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Our grocery/everything store is hosting a reusable bag design contest and I submitted my entry last night. If you would be so kind as to vote for it here (http://www.designareusablebag.com/vote-for-designs/bag.aspx?BagId=42512&banner=fredmeyer), I would REALLY appreciate it. The grand prize is a $1000 gift card to that store (Fred Meyer, which is owned by Kroger). My dear friend Andi told me about the contest, so let me plug her design as well! (http://www.designareusablebag.com/vote-for-designs/bag.aspx?BagId=24239&sr=1)

I thought I might enter another design that was less girly, but I don't know. I am guessing the judges will be mostly men, but the people who would buy reusable bags would mostly be women? I don't know. The birdy design was originally a Blogger theme I was working on but gave up on. Here he has breathed new life as an Earth advocate. :)

At any rate, the contest ends May 15th, but you can* vote every day between now and then. The top vote-getter doesn't automatically win. As I mentioned before, there will be judges who choose the eventual winners.


(*and should! Just sayin'.)

Cross #4 off the list! I have officially made a blogger template. You can check it here!

I plan to release it to be used by others who would like to in the near future, after some inevitable tweaking. I also have one other design finished that needs to be bloggered up!

Coming soon, a blogger template made by me, called soulsofia|stitch! I designed it today (the css took me a while!) and hopefully soon I will be able to insert the blogger coding to make it work with the blog and widgets. Here's a sneak preview... (note it looks nothing like my original idea!). I have actually worked on two designs but this one is the first one that I was able to make the css work. :)

I have the yarn for my next project. Of course this is a scarf, I'm not quite ready to move ahead on that front, but I will be making one for myself this time. I found this great yarn at the craft store, but they only had one skein. It's really chunky yarn, but it was not long enough for a scarf.

So I went Googled the type of yarn (Patron brand "Pooch" in "lamb" color) and ordered what I needed at Knitting Warehouse and it came two days later! Of course I'm not able to start my new scarf yet but I'm really excited about it. If you're not the kind of person who makes crafts or has that innate NEED to create things, then I don't know how to explain it to you. :) But I'm looking forward to my weekend (starting tomorrow) so I can start this project!

Bryan and I catch up on our TV shows on the weekend after the boys go to sleep, so it's a great opportunity to multi-task. I'm getting better at being able to knit without looking, but sometimes the shows suck me in and I forget about knitting until he goes to fast forward the commercials. :) But if I'm lucky, I may be able to fit in some knitting tomorrow during the day, too.

True to my #4 To Do, I have begun the design phase of my future first blogger template, a project I'm for now calling "soulsofiadigital". Who knows what it will be called when its finished, let alone what it might actually look like when it is born, but I had fun playing with a new image editing program (GIMP), since I can't find my Photoshop cd. God bless Open Source!

I somewhat feel like I don't want to reveal what I have now... Something like an artist needing to showcase only the finished work... But at the same time I would like to chronicle the progress since this is my first blog template design of my own creation. (I've changed graphics and colors on existing ones many times, but that's not that hard.)

I suppose that helps my #8 To Do, so here is a little chunk of what I just finished working on, which doesn't look like much. This is sets the color scheme and feel I'm working with. It's actually a cropped bit of it, at a low-resolution, but you get the gist. More to come.

Ok so my second scarf I made for my dear friend. The first scarf wasn't quite as neat in the beginning rows but this one came out well. Also on the first scarf I didn't attempt a fringe, but thanks to a tutorial on expertvillage.com (also found at youtube and on my knitting playlist a couple of posts back) I found it was actually not so hard! I couldn't locate my crochet hook but a pair of tweezers worked just fine. So here are some close ups of the knitting, the fringe, and of her actually wearing the scarf.

I learned how to knit in elementary school after my class read a story in which the main character learns how to knit. I can't remember the story after all these years, but I remember everyone in the class knitting... But alas, I didn't keep it up and eventually the how to of it faded from my memory. (As so much does.)

When I was pregnant with Caleb I tried to re-learn but I could only remember how to start. Needless to say I didn't get very far. I think I still have that ball of yarn in one of my boxes that are packed full of craft supplies in my mom's barn.

Well this year she bought me a really nice red yarn for my Christmas stocking, but since we didn't do gifts, the stocking was full and the yarn didn't fit. So she gave it to me, along with some lovely fat wooden knitting needles (the same ones I learned on in elementary school). I think I have to give those back, but I'll be slow about it.

So she and I together were able to remember how to start the knitting, and it started coming back to me. Caleb came into my room while I was knitting away, and asked me what I was making.

"A scarf, I think," I said.

"Can you make me a scarf when you're done with that one?" he asked.

"You can have this one!" I replied.

So I knit a bit more until I had a scarf of a reasonable length for a small boy. Then I took my work back to my mom so she could show me how to finish it off.

Let me take a break here to let you know how much I am finding that I am just like my mom. I look at her and figure in time I will BE her. Sometimes that is scary. This was one of those times.

"I know you have to cross them over," That is all she could remember after trying a couple of times to start the finishing process. "I can see myself crossing them somehow in my memory."

I am so like that.

Luckily, Bryan was there. "Check on YouTube," he said.

So I checked on YouTube yesterday and sure enough, there are some excellent tutorials on knitting. And I thought the only thing on YouTube was downhere videos and people hurting themselves in one way or another.

So as a service to all three of my readers, here is how I knit my scarf, courtesy of YouTube. The videos are from "ExpertVillage" featuring a lady named Michelle. I didn't like the ways she showed how to cast on (start) so I found another lady showing just how I remembered how to do it.

