anoisette

My sewing corner is a disgraceful mess. I’ve been accumulating more and more stuff and running out of space to put it. It’s time to get back to thinking more about how to organize the space. I put a bunch of books on hold at the library, like Dream Sewing Spaces: Design & Organization for Spaces Large and Small, and I can’t wait to see what kind of ideas and suggestions come up. Looking through the quilting stashes at Ami Simms’ Show Me Your Stash is reinforcing the practicality of an Ikea bookcase like the EXPEDIT, I especially love the ones where the fabrics are organized in a rainbow of colors.

Also, I wanted to mention that this post is the first one in which I used Wordpress’ iPhone app. I uploaded the photo straight from my iPhone. I love it when technology makes things so easy!

I’ve been playing with Wordle, making word clouds that I could somehow incorporate into the wedding. Not sure for what yet? The invitations maybe? Table numbers? A big poster? Anyway, it’s fun to pick fonts and colors and I like the way it looks and how it has significance to us as a couple. I ended up using text from the story of the development of our relationship and I like that you get the main gist from the big words and then can dig down and read the smaller ones. But really you could use text from anything, whether a favorite story or poem, or even emails you’ve written to each other… Or if you both have blogs it can pull the words from the RSS feed. Lots of possibilities!

2008 was the first year that more people lived in cities than rural areas. Unfortunately over 1 billion are living in slums. These amazing photos document the lives and homes of people living in 4 different cities around the world.

So we made the trek down to the Making Memories with Scrapbooking store and although it was far it was totally worth it. They have such an amazing selection and we were able to find a nice card stock to mount our save the date magnets on. The best part was that since it’s my birthday month, I got 25% off my purchase. It was also great to check out all the wonderfully creative cards and wedding invitation samples they had throughout the store. They have a wedding invitations class coming up soon and if it weren’t so far I’d really consider going.

So we got a new printer, yay! First thing I did was print a test sheet, a photo, and a pdf (calendar from Mibo). The pdf came out pretty good so I am happy enough. The photo left much to be desired, but it’s not a photo printer so I can’t complain.

What’s with the ‘usb cable not included’ racket though? Why can’t the printer just come with a cable that probably 99% of people buying the printer will need? We got the printer at Future Shop where they were selling the USB cables for an outrageous $30. So we went accross the street to NCIX and got one for $7. Yeesh.

The magnets came in the mail today, so I guess it only took 2 weeks when I was expecting them to take 3. That’s not bad. The quality is ok. I’m really picky about printing though but I guess for the price I can’t complain. So as long as I don’t start getting mystery charges on my credit card I’ll have to say VistaPrint isn’t all that bad.

Now I am researching printers because I decided I don’t want to address all of these Save the Date envelopes by hand. Besides, we’ve been meaning to get a printer anyway because every so often we’ll need to print something at home and it’s annoying to have to take it out and do it somewhere else.

I also want to buy some cardstock to mount the magnets on, but I don’t really know where to find nice paper in Vancouver. I checked the Staples website but their cardstock colors are so blah. There’s always Michael’s but the locations here are far out in the burbs. A google search turned up this place called Making Memories with Scrapbooking, it’s also kind of far but looks very paperlicous. Looks like I’m going to have a busy week-end because I’d really like to get these all stuffed and ready to send out by Monday.

My goal for January was to get the Save the Dates made. While they are technically not yet made, they are out of my hands.

I ended up going for magnets from VistaPrint. I was extremely hesitant to use VistaPrint because there are tons and tons and tons of horrible reviews about them (just do a quick Google search and you’ll see), BUT one of my coworkers has used them a few times and had no complaints or mystery charges on her credit card so I decided to give it a go. Said coworker also hooked me up with an email promotion she had received for free magnets, so that was my starting point.

All I have to say though is that VistaPrint sure works hard to make a buck and does leave a bad taste. For example I was hemming and hawing over whether to order 50 or 100 magnets, it was $8 for 50 and $26 for 100 (which makes no sense whatsoever), in the end because of their funny ’shipping/processing’ charges ($8 for 50, $9 for 100), I got confused and figured I would just get the 100 and have it over and done with. Although now that I’m sitting down and doing the math I see that it would have been cheaper to order 2 sets of 50. Oooops.

To add insult, as soon as my order was sent through (point of no return because they claim the millisecond you hit that button the order is sent to their production system, making changes or cancellations impossible) I got an offer for another 100 magnets for only $13 with no ’shipping’ charges! Makes me wonder if something similar would have happened if I had just ordered 50 to begin with and tacked another 50 on for a discounted price. I could have really saved! I’m already having buyers remorse and haven’t even seen the goods!

Has anyone else had any experiences ordering from VistaPrint?

Ok so it’s January and it seems cliche to say that I am starting the Couch to 5K running program. I have good intentions to see it through to the 9th week yadda yadda yadda but it’s more about the journey, right? And a journey needs good music.

So that’s why I was pretty happy to find out that there are quite a few Couch to 5K podcasts out there to make the journey more enjoyable. Unfortunately after downloading and listening to a few them and realizing they would actually be more of a disincentive to run, I realized like so many other things in my life (it seems everything?!) I was gonna have to DIY it.

Thanks to the googles I found a step by step guide on how to Create your own interval running playlist. So far I’ve spent more time making the playlist to go running than I have actually running. But let’s just keep that between us.

Here’s an example of a gorgeous Ikea sewing studio. I love how it looks so light and airy even though it’s in a basement. That EXPEDIT bookcase sure is popular for studios. It’s great to see things being used, rather than just imagining it in your head. For example when I was at Ikea about a month ago buying my sewing machine table I seriously considered buying the VIKA ARTUR trestles for a cutting table (although at the moment I have nowhere to put it) because the white ones were on sale for a pretty good price. But I wasn’t sure if they were what I really wanted for a cutting table or if they would work. But it looks like it works in that studio! See more lovely photos at The Yvestown Blog.

My first encounter with Marimekko was discovering a vintage dress from the 1960s in the Clothing and Textiles collection at my University. The dress was one of the pieces in the collection that was lacking documentation so I took it up as a class project and delved in to the research and have been a fan ever since.

Today I discovered they offer free desktop wallpapers on their site. I’m getting a Marimekko theme going on at my computer with my Marimekko desktop and mousepad.