I wish I could say that this week has sped by, but that hasn’t really been the case. Dragged or plodded, maybe?

Next week will be entirely different, though. Husband got a long-awaited phone call yesterday telling him that he’s been invited to Florida for an interview. Hooray!! Unfortunately I don’t get to go, but he will get to meet a lot of people and bring back the scoop (and *hopefully* an offer letter). Instead, I get to spend the time here with mum & grandpa, which is always something to be looked forward to.

Since I can’t guarantee computer access and all that jazz, I’m going to be taking a little blog break next week. I feel like I’ve been doing an awful lot of that, haven’t I? It seems better to go ahead and decide that in advance, though, then to put up one little post and a few bad photos.

Plus, I think I just need to step away from the internet for a while. Am I the only one who sometimes thinks that life would be simpler if I had never discovered the world of blogs? Not better, perhaps, but definitely simpler. Imagine what it would be like to not know that there are a thousand art + craft blogs out there, daily beckoning you to visit them for new ideas and content. To not be influenced by the hundreds of other styles and subjects that seem better or more marketable than yours. To not worry about how to make your house, photographs, yard, cooking, etc. look as nice as hers. 

So next week, I’m going to settle down with a sketchbook and a couple of picture books to do a little exploration and re-evaluation — but no blog-hopping. Will let you know how it turns out. :)

The dishes I saved for last are a couple of pieces that most of my friends own because they’re just so darn cute.

I mean, how can you resist that chipper little sugar & creamer set? (Alisha couldn’t…see her flickr page for another really lovely photo of this set.)

And then there are these lovely Japanese bowls, which can be found at thriftstores everywhere for about 50 cents apiece. They’re so delicate and have the best shape…who says that pretty dishes have to be expensive?

Thanks for showing your dishes and admiring mine this week. And don’t forget that we are hopefully moving next summer, so a lot of these may appear at the Gibbs Mega Moving Sale sometime in May…and I’d so much rather that they go to someone I know!

Have a good weekend + week, all.

I’m going to be quick because I decided that a little lunchtime trip to the library would do me some good. So today, I present my little demitasse cup collection.

The bright blue set is from a housewares store in Freiburg, Germany. Germans make nice dishes.

The dark blue + gold set is Russian, picked up at a bazaar in the north of Azerbaijan.

I love small cups, but they happen to be wildly impractical. I have had coffee in a demitasse cup maybe three times in my whole life, but they are so hard NOT to buy when you find them.

If you like dishes and you’ve got a minute, you should check out the Vintage Ceramics & Tableware group on Flickr. So many pretty pieces!

Wednesday brings me to my absolute favorite dishes of all time. Oh, and did I mention that I happen to own them?

My dear, dear mother found this set at the Goodwill before Josh and I were married. (They must have just brought out the box, because by the time I get there the china section consists of Shopko rejects and non-charming vintage ware.) Anyhow, mum bought it all and instead of hoarding it for herself, she gave it to me! What a woman!!

When it came time for Josh and I to register at Macy’s, I just couldn’t convince myself that I liked any of their china better than the stuff I already owned. That plus the fact that it was ridiculously expensive encouraged us to simply not register for dishes and make do with these and another coordinating vintage set that I picked up a few months later. We have broken one bowl (sniff) and there are a lot of little cracks and chips in various pieces, but I still think it’s the perfect set. I even have bread plates. :)

The yellow cups are part of the coordinating set I mentioned…I found a big box of plates with a big yellow + black flower pattern, yellow bowls, and these cups and creamer/sugar set. Rather 1950s cafe meets Martha Stewart, don’t you think? I will (alas) probably sell them if/when we move, but for now they are the perfect set for lots and lots of guests. Which we have from time to time.

Okay, Mackenzie posted about her amazing plates today and you should definitely take a look. And designonpost put up lovely pics of some of her plates. The plate with the thumb cut-out is amazing!  Tanaudel also pointed out design*sponge’s modern china roundup, which might be a BAD place to visit if you have expensive taste and a small pocketbook. Not that any of us are in that situation. Ahem.

I thought about titling this post “What, she still thrifts?” but my jury’s still out on using “thrift” as a verb. It’s one thing to say that you went thrifting on Saturday, but I still can’t wrap my head around some of the stranger ways in which I’ve seen it used.

Okay, on to the dishes. I spotted these as soon as I stepped through the door of Palouse Treasures last Friday (mum, these are the ones I was telling you about).  They were spread all over a small shelf to full advantage - isn’t that much nicer than splitting a set up and requiring the poor customer to search every nook and cranny for one more plate? Yes, I did search just in case, but I didn’t find any more.