Michelle and I really liked one of the photos we took during her senior pic photoshoot, but the background was so bad. The side of the new barn, the camping trailer, the general unbeauty of that side of the property... So since the boys are sleeping over at my MIL's house, I worked on this while catching up on LOST at the same time.

From Michelle's Senior Pictures Photoshoot

My sister is graduating in a mere eight months. Scary. She is 9 years younger than me. So since she loved the other picture that I took for her a while ago, she asked me to take her senior pictures. Here are a few that are finished now. We took all three of these on my mom's property.

Edit: I just finished one more, so here it is. This one is on the old property, the barn in the background is over 100 years old, I believe.

Some creating has been going on here today! Here are the two projects for the Reach that I worked on today..

Here's the first version of a logo for The Reach's new-born men's group:

I just finished the invitations for our Prayer Partner Banquet. Thanks to Bryan and Mark (Sturge) for the input. :)

Believe it or not, Micah will be turning two next month. I've been giving it a lot of thought this year, pretty much since last year when I wanted to do a farm animal themed cake and couldn't find one. So I've had the idea of farm animals for a year, but I have been contemplating how to go about it this year.

My parents, luckily, live on a semifarm. They have a barn, they have a horse, they have a pony, they have a dog. So my first thought was to have Michelle give pony rides and she said she'd do it. I can't wait to get pictures of that!

Last week my mom and I went to the craft store and purchased all that (we think) we'll need for the birthday cake, and I purchased an assortment of papers to make some invitations. They're a lot more complicated than any other I've made, but having just finished one (it took a while) I am glad I decided to do them by hand.

I'm also glad that I've started over a month in advance of the event! It was sure a lot of work making templates and cutting and such... I debated with myself about posting it here, but the chances are good nobody will look anyway so here it is:

Well, it's been precisely one month since my last post. It's been a very creative month! In random order:

We're getting sweatshirts made with the above logo on the front, and this third design on the back:





I also put together a little purse for my niece from some wonderful supplies at the craft store. It was a pink purse with a light yellow interior. The handles I chose were c-shaped clear acrylic that easily attached to the purse. Caleb and I chose some adorable cupcake iron-on appliqués that I ironed on on the front, sides, and inside of the purse. We filled the bag with some pink Build-A-Bear motif goodies we found at Michael's. I wish I'd gotten a photo of it before I gave it to her. I'll have to see if she brings it with her to church on Sunday so I can add a picture here.


I also painted/decoupaged a little stool and picture frame to match as a baby shower gift for a friend (and I guess I hope she doesn't check my blog so the surprise isn't spoiled!). I painted the major surfaces in pink, the undersides in yellow, and the sides in green. For the stool I cut out some flower shapes (freehand), painted on the leaves, and used some "epoxy stickers" as the raised centers of the flowers. As a finishing touch I added polka-dot ribbon around the edge. For the for the frame I cut the paper along the pattern of flowers, added ribbon, and an epoxy sticker. I used sparkle Mod-Podge over the whole of both projects, but you can't really see the sparkle at all in the photo. Trust me, it's really sparkly. (read:girly)






It's been really fun to use the creativity and inspiration God has given me these last few weeks. As long as the creativity lingers, I can create. I am working on a project for Mother's Day, as well, for my mom. Bryan is also making something (different) for his mom. I hope we can get them both done on time!! It seems I recently have an abundance of creativity, but a shortage in time. :)

I am working to create a logo for our church's men's group. The group is called Every Man Restored. These are some of the logos I created today. None of them made the cut, though. Some were good, but too ink-heavy. The final design will be screen printed in white on the back of black t-shirts.

I've been on the internet a LOT lately. I was tasked with creating both a craislist-like (but everything is free) section of our website as well as creating an online address book. Both things I had never done before, but it is my personal motto that I can find anything on the internet.

So first I tackled the craigslisty thing. We haven't decided on an official name for it. In fact, we are having a contest at church for people to prayerfully come up with a good name for the project. I set it up in a bulletin board format, and the harder part of it was making it look at least nice. Plus, I had to make examples for posting bulletins and the contest rules. (The winner gets a Starbucks gift card).

Yesterday I took a break from that to create some potential desings for the next batch of business cards. I'll convert those to little jpgs, when I get the chance, so you can check them out.

Today I installed the system for the address book. It took me a while because the type of coding (language) that is used is something I'd never dealt with before. After reading up on a few basics, I was able to install it fairly easily because this particular system came with a file that does a lot of the work itself.

The last part of that was creating a cool graphic for the address book. You can check it out here. But really the last part would be inputting all the names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, and anniversaries. This part I'm hoping somebody will volunteer to do. I might just bore myself into a stupor if I did it myself.

The program will need a little tweaking if it will be like our printed directory - with everbody in the family having their bday listed etc. But I think I will be able to accomplish that in the next couple of weeks.

I really need to develop the kind of personality that can just put something down halfway (or 1/4 of the way) through. As it is with these different projects, I have a huge mountain of dirty laundry to take care of, at the very least.

So tht's what I've been up to the last four days. I do feel like I accomplished a lot, and I hope it all gets put to good use.

I just launched a new website for my church and since you are the people I trust with my semi-finished work [hence this blog :) ] I want to know what you think about it, things you think should be added, etc.

Keep in mind that the website is not done yet. I refer to it as "functional". The design is basically finished, aside from some minor tweaks. As far as content goes, more will be added blog-style as things come up. The Discover section is pretty much complete for what info I have at the moment, but more will be added to that too.

Check my work at www.NorthbayCovenant.org and then comment away, my friends. I already have a list of things to work on, but the more input, the better, I think. I may not execute every suggestion, but all comments are valuable and will be taken into consideration.

Thanks!