late night rambling

-My kids have been having a hard time sleeping lately. I don't know if it's just a developmental thing, or a weird winter gloominess thing. Lil c has been hanging out with me while I sew late at night and although it's kind of cool that she's interested (and likes to copy what I'm doing) I have to say that it also kind of drives me nuts! At the end of the day I really crave my alone (with my sewing machine) time and I just can't relax when someone is watching me. Very closely. Anyways, I've been sewing up little things for a market that's coming up in just over a week. Zipper pouches and tissue cases have been in assembly-line style production. It's actually been great going through my stash and finding fun bits of fabric to make stuff with.

-lil c has always been a chatty girl and started talking pretty early on. She learns by copying sounds as opposed to big C who started speaking a bit later on and made up words and sounds that made sense to him (gacks = bike, mogacks = motorbike). So while lil c can properly pronounce all the names of the cars characters in the Cars 2 movie, something she says that totally makes me smile is "ewk-mew for bweh-fix". That's supposed to be "oatmeal for breakfast". I love it so much I actually don't want to correct her pronunciation, quite yet...

-for anyone wanting to learn more about sewing with Japanese pattern books, check out Katie's blog over here. She's been posting tips for sewing with Japanese patterns and really gets into some wonderful detail on how to read the patterns and work your way through a project.

-Karyn from Make Something just posted this today about the iPhone app for Project 365 and I think it just might be easy enough that I'll give it a go! I've seen other people post their photos on their blogs and although I'm not sure I'm going to actually post mine on the blog, I think it would be super cool to keep a daily photo journal.

-I just started my exercise routine (and I use the word 'routine' very loosely..) I've heard people say that you're not supposed to share your goals if you're serious about them because the act of sharing them gives some of the gratification of accomplishing the goals.. without actually having accomplished them.. And I've also read that you SHOULD share your goals so you can be held accountable to them.. Either way, I've been trying to exercise more and lose my 'sewing gut' (I only call it that because I mostly started gaining weight when I began sewing more regularly - sewing time somehow replaced exercise time) but I never really followed through. So since I've shared my sewing goals with you already, I'm going to share my exercise goals too. Without going into too much detail, my overall goal is to loose 10 lbs by my birthday in May (or the equivalent in belly-inches since I know muscle weighs more than fat - yadda yadda..) And to sweeten the challenge, if I achieve this goal, I'm going to splurge on some of that amazing liberty fabric that I've only dreamed about to make myself a sweet (hopefully sexy) little dress! Yup, now there's motivation for me :)

Aaaand, it's time for bed.