Month: February 2011

This weekend Taylor, Sym and I DIYed some space shirts!

We started with plain black organic cotton t-shirts from American Apparel, in small (for Sym), medium (for me) and large (for Taylor). Sym probably would have been better with an extra small but they didn’t have any in the store but if you buy 3 of the same style you get 15% off. Gotta save that nine dollars!

First we brushed and dripped bleach on them. (we put cardboard inside them to stop it from bleeding through to the backs). Mine is on the left, Taylor’s is in the center and obviously Sym’s is on the right. She used a very light touch with the bleach, I think she just didn’t want to smell it anymore. We let them bleach for a few minutes and then rinsed them out into the washing machine-we did this between each step. It spun them fairly dry so we didn’t have to worry about drying them every time.

Next they went into a dye bath of wine red dye. Sym left for her dad’s right after so I rinsed and hung hers- she’ll finish it today or tomorrow. Taylor and Sym’s went in plain but I tied a couple elastics around mine.

After the dyeing we bleach them a second time- Taylor brushed his again while I went with a straight drip-and-splatter approach.

For the next step I mixed up four batches of dye- scarlet, wine red, royal blue and a purple I cobbled together from the wine red and blue. Again I dripped and Taylor brushed. Afterwards I also added some black to mine to darken up some areas.

After the final rinse we left them to dry overnight and then this morning it was time to add some stars! You can just use acrylic paint for this, but I happened to have some white fabric paint (I bought it years ago for project I never did). To do the star s you just dot the paint on in a random pattern- I also did a couple of lens-flarey ones. To set the fabric paint you can iron it on the reverse, or just toss it into the dryer for 20 minutes or so.

And the finished product! I wore it out today and felt pretty awesome about it. I wasn’t the only one who thought so, as a local street style fashion blogger asked to take our picture.

The past week or so has been a TOTAL BUST with regards to my whole making-better-food-choices plan. I ate too much junk food, too much take out, and not enough actual meals. I felt gross and bloated and lethargic, so yesterday I took DRASTIC ACTION and had broccoli for lunch. I put a teensy big of butter on it and sprinkled it with pink salt and it was delicious!

Today Sym is off school so I made us sandwiches with ham, havarti, pea shoots (I frigging love these things!!) and baconnaise. They were so yummy that Sym didn’t even realize there was cheese in hers (she normally refuses to eat cheese in non-melted forms because she says it’s too hard. Like, idek, she’s crazy).

I also remembered to actually take my vitamins today, and got Sym and Taylor to take theirs as well! Now if I could only find the time to go to the gym…

Last night Georgie’s friend Lucy the pug came over to play. I tried to take pictures but they were running and chasing and wrestling almost non-stop the entire time, so what I mostly got was shots of blurry dog booties. I did manage to capture this, which I think perfectly expresses their puppy friendship.

A made some bunting for Sym’s room a couple of weeks ago, but she’d been asking me if she could make her own so last night I helped her do just that.

She wanted to use rainbow colours, but we inexplicably have NO PURPLE PAPER. I know, it’s insane. Instead she chose four bright colours: orange, green, blue and yellow (the green and blue are prettier irl, it was late and the lighting in here isn’t the best at night).

I cut the triangles for her and fray-stopped a length of white satin ribbon, and she got to work with the tape.

The finished product! (Yes, the glasses are back.)

We hung it up on her door, under the “No Boys Aloud” sign

Puppies are still “aloud” though!

“Look what I have!”
“Big weird glasses? Let me take a picture with them on you.”
“Alright, I’ve been wanting to see how they look.” (pause for picture-taking) “Great! Now see, these are 3d glasses but with no lenses, I just have to marker over where it says 3D on the side.”
“So you can wear them all the time???”
“Yes”

Please note this is the first picture I’ve taken with her making a normal face in about a million years.

I was very, very grumpy all morning, but when Taylor came home from work he cheered me up by bringing me lunch and a surprise present: the hardcover comic collection of The Last Unicorn. Have I mentioned I’m a fan of unicorns? I think it may have come up.

Yay! And wow, I really need to clean off my desk.

I showed this Portlandia clip to my friend the other weekend and she pointed something out to me. I can’t decide if makes me prescient or just sad.

edit to add:

note: there are more birds in the bedroom but Taylor is sleeping so I can’t take pictures of them right now

This morning Sym finished up all the Valentine cards she made for her classmates- I stupidly didn’t take any pictures of them but happily, she made one for me too 😀

We were going to get red envelopes but they were sold out which is good I love these little gold ones!

