March resolutions. If you recall, the theme of the months was craftiness. I accomplished a ton, but still managed to buy stuff for even more projects. I took a quilting class (one session left), another online scrapbook class, and signed up for yet another that starts next week. I also made melt and pour soap for the first time and purshased even more fabric. 

The resolutions were:

1. Have all items to sell on ebay out of the house by the weekend of February 25. I want to come home from Vegas without any clutter.

Success! I mailed the last item the day before vacation. Almost everything sold and I made about $500. The best part is that my closets aren’t bursting at the seam. Oh, they are still full, just not bursting.

2. Complete the Colts 2005 accordian card file scrapbook. I need to get this down on paper soon before I forget all the good (and not so good) memories from the Colts season this year.

Success! It’s finished and I’m happpy with the results. It was a quick little projects with wallet-sized pictures and hand-written journalling. Nothing fancy and it gets the job done.

3. Assemble wine journal. The labels are piling up and I want to get them in the book before I lose them.

Success! Again, it’s nothing fancy, but is a great place to record what wines I’ve had and note which ones I want to have again.

4. Complete two panels of the Christmas Tree Skirt. I’ve been working (aka NOT working) on this since 2002. I made up a schedule that will get it done by September.

Fail! Although I did work on the project, I didn’t complete two panels. I didn’t even complete one panel. There is no motivation when it comes this project.

5. Finish all the assignments in the online scrapbooking class I’m taking.

Success! All assignments that I was interested in completing are complete.

6. Complete three projects that I started at the Creating Keepsakes Conventions I attended last year. I’m not allowed to go to another convention until I’ve finished every single projects from the two conventions. Luckily, the Bellevue one isn’t until November.

Success! I actually completed four projects from convention and four other small projects that I had laying around. I didn’t put pictures in them yet, but they are four assembled projects that are ready to be given away at a moments notice.

I’m pretty happy with the results here. Obviously I really wanted to complete all six, but I did a lot this month and hope the momentum continues. April’s theme and resolutions will be posted on Monday.

 Generation T: 108 Ways to Transform a T-shirt!  This is a super great book and I’ve barely skimmed the pages and pages of crafty projects using a simple t-shirt (or two).  You can make a tee into a skirt! A bag! A halter top!  As soon as I pull out some old ratty tees from my closet and buy a good pair of scissors my springtime project will be to try out some of these t-shirt transformations.

Happy National Craft Month everyone! This was clearly not a good month to try and get my craft supply spending in control as craft stores everywhere are having amazing sales. They also email me amazing free project ideas which gets the old brain churning thinking up many more new craft projects. I’ve been on a role this month, thinking of at least five more “brilliant ideas” to craft.

To celebrate this most fantastic month, my friend Katie and I signed up for a beginning machine quilting class. It’s a four session class where we learn the basics of quilting and complete a table runner. Katie and I aren’t really table runner kind of folk, so we are crafting said table runners with our parents in mind. We aren’t sure that our parents are table runner folk either, but they will be gifted with our creations nonetheless.

This brings me to my real question. How do you feel about handmade gifts? Clearly, I love them. I love to receive them. I love to make them. This is a no brainer though, because I love crafts. What does the non-crafter think about crafted gifts? 

There is something inherently dorky and embarressing about giving a homemade gift. I never know if the giftee will like it. Will they think it is dumb? Will they value the time and effort put into the gift? I feel this way every time I make something for someone even though I’ve never been disappointed by the reaction of the giftee. I experience a strange mix of pride and shame, but yet I continue to make homemade presents. Does anyone else feel this way? Fiskars has a new ad campaign where they asked scrapbookers, quilters, gardeners and other crafters to make a journal entry answering a question about crafting. My favorite assignment was “using any means you want, express the feeling you get when you give someone a gift that you have made yourself.” One crafter used her entry to describe exactly the situation I just mentioned. It made me happy to know I’m not the only one with this unusual outlook on giving homemade gifts. Unfortunately, this ad isn’t in their gallery, but another ad also captures the good part about giving a homemade gift.

I’m a self-described magazine junkie. My subscriptions are usually in flux, but I always have at least one on cooking, another on crafting, and a third for movie news. ReadyMade is far and away my favorite magazine. It’s a DIY smorgasbord filled with instructions on fun and hip projects. I’ve yet to actually complete a ReadyMade project, but I like to see what kind of stuff the cool kids make. I also enjoy Cooking Light, Real Simple, Entertainment Weekly, Premiere, Sunset, Budget Living and Creating Keepsakes.

