Not a quilt for a baby, but a quilt made out of baby clothes.

Although actually, it’s more like made out of toddler clothes.

Except no, it’s not just clothes, it’s her adorable DRESSES!

I should really call it Jocelyn’s Toddler Dress Quilt.

So, just to warn you guys, this is a sewing post. But there are also pictures, so you can just glaze over the SEWING words and look at the pictures - sure, they’re of quilts, but there’s also a blurry one of Jocelyn wielding a naked barbie doll, so don’t skip!

I’ve been stockpiling the sweet little summer sundresses as she grows out of them with the intention of making a quilt out of them for her some day. I first discussed this here. Now, we’re talking about a myriad of patterns and colors and even fabric weight (though I’m trying to keep it to just wovens, no knits) so when I do make this quilt it will be quite a task to meld it all together.

So, a few items have caught my fancy in the last month or so, and I wanted to make a note of them so that when that Quilt-Making Day DOES arrive, I’ll have some ideas to draw on.

This Denyse Schmidt “Single Girl” quilt looks adorable, but I don’t think it would showcase each fabric enough. I want to be able to look at each fabric and remember my little girl WEARING it.

If I was making the quilt today, I would have to go with a coin quilt. Here’s Hillary’s blogiversary quilt from Wee Wonderfuls that jump-started that idea. The white base color frames each fabric beautifully.

I wonder if I have enough dress fabric for this yet? I think I definitely will once she outgrows this summer’s clothes.

Which will be in about TWO MINUTES!

(All they can talk about every time I drop her off in her new classroom is, “She’s HOW old? Wow, she is TALL. Look how TALL. She looks like she’s FIVE, because she’s SO TALL, TALL, THE TALLNESS, I MUST COMMENT ONCE MORE ON THE TAAAAAALLL.” — I get it. She’s tall. We have spawned a tall amazonian girl-child. Shuddup already.)

I am all itchy to sew something. I sewed a sweet little sundress for Jocelyn which she has not allowed me to take a picture of (here’s one I got where she is RUNNING AWAY IN PROTEST, wielding a naked Barbie doll. “Don’t take my picture! I have a naked Barbie, and I’m NOT AFRAID TO USE IT!)

I SHIRRED! It was lovely fun, the shirring! When I finally got it to work! If you don’t know what shirring is, it’s sewing with elastic thread in the bobbin which makes the material get all stretchy and lovely - the top half of that dress = shirred. I got the motivation and know-how for it over at Portabello Pixie (the Shir Madness! Tutorial is down the side of her sidebar).

But that was months ago, and I want to sew something NEW! Something FOR ME!!

Look! It even says it’s FOR ME!!

I bought Alicia Paulson’s Tanglewood Bag pattern the instant she put it up for sale in her shop, but not the fabric kit, and have been hung up on fabric.

For ease of use, I thought, “I don’t HAVE to cut 48 2″ squares… I could just make the pattern with a solid fabric and not do the patchwork thing…” Which, let’s face it, is an EXCELLENT idea because I’m bound to mess something up and messing up on a 48 pieced 2″ squares will definitely make me cry, and so I could make the solid purse kind of my trial run before a “final” version, and also? I still have PLENTY of material left over from the blurry shirred dress up there — but even that sort of lazy talk didn’t motivate me into actually sitting down and doing it. I may pitch in the fickle towel and just MAKE IT ALREADY.

So this bag is my goal for the next week. Sewing. WOOOO!

-amy. lazy, fickle AMY.

I lost 3.5 lbs in February.

Yay me!

While I did not make my goal of 5 lbs a month, I am happy to say the crack down in the last week made this month at least respectable and not abysmal.

This makes a grand total of 18.5 lbs. I’ve also updated my project skinny chart (link on the side).

Now to keep up the momentum into March

I’m having computer issues that are really truly going to drive me around the bend.

At work, firefox has decided to freeze up whenever I try to load up a page on my localhost (basically, a webserver on my computer).

This means that I have to use IE to work on anything.

I HATE IE.

At home, my internal wireless card in my laptop is not working properly. It will be connected to our wireless network and then disconnect for no reason, and not be able to reconnect. I click “repair” and wait for it to do it’s thing and cross my fingers that it will be able to reconnect. It does this about 15 times in the span of a half hour.

I AM SO FRUSTRATED I WANT TO SCREAM.

IN OTHER NEWS:

So, February has not been a good month for Project Skinny. I have only lost 1 pound so far. Is it silly to try to go for a 4 lb loss in the last week of February so that I can keep my 5 lbs a month goal?

I don’t think it is, especially considering a few things:

I have a lot of weight to lose, which makes big numbers a big easier than for someone who only has 10-15 lbs to lose,

The first week of a weight loss program can often throw up big numbers. (for me in fact, it was over 6 lbs, back in November.)

