I completed two of my 101 Things recently.  This post will complete my “blog every day for a month goal”.  I think I’m going to take a few days off and then try to start posting every weekday.  The idea of this goal was to get me into writing again, since I tended to go long periods without writing anything.  I’ve been running a bit low on topics lately though.

Yesterday, I finished my “floss every day for a month” goal and I have a dentist appointment this week, so I’ll probably keep it up daily at least until then.  Then I’ll try to floss everyday, but I won’t be getting out of bed at 2am because I remembered that I didn’t floss.  I faltered a bit on the eating breakfast goal, because one day I felt too sick to eat, but I started over and I’ve built up another week or so.

I’m going to try to start my “do yoga every day for at least 15 minutes, for a month” goal.  I probably won’t be able to keep it up every day right away, but I’ll just keep restarting. The more days I build up, the less likely I am to skip a day.   At least trying to do it every day should help me destress and get in shape again.

One of the blogs I try to read regularly is Unclutterer.  It inspires me to try to keep my life free of clutter, which I find helps keep my find free of clutter.  Watching TV shows like Clean Sweep and Neat help as well, though I haven’t seen either of those for a while.   I’ve been really trying to unclutter my place and make it look simple and clean.  It’s quite the challenge in a place that’s less than 600 square feet.  I find that the more I get rid of things, the less I want to buy.  I just don’t want to mess up the new neatness by filling it with stuff.

I saw an ad on eBay the other day, saying that the average US household has $1500 of unused stuff laying around.  I’ve been selling a bunch of stuff on eBay and Amazon Marketplace since October, mostly stuff I haven’t used for a while or stuff that I really didn’t need to buy and don’t use very often (CDs, DVDs, DVD sets, books, camera equipment, my N64 system, my old broken laptop, some unworn clothes and shoes).  I’ve made about $1000 so far in the past ten months, and I have plenty more to get rid of.  An extra hundred dollars a month isn’t too shabby.  I put most of it toward my student loans.  I also traded a bunch of books on BookMooch, which kept me from buying too many new books.  Also, taking on the unclutterer attitude has saved me money since I’m buying less stuff I don’t need.

Have a look at the stuff you’ve got lying around that you don’t need.  Think about what you can get rid of and what you can make some money off of, whether it be via eBay, Amazon, Craiglist, etc.   If you restrict the clutter in your house, you may find the clutter in your life to decrease as well.

I’m seriously thinking of taking a trip to Dublin and/or London next April/May for three to four weeks.  I’m just trying to figure out where I want to stay and what I can afford.  I’ve been putting money in savings for a long time now, but most of that went to my down-payment for my condo in October, but I have a decent amount built up again.  I’d just hate to spend too much when I could be paying down loans.

Since I have some health issues (and stress issues), I’d rather not stay in a dorm at a hostel.  A single room (even a really tiny one) at a hostel might work, but I would really prefer to have my own bathroom, so at least I could have a nice long bath if I get too stressed.

I found a Contiki tour of the UK and Ireland, which is 17 days long.  It starts in London and the last day is in Dublin, before going back to London. I thought about doing that and then spending another week or so in Dublin before flying home.  I’m not sure how I’d do with a semi-structured tour though, especially if the purpose of this trip is to destress.

I’m considering just going to Dublin and living there for almost a month.  Then I can take my time seeing things around me and meeting people.  I’ve been thinking a lot about doing a home exchange (like in the adorable movie, The Holiday).   I’m going to work on finishing up furnishing my condo (still need a bed frame at least, to do the finishing touches on my couch, and to do a lot of cleaning) and take some photos to post on that website.  It would be really great to trade homes with someone who wants to come to Victoria.  I’m reasonably close to downtown and my place doesn’t really require much maintenance, so I think it would be a good deal.  That would probably be the cheapest way to spend some time in Ireland.  I might go for London instead, or even another British/Irish city, if I find somewhere good there.

If the home exchange thing doesn’t work out, I might try to find a sublet or vacation rental, provided they’re actually cheaper than a hotel.  There are some pretty cheap hotels/motels around here, but they’re kind of sketchy and dirty.

Anyone have any travelling tips?  Anyone try a home exchange?

So, what should happen during my month of not buying things.  Fluevog is having an amazing shoe sale!

I want three of the Memories shoes and they’re all only $99, which is quite cheap for Fluevogs.  I’m going to refrain from buying them though, since I probably wouldn’t wear them that often anyway and I really need to use my money for more important things.