The dishes are fairly old (50s, maybe?) and not in particularly good condition, but I count that as a plus since it means that I’m not afraid to use them. Only the plates have a marking underneath — American Ironstone. I think that’s actually the maker of my other favorite set of dishes as well, so they seem to have turned out some nice patterns. Don’t you just love the blue flowers?!

The only downside to the purchase was that someone got a little carried away with the tagging machine about put 3 or 4 or 5 price stickers on every singe piece. As in, one on top, one on each side, and one on the bottom. This may seem like a mild annoyance, but it took about an hour to scrape all of them off and I still have a lot of sticky messes to deal with.

I was growing a little upset about this when Josh pointed out that the thrift store employs a number of mentally handicapped people and that they are probably responsible for tagging items. Er, I repent of my bad feelings. But it was still a lot of labels.

Any more dish sets out there…?

I decided yesterday at approximately 2:00 pm that this is going to be Dish Week. Due to a little spate of thrifting luck + another blogger’s generosity, my cupboards runneth over with lovely dishes at the moment and I’ve decided that it’s high time for some show & tell.

Want to play?

I’ve never started a theme before and I think you’re supposed to announce it a week in advance (or something), but I’m running a little late. So sometime before Friday, take a pic or two of your favorite dishes and leave a comment with a link so we can all enjoy them. They can be vintage or new, lovely or weird, porcelain or plastic. The main thing is to fish grandma’s cheese tray out of hiding and show us what you’ve got!

Okay, so I’m going to start off with my new favorite cups. These came all the way from Kristy in England, and I l.o.ve. them.

Mm, nothing like cheerful Pyrex flowers to make your day happier.

And they even match my favorite thrifted coffee pot!

As the final leg in my project-finishing marathon, I present to you…my new hat and scarf set!

(Am I the only one who feels like a dork while trying to take photos of one’s self in a semi-public location? I stepped into the alley next to our apartment to take these, and I think that some people were watching. And wondering.)

I didn’t follow a pattern for either item, unless you count “knit until you come to the end, and then stop” as a pattern of sorts. Nope, as soon as anything resembling gauges and counting and needle size comes into the picture, I become all thumbs. (Okay, I still count, but it’s in a very laid back 80-sounds-like-enough sort of way. )

I started the scarf a couple of months ago as my on-the-bus project, which means that I only worked on it for about 15 minutes a day. It’s actually not a bad way to knit, if you’re patient…it’s just really slow.

In retrospect, I should have made it thicker or something because it tends to fold over on itself and get really skinny. Or may I should just say it’s a skinny scarf and that I wanted it to be that way.

So, after finishing the scarf, I had enough yarn left to make a hat. I’d been envying other people’s hats with earflaps for a while, so I decided to make my own. I thought and thought about the best way to attach the earflaps without a seam, and in the end I decided to take a new-to-me approach and start at the top rather than at the bottom. I had to work out the pattern on top a few times since anything that disrupted my counting meant that I forgot what my pattern was and I had to start over (mm, I guess this is where written instructions would have helped).

You can’t tell from the photos, but the cords on the earflaps have cute bouncy pompoms at the end. And then I stuck some on the scarf, too, for good measure.

(Note the cute new shoes, courtesy of Ross.)

This will probably be my last post of the week since I need to work on the Ren Fair poster tomorrow…it turns out that I made my painting a little too small, which means that I have to re-scan it at a higher resolution and size it up. This is not particularly good news, since illustrations almost always look better when they are made smaller and very rarely look better when they are made larger. But you gotta do what you gotta do.

Thank you all for your kind comments this week, and I guess we’ll find out on Monday who the Amy Butler contest winners are!

(Oh, yesterday’s favorite search term: “fat chihuahua.” ???)

I found out about Craftzine’s Amy Butler Sew Inspiring Contest at the beginning of February and immediately hatched a plan to sew a purse. A quick look at my fabric shelves told me that this was the time to use that favorite vintage skirt that I’ve been slowly cutting up (hey, it was made for the skinniest woman ever!) and my precious yard 1/2 yard of Amy Butler’s Chrysanthemum, picked up a year ago at a quilt store in Bellevue.

