Come out this Sunday from 3-6pm for Crafternoon at the Whistle Stop. Bring your craft project, have a cocktail, get some inspiration from other artists while listening to tunes spun by DJ Judy.  I’ll be there, come out and say hello!

The Whistle Stop is at 2236 Fern, San Diego, 92104.

My birthday was the other day, and a few of my girls took me to Palm Springs for some hot tubbin, eating, video poker and fancy-drink swilling.

We went to a nice dinner one night, and while I kind of expected that they would arrange to have the waitress bring out a piece of cake, I could never in a million years predicted that they would have her bring out this:

Yes, that is dried rose petals and a Best Lover trophy with the cake. I spent the following five minutes making a long-winded acceptance speech and telling the waitress how, if she works really hard, she might win such an award one day. Fucking awesome! I love my friends.

The wait is over! Amy Kate is finally ready to show you what she’s been working on. Click the photos below to see the item, with more pictures and description, in our etsy shop. Each item is hand-painted. Pretty freaking sweet, right?

Query: 16 tentacles?

Reply: The better to Luv with, my dear…

(feeling squishy yet?)

Soooooooo, We’ve been teasing you for a little bit about the new bags. Hints dropped on Facebook, then mysterious silence, you know the drill, you’ve been there. I’m rocking this junk burlesque style. Like Gypsy Rose Lee burlesque, where I take off one glove for twenty minutes, go back stage, smoke a cigarette, breastfeed an illegitimate child and then return to spend the next half hour rolling down a nylon.

Here’s your first glove….

Kinda sucks that Octopi have 8 tentacles, and there’s two of them, huh? That’s a lot of freaking gloves.

Regular readers of our blog know that my sister Kristy has two adorable cats, Crockett & Tubbs. She really loves when I write about them, and so they’ve been featured here several times…like here, here and here.

Her birthday is coming up and I had the most genius idea, an idea I knew my sister would love. An idea based on our love of cheesy old family photos. An idea that would, no doubt, make for her favorite birthday present ever. Here is that idea come to fruition:

Right?! Doesn’t it totally look like I took the cats to Sears Portrait Studio? Crockett in his best tie, Tubbs looking crazy as usual. I bought a fancy frame for it and I think it really brings it all home:

Thanks to my friend Ian over at Skeptic Design for putting this together for me, because lord knows my Photoshop skills don’t cut it.

Happy birthday Kristy, the cats and I love you!

For pretty much the whole of 2009, my stuff has been spread out over the surface of our house’s nicest, newest room; “The Addition”. Fancy room, fancy name, I know.  We actually tried to come up with other names for “the Addition”. The only one I really remember is “The Lido Deck”, after that area on the Love Boat where it seemed like all the action was always happening. “The Lido Deck” never really stuck. I probably don’t have to tell you that.

Anyway, no one else really seemed to mind, but after a while having such a large part of the common area of the house overtaken by batting, and cutting tools, and vinyl and fabric and machinery gets old. It’s hard to create and really dive into crap when you have to stop and clear the table for lunch and dinner. It’s a distraction from the process when you know that you have made it so that the rest of the family could sustain injury, either from accident or “interruption rage”. (The phenomenon that occurs when the perfect storm of extreme concentration and frustration mix with the unreasonable request for dinner from an outside party).

We throw a fairly large Christmas extravaganza here every year (to be honest, these parties were the excuse for building the addition in the first place) and that pending event, coupled with the exodus of my oldest son from his basement domain finally inspired a change.

Jordan’s former room in the basement is bright and roomy- our house is an ancient battle ship whose foundation rises high off the ground and affords us larger than standard windows. Its semi finished, meaning that there are paneled walls, with lots of newer plugs for the sewing machines and iron, but more importantly, for the laptop and the iPod dock. I am able to have all my fabric in open view, thanks to an awesome Ikea storage unit that Jordan left behind. There is also room for a permanent cutting area/place to drop stuff when my mind is distracted and my arms are full. I list these features only semi jokingly, because I think it’s super important to know yourself; the practical things, like room enough for organized storage and an uncluttered view, but also you need to cater to yourself. If you are the kind of person who is going to need Hulu streaming, or music playing at inappropriate volume level to get you through your process, allow for that. If you know that you get so immersed in what you are doing that you can’t clean and organize as you go, give yourself an area to pile crap, and make the commitment to not let said crap to get out of hand. If you need a series of booby traps set up to signal and slow the progress of approaching children or spouses so that you can slip through a secret door into a panic room…but you get my point.