But oh, the pretty!

Truly

Madly

Deeply

I don’t even know which ones I like the most.  Good thing they don’t have the Teapots Ceylon in red, which I was coveting before.  I would have a lot harder of a time controlling myself with those.

After reading about them at Crissy’s Catapult Photography Blog, I want a Shootsac.  It seems kind of expensive to me, but then again, all of my camera bags are very old and very used.  It’s a lot cheaper than replacing a decent lens, anyway.

Shootsacs look like they’re made to be very tough and they can hold three to six lenses and other accessories.  It would be handy to have lenses at my fingertips like this, because pulling a lens out of my small zippered camera bag and juggling the old lens and changing them can be quite the hassle and I’m always afraid I’ll drop one.    They also have lots of cute covers and I suppose you could make your own as well.  I’ve been looking for a decent way to carry my equipment, since most bags are so ugly and clunky.

I’ve been shooting with my Horizon Kompakt lately, trying to finish my first roll of film in several months.  I took it down to see the tall ships in the harbour a couple of weeks ago.  I took it to the Danny Michel concert and embarrassed myself with its noisy rotating shutter.   I finally finished the roll this past weekend, but I wasn’t thinking when I went to wind the roll back up and turned it the wrong way.  So, when I opened the back, the film was still out.  I’m hoping that’s why a lot of my photos (but not all) have an apparent light leak on them.  I really hope this camera isn’t messed up.  At least the people at the camera store thought it was cool.

The above photo is of the tall ships (and you can click it to see a slightly larger version).  I’m going to try to post-process it and hopefully I’ll be able to get rid of the weird light.  I have to do a lot more reading in my Photoshop book first though, since I scanned to a RAW file for the first time (the above photo was the .tif scan, auto levelled and saved as .jpg).  Oh, and I broke my buying fast by buying VueScan, because the software that came with my scanner doesn’t know how to scan panoramics.   It seems like a pretty great piece of software so far.  I’m not going to buy anything else this month though, I swear!

So, this has been going around on some blogs I read and I figured I’d help spread the word.    Trashy Diva is an independent clothing store in New Orleans, where the lovely Miss Malaprop worked for a while.  Recently, the owner/designer, Candice, found out that one of her designs was copied and reproduced by one of their wholesale customers, Unique Vintage.

Candice writes on the Trashy Diva MySpace blog:

Yesterday, a customer brought in a photo of a dress (printed out from one of our regular wholesale customers UNIQUE-VINTAGE.COM… this photo is of one of my dresses-but in a different color. The customer was wondering if we got some new colors instock  in the popular “Trixie” dress. After a bit of investigation we find out that this website has actually taken one of our dresses to a factory  and had the dress copied and is selling the dress as their design under their label on their website. WHAT!!?!

I have been continually manufacturing this ORIGINAL design since at least 2002! I have countless hours and dollars investing in the continual perfection of this dress pattern… This 2007 version is what I find shown and copied on this website. Not a Shaheen dress, not a Hawaiian style dress, not a new original that looked similar, not a misc. copy of a vintage style, but MY DRESS that I know backwards and forwards! Why did this greedy company copy my dress?

Well we asked, and we really didn’t get much of a response. No denial. Actually, they seemed angry with us for even asking. How dare we!

Over the past year this online retailer has bought a lot of this dress style from Trashy Diva and apparently it sold really well for them. Obviously, they don’t care about the designers that they represent or the uniqueness of the goods that they sell. Designers beware- apparently if they like your stuff and it sells well you’ll see your designs with their brand name. I am sure that we are only the first of a long list of small vendors that will be exploited by this retailer.

Loki at HumidCity called the parties involved and wrote a great informative post about it here.

Right now, you can get the dress from Trashy Diva for the wholesale price of $34, which is really cheap for one of their designs.  I’m very tempted to break my month-long buying fast to buy one of them.

As an aside, for those of you who, like me, are trying to buy only from stores that use fair labour practices, I contacted Candice through MySpace to inquire about their manufacturing practices.  I own one of their dresses and was somewhat disappointed to see that it was marked “made in China”.  She replied saying that all of their items are made in a small factory in China.  She has a friend who is a factory liason there, who reports that their factory treats their employees well and the people seem happy.  Trashy Diva had dropped a previous factory because they heard that they were not treating their employees that well and she says if she hears of anything bad going on at the current factory, she will find another factory that is better.

