I have this awesome big stuffed bear. I’ve had him my whole life. He has traveled to NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles and now resides with me out in the mountains. I’ve loved this bear. I used to dress him in my clothes as a kid.

I played with him so much that he starting falling apart when I was about 10. That’s when I started fixing him. I stitched up all his holes over the years with all sorts of colored thread. I even resorted to gluing the stitches together when the thread didn’t hold.

He has been through so much with me, and now its my daughter’s turn to be his friend. She has been wanting to play with him, but he sprung another hole recently and had to do a quick fix with duct tape.

My my daughter’s 4th birthday, I decided I wanted to fix him. I took him all apart, re-sewed him and restuffed him. They are kind of long videos except for the last one and I didn’t have a good angle on the camera, so you can’t see everything, but I published it anyway. My daughter is fascinated in watching my videos of making things for her.

Happy birthday my baby girl!

This is a continuation to the design I started on Friday. I added pockets to my daughter’s skirt. Nothing new to report otherwise. My kid stopped officially napping at school last week and she is downright cranky-mean in the afternoon. Hopefully she will adjust to this no nap thing and be nicer.

Now she is being goofy and playing with stuff in the shop.

I used to be so creative, then I had a kid. That kid shows me how creative she is, so I think its time for me to show her how creative I can be. I am making it a personal goal to do a Friday Creative Challenge each week. I actually did one a few weeks ago, but I haven’t edited it yet, so my first one is from yesterday.

I took apart an outdated skirt with embroidery on it and re-purposed it into a layered skirt for my daughter. And she loves it by they way. I’m going to add pockets to it next week with the left over embroidered pieces.

I really had good intentions when starting my count down. It doesn’t help that I’ve been sick for 2 weeks. The first week the illness was in my head and I couldn’t concentrate on anything and the second week I had literally lost my voice. That’s the first time that ever happened like that. My voice is finally coming back after 9 days without it.

I just have to shake this illness completely before the 15th of June or I won’t be able to see my folks.

On the creative front, we did go to Maker Faire in San Mateo last weekend. It was somewhat fun with a 3 1/2 year old, but she is going through this obsessive compulsive phase where all she wants to do is the same thing over and over again. It made it hard to actually find new things to do.

We also hit the Exploratorium in San Francisco last weekend which was also cool. Emily loved it and it was really hard to get her to leave. I wish they had an Exploratorium Mini Museum that could contain about 20 activities and would be designed for the parents that want to leave after 2 hours with a 3 year old. That place seriously just went on and on and on. Its amazing that the whole thing is built on a pier.

Between the illness and short little family vaca up to the Bay Area, I have been working on rewriting my bra book. Not the whole thing, just 3 chapters of it. The measurements, the drafting and the grading chapters. I’m excited to finally get this second edition written.

Our summer camps are to begin in 7 days from today. I’m excited to do some new activities with the kids. We will be testing out several projects next Saturday so we can properly teach them. We also have our first radio ad going on the airways starting today. I sure hope it helps keep our summer busy.

We still have lots of prep work for our school. Since I’ve been sick, I haven’t had a chance to film our training sessions, so we are about 2 weeks behind on those, but I hope to catch up this coming week before camps start. I still have about 18 classes to write, so my summer is bound to be a busy one.

I must go get my second cup of coffee now, so until my next update, have a great week.

Yeah, this experiment is failing miserably. I had a headache for the last 2 days and its finally gone, but now I have a sore throat. I sure hope I kick this in the next 2 days before my mini-vacation to the Bay Area.

I fixed 2 dying sports bras yesterday by replacing the elastic. Yay- a second chance at life. I stretched them out when I was pregnant and really just didn’t want to toss something that was fixable. I also made an adjustment to some new bras that the underwires were poking me in the back. Yeah- I said the wires were poking me in the back. Its a little ridiculous.

I know I have big ladies, but please- wires do not need to support my back anymore than they need to support my neck. I seam ripped the underwire channeling off about half way around the cup and reattached it where it should be. Now I just need to find a wire that will fit in it. I tried the 50, but it was a little short. I will try the 52 and if that doesn’t work, I’ll just cut down the wire I took out of it to fit.

I have had a pretty busy weekend, but I am feeling quite accomplished. I finally sat down to work on my pattern book. Anywho, it actually motivated me to work on the second edition update of my bra book. And I mean I was motivated. I completely rewrote the last 3 chapters of the book.

