I followed the tutorial pretty closely, but I already had a plain white shower curtain to which I simply attached my ruffles instead of buying material for the back, making buttonholes for the hooks, etc.  I had been wanting to dress up my poor, boring white curtain for quite awhile so this was the perfect way.

(All phone pics, nothing fancy.)

The curtain in progress.

And voila!

My commentary:

1) If you, like me, are working with very lightweight strips that are easy to see through, either do what Leanne did and use a yellow highlighter that you can barely see, or do what I did and simply pin while measuring to keep each ruffle straight.  I used pink highlighter at first and you can see it through the back of the shower curtain (and, if you look closely enough, through the light ruffle at the top).  So after that, I just started measuring and pinning.

2) DO NOT buy yards and yards of fabric in order to have one continuous strip for each ruffle.  I bought 2 yards of each and attached two strips end-to-end for each ruffle, and she is right – you cannot see the seams.  It is definitely worth saving all that money.

3) Because I was just adding ruffles to a pre-existing curtain, I had to consider how the top of the curtain would look with regard to how I attached the first ruffle.  I sewed it on upside-down and wrong side up, then turned it down so you can’t see the seam.  I hope that makes sense, because I didn’t take a picture.  (My top ruffle is shorter than the rest, but I don’t care.)

4) Leanne says she would have slitted her wrists if she didn’t have her ruffle foot.  I took her word for it and ordered one on Amazon.  Let me tell you, I was closer to going crazy trying to work with that ruffle foot than I ever was when I finally ended up sitting there and hand-gathering each strip while enjoying “Dr. Who.”  I had a very talented friend direct me to articles and videos that helped me a LOT (how to attach it to your machine, how to feed the fabric, which stitch to use, etc) and the ruffle foot worked great at first.  But then it would just start jamming my machine for no reason that I could figure out, no matter how much my husband and I both tried.  After three broken needles, I called it quits.  If you have patience and don’t mind doing this project over three weeks a few days, I think you’ll be just fine hand-gathering.

Are you going to make one?  Let me see if you do!  :)

Two thousand and twelve years since the birth of Christ.  That sounds old, but is it?  As much as science wants to claim it knows everything, or try to LEARN everything, the truth is that, when you think about it, we don’t know if our world is “old” or not.  Been around for a long time?  Sure, but we don’t know the timeline Earth has as a whole.  Every day that the sun rises, this planet is older than it’s ever been.  I mean, duh.  Same with us.  I’m older now than I was when I started typing this sentence.  But the difference between human beings and the planet is that we know the general length of time we can be expected to live, unless illness or accident should take us before our bodies give out.  We don’t know if 2012 is as old as the earth is going to get, or if people will laugh at those silly Mayans in the year 1023984789323.  As a Christian, I believe it when the Bible says that Jesus will return “like a thief in the night ” – no one knows when it’ll happen – but even people who share my faith seem to think that the world is ending if they live through an earthquake or five.

But this post isn’t supposed to be about the end of the world.  Goodness knows I am so incredibly sick of hearing people theorizing and joking about that, I don’t really care to think about it ever again.

This post is about a new year, and some of the things I hope to accomplish in it.

Now, I’m not going to post a list of resolutions.  It’s come to the point where I cringe at the word, it having become a colloquialism for “something I would like to do but have already accepted that I will eventually fail at.”  (Sorry, Churchill, couldn’t think of a non-awkward way to not end that sentence with a preposition.)  I am simply going to go through some little and some not-so-little goals of mine that I sure hope will happen this year.

*I would like to no longer be afraid of my sewing machine.  Sure, I use it all the time, but the poor thing probably gets so bored with doing straight stitches and zigzag stitches when there are so many other possibilities.  I’d like to learn to insert a zipper, snaps, multiple buttonholes (one is easy enough, but spacing multiple buttonholes and buttons apart evenly so that the garmet/what have you fastens the way it should is a whole other animal).  I’d like to be confident in sewing instead of biting my lip and hoping for the best.

*I’d like to get good at the piano again.  I played for seven-and-a-half years, then my teacher stopped teaching and I had to go to another teacher.  My new teacher didn’t like that I’d never learned to sight read (I play by ear) and took it upon herself to teach me.  I just wanted to play songs I liked; I wasn’t interested in being able to say I had some technical skill (that, yes, I probably should have had anyway, but I don’t really care).  Learning under her was more difficult than learning piano in the first place had been.  So, being a stubborn seventeen-year-old, I quit, and though I have a very nice keyboard, I haven’t touched its keys in years.  We’ve recently moved it into the living room and I hope to bring it to life once again.

