Framed Owl

After a long break from craftiness, I've finally started to get back into it.  For Christmas, Tyler got me a Silhouette!  I've wanted one for a long time, and now that I have it, I'm full of ideas again.  I made this little owl picture for my niece's first birthday.  Of course, she's too little to appreciate it now, but maybe someday?  In the meantime, I hope my sister-in-law likes it. 

Everything, except for the letters (they're stickers), was cut out using the Silhouette.  I think it's one of the most useful crafting tools that a woman could ask for.

10 Days Without Chocolate

*Disclaimer: This post is long and contains no pictures.  I think you should read it anyway.

Before I met Tyler, before guys I dated in college, before my first boyfriend in high school...I was having a love affair with chocolate.

It must have started around the time that I could eat solid foods, although I don't remember exactly when that was. For as far back as I can remember, it was a house rule that we could have two cookies for dessert after supper.   These weren't just any cookies.  They were my mom's homemade chocolate chip cookies, which as chocolate chip cookies go are among the best in the world.  The cookie tin, with a smiling teddy bear on the lid, was kept in the cupboard, and resupplied when ever rations were low. What's a kid to do when her very own mom makes the best chocolate chip cookies in the world? Eat two after dinner.  Every night. For most of my childhood.  And I learned that dinner was always supposed to be "capped off" with a sweet treat. 

Of course as a child I ate more sweets than just two cookies per day.  It's no secret that American kids find sugar everywhere everyday.  Eating copious amounts of chocolate mattered a lot to me.  But not in the way it should have.  It mattered emotionally, not physically.  I could self-medicate my depression with chocolate as much as I wanted without gaining weight.  Until I hit age 25, I never weighed more than 118 lbs (and was usually more around 105).

As I grew up and became more educated about health, I started rationalizing my sugary habits.
-I eat lots of healthy food, so it doesn't matter if I eat a lot of chocolate too.
-I almost never eat fast food.
-I NEVER drink soda.
-I almost never eat anything sugary if it doesn't have chocolate (thus eliminating quite a few calorie sources)
-I'm almost completely vegetarian.
-I exercise several times a week.
-I'm still too skinny.

And yet somehow, in spite of my "healthy" lifestyle, I started gaining weight sometime after 26.  And it wasn't cool.  On this blog I've already talked about some of my weight struggles, so I won't go into huge detail.  Suffice it to say that my heaviest was just too heavy for my 5'2" frame.  I hated looking at myself in the mirror, and didn't want to see any pictures of myself.

Finally I cut down (notice I didn't say "cut out") on my rationalizing and started working on the trouble areas.  In July of this past summer, I started doing P90X workouts with a couple of friends.  When the school year started, our new principal happily surprised the staff by arranging for us to be able to work out for free with a boot-camp style training organization called Camp Gladiator. So I started working out with them twice a week, and I'm happy to say that I love the workouts and I've kept it up.  I also do a combo of walking and jogging everyday.  But increasing my exercise only decreased my pounds by 7 or 8, and I wanted to lose more.

I realized that I was only going to lose more by changing my diet.  You see, I was still rationalizing..."Since I exercise SO MUCH I should be able to eat whatever I want."  Sadly, this just isn't true for me. I can't eat as many healthy foods as I want, exercise as much as I do, and eat the amount of chocolate I was eating and still lose weight.  So about 15 days ago I decided to see what cutting out sugar for a month would do for me.  10 days ago I stopped eating chocolate, and other sugary sweets. Originally the plan was to cut sugar completely, but I realized that wasn't going to work.  Not right now anyway.  So I decided to cut anything that looked like, or could be confused with dessert.  And I'm down 2 more pounds.  To be fair, I lost some weight while I was sick a couple of weeks ago, and the 2lbs are actually just pounds that I didn't gain back after being sick.  Still, that's something.

Aside from wanting to lose weight, there's another reason that it's important for me to at least temporarily sever sweets.  I realized that my dependency on them was absolutely real.  And it's kind of ironic that this dependency has been in place for most of my life.  About 3 years ago I started taking medication for anxiety/depression.  The medication helps SO MUCH, and yet I kind of hate that I'm dependent on a pill to help me have normal emotions.  So, if I'm bothered by taking a pill that actually really helps, how can I not be bothered by a dependency on sugar...which really doesn't help or increase my health?

And so it's been 10 days; which is about 5 days longer than I've ever gone before.  I plan to go until February 7.  We'll see what happens after that.   

Ombre Quilled Monogram

 Yesterday I had a sudden urge to craft.  I have a small obsession with grey and yellow right now, and I also love ombre, so I wanted to put all that together.  I came up with this semi-quilled monogram.  This was a super easy project.  I painted the R grey, quilled a bunch of marquis, and mod podged them on. 

Unfortunately, these colors don't go with anything in our house.  So, it'll probably go in my classroom when school starts.

Tatertots and Jello 
Sugar Bee Crafts

Kaiser Wedding- Lovely Lavender

 A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of arranging the wedding flowers for my dear friends, Thai and Robert.  Thai chose four lovely shades of purple carnations, and lavender roses.

The bride, Thai.

 Here, I'm holding my bouquet against my dress.  

I had the honer of being the matron of honor.

The mothers' corsages

 Husband's boutinnier is on the left.  He was the best man.

 Another shot of my bouquet.

 

A final shot of the bride's bouquet.

 

 It's always hard to get good pictures, or any pictures at all, when I'm in the wedding party.  But it's also always a joy whenever I get to work with flowers. 

Colorful Quilled Poster

Two weeks ago I became the full-time 5th and 6th grade teacher at my school.
I wanted to make a gift for the students, and the classroom.

I wanted it to be something that the students would appreciate,
and something that was very much a part of me.

So I came up with this giant, quilled poster.

It was a lot of work since I had to cut all the strips.
They are thicker than the usual 1/8th width of quilling paper.

So now it hangs proudly in the classroom.

The students think it's pretty cool.

The next step is to get it framed.

Cake Pop Addicts

Confession: My students (5th and 6th graders) are cake pop addicts and it's my fault. A couple of months ago, I needed an excuse to try making cake pops (why I thought I needed an excuse, I don't know). So, I told my students that if they missed five or less, as a total class, on their spelling tests, I would make them cake pops. They didn't know what cake pops were, but when I explained, the dream of cake on a stick was enough. The 5th graders made their goal that very first week. I went ahead and made them for everyone. They were an instant hit.

Since then, I've made them two other times. The ones in the picture were for Valentine's. I wish I had taken more pictures, but it was LATE at night, and I was desperate to go to bed. My pops are not perfectly round, and the pink for Valentine's didn't turn out as pink as I wanted...but truthfully, 10-12 year-old students getting a present from their teacher just don't care. What matters is that they made their spelling goal, which means cake on a stick. They are incredibly "treat" motivated....hmmm, how else can I use that?

Tangerine and Light Blue

My SIL has a friend with whom she regularly exchanges letters
(wish we all did).

So she asked me to make her some cards,
which I readily agreed to do.

She told me that she likes eggshell blue, and tangerine,
but left me to my creative devices beyond that.

I couldn't find "eggshell" paper, but the orange I used is actually called "tangerine."
It's nice every once in a while when the stars align.

And so these birds were born.
I've mentioned before that I like simple cards,
ones that can actually fit into a regular envelope.

Here they are, all cutely 'twined and ready to go.