I think with me hovering up and down half a pound most of the month, if I really get back to basics, quit dinking around and GET ON IT! a 4 pound loss is feasible.

So I’m aiming for that. Wish me luck!

That’s right, today is my birthday. And I’m having a dilemma.

I haven’t lost much this month, but today I am finally lower.

But it’s my birthday! I wanted to go to a japanese steakhouse tonight, but you know those places are pretty bad on the healthy food scale.

The real sticker is I have an appt with my doctor to check up on the whole weight loss thing one week from today.

ARGH.

We will probably still go to the steakhouse. I just need to eat LESS of it!

Now… I’m off to make myself a cake Carrot, with cream cheese frosting.

(scary ice today has caused the kids’ school to close so i’m home with them today.)

(i really hope to get back to posting soon, and ahem, i’ve totally fallen off the photo a day wagon and am still debating whether to try to get a bunch of photos up or just can the whole thing. I guess we’ll see.)

Now, I realize that money is one of those things that you are not supposed to talk about, along with religion and politics (and I’ve been pretty good on all those subjects on this here blog so far). I really debated about posting this, as it crosses a line about how much information I want about me and my family out there for all to see. But I feel like there are probably a lot of normal people out there plodding along like we have, who don’t like their situation and who might benefit from hearing some of this.

Without going into too much detail, I’ve been crushing on all the personal finance blogginess and podcasts out there in the inkernet. One of my new years resolutions was to get a better handle on our finances. More than just making sure the bills were paid on time and then spending on whatever until the rest was gone. Probably not a good plan, right? Right! We’ve let some debt accumulate and so it was time to pull my head out of the sand and get moving on it.

(I have even started a super secret money blog in order to keep me motivated. Hello, I am fickle. I need things to keep my attention from wandering when something shiny walks past. And no, I’m not telling you the url. Some dirty laundry should only be read by STRANGERS! See above re: how much information i want about me and my family out there.) (If you’re a stranger, maybe I’ll tell you.)

Obviously, the first order of business was to start spending less, which James is already good at, and me, not so good at. I stopped eating out at work (except for group lunches) and more importantly, on the WAY to work. While this is a good first step, I still needed to know where our money was going and get it to go where I wanted it to go.

Now, I handle the finances in our household, a role that James is fine with. Discussing money and budgeting in our household has not been without stress, conflict, and outright tension. OK, I admit it, when he sometimes (rightfully so) criticizes the state of our finances, I would usually throw up my hands and say, “Let’s see YOU pay all the bills then!” and it would stop about right there.

So the very big important second step was getting the budget in order. I know how to budget - a handy spreadsheet will suffice for most everything, really, but I ran across some budgeting software purely by chance (linked off of one of the personal finance blogs I’m crushing on). It’s called, “You Need A Budget.” Catchy, huh! I’m a quicken user, and I have tried using the budgeting part of quicken, but have found it lacking. Usually I just ignore it, and assign things to categories as the transactions occure. Which, yes, shows you WHERE the money went, after you spent it, but doesn’t not help you put it where you want it to go! And yes, assigning a $200 Target bill to just “household: groceries” is me lying to myself, don’t you think?
So enter You Need A Budget - this program is really cool. It’s not produced by a company, just a guy who decided to put his own budgeting system into software form (it was originally an excel spreadsheet, which you can also purchase) and there you go.

Now this is the part where I should just point you to the software and let you look further if you’re interested, but I can’t. I love it so much, I’m going to get into it right here. I don’t blame you if you skip the rest, but there’s some touchy feely crap at the bottom, if you want to just skip to there.

The software has 2 main screens - the register, and the budget. The budget screen has the month at the top, with a big number, which is your available money. Then there are all the categories. To start, you switch over to the register, make an income entry which is whatever your checking account balance is, and then when you go back to the budgeting side, voila, that number is there as “available” to budget with.

So then, you think about what you’ve got coming up, (the phone bill, the gas bill, the kids’ piano tuition, groceries, etc.) and in each category, you assign what you think you’ll spend. As you enter numbers for each category, the available amount decreases. You keep on doing this, until you get that available number to 0. Now all your money is ASSIGNED. It all has a JOB to do. You can make or change categories to fit your needs.

Now, as you go through the month, you enter your purchases in the register, and it will show up as “spent” in the budgeting screen. You can see with a quick glance that you’ve spent $79 of your $400 grocery budget, and it will even show you the available balance left.

It used to be that as the month went on and our checking account balance dwindled, I would grow worried & concerned $600 left in the checking account used to be, “what is going to happen? will that stretch far enough?” Now, in my budgeting screen, if I’ve assigned amounts to all the categories I can think of (including some categories for yearly expenses, like car tax and tuition) and see that I still have $600 “available” - it’s like I “found” money to put into savings or towards debt!