So I opened up the pattern, pulled out the fabric, cut my pieces, and started sewing. Things were going along swimmingly when good ol’ recruitment weekend hit and everything was put back in the craft room. This normally wouldn’t be a cause for concern, but given the poster situation I wondered a few times if I would actually be able to finish the project + take photos before the February 29 deadline. See, one of the downsides of winter — besides snow + slush + cold — is that the only time that I am home during daylight hours is on the weekend. So, if I want to take photos in natural light I have to finish the project in time to take pics before it gets dark on Sunday afternoon.

Here’s the exciting part: after getting my poster turned in on Saturday morning and spending some time cleaning the apartment, I told husband that I’d be able to finish the bag by evening. And I did!

Translation = I accurately judged how long it would take me to finish a project!

This might not sound very momentous to you, but I am constantly tripping over the disconnect between how long I think it will take me to do something and how long it actually takes. So this is big. Very big. And I know that the main reason why it worked this way is that I actually used a pattern*, instead of deciding to make it all up myself.

*I modified it a little teensy bit, but that really doesn’t count.

So right now I am really, really excited about Amy Butler patterns with all their cuteness and time-saving abilities. There are a lot of great entries in the contest so I’m pretty doubtful that I’ll win, but hey — I came out with a cute new bag and a new sense of time management.

Thank you, Amy Butler.

P.S. I included some sewing descriptions, etc. with the photos in flickr, but you have to click on the image to be able to see them (if you’re interested).

The recipient has informed me that she received her package, so I think it’s okay to give you a little peak at my half of a fun swap.  I won a drawing on Kristy’s blog and had the honor of sending a little box of crafting inspiration to her talented daughter Lily (in exhange for some really fabulous cups). Since Lily is a seamstress, I poked around my craft room and a local thrift store and came up with:

assorted buttons and trims,

vintage fabrics and an Amy Butler pattern that I know I’ll never get around to sewing,

and more fabric pieces and an embroidered pillowcase.

Lily, I hope you enjoy these!

I’m taking the day off tomorrow to work on a bunch of projects at home (hoorah!), so I should have lots of nice show + tell next week. You know how there are times when you’ve got lots projects going but haven’t actually finished anything for a long time? And so you feel like you’re not making any progress? But then suddenly a couple of those projects actually DO come to an end, which means that you can put away those scattered knitting needles and balls of yarn and the drawing supplies all over your dining room table?

I’m getting that feeling right now.

Not a work, mind you, but at home — and that’s good enough for me!

Well, that turned into a long-ish break, didn’t it?  Last week turned out to be rather more grueling than I had expected, and I’m still trying to get my health + energy back. I don’t want to bore you to tears with a full description, but highlights included:

• lots and lots of late evenings at work
• working for hours on a website that ended up getting scrapped in favor of a to-be-built new one
• getting sick two days before 15 prospective students were due to arrive on campus
• going to work for two days with the full-blown flu because there was absolutely, positively, no way to stay home (apologies, coworkers!)
• literally losing my voice at a time when it’s very important that I communicate well
• pondering whether I was capable of driving, and then finding out that I was
• pondering whether I was capable of holding a coherent conversation, and then finding out that I was
• pondering how I was going to possibly make it through the week, and then finding out that I could
• realizing (again) that I am much more efficient when I have wayyyyy too much to do and can’t go home til it’s done
• deciding that I hate my job
• deciding that I love my job
• deciding that, whether I love it or hate it, there’s no way I can quit and that I need to try harder to have a good attitude

If you talked with me at the end of last week, there’s a good chance that I didn’t have very many nice things to say about life. And if I had written the list above on Sunday, there’s a good chance that I would have only included the negatives (including a lot of things not mentioned). Dear, patient husband listened to an awful lot of complaining, and after all was said and done I owed him - and probably some of you - an apology. Yes, things feel like they suck sometimes. But God is good and He’s making good things happen even when you’re trying your best not to notice. I’m sorry for not looking around for the good as well as the bad, and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.

The Beans was a very patient dog last week, but I think her expression just about sums it up:

Recruitment weekend, we are SO glad that you’re over!

I am almost ready to update my shop with the new gocco prints, but every time I sit down to do it I remember something else that isn’t ready yet. Argh. More “sneek peaks” below…not that they leave a lot to the imagination.

My big accomplishment today will be not quitting my job. Or screaming at anyone who asks me to take on a new project. Or acting surprised when one more thing goes wrong.

So if I’m sitting at this desk tomorrow, it will mean that I succeeded.

Which is good, right?

(Lauren, not a whole lot of things are making my day right now so I’ll have to try tomorrow. Sorry!)