BEE my Valentine, get it? And here is the shirt I got her:

Taylor actually picked it, I think because the little dog looks like a Georgie/Kichou hybrid.

Since there’s no school today her friend Ali came over to play, and they’re currently holed up in her room with a bunch of candy and Nintendo DSes

Taylor and I didn’t get each other gifts or cards or anything, but we did get this KEYTAR DOG.

I meant to write this post last night but instead I spent the whole evening watching creepypasta youtubes. Oops. I mean, TOTALLY A VALUABLE USE OF MY TIME.

Anyway. Friday was a super chill day- Sym was away with her dad, and I only had one daycare kid here and she’s a super good natured baby so we just hung out and played all day. At naptime I did some reading with my dog.

Later my internet friends Leanna and Carleigh came over to play Dance Central with Taylor & I.

Taylor, Leanna & two fuzzy dogs.
It was super fun- in fact I had a little too much beer fun:

Lovely. On Saturday I was feeling pretty gross but luckily Taylor and I had ordered Domino’s at one am so I had plenty of old, cold pizza to eat (note: I have no recollection of tweeting that).

Mmmmmmm. That was basically my whole day- I slept in, ate eight billion pieces of pizza and eventually left the house in the late afternoon to mail some bunting and buy snacks, because that evening another internet friend, Katrina, and her husband Scott came over to play SETTLERS OF CATAN.

I’d never played before, but instead of reading the instructions I decided to take the time travel learning approach and learn AFTER I played. It worked, and I won. Well, I won the first game, and then Scott decimated everyone in the other two games.

Sunday was spent running errands- I needed to get some piano books for Sym and I was on the prowl for new tank tops. We inexplicably left the house hours before any of the stores we were going to opened, so we stopped by The Templeton for breakfast (which was the only actual meal I ate all weekend, except for the pizza)

YES, we took pictures of each other in the restaurant and tweeted them WHAT OF IT. I wish I’d taken a picture of my huevos rancheros because it was delicious. Anyway. Once we started shopping I was unfortunately unable to find any tank tops I liked (because it’s February, durr), although I did get some tees and a sweatshirt at H&M, as well as socks and a Valentine shirt for Sym.

After running some boring dog errands (although I DID get 150 puppy pee pads for $40, score) we rounded out the afternoon with ice cream and SNL. Here’s Taylor enjoying Taran Killam’s amazing Eminem.

You can’t tell because he’d pulled it together by the time I grabbed my camera but he almost choked on his ice cream.

The ice cream was root beer float flavour. I think we should make root beer floats with it and have root beer float root beer floats. Or would that be too much? Georgie thinks so.

I totally slacked on blogging about my weekend yesterday and now I have TOO MUCH to blog about. So before I talk about the weekend, let’s talk about today. First of all, I have a SURPRISE long weekend- both the kids I had scheduled for today are sick. Now, I’m not happy that my two little friends aren’t feeling well, but let’s be real: DAY OFF YAY!!!! Sym also has the day off and Since Taylor was home at a reasonable hour we decided to make a yummy brunch.

Our first thought was pancakes, because who doesn’t love pancakes? Then I thought maybe French toast, and THEN I thought maybe we should make Nutella sandwiches and use them for the French toast. Then when I was at the store buying eggs I figured I’d get a bunch of berries to put on the Nutella sandwich French toast and then I figured I’d poach the berries. Then I thought we should have powdered sugar on them, but I also thought I should grind up some red sprinkles to make pink sugar as well. I KNOW, SO MANY GOOD IDEAS!

We’re out of regular salt so Taylor was trying to grind up enough pink Himalayan salt for the French toast mixture. Pink salt is more Valentiney, right?

Strawberries, blueberries and blackberries, ready for poaching. I think I had about 2 or 3 cups of berries here, and I poached them in like, six cups of water & 1½ cups of sugar. We didn’t end up finishing them so the leftovers are being frozen for future use in oatmeal.

Nutella on sesame white bread, so classy. We cut them into triangles so we could fit them all into the pans at one time.

My assorted sugars. I ground up the red sprinkles with a mortar and pestle (a Christmas gift from my MILs) and sifted the powdered sugar through half a teaball so I didn’t dirty my large sifter.

Taylor adding some egg mix to the toast while the berries simmer.

Pretty much the most delicious thing ever. Now, regular French toast is pretty great, but by using Nutella sandwiches instead of plain bread and throwing some poached berries on them we made this brunch SPECTACULAR!