In the last few months, I’ve discovered two new magazines that are each awesome in their own right. The first, Notebook, is an Austrailian women’s magazine. It’s been out for over a year, but I picked up the January issue last week. This isn’t like Glamour or Vogue, but more like Martha Stewart’s or Oprah’s magazines. It’s bright and colorful with sections on food, home and garden, and lifestyle. The most interesting part to me is the calendar section. In it there is a page for each day of the month with either a thought, quote, or action for the day. It might say go for a hike and then list out some cool places to go hiking or it might give a recipe to try for dinner. If the day is a holiday, say Chinese New Year, that day’s entry will be about celebrating the holiday. I haven’t seen a section like this in any other magazine and I’m hoping it will become more popular.

Notebook is also fairly interactive with areas for jotting notes or keeping an exercise schedule. It also has fold out dividers, so you can flip to any section in the magazine without paging through. The editors of this magazine mean for you to carry it around with you all month, like a planner or a calendar. I won’t be using it for that, but I can see how it could easily become a good tool for organization.

Since the seasons in Australia are opposite from ours, the one I picked up is about Summer. It’s great reading articles about growing tomatoes and going on road trips this time of year, because it gave me something to look forward too. I probably won’t pick this up every month, but it is a good escape.

I’ve already subscribed to the second magazine I recently discovered, Scrapbook Answers. It has been out for about four months now and is, as the name points out, solely about scrapbooking and paper-crafting. What makes this magazine different from other scrapbooking magazines I’ve read is its focus on techniques. Each issue comes with a cd that has short instructional videos that teach new techniques. The cd also includes a smattering of fonts, printable images, and image software.

Another good thing about Scrabook Answers is its product reviews. They writers aren’t afraid to give negative reviews and the magazine doesn’t have the rah-rah cheerleaderesque quality of the other scrapbook magazines. I’m hoping the magazine will up its page count soon, as the issues are a bit slim.

Those are the two magazines I’ve been interested in lately, but if you know of any great or fun ones I’m missing, drop a comment. I’m always looking for new ones to read.

Since I’ll be blogging here from now on and abandoning my old blog, I’ve updated and reposted my last entry. I know I’ll want to follow up on it at the end of March. Instead of setting traditional New Year’s resolutions this year that are mostly unsuccessful, I’m setting monthly goals. January was organizing month and it was a great success. Motivated by this, I’m going to continue with this resolution scheme. I like to use the S.M.A.R.T. goals paradigm for making resolutions, no matter how silly the goal. This helps to stay accountable.

February is short and shaping up to be super busy, so I decided to give myself two months to complete my resolutions. The theme of these two months is craftiness. I’ve got projects upon projects piling up. I did weed some out when organizing last month, but I probably still have materials to make at least 20 different things. Be it magnets, scrapbook albums, stencil t-shirts, embroidery, or material for zipper pouches, I have the ingredients to make a whole lot of awesome things. I’m always buying more too. While the wise goal would be to eliminate the behavior of buying more crafting supplies, I’ve decided to focus on finishing some projects this month. My logic here is that I will build in the behavior to see my projects to fruition and I will begin to craft faster. My goals of the month are:

1. Have all items to sell on ebay out of the house by the weekend of February 25. I want to come home from Vegas without any clutter.

2. Complete the Colts 2005 accordian card file scrapbook. I need to get this down on paper soon before I forget all the good (and not so good) memories from the Colts season this year.

3. Assemble wine journal. The labels are piling up and I want to get them in the book before I lose them.

4. Complete two panels of the Christmas Tree Skirt. I’ve been working (aka NOT working) on this since 2002. I made up a schedule that will get it done by September.

5. Finish all the assignments in the online scrapbooking class I’m taking. (More on this in another post.)

6. Complete three projects that I started at the Creating Keepsakes Conventions I attended last year. I’m not allowed to go to another convention until I’ve finished every single projects from the two conventions. Luckily, the Bellevue one isn’t until November.

Meeting these goals will definitely be challenging, but I think it is also realistic. The key will in finding time on weeknights. I decided that this systematic approach is the only way it’s going to happen. I’m concerned that it might take some of the fun out of crafting, but it can’t hurt to test it out for two months and then report back.

This monthly goal setting is keeping me motivated so far, but it is very early in the year. I read somewhere that it takes 21 days to integrate a new habit into your life. Now, I don’t know how you measure something like that, but it sounds reasonable to me. Hopefully by the end of the year I’ll have 12 great new habits and less bad ones.

Also, I should note that only seven days into February and I’m half way done with goal number one. I’m selling off a bunch of junk culled from organizing month including most of my pez collection, the old Sega Dreamcast, and some other odds and ends. It takes a long time to post ebay auctions with a dial up connection and I’m hoping to finish the rest tonight.

I need to admit too, that I’m doing a poor job of staying on the “don’t buy craft supplies” bandwagon. I purchased a screen printing kit on Friday and my mind is racing with new project ideas.