Emmie's Christmas Present

So I can't show you anything I am working on right now since most of it is for competitions, but I can show you what miss Emmie has been up to. For Christmas we bought our sweet girl her own sewing machine! (she kept jumping on mine every time I would go iron something, and it was getting frustrating for both of us to keep waiting for the other.) She loves taking all my scraps and making things, and has a whole box of them in her room, the other day she came out of her room with a shirt she had designed and sewed all by herself by HAND. I really need to get a picture of it because it is so cute, but without THAT picture yet, I will leave you with a picture of my baby on HER baby instead, 

She's working on her first pieced quilt, all by herself, I am soooo proud of how she's doing, I can't believe she's only 10! (By the way, this picture was taken today, and I am pretty sure this is day 3 of her wearing her Christmas pajamas in a row, gotta love Christmas break!)

Isaac and Paul are at a week long Civil Air Patrol Encampment right now, so we girls are just slumming it and trying to get some sewing done.

Happy Christmas!

Sorry I've been so dull around here - to be quite honest I have been crazy busy getting ready for Project Run and Play, and So You Think You're Crafty, that I don't have any projects that I can actually share yet.

I have also been struggling with what to say after the school shootings in Connecticut, my heart is broken for those families, and it is hard to feel like casual blogging is appropriate so soon after something like that. But in truth if we don't carry on, (while still remembering to hug our kids a little closer,) then we are not serving anyone.

I just dropped in today to say Happy Christmas, and share the photos that went into our Christmas cards this year, it's already Christmas here in Korea, and we had a lovely Christmas Eve eating cookies, drinking eggnog, and watching Holiday Inn and we watched White Christmas last night. (I'm pretty sure it's not Christmas without Bing Crosby to tell me it is.)

I can't get the family picture to load (the file is too big for some reason) but here are the others until then.

I hope all of you have a lovely holiday season with your families, mine is feeling terribly far away right now all the way across the world. (although I feel terribly grateful to be here with my two sweet kids!) Love to you all, and I will honestly try to remember to pop in every now and again on our way to the January start date for both competitions!

Big News For The New Year....

So there was an announcement made today on Project Run and Play, that makes for some pretty big news for my new year!

I get to join some fantastic ladies and sew projects on the next season coming up this January!!! 
I feel terrible for my poor sweet sister Sarah, because she has an anxiety attack every time I compete in anything, checking back all the time to see how I'm doing. (I never check until the voting's over, I just can't look.) SO, Not only will I be competing in So You Think You're Crafty, this January, but also Project Run and Play. BUT don't worry Bear, because I am pretty sure, with the lovely ladies that I am competing against, you won't have long to stress! HOWEVER you should have seen me when Sarah was competing in the Miss Arizona pageant (my sister is stunningly beautiful) I can't believe I didn't wet my pants I was so nervous for her, so turn about is fair play! 

Giveaway Winner!

Sorry it took me more than a week to get this up, I was called in to substitute teach a few times this week, and I let this slip for a bit! I am so excited to announce the winner of 2 yards of Michael Miller's Viking Fabric!


And drum roll please for the random number generator........

Which means that Lisa wins!

Lisa please email me with your address, and I will get your fabric off to you ASAP! (it might take a bit longer to get to you since it has to come from Korea, but not too much longer than USPS usually takes)

Christmas PJs Guest Post!

Today I am guest posting over at So You Think You're Crafty, with Isaac and Emmie's Christmas Pajamas, I would love it if you would join me over there! 

Deer Dresser From My So You Think You're Crafty Audition

I have finally decided to post my audition piece from S.Y.T.Y.C. since the poll closed forever ago. I had several people tell me they could tell which piece was mine, so we'll see if you guessed right! (although I doubt anyone will tell me they liked something else better and voted for that instead, I'll just never know....!) 

For my audition piece I have a dining room sideboard/dresser that I got at a thrift store a couple of years ago. I always intended on refinishing it, but it sort of traveled through a couple of different rooms in my house "as is" for a few years while I waited to decide what to do with it. The knobs on the cupboard doors were my only addition (they were purchased from Anthropologie) since the originals were missing.

I recently settled on a color scheme I wanted for this piece, and got to work redoing it! The bottom piece of trim was missing a lot of the veneer, so we turned the piece upside-down and cut 1.5" of the bottom to get a cleaner edge. After stripping the whole thing down, I dry-brushed a gray paint onto the top, and then sanded it back, then adding a driftwood gray wood stain over the top to get a sun-bleached look.

The body I painted in a soft blue green, adding a antique gold to highlight the carving details. On the front of the doors and drawers I also hand painted the heads of stags and a traditional scroll design in the gold paint.

After sanding everything back, I antiqued the whole thing with stain, and lastly varnished with a satin varnish.