Why the last 3 chapters you ask? They are the grading chapters and I have been working tirelessly on bra grading for a client, so I have perfected my directions and wanted to tackle those first. I still need to add the computer grading directions from my software, but that shouldn’t take too long.

I still want to work on some other rewrites in the book, mainly the cup drafting and the introduction chapter, but the rest will remain the same. I am glad I finally sat down to do it. I have really been dreading working on my books for a really long time. I really have no idea why I have been dreading it, but I have. It wasn’t that bad to get back into, so I’m hoping this is just the beginning of me writing again.

Perhaps this writing/creative challenge I have given myself is helping me out. I guess its kind of like exercise, you dread it until you actually start doing it, then its cake. Hmmm, speaking of cake, I would really like a slice. Maybe the corner store has some. I’ll go investigate.

Trying to write something daily is virtually impossible for me. I really just lack the time. Between being a mom and running a business, I barely have time to brush my hair, let alone take 30 minutes from my day to write or do something creative. But I am trying!

Emily had a Mother’s Day/Father’s Day performance with her class on Friday. It was her first performance. She was super cute. She was in the Farmer and the Dell skit and was the dog. I had to make her the brown pants for her costume because they don’t sell brown pants this time of the year.

Once she was on stage, I noticed she was also wearing the scrap skirt I made for her (which was not part of the costume). I think she just loves that I made her stuff and wanted to show it off. I wore my scrap skirt yesterday too, so she was even more excited that we were matching.

I had planned to take the last few hours of Friday to do some stuff for myself, but we got our big shipment from China so that became my focus for the day. This weekend I may try to get back to reupholstering my round chair. Its just been sitting downstairs for almost 3 years wanting me to work on it. Perhaps this is the weekend it will happen.

If you are looking at the dates, you are probably noticing they aren’t really on the days they are supposed to be on. I worked my brain pretty hard yesterday doing some pattern grading on some bras. It was pretty intense to the point that I couldn’t speak in sentences that made sense.

I did accomplish something I had been striving for – finding a pattern in grading that I can take to other projects and then write updated directions for my bra book. I’ve learned a fair amount about bras since I wrote my book so I am planning on releasing a second edition fairly soon.

Luckily I already updated the book for the previous set of changes I made, I now just have to sit down and update the grading portion. Oh what fun, I say sarcastically. As for creative challenges for yesterday, I’d say that the pattern grading was it. It was humoring the mathematical OCD part of my brain.

I actually did creative stuff on the 43rd day, but I was so exhausted when I got home I just passed out. I made myself and my daughter skirts from our huge box of scrap fabrics. I am having difficulty posting pictures on here as my husband has locked down my site and WordPress specifically.

That’s a programmer for you, that and the 25 character alpha numeric password he throws on everything. I plan to figure out the posting pictures thing and update all of these creative posts with them.

Yesterday was actually a pretty productive day. I had an employee call out sick, but I had created a to do list for her and for myself and lets just say I completed her list as well as most of mine. That explains my exhaustion I suppose. I’ll keep this one short as I need to finish drinking my coffee.

Today marks the second day towards my creative countdown. Today is also Mother’s Day. Today is 44 days until I turn 40.

I wanted to celebrate this day of motherhood by just hanging out on the couch with my daughter. I wanted to introduce her to Goonies. She lost interest after about 35 minutes, which was also the length of time it took her to eat her popcorn. I didn’t get to spend the day with her in my lap, but she is becoming a big girl and doesn’t need mommy all the time anymore.

I enjoyed Goonies on my own. I have watched it so many times that I don’t really need to watch it to watch it. I actually inspected the DVD before putting in the player and wondered if it would play at all. It is so scratched up. I think it spent a year on and off sitting on top of the DVD player and being played repeatedly.

I just hope that one day Emily will have the same appreciation as I do in that movie. It’s fantasy and innocence and heroism and hope all wrapped up into a tiny little DVD.

My creativity today is just writing, as my original goal in today was to touch up my grey roots and add purple tips to my hair. Lets just say neither worked. The dye burned my scalp so I removed it after 20 minutes, so now my roots are “creatively” splotchy grey and the purple, you ask? Well that looks grey too. Needless to say today’s dye job was a fail in my books. I normally get a dye at the health food store, but I went to Sally’s and picked the no ammonia professional dyes. I’ll probably be redoing it in the morning to hopefully get the grey. I might try the purple again, but I used most of the bottle and am pretty much unimpressed.

Anyway, that’s my day. Dinner is almost ready and the chocolate lava cake(s) in the freezer has my name all over it.