Pictures are worth a 1000 words

they are ready now...

Floor pillow I made with some fabric I fell in love with a while back. I used fiberfill for this... it is very fluffy but if you weigh more than 50lb you feel like you are sitting on the floor. I will have to redo it using foam or some other filler. The kids love it though.

This is my new love or should I said renewed love since I bought this with money I got for our wedding. I made a slip cover because I couldn't stand the pattern on our hand me down couch.

This is a skirt I am making for the daughter of a friend of mine. Her favorite color is purple and she loves dragon. I'm going to finish off the skirt with some pockets and embroid a dragon for her.

This is the stack of fabric waiting for me... and I have a few more things stashed away or old clothe waiting to be cut and reused. But I have to say lots of fabric but little $$. Joann's had some fat quarter for 99 cents each and well I use two for a skirt! I found tons and tons of linen I bought 10 years ago... Along with some so so fabric I bought for making a quilt seriously what was I thinking maybe I can use that to make baby boy pants.... We shall see

This is the second skirt I made for MEC. The fabric was very flashy at the store but one the skirt made it turned out super cute. I need a bit of practice with the pockets. I also seriously need to improve my picture taking cuz well you don't really see anything here!

And voila ...

I think next I will finish the dress I started for MEC, then will decorate a white tee shirt for MAC, I want then to prepare a few gifts for baby showers and maybe make a top for myself pfff Wait I need to take a deep breath every 3 sentences or so.... I guess I should apply that on my blog as well.... So much to do ideas are popping in my head like fireworks. I have a few interesting reads that fuel my creativity and help me improve my sewing "made by Rae" and "Made" and all the other blogs I discover through them. Maybe one day I will give back, but for right now I will soak up all the tips and tricks that I can.

Quick recap

What has been happening in my life lately.... Lots of work, family time while my parents were visiting. Lots of sewing, dunno why all of a sudden I fell in love with my sewing machine! I mean it has been sitting there for the past 10 years! But I'm loving the feeling of creating of figuring things out! It is just so fun, I'm like a kid at Christmas time!

While I tackled the chair slip cover also known as the "vagina chair" for its color, I also decided to wrap up a few projects. So here is what I've made in the last few weeks...

- Slip cover for my super duper comfy wing-back chair first craigslist purchase thanks CG!

- Floor pillow for some of the lighter weight people in our household (need to rethink the filling)

- A dress for MEC from one side of the top part of an existing dress...

- two skirts

- One top

Pfff... Lots of projects done lots more to go and maybe some news to come if I bite the bullet!

Well you might think what happened to the training well you see creativity and training are quite mutually exclusive in my current life! So training was pretty much non-existent for the past 3 weeks. It puts me to shame when the pregnant stud ladies mind you are working out twice to three times more than me!

We are working on changing that and finding a good balance between training and creating.

Sunday I went for a ride with a friend nothing duper exciting just a little 18-20M bike ride around Rancho Santa Fe, today I went for a measly 3M confidence booster run. I will work my way back to a 5-7 day workout per week!

Finally the vegetable patch is growing, we have a few potatoes showing their foliage, about 10 yellow squash seeds have taken a lot more tomatoes and some peas too.... I will have to work on the yard as my approach was put as many seeds as possible and see what grows!

My parents have left and so the excuse of missed workouts and the laundry and cleaning up fairy!

two steps forward one step backwards

I'm referring to posting. I have been looking at my last post and the days that have gone by... I have grumbled at the lack of posts on the blogs I follow.... But yet each time I start this post I stop discard and walk away.

So what's new... not much. Training is going well, although a little shaken up by our routine changes. My parents are in town. It is awesome since I haven't seen then in a whole year (Really really don't like that). I love to see them interact with my kids. I haven't done laundry since they arrived and miracle our closets are bursting out the seams... I had no idea we all had so many tee shirts ;) We have weekly date nights!

All this is great but my routine is a little shaken up

and thus my training is suffering a little. Well last week was a little lazy and I only did 5:30 hours. This week looks better ;)

However I did one of my hardest training session ever. My coach organizes this legendary brick session, for the non-triathletes a brick session is a bike followed by a run. In this 1 hour session we do 3 intervals of bike training on our trainer then run. When I told her at the beginning of the session that I forgot my heart rate monitor she told me with a huge smile ah don't worry you'll be working as hard as you can anyways! I started being worried. So after the first interval I had this deer in the headlight look on my face thinking what did I get myself into! It is one thing to think it is going to be a tough session another completely to go through it ;) Anyways so in my head goes oh crap I have a date night after that I hope I can keep it together. When I told her hey you know I'm not sure I can go through the last intervals big smile and sweet talk.... You are not gonna give up are you ;)

So I didn't give up, I went through the whole workout and my ego was again tucked away neatly in my pocket because I was the slowest of the bunch. I felt my legs the next two days.

I am so thrilled I hired this coach. I love working with her and it helps a lot as I train 99% of the time alone. Actually that is another bonus of my parents being there is that B has been keeping me company on my workouts. He pisses me off because he is sooo much better than I am but hey little by little we become less little.

On a side note my coach who is a pro XTerra triathlete (triathlon off road!) and finished 2nd of the world championship in Hawai last year, finished 2nd of the Oceanside Half ironman last sunday. She was competing against pretty big names in the field! Now it motivates me to work harder!

On sunday I totally flaked on my ride and instead sew a princess dress for MEC. She has been asking me for one since her sleep over and snody as I am I didn't want to buy a 30$ crappy dress. Instead I decided I would sew her one. We went to Joann fabric and bought some really cool brocade and a pattern. It is by far the hardest thing I have ever sewn but also since I wanted to do it properly I cut everything, basted everything and thus it was actually fairly easy to put together. We did have a little episode when a piece of the sewing machine came undone. I couldn't figure out how to put it back, a screw fell inside the machine, then we had to undo most of the sewing machine to get it back. I was so close to throw the damn thing away and go buy a brand new one.

This is all I have to report at this time....