I can understand the fact that China has much cheaper manufacturing costs, even at factories that pay their employees well and have high standards.  Even with factories in the US, you can’t be sure that they treat their employees well or even pay them minimum wage.  I generally look at things made in China and assume that they’re not ethically manufactured, just to be on the safe side.  It’s nice to hear from a shop owner’s mouth that they are concerned about this issue and I do believe her, so I will continue to purchase from them.  Another good thing about purchasing from Trashy Diva is that you’ll be supporting a small business in an area of the US that could probably still use the support right now.

I was going to write a serious post tonight, but I’m too tired right now.  So, instead I’ll leave you with silly photos of my cats.

Izzy in a box, with all her many toys.

Freddie in the same box.  Note the size difference.  They’re both about 14 months old.

This is how she plays.  Sitting on her bum.

After I got the top all sewn up, I laid the backing fabric on the floor with the batting and the top piece on top.  I pinned the three layers together using the bent safety pins, with one pin in the centre of each square.  This took longer than I thought and left me with a really sore finger. Then, I sewed through all three layers following the horizontal seams on the quilt top.  I tried to do the vertical ones as well, but my machine kept messing up because the quilt was too big for the table (and my machine is an old flea market piece of crap).  So, I ripped out the vertical rows and just left it as horizontal rows.  Since the batting was a solid piece of fabric and not that looser cotton batting, I think it will be ok.

Then, I made long strips of binding out of extra backing fabric.  I sewed the binding face to face (with the binding folded in half lengthwise) with the front of the quilt, then folded it over the back to sew onto the back.  This didn’t work out so well.  The binding wasn’t quite even or something and the stitches wove near and far from the edges of the binding.  So, I ended up picking out all the stitches on the back of that first side and sewing all of the fronts on by machine and the back by hand.  It looked much neater done by hand, and I sewed the back part just through the back layer or two of fabric, so it wouldn’t show up on the front.

Below are some photos of the final quilt, including a close-up where you can see how my intersections don’t quite match up. It’s not really as crooked as it looks, but I had to take the photo from a weird perspective and try to fix the perspective in Photoshop.   I think it looks pretty cute in general though, despite its flaws.  I really hope she likes it.

In conclusion, quilting is a lot of hard work, even with a very simple pattern.  It requires you to be very precise, and I’m just not very precise.  I don’t think I’ll be quilting again for a long, long time.

Since my friend’s baby was due on Thursday, I doubt she’ll be reading this (not that I thought she was reading it before).  Now I can talk about the gift I worked so hard on for the past few weeks.  I decided to make her a baby quilt.  I’ve never made a quilt before, so I selected a pretty basic pattern and used my Quilting Bible as a reference.

When I went on that little spending spree at Michael’s last year, I picked up a quilting ruler and rotary cutter.  Then, I went to The Cloth Castle and picked up everything else I thought I needed.   I got five different patterns of 100% cotton flannel, which is really nice and soft, in cute baby prints.  Using the advice of the  people that worked there, I got some bent safety pins, which make pinning on the floor much easier, and some natural, soft batting, like this. It turned out that I should have bought another quilting ruler, maybe one of those clear ones with the numbers on it.  Instead, since I couldn’t even find my regular ruler, I used the edge of a clipboard as a straightedge.  It didn’t work too well.  Some of my squares weren’t quite square, especially the blue ones.

Backtracking a bit, the first thing I did was test the fabrics for bleeding by swishing a swatch of each of them in soapy water and letting them soak for a bit, then letting them dry on a white cloth.  Then, I preshrunk everything on the delicate cycle in the washer.  Here’s a very important tip: serge or zigzag (or at least pinking shear) the edges of your fabric before you prewash it.  I didn’t do that and this stuff shreds like crazy.  I had to cut off the shredded parts, zigzag the edges, and wash it again.  I also preshrunk the batting, which did not need zigzagging.

Once I had all my pieces cut out, I arranged them all on my bed in the pattern I was using.  I couldn’t cut out quite enough blue, so I had to cut more yellow and make a slight change to the pattern.  Then, I sewed each of the squares together in rows and then sewed the rows together (after pressing the seams to one side).  This took a really long time.  Actually sewing the rows together was a very discouraging experience, because I couldn’t get all of the intersections to match up no matter what I did.   I attribute this problem to not having perfectly equal, square pieces.  If I ever do this again, I’m going to use all of the proper tools for cutting.

I’ll write about the remaining steps of quilting and show you the final product tomorrow.