Marriage is a Marathon... a half marathon.

Life is starting to get back to normal.  Check out Ellery's update about our Lululemon half marathon civil ceremony on our wedding blog.

And photos from the ceremony by our photographer Crystal Giles.

June: A Review in Pictures

The Nugget and I ran the Starbucks Run for Women. 

We raised $400 for Plan Canada and ran the 5K race.

Ellery and I finished our invitations and sent them out.  

Huge accomplishment.

We visited Joe in Nanaimo and got our matching wedding Bee tattoos.

I turned 35! And was showered with presents and love.

Ellery even baked me an Oreo Cake and it was yummy.

And I ran my first Half Marathon with my good friend, Aimee.

We even beat our goal time of 2:30.  Did it in 2:19.  Woot!

Stuff and Nonsense... (I feel like I've used this title for a post before.)

Sadly, I didn't make it into the Carded show, but Ellery did and that was rad. Here's his post on how it went. 

I also posted on our wedding blog for the first time here.

Nugget ran her first 2.5K Mini Sun Run.

And we finally got our laundry room set up.  It's actually more of a large closet rather than a room but at least it's organized now.

Judging from my lack of blog posts, it appears I have dropped off the face of the earth.  Not so!  Wedding stuff is all consuming and on top of that I've decided to train for the Scotia Half Marathon which I will be running to commemorate my 35th Birthday in June.  

So what else has been going on?  Not a hell of a lot.

Ellery and I started a wedding blog which we're trying to update without giving too much away.

We're trying to re-organize the apartment so that everything is nice and neat for when we start our "official" married life together.

I'm training Nugget to run the kids SunRun and the Starbucks Run for Women.  It's become our mother-daughter bonding time.  She wants to eventually get to the point where she can run with me, Ellery and Jenn and be what she called "the super healthy running family".

And I sent my first ever submission to the Carded show.  This is it.

Been a While...

It's been a whirl wind since the engagement.  In case you missed it, Ellery's Part 2 of our Engagement Story is here.  We've both been busy planning our wedding and despite feeling incredibly rushed to make decisions for an event that is a year away, we're having fun.  The hardest part so far was picking the date, and after changing it three times for various reasons, we've settled on August 18th, 2012.  I have a ton of DIY projects planned and we've been debating on blogging about wedding stuff because we don't want to spoil surprises.  This is partly why I haven't posted in a while... it feels wrong to discuss and show photos of the wedding things I'm working on.

Aside from wedding stuff, I've been knitting more viking hats.  I recently shipped one to Paris and one to Norway which was awesome.  Halloween planning has also begun and this year I'm not planning anything epic for myself because, to be honest, I have wedding brain.  We're doing a trial run of Nugget's costume tonight so I'm hoping that will spark the Halloween bug.

Somewhere a Pig is Flying...

So over the Labour Day long weekend we went to Cutesypoo's house warming barbecue, had a Date Day in Whistler and got engaged...  yep... ENGAGED.  I don't think my mother ever thought this would ever happen.  Heh.  Read more about our ring on Ellery's blog here.

My freakishly long finger makes this photo look a bit odd.

Crocheting Whatever

Been making a few more things for my last Artful Sunday on August 28th.  

I made a couple more Kokeshi...

Mia is approximately 6" tall.

Keiko is approximately 7" tall. 

I also crocheted a bunch of hearts that I'm not sure what to do with yet. 

They're about 2.5" in length x 2.5" at the widest part.

They may end up being brooch pins.

And this is my prototype for a Sugar Skull.  

This one was pretty fun to make so I'll probably make some more.

Nugget's Gleeky 10th Birthday

My sweet Baby Nugget turned 10 years old on Saturday. Each year she starts planning her next birthday right after the last birthday party and by the time her birthday comes, she's changed her mind a billion times about what she wants to do. The themes for her 10th birthday went back and forth from 80's to Mad Hatter's Tea Party to Glee several times. A month before her birthday she decided on the Mad Hatter's Tea Party and I made a reservation for high tea at the Urban Tea Merchant and then about two weeks before her birthday the commercials for the 3D Glee Concert came up and she changed her mind and went back to Glee. So the plan was 3D Glee Concert, lunch at Red Robin's and then the beach.  I limited what I had to make to the cupcakes that looked like slushees. 

Nugget got the idea from this blog and I found the Big Quench labels here.  I used a basic vanilla cake recipe for the cupcakes instead of the one from Bake Odyssey, and I made vanilla butter cream frosting that I tinted red.  The cupcakes were finished off with a sprinkling of red sanding sugar and a Twizzler for a straw.  Nugget's goody bags were Glee pencil cases full of candy and school supplies.

Nugget's cousin Annabelle slept over the night before
and gave Nugget a Glee manicure.

The girls coming out of the 3D Glee Concert movie.
Rutty and I sat a couple of rows in front of them.  We anticipated lots of singing from the girls.

Rutty and the girls perusing and colouring the Red Robin's kids menu.

Our waitress gave Nugget a birthday sundae and made her stand on a chair while she yelled at the entire restaurant announcing it was Nugget's birthday.  Then she and a few of the wait staff sang some royalty-free version of Happy Birthday.

My baby's all growd up.

Annabelle, Nugget and Isabelle with their nerd glasses, the 3D glasses with the lenses popped out.  

Maya didn't keep hers so she didn't want to be in the photo :(

On our way back from the restaurant we realized it was also the Annual Vancouver Zombie Walk so we stopped at home for our beach gear, cupcakes and the Buffy Scythe... to fend off the zombies on our way to the beach.