*I’d like to declare Ryan and myself debt-free.  We are well on our way, having paid off our credit card and my car in 2011.  After the rest of my school loans, we’ll be debt-free.  (This doesn’t include the house we still own in Oklahoma – grumbleeconomygrumble.  Anyone need a 3-bed, 2-bath in Broken Arrow?)

*I’d like to cure myself of my paralyzing fear of snakes.  ”Paralyzing” is the key word.  I accept that I will always have at least a healthy fear of snakes, but I want it to be just that – healthy.  No more seeing a tiny, harmless snake and reacting by jumping ten feet into the air, screaming, sobbing, hyperventilating, fleeing the scene and refusing to ever go back to that particular location, and subsequently having nightmares for weeks that there are snakes chasing me and I can only move in slow motion, or not at all.  I want to be able to go on hikes, nature walks, into the woods, etc without gearing myself up as if I’m facing my own gruesome death.

*I’d like to blog more – and I’d like it to be because I want to, not because I’m playing to some audience that I’m really hoping exists.  I’d like to not care whether what I blog about is interesting to a lot of people.  If I feel the need to express something, I want to do it without criticizing myself about it.  I will have great days and weeks and months.  I will have bad days and weeks and months.  I will blog.

*I’d like to make exercise a consistent priority in my life.  I’d like to view it positively, maybe even as something fun (gasp), and not as punishment for eating a piece of chocolate cake.  I have no unrealistic goals of never eating this or that again, because I know myself and as soon as I tell myself I’m not allowed to have something, I’ll obsess over that very thing.  As the great Jack Black said in School of Rock, “I like to eat.  Is that so much of a crime?”  Because of this very hobby of mine, I’d like to enrich my life with consistent exercise.

Well, that’s all I can think of for now.  What are some things you’d like to do this year?  The world is young!  Well, that may be entirely false, but I’d rather die believing I have my whole life ahead of me any day.

You’ll need a mason jar (1/2 off at Hobby Lobby = 75 cents), some little Christmas trees (also HL 50% off = $1 for a bag of 3 larger, 75 cents for a bag of 5 small), hot glue gun, and enough white glitter to generously cover the base of the jar.  I like the look of the silver glitter-tipped trees in Anthro’s version, so I also used some Mod Podge and silver glitter that I already had on hand.

I poured some Mod Podge onto a foil-lined plate and gently dipped the tree all around – don’t drag it unless you want bigger clumps of glitter.  (You could also use any glue, but Mod Podge is what I had on hand and it worked great.)

The glittered tree:

While the trees were drying, I hot glued the pieces of the lid together by gluing a rim around the ring, then attaching the flat circle part.  (I am sure there are technical terms for these lid parts that I do not know.)  ;)

Arrange your trees/whatever other figurines you’d like you use (woodland creatures, etc), making sure they will fit inside the jar width- and height-wise.  Hot glue in place and let dry.  I got pretty sloppy with my hot glue, but I knew the glitter “snow” would cover it so I wasn’t worried about it.

Pour the white glitter into the jar.  (I lucked out with JUST enough!)

I applied hot glue all around the rim of the jar, then screwed the lid on.  Practice screwing the lid on without the glue a couple of times (I know that sounds silly, but it’s tricky) because obviously there’s not much going back once the glue is on there.

Turn over and enjoy!

Goes perfectly with my woodland scene cake platter (an idea I stole from this post from Nienie).

Because I liked how this turned out so much, I went a step further and did the same to a huge apple cider jug that I dug out of the kitchen trash at church last Sunday.  (I am nothing if not resourceful.)  This one was a bit trickier and involved many antics with two marshmallow roasters-turned-pair of tongs.  After a few furrowed brows, heavy sighs and the realization that I had glitter on my tongue, it worked out.  For this one, I used fake snow flakes (also from Hobby Lobby).

The happy woodland family

Are you going to make one or some?  Show me a picture if you do!