I know that a lot of you are limited as far as space. I am lucky that I was able to drive out one of my young and reap this paradise for myself. Barring my opportunities, you might try and carve out a dedicated space to work with what you do have. Figure out what you need to give yourself the peace to get into the zone, and give it to yourself, whether you have the room to make it permanent or not. Allow yourself a little luxury; it helps your mind relax and makes crafting more the escape it was meant to be.

That… or that perky tramp Julie just informed me that yoga follows the shuffle board tournament in 15, up on the Lido. Now that there’s room, that is.

-This post is insanely overdue, but one cannot control the timing of when she remembers what folder she put the photos in. So pretend this was posted a month ago. Thanks!

Megan and I went to Michaels to buy supplies for Holiday Shirt Making Party when I found these amazing cards in the dollar bin. I am not sure if I had ever seen such ugly holiday cards, so of course I had to have them. The rub, however, was in deciding what to do with such monstrosities. After discarding a number of stellar ideas, we decided that we’d write really bizarre holiday wishes in them, leave them unsigned, and stick them in the doors of some of our neighborhood friends.

In each card we wrote a message that ranged from sweet to completely vulgar. Then we ran around the neighborhood in the rain, delivering our little nuggets of holiday cheer. While we were being sneaky, Megan slipped and fell down a driveway. Thank god she did so quietly so we weren’t busted, although my hysterical laughter almost gave us away. As a result, she got to hobble around with a holiday-induced thigh bruise for the next week.

Over the next few days we heard stories from people about “this weird card someone left me” and we were so proud of ourselves for creating a Christmas Mystery. Then we heard that this couple friend of ours were having a massive fight when they found our card, and it made them so confused and distracted that the fight was forgotten. A Christmas Miracle! Yes, we are Angels, making the holidays bright and more than a little bit weird.

Here are some of the messages we wrote- I left out the really nasty ones, but trust me when I say that they were pretty genius. Below are just some of the silly ones we created. Wouldn’t you be so happy if you found one in your mailbox? Click on the photos below to see the bigger version.

Last week, I got laid off from my job of 13 years. It was a long time coming- the company has been struggling in this economy and I had already taken a pay cut earlier in the year. Plus, since they didn’t really have work for me, they had been outsourcing me for the past seven months to a colleague whose company needed help. So, getting officially laid off did not come as a shock at all. (And don’t cry for me yet; most likely I’m going to take a job with the company where I’ve been helping for the past several months).

Even though I knew it was coming, it was still a little sad. I’ve been there for a long time and change is always hard, and being told you aren’t needed is a blow to the ego. I mean, how dare they think they can get along without me?! With decision making like that, no wonder they can’t afford to keep me. Hmpph.

When my boss instant messaged me on a Friday, at the end of a pay period, telling me we needed to “have a talk” that day, I knew what was about to happen. And while I was getting this information, my Pandora “Poison” radio station decided to provide the most perfect soundtrack to getting canned.

First up was Skid Row’s “I remember you.” While this played, I saw a crazy happy montage in my head featuring some of the best adventures my boss and I have had together. I saw him getting pushed by a warehouse worker, remembered the time we picked out socks for him at Banana Republic during a convention, saw him giving his cabernet-fueled inspirational speeches, and of course saw us running and laughing on a beach, because that’s an important component of all good montages.

So of course, that sent me into hysterical laughter. Just as I started to settle down and feel the sad/worried/panic part of being laid off come on, Pandora then played “Bringing on the Heartache” by Def Leppard and the laughter started all over again. Then to make it even more hilarious, the next song was “Don’t know what you got until its gone” by Cinderella. Just when I started to think our Human Resources department had somehow hacked Pandora to mess with me, Scorpions came on to assure me that “there’s no one like you.” At this point I was laughing so hard that all my bad feelings started melting away, and by the time Guns N Roses chimed in with “Don’t Cry”, I was a-ok and ready to face my next challenge.