The Big Reveal

Life has been pretty hectic these past several weeks, as my due date nears...
• Baby and home furniture shopping
• a trip to the ER for my dear hubby
• maintaining my shop
• and working at my part-time job
So blogging was not exactly a priority. And I'm sure it will be put on the back burner once our little one arrives too.

But I'm happy to finally share the results of last month's hard labour and home reno project.




There are still some finishing touches that the shoji doors require to make them easier to open and close, but for the most part they are done and function fine.

Of course, some repairs are needed as well...

c/o our bad kitty, Suki.

And we need to start training the cats to stay out of the bedroom, as well as preparing them for the arrival of their little sister. That will be a task and a half. We are hoping for the best!

More pics to come in the next few weeks of our revamped home. Ciao for now.

Long Overdue

I've been terrible at blogging lately.

So much to do and so little time.

That's kind of how I felt yesterday after Matt and I got home from doing some baby shopping, finally. We bought a crib, but the saleslady told us that a car seat and stroller are more important. We only started looking at some yesterday. Yikes!

I'm still not due for another 8 weeks - so that's not the "overdue" the post title refers to - but I feel like the clock is steadily ticking and it's hard to accomplish much these days.

These books literally sat on this cart for weeks, after we finished setting up our shoji sliding doors. I finally reshelved most of them yesterday morning. Still need to snap some "after" shots, but I'm waiting until the shelves are fully reorganized, which will hopefully happen next weekend, once we go to Ikea again.

Here are some more "in progress" shots of our shoji doors... these, like my home reorganization, are the long overdue things I'm referring to.


Oh, also of note: this morning I redrew for the winner of the October blog giveaway since I didn't hear back from the original winner. Congrats to Leslie, one of my etsy customers last month. Stay tuned for this month's giveaway announcement... happening in under a week.

Think Pink

I've had pink on the brain lately, so I'm loving this pretty treasury that I'm currently featured in, thanks to this sweet seller.

And I finally bought the first few baby clothing items over the weekend, including these oh so adorable sneakers from Old Navy, where I've done quite a bit of my maternity shopping. I've been resisting the urge to buy everything cute in sight, but I couldn't resist these.
I promise to share some photos of the finished shoji doors soon. They are mostly done, but we are wanting to add some castors to the bottoms to make them easier to slide back and forth. Another trip to Ikea is planned for later in the week for more baby-related items and more office and studio gear. As usual, I'm looking forward to it.

Bye for now.

Studio Peeks & Work in Progress

Despite the long weekend, it's a working weekend for us. Here's a peek at my button and magnet making station around 8:30 this morning.

And here are some more peeks around my home studio from this morning.

my button & magnet making/shipping station

some completed button and magnet sets

my clothing stock (on the left) & the not yet completed "walk-in closet" ( it's going to be enclosed with curtains)

And here's how things were looking mid-afternoon...



Matt decided that this was the weekend he was going to build the sliding shoji doors, mentioned in a previous post. So after a trip to Home Depot this morning, and several hundred buckaroos later, work began and is still going as I type.

Needless to say, our place is looking and feeling a bit chaotic at the moment. Most of our downstairs is a work in progress, really. But once these doors are up, and after another trip to Ikea in the near future, I think our place will start looking and feeling a whole lot better. Fingers crossed!

Making Room for Baby & Shop Stuff

That's a bit of what I've been up to recently. Since we live in a loft, the open concept requires a bit more planning for a baby and we've been racking our brains on how to divide up the space. Right now we only have these curtains as a room divider.
I am leaning towards enclosing our bedroom to keep the cats out - where baby will sleep for the first year, most likely - but whatever we put up has to still let light in, be relatively lightweight but sturdy, be easy to install and affordable! Yeah, wishful thinking. Matt wants to build shoji screen sliding doors himself - I took out the book below from the library for him - but without a proper workshop and tools, I'm wondering how easy this diy project will be. Those of course would be ideal (except who knows how they would hold up with the cats loving to scratch wood?). We've got less than 4 months to come up with a solution.

{Oh yeah, we found out it's going to be a girl!

I've kind of just been savouring the news and telling a handful of people so far. We'll see if the results hold up, since I've already had my share of surprises with the pregnancy so far}

We've been making room for our new addition in there over the past several months and finally acquired a lovely new dresser for all of us on our last trip to Ikea.


Most of my clothes have made their way onto the other side of our bedroom and I am badly wanting to finish my walk-in closet plan for them, since it is kind of a sight for sore eyes at the moment.

The Stolmen system from Ikea is what I have in mind for our personal clothing and also for my shop stock, as it works well in places with high ceilings. So I'm on craigslist daily searching for that and numerous other Ikea pieces at reasonable prices.


And speaking of making room for baby, unintentionally, this past week we had to throw out almost everything we had stored in our building's basement storage locker, due to our own and someone else's ignorance. Apparently every time it rains - and this summer has been a wet one for sure - the basement in our building tends to flood. We only found this out recently. Well, combine that with someone not speaking up about a broken pipe in her storage locker and our choice to store stuff in cardboard boxes, and you get damaged goods. Plus, since we didn't try to salvage things right away, mold started accumulating and for our safety and our baby's safety, we - well, Matt mostly because I shouldn't be moving heavy things right now - had to toss out everything that we thought had been contaminated and wasn't utterly important.

That included all of his childhood mementos, albums, artwork and his most prized toy, a stuffed rabbit - his mom had gathered it all to give to him when she and his dad moved out east several years back. For me, I had to let go of a box full of old journals and sketchbooks, which had me a bit ill at ease. I don't want to imagine someone else reading those or going through my personal things. But oh well, if that stuff had meant such a great deal to us, we probably wouldn't have put them down in storage. That's what I've tried to tell myself.

As well as rearranging stuff in our home, I tried out the new rearrange shop feature on etsy the other day and colour coded all my items. I don't know why, but I tend to do that with things. My clothes are like that and when I had my own section for clothing in stores, I would do that. Our bookshelves are like that too.

Right now, red is on the first page. I will change that up probably every so often. At least you can still change the view to select "most recently listed".


Other than that, I've been pretty busy screen printing for others and getting together my own Fall stock to send out to various shops. This is one of the images I printed, which is also one of my favourite new ones available through Oddbird Designs.


I'm also working on a new design featuring an owl - yes, not just a puttytat! - and will hopefully have it ready to unveil and print in a week or so. And I've got a new custom portrait keeping me busy too, which I'll post about another day. So all in all, pretty busy and happy for it.

This month's giveaway will be another good one, with 3 different winners chosen, so be sure to check back on the 15th!