To the beach!

We hung out at English Bay, opened presents and then the girls ditched me to go exploring by the water while I watched all their stuff.  It was a fun day.

Krazy for Kokeshi

My Nugget LOVES Kokeshi dolls and she and her cousin, Annabelle, like collecting Momiji, which are like modern kokeshi dolls.  There's even one named after her that she got from Annabelle for her birthday last year.  Inspired by the cute dolls, I decided to make crocheted versions for Artful Sundays on August 14th and 28th.

I've only made two so far and Nugget named them Yui and Naomi.

Both have crocheted heads and bodies with knitted hair and embroidered felt details. They have safety eyes and are stuffed with polyfill.

 

Naomi:  8.5" tall.  

Yui: 6.5" tall.

Because Sharing is Caring

I have a tendency to randomly post links to things on my Facebook that I like in hopes that my friends will find them interesting, informative, inspirational or just plain neat.  It just recently occurred to me that I could compile my favourites in one handy dandy blog post every once in a while and share with the 20 people following this here blog.

I loved this post at Cup of Jo on how to speak to little girls.  Do you think you'd be a different person if more importance or attention was given to your thoughts, interests and talents as a little girl, rather than appearance?

I have Craft fairs on the brain lately and have been thinking about the pricing of things I make.  The timing of this post on the Craftzine blog was perfect and very helpful.  Pricing has always been a difficult thing for me especially since I have a day job I love and what I make and sell is a hobby. 

I wish I heard about dog duvets from Molly Mutt before I dropped $50 on a new bed for Boomer.  She destroyed the orthopedic foam within days of getting it.  I've recently stuffed the bed casing with old towels which is pretty much the concept behind the dog duvet, only the ones at Molly Mutt have cooler prints.  Next time...

Photos from Where Children Sleep from documentary photographer James Mollison... will give you a dose of perspective.

Knit James!  Thought it was cool since he's one of the characters from the show I work on.

Font!  From Fluids!.. cause I love font.

(Balisong) Butterfly knife-styled Pen. Sadly, a year too late for my Hit Girl Halloween costume.

And lastly, Rutty's 35th Birthday Re-cap...

An Experiment in Baking: The Making of Rutty's Birthday Cake

Ellery (AKA Rutty of House of Ten fame) turned 35 a couple of days ago,  July 28th to be exact.  In celebration of his birthday, we are going to Langley for a birthday barbecue.  My contribution to this most special event is a birthday cake... from scratch! But this is no ordinary birthday cake, this one was inspired by the Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookie!  The magic began at 7:00 AM this morning.

I started with a chocolate chip cookie dough, the recipe from the back of the Chipits bag.

Then a layer of Oreos which were covered with another layer of chocolate chip cookie dough.

Into the oven until it looked like this...

The next part of this magical cake was the Super Chocolate Cake layers.  Recipe from one of the Best of Bridge books I had kicking around.  I went with this recipe because it claimed to be super.  Let's hope it is.

I poured the batter into two pans to make two thin cake layers and baked it.

Next I made Peanut Butter Buttercream frosting for the layers and the crumb coat.  As I am not a baker, my kitchen lacks the appropriate tools such as a proper spatula and rotating cake stand.  I used a short little spatula for spreading cream cheese on bagels to apply the crumb coat.  In lieu of a cake stand I flipped a cereal bowl upside down and placed a cardboard circle covered with tin foil on top and put my cake layers on that.  Very professional.

My rough crumb coat of peanut butter buttercream.  
Emphasis on rough.

This is the chocolate buttercream for the final finish.

Ta-da!  The finished cake!  I hope it's yummy.... 

I hope.

UPDATE!

Rutty's cake aflame with 35 candles.

The birthday boy blowing out the candles.  

Good thing he's not asthmatic.

The cake cut up revealing the layers of goodness.  

It was super sweet.  The slices had to be really thin.

Robson Square Artisan Market

Last Saturday I participated in my second Craft Sale ever and my first one on my own, the Robson Square Artisan Market.  It's a new market that just started in June this year.  So far it's had a few things going against its success: the riot in June, construction on Robson Street above, the crappy weather, and a ton of competing events.  We did get a good flow of people wandering down the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery curiously following the sounds of the live entertainment on our market day though.  We got a lot of smiles, and positive comments but few sales.  

My brain was pre-occupied with the all the stuff that's happened in the last few weeks and it kind of ruined the anticipation of the market for me.  I honestly wasn't as excited about the market until that morning when Nugget and I were setting up.  The night before was a crazy panic trying to get everything together and finish the doll I started a couple of days before.  I finished it about an hour before we had to leave for the market.  

I was exhausted and not in the mindset I would have liked to be in.  I probably could have done more to promote it, like write a blog post BEFORE the market and not after.  DUH.  

I have a couple of Sundays sharing a table with the lovely and talented Karen Francis and L.A.M Designs (Aimee Illescas and Virginia Turco Greyson) at Artful Sundays on Commercial Drive in August, so I will pimp the hell out of those.  Here are some photos of our set up...

Nugget peeking behind the hat stand (borrowed from Durka.  Thanks Durka!) holding a couple of zombie hats and a viking hat.  That's the doll I finished that morning.

Nugget posing at our table.  We had the brightest, most random set up.  

I referred to it as a "Zombie Viking Sushi Carnival of Random Curiosities".