There’s a whole other side to the software too, which is the methodology, called the “Rules” which I also adore. I am not going to get into them much though - if you want to read more, it’s on the website.

I could go on, and I WILL go on, if you really want me to. But I won’t go on any more right here. If you’re looking to get your finances in order, this is a great piece of budgeting software.

TOUCHY FEELY CRAP

Let me just say this - the best part about this software? James and I are on the same page. He still doesn’t really look at the budget, I’m pretty much handling all the money… But no one feels like they’re being told what to do, we’re in this together and there are no more arguments, we both know where the money is going, and we are both on the same page. We have made some very specific goals and our budget reflects that. You HAVE heard that money is the #1 cause of divorce, right? (OK, I just made that up, but it MIGHT be true!) While we still have work to do in front of us, it is nice to have a plan, and nice to know we’re pointed in the right direction.

Also - It really makes me think twice about buying stuff. It’s very freeing. I don’t feel the need to buy useless crap anymore. Crap that only clutters my home and we don’t really need. I know this feeling won’t last, and there’ll be times when I just want the INSTANT GRATIFICATION of a new whateverwhatsits..

But you know what else? If I do? There’s money in the “Amy’s fun money” budget category for whatever the hell I want.

-amy

OK, first off, since I haven’t been going to the actual meetings, just zipping in to the WW office, weighing in, and then zipping out, I have switched back to online only, which is only $40/3 months, instead of $40/month. If I start to get all slacky slacky again, then I’ll know it’s time to cough up the dough and head back to meetings. I feel pretty good with how I’m going though.

That means I’ll be weighing myself on my own scale and not the super picky down to 1/10 of a pound WW scale. My scale is not-so-picky rounds to the 1/2 pound scale. So being the anal retentive weirdo that I am, I’ve gone back and rounded all my past weights to the half pound as well.

And in so doing, I realized that I screwed up the January numbers in the last post. So just for full disclosure, 7.8 was *not* an accurate number, I screwed up the math - it should have been 6.8, not 7.8. And ALSO, I went by the total from last week’s weigh in instead of waiting until today’s weigh in. Since technically, today’s weigh in is weight I lost in January, I should include that. I think I was leaving it off to give me some padding for February, but tsk tsk to me. Just incase you don’t realize, I AM still weighing in every week, but I am only reporting monthly numbers to the blog

So, including THIS week’s weigh in, and switching all the numbers to rounded .5 numbers, the new total for January is 9.5 pounds, for a total of 15 pounds.

So yeah! Once again, huzzah to me!

A couple of other things that I meant to write yesterday but didn’t really have the time. (I’m home today, with a sick Ethan. thus all the typey typey!)

When I went to the doctor for my brick of snot sinus infection, she was (as she always is) concerned about my weight. It makes me feel so bad, because EVERY time I go in for something, she talks me up on the whole weight loss, and it seems like EVERY TIME I’m always, “Yes, well, I’m working on it, it’s been hard, I can’t seem to stick with it,” etc etc. This time, I felt kind of bad, because I had had a gain over the holidays, but still semi decent because my overall weight loss since november was still a loss, not much, but still a LOSS! Still though, in the past, I get around the 10-15 lb mark and then lose steam. I start making excuses, I start eating too much on one day and then trying to “make it up” the rest of the week and then the whole house of cards falls apart. I just can’t stick with it. I was feeling somewhat good to report a loss, but it was very apprehensive, and I told her so.

Two years ago, when she gave me the talking to, and I was on weight watchers, she gave me an appetite suppresant to help me out. I think it worked physically, but the mental game was too much, I petered out and I basically went back to eating too much.

Well, she gave me a prescription for it again. The first week was tough, because it basically beats up your heart and makes you feel like you’ve had too much caffeine. The first couple nights, I couldn’t fall asleep until 1 or 2 in the morning. It got better after the first week, and now I don’t feel jittery, pretty normal actually. I think it’s working pretty well.

Again, every time she’s given me the talking-to, she has wanted to see me back in her office in 6 weeks to check up on the weight loss. I never usually make check-up appointments when I’m there in the office, I wait until it’s closer and make them, so I would head home, the weight loss and my will power would peter out, and I would just never make the check up appointment.

Well people, my check appointment is made (MARCH 3RD!) and I am not going to peter out! I keep thinking to myself, “If I can lose 5 lbs each month (which should be EASY, that’s not even 2 lbs a week!) I will have lost 60 lbs by the end of the year. You can do this.”