  

Here's the finished product. We have decided to use the sideboard for an entertainment center, and as such, we cut out the back of the second drawer down so it now houses our Blue Ray player and old school Super Nintendo, I know a lot of people hate the look of a large screen TV on display in their home, but I'm afraid this is all me, I LOVE watching TV and movies while I do projects, and I don't dislike how it looks (embrace it I say!) In an ideal world we would have the TV wall mounted, but where we live right now, we are not allowed to wall mount things that heavy. We can still use a TV changer even though the drawer is shut, because we have a little receiver that sits on the TV base that controls the Blue Ray player. (I highly recommend these receivers, we got ours off of Amazon for less than $30, they just plug into your electronics, and it opens up a whole new world of being able to hide the equipment behind things and still use the remote) The pottery above it is English, Italian, and Spanish, all picked up either from estate sales or travel, I love that the Spanish plate in the lower middle is golden in color, and has a stag on the front tying in the deer theme!

I hope that y'all like this piece as much as I do, it fits perfectly in my home decor, and is one of the main centerpieces of our home.

I have photos of us redoing this piece I need to retrieve off of the camera, when I do I'll post them here as a tutorial (famous last words) I also have a guest posting coming up at So You Think You're Crafty today (well the 10th in the US, it's already the 10th in Korea) and I will post the link to that here on the blog when it goes live. (I made the kid's Christmas pajamas.) 

Express Bus Terminal Flower Market, and COEX Aquarium {Travel Thursday}

Last weekend we went off on an adventure to the Express Bus Terminal Flower Market in Seoul, and to the COEX Mall Aquarium.

Here Emmie and I are inspecting the merits of wool ribbon. I'm not sure Isaac sees any merits in wool ribbon.....

 There's a great selection of trims here. (I'm wearing my knit cowl that I made a month ago and never blogged about.)

 There are lots of Christmas things this time of year even though Christmas really isn't that big in Korea.

 I wanted to bring the white stags home, but alas they were not in the budget.

 There were tons of fake flowers in the Flower Market (we missed the fresh flower market, they close that by 2:00 pm)

 Next we moved onto the COEX Mall's Aquarium, I heard great things about the aquarium before going, and it was relatively inexpensive for an aquarium at less than $50 for all 4 of us.

 My favorite part was the Dr Fish, they eat the dead skin off of your hands, and are used in pedicures here in Asia. You had to wash your hands, and then stick them through the small slits.

 It was the weirdest sensation to be nibbled on by tiny fish.

 It's hard to see them through the plastic, but they were about 2.5 inches long and it was soooo ticklish.

 Emmie didn't want to try it at first, but eventually was brave enough.

 It's funny seeing North American animals in zoos here as exotic animals.

 I can't read exactly what this sign says, but I'm going with the guess that these are NOT Dr Fish, and you should not put your hand in this tank.

 AH HA Piranhas! Ya, don't put your hand in there.

 Oh, and Sharks.

 Isaac was pretty excited about the sharks!

 It was so dark it was hard to get a good picture of the big shark room.

 Isaac kept begging me to get shots of him in front of the sharks.

 I'm not sure what is going on with the wing display, but it was sparkley.

 You can see the difference between my kids, he has delusions of being an archangel, and she thinks she's cutesy.

 Here is the touch pond, with a million starfish.

 Emmie mostly liked the blue ones,

 I'm pretty, sure she wanted to take one home.

 At the very end they had a shark to take pictures with.

 My boys obviously don't know how to be eaten by a shark.

 How 'bout Emmie shows them how it's done.......

 Yup, that's how you get eaten by a shark!

Later that night we went to the Seoul Lantern Festival, but I will save that post for next week!

It's All In The Details....

So I have shown bits and pieces of my front door decor, but I thought I would actually get out the good camera and take decent-ish pictures (I didn't take the time to edit them and the hallway lighting is bad and windowless)

We live in a high rise apartment with a central area on every floor with elevators, and then hallways that branch off of them, we have one neighbor directly across from us, but other then that we have an indoor hall all to ourselves. Every Christmas we usually add so many lights to our house that it can be seen from space, but here in Korea we are limited to our door space.

Here's what the door looked like before with all the greenery up, but no ornaments yet,

Here is one of my paper fan ornaments, this one with a little fox.

 Here is the little tree I painted the base of and decoupaged with my fox image, (the deer came from TJ Maxx several years ago.)

 The wreath hangs on the side wall, I don't like wreathes on the door because they tend to make the entryway more narrow when you open the door to walk through, and our door is self closing, so it would close into you all the time.

 I love the look of the french horn, and the lovely face and natural hair on the Santa (is it really a Santa? The blonde isn't exactly what you think of, but I still think of him as a Santa.)

 The garland that goes around the door is hung with Command hooks in order to not damage the wall, I am very pleased by how well they are holding everything in place.

 There are wool felt ribbon half loops, brass Christmas horns (I collect them from thrift shops when I can find them) pheasant feathers, and my paper ornaments going all around the door.

 As an added detail, I cut an oval of sheet music paper, wrote our apartment # on it, glitterized it, and then used double stick tape to put it over our more industrial looking apartment #.

 We threaded the light plug under the door, and have the lights plugged in from the hallway inside our apartment.

 Pretty homey for an apartment complex huh? I love being able to put our own spin on things so that our door, (that looks like every other door,) is OUR'S.

 I'm ready for Christmas now!