i’ve finally taken the etsy plunge.  thanks to the helpful tips and vigorous encouragement of beans (with her awesome crafterall knowledge) last weekend i was able to take some more photos of the things i have to sell, wade through the nuts and bolts of posting an item for sale, and subsequently get picked right away for a treasury*!  right now most of the things in the shop are items i’ve made in various crafty phases of the last few years that never made it into brick and mortar stores for whatever reason.  i hope in the next … let’s be generous and say six months…. to have some of my most recent creations added to the shop.  i’m still ironing out some of the kinks, so feel free to send suggestions my way.

to celebrate, let’s do another giveaway!  (by the way, i do have a winner for the last giveaway, but i’ve been very slow in delivering the goods.  life has been busy the past three weeks!  i like the recipient to be surprised, so i’ll wait to post until she’s gotten it.)

to enter this giveaway, leave a comment telling me what you’d most like to see in my etsy shop (quilts?  needlepoint?  needlepoint patterns?  screenprinted items?  photography????  rhubarb sauce?  (um, is that legal?  or would i need to have an industrial kitchen?)) and i’ll choose a winner at random to win one of my screenprinted items from last weekend–your choice of either this hemstitched linen napkin / handkerchief:

or this tea towel:

apparently, i like green…..  both of these items were repurposed from thrifted fabric items and made more beautiful with a little screenprinting.

*this is etsy-speak for a set of 12 items, usually based around some sort of theme, that users put together in a photo grid.  sometimes, if you’re lucky, a treasury that you’ve been picked for might be featured on the front page for a little while and then your shop gets good exposure.

today i had the blissful pleasure of sewing for several hours this morning and i eagerly dug into the most recent batch of fabric sent for the common threads quilting bee.  lynn sent a very fun set of fabrics, using colors that i don’t normally combine (orange, lime green, grey, brown) but which looked great together and her instructions were very wide open–any size is fine, any style is fine, but she’s attracted to quilt blocks that look like mini-quilts.  this was my first block:

but there was so much fabric and i was enjoying it so much…. that i made a second block:

this one started off with 4 columns of “stacked coins” but i was running short on the brown border material, and i liked the squareness of just doing 3 columns, so there you have it.  ahhhhh….. sewing is such a restorative activity for me.

let’s see, what does the title say next?  oh yes.  flirting with veganism.  see, last weekend when i was meeting my new nephew, i also got to visit my very dear friend and college roommate.  (i am so lucky that she and my sister live in the same town!)  her family has been eating vegan since shortly before christmas for health reasons.  they read a book (i should ask her to remind me which book it was) that touted the health benefits of eliminating animal products from your diet, so they’ve been trying it out.  they still occasionally eat meat to get their vitamin b12 and to avoid hassle at friends’ houses or restaurants, but at home they cook vegan.  i’m inspired by this.  i don’t know if i could ever be a full-time vegan, but i talked about possibly doing one vegan day a week with mr. happy stuff and he said, “why not two?”  since i was home all day today, i thought i’d give it a shot.  i mostly succeeded at avoiding animal products (i noticed later that there was a miniscule amount of milk in the slice of bread i ate for breakfast), but i don’t know that i had very successful food intake today.  my lunch was a bowl of rice, a bowl of guacamole and some corn chips.  but i learned some things!  (always nice when you’re trying an experiment)  1.  before attempting veganism, it’s a good idea to make a few menu plans and then go buy the groceries for them.  not just scrounge around for whatever you’ve got.  2.  i think i can pull off one vegan and one vegetarian day a week, but eliminating dairy and eggs is a real challenge for me!

and last, but not least, i remembered a travel tip that i wanted to share with you.  sometimes, when i’m traveling by plane, i remember to pack an orange or two for the trip.  eating them while i’m on the plane and smelling the peels helps to battle the stale air and accompanying nausea that is almost always a part of air travel (at least for me).  anyone else have a favorite travel tip to share?  or a vegan recipe suggestion?