I hate to be so happy go lucky optimistic, because I just know the shoe is going to drop and I will throw in the towel and start swimming around in doughnuts and ice cream with no will power whatsoever… But then at the same time I really do feel like I’m doing good. I have stopped going to mcdonald’s every morning, I’m bringing my (healthy) lunch in every day and thus am not tempted by eating at the cafe (omg, their chicken marsala is so good) - these little things means I have got a good leg up on sticking with this.

I must say, I feel pretty good. You now how I said up there that 10-15 lbs has been my petering out point? I’m at 15 lbs total. And no petering going on!

Tentatively… Apprehensively… I feel good I can do this.

(Now I need to come back and read this post every week!)

-amy

It is the last day of the month! And you know what that means! OK, maybe you don’t, but I do, it means I am 1/12 of the way done with one of my 2008 Resolutions. I resolved to lose 5 pounds each month.

And for the month of January, I have lost 7.8 pounds. YA-HOO!

I am totally digging this ‘update once a month’ thing instead of every week. It takes off the pressure, and makes me feel like I have really accomplished something.

-amy

I have to admit that I tend to be 2 things.

I am fickle, and I am obsessive.

These two things are not necessarily bad things, but they sometimes aren’t good.

I latch on to something and obsess about it until I have squoozen (it’s a word!)(ok not so much) out all of it’s juicy goodness.

Then I get bored and need something new to latch on to. Let’s face it people, it’s amazing that this blog isn’t all cobwebby, because I just as probably could have forgotten about it 2 months after I started it!

I just have to say, it’s a good thing I am still married! It must be the sex. One can never get bored with good sex.

Ahem!

OK, so in the past few years, a few of these obsessions can be pointed out. Of course there’s Project Skinny which I’m just not going to get into lest I cry myself to sleep tonight. I’ll just say that this is gonna be my year!

Last fall I got all design crazy planning out how to kit out our newly-floored basement. (Which I really should follow up on and post some pictures.)

Last Christmas I read every photography website on the interweb trying to determine which piece of photographic equipment I should get next.

And now lately, I have been scurrying around reading personal finance blogs, listening to finance podcasts and going all crazy with the google spreadsheets. =SUM! =PRODUCT!

This is me! I latch on, and I obsess! and then 2 months go by, and I am on to the next thing.

I think though, that I have been neglecting to report on the one obsession I have had my entire life. It is one thing that I will never ever grow weary of. Long before I had the most adorable children on earth and a damn sexy husband, I have had this obsession.

When I was growing up, we had a Thanksgiving tradition. We would go around the table, and state something we were thankful.

When I was 12, I said, “I’m thankful for my hair.”

31 years later, and I still haven’t lived that statement down.

That’s right, people, I’m talking about my hair.

So while I have set down some goals for 2008, Important, Adult, and Very Mature Goals, I think it’s important to put this one down in writing as well:

I want red hair by the end of the year. If that is impossible, then at least by my 2009 birthday.

I’m glad we were able to cover the important things in life.

Thank you, and good night.

I pledged not to buy food at work, in January. Except for group lunches, I was going to eat breakfast at home, and bring in leftovers for lunch. No buying food.

I have really done well. we’re near the end of the 2nd week (of a 4.5 week month). I have also been trying to plan out our dinners for the week, so that makes it easier as well. When there’s leftovers in the fridge, it’s easy to grab them on the way to work.

Breakfast is tough for me, because I am always in a hurry. Even when there’s plenty of time, I just want to get out of the house already. My old habit was to stop at McDonald’s and get an egg mcmuffin and a diet coke. While looking at this habit from a weight loss point of view, it really wasn’t terrible. It’s not a bad nutritional start to the day, as long as you count it for what it is. However, looked at from a financial point of view, it is a HORRIFIC habit to have. It’s roughly $4 for that meal, and 5x a week for 4 weeks is $80. Times 12 months and it’s $960 for the year! Wouldn’t I much rather spend $960 on something much more substantial? YES I WOULD! And this is only breakfast, I was also spending $5-10 on lunch!

So because I’m always in RUSH RUSH RUSH mode in the morning, it’s tough to sit down and eat breakfast. Just in case I forget, I brought a box of instant oatmeal to work, so I would have no excuses to stop anywhere on my way in. If I hadn’t eaten breakfast, I could just eat at work! Look at that, I actually thought ahead!

But today we have my first mis-step. Last night we had rotisserie chicken (from costco) but I did nothing with it afterward, and was in too much of a rush this morning to throw something in a tupperware for lunch today… and here it is, lunch time.

Doh.

Other goals - the photo thing is going well, the trip to DC was definitely worth a few photos, but now I’m at the last of my pre-posted photos and need to get out and shoot some more! I don’t *want* to use blurry camera phone photos for project 366, but I will if it comes to that! And then you’ll be sorry!

The key is to prepare! Prepare prepare prepare!

later, i gots to go find some lunch.

- amy made a new category and everything