I have decided to no longer *actively* pursue professional photography.  Taking photographs is something that I love to do, and I want to keep it that way.  I have found that for me, seeking out clients is stressful and disheartening, especially in an industry that is becoming more overly saturated by the day.  Doing photoshoots for families and couples for the past two years has been very enjoyable, and I hope to be able to continue to do it for loved ones in the future.  I am not stepping away from my camera; on the contrary, I hope to view it as more of a friend than a business tool from here on out, and therefore use it even more often.  I am also not announcing that I will never do a shoot for someone again – I have a couple of them coming up that I am most excited about  And if you are reading this and would like to talk to me about taking some photos, please go ahead and contact me.  The purpose of this announcement is mostly to say that, because this blog has thus far been geared mostly at attracting potential clients, I haven’t really had many opportunities to post.  And that makes me sad.  (It also tells me that I haven’t been trying very hard, which in turn tells me I don’t want to be a professional photographer that badly.)

See, if you know me at all, you know that I have a lot in my imagination and on my mind at all times.  I wear my heart on my sleeve, and, though I’ve gotten some criticism in the past for being “too honest” online, I like it that way.  I am and always have been an open book, and I’ve got nothing to prove to anyone, anyway.  That, and over the past few months, I’ve come to feel restless, and I’ve recently realized that it’s because I don’t have a way to consistently express myself creatively or emotionally.

What I’m getting at is that I’d like this pretty blog o’ mine to become a personal one.  I have a plethora of blogs that I follow, and getting those glimpses into the authors’ lives is one of my favorite things about every day.  I want to be able to post the way they do.  Maybe I’ll even pick up a few people who look forward to seeing if there’s a new post on my blog each day, too.  Maybe not.  I’ve gotten to the point where I recognize that I need to do this not for the Google analytics telling me how popular my blog is, but for me.

What I hope you’ll see: more frequent posts that capture the big and little goings-on in my life and my feelings about them (and, of course, plenty of pictures).  I’ve felt like time has really been slipping through my fingers lately, and I’m hoping to slow that as best I can by giving myself something to look back on and remember.  This blog will henceforth be my attempt at that.  If you’re reading, thanks

Thanks as always, lovely friends of mine, for letting me be your photographer!  :)

I think I might make some fabric birds to hang here and there, too.  We’ll see.

Happy (early) fall!

I wish I’d thought to take a “before” picture – alas.

I laid my sweatshirt flat and cut a scoopneck.  Straightforward enough.  I then found a deer head stencil, printed it off, cut it out, traced it onto iron-transfer paper, ironed it to a cute fat quarter I had lying around, cut out the fabric, and ironed it to the sweatshirt.  I threaded my machine with bright fuchsia thread, took a VERY deep breath, and began to sew a very tight zig-zag stitch around the appliqué. Obviously, the antlers were the hardest part and it took me days to finish – more than anything because it was so exhaustingly tedious and I know my impulsive tendency to just hurry through something sloppily to get it over with, mostly when I “know” I’m going to mess it up anyway.  But my patience paid off.

It’s not absolutely perfect upon close examination, of course, but I rather like it.  :)

Since visiting New York for the first time over three years ago with my sister, Mary, I have been head over heels in love with it.  Particularly with a certain beautiful, (relatively) peaceful haven smack dab in the middle of bustling Manhattan.

I had the extreme honor of taking my very own sister’s engagement portraits in Central Park this summer.  Central.  Flippin’.  Park.  Doing a photoshoot there has been a dream of mine since my first wondrous stroll through it and what better way to make that happen than with my sister and her awesome fiance?

We decided to go early in the morning to catch the pretty light before the park would be flooded with tourists.  It worked out beautifully.

Behold, Mary and Josh:

One of my favorites.

Mary happened upon this great be-vined (is that a word?  It is now) area behind the bandshell.  We definitely had to take advantage!

They are so happy together.  It makes me so happy, too

Love this series, taken at Bethesda Terrace.

Mary and Josh frequent Alice’s Tea Cup in the city, so I found it only appropriate to include ol’ Alice in their session

I saved my absolute favorite for last!

Congratulations, Mary and Josh, and I am SO excited to watch you embark on the adventure that awaits you!

Before:

After:

(Marquee letters from Scarlett Loves Rhettro in Atlanta).

Yay.

It had been raining, raining, raining all day and we were thinking that the shoot wasn’t going to happen.  But they came over for dinner anyway and the weather suddenly turned so beautiful that we couldn’t NOT go out and get some shots.

She loves him

He loves her

Oh, that yummy sunlight.  I could gobble it up.

Dusty Rose and Glo, thanks so much for letting me capture your ridiculously sweet love for each other!  ;)

]]> http://www.adventuresbysarah.com/?feed=rss2&p=348 0 http://www.adventuresbysarah.com/?p=348