A few weeks ago I had a major “I could make that” moment when one of my coworkers handed me a pen. It was free pen she’d gotten from the campus copy store, and the entire body of the pen was paper. It was lightweight, had a wonderful feel to it, and looked pretty sweet.
I stared at it and then said, “Hey, I could totally make one of these!” Read the full post »
https://tallystreasury.com/2011/06/paper-pens/
First of all, ladies and gentlemen, I must apologize. I am still trying to get caught up on various projects after the whirlwind of moving, and I’m afraid I’ve gotten a bit lazy with the blog in the past couple weeks. I shall endeavor to get back on track with timely updates.
It seems that right now everyone around me has hockey on the brain. The Canucks have made it to the playoffs, and my understanding is that this hasn’t happened for well over a decade. I myself am decidedly not a hockey fan, not because I dislike it (though soccer players are way cuter), but because I never cultivated the kind of detailed understanding of the game that brings thorough appreciation of it. I’m not sure “nuance” is an entirely suitable word for a sport that involves knocking other players’ teeth out, but I’m sure there are at least a few subtler details of gameplay that I’m missing out on.
https://tallystreasury.com/2011/06/cardboard-marionettes-go-canucks/
Today, dear readers, a quiz: What’s the first thing you do when preparing to move? Is it:
If you guessed C, you are correct! A and B can come later.
My boyfriend and I recently (as in last weekend) moved from a very small and charming apartment to a much larger boxy, white-walled and sterile space. We now have a crafting room and a bathtub and a patio and a kitchen sink that could comfortably house a family of ducks, but we also have a whole lot of empty, blank, bland neutral-toned space. It’s been keeping me up nights.
Before we moved, I decided that our new living room colour would be blue. An interesting decision, as we owned not one single piece of furniture or decor in that colour. In tandem with this blueness, I decided that some map themed decor would be nice. Maps are gorgeous, interesting, and busy enough to distract the eye a bit from all this blank white space. And I have some beautiful old atlases I’ve been cutting up for crafts.
https://tallystreasury.com/2011/06/easy-peasy-redecorated-coasters/
For those of you wondering if I have fallen off the face of the earth, I have not. I’ve simply been moving. My boyfriend and I decided to leave behind our charming character apartment for a place with less charm but more elbow room, and a kitchen sink larger than a shoebox. (In a couple of weeks we’ll have hopefully recovered, and my blog updates will get back to Fridays, rather than some vague unspecified time in the middle of the week.)
In the course of all our we’ve-run-out-of-packing-tape-again and where-did-I-pack-the-spaghetti-strainer mayhem, we discovered we own a lot more things than we thought we did. The amount of stuff in our place (seeping out of the walls, as best I can tell, because I don’t know where else it could have come from) defied all natural laws of the universe. For days, local thrift stores reaped the questionable benefit of all our past consumerism in the form of several carloads of donations.
https://tallystreasury.com/2011/06/moving-rediscovery-of-the-good-the-elmers-and-the-emo/
Sometimes life is about laziness, sometimes it’s about busyness and sometimes it’s about delayed gratification. This week it’s about all three. Because I’ve been busy packing all my possessions into cardboard boxes, I got lazy and decided to just watch Arrested Development at the end of the day (several days in a row), thus you’re now experiencing the delayed gratification that comes after waiting for a blog post that was supposed to be up five days ago.
Speaking of delayed gratification, almost exactly a year ago I borrowed this spiffy jacket from my friend to use at a work function. (I work with international students and some of them needed to dress up as lumberjacks for a play… my job is kind of off the wall like that.) He was sad that one elbow had a hole in it, so I said I’d patch it for him when our students were done with the jacket. And I did… a year later.
https://tallystreasury.com/2011/05/smooth-edged-hidden-hem-patches/
We’re moving soon, and I’ve been slowly going through all my stuff, organizing and paring down. When I say “stuff” I largely refer to crafting supplies, since that’s what most of my world is made of.
While sorting through all that “stuff” it came to my attention that I have what might technically be referred to as a boatload of paper scraps. They’re useful, you see. And they’re paper, so it’s not like they take up much space, or weigh very much… right? Um.
https://tallystreasury.com/2011/05/paper-orchids-and-spiralled-paper-roses/
All of my houseplants go through a sort of trial by fire. Or trial by neglect, to be more accurate. If they can withstand my general gardening ignorance and sporadic-at-best attention, they get to stay. If not… well in that case there isn’t much of them left anyway, is there?
It’s not that I dislike plants (quite the opposite, in fact), it’s just that I’m not very good at caring for them. Years ago my boyfriend gave me an African violet (because I’m such a shrinking violet, haha – he got the idea somewhere that sarcasm is sexy). It did very well until January, when – coming home after 2 weeks of Christmas break at my parents’ – I sort of forgot to take care of it. And it sort of, um, died. My boyfriend gave me another one with the threat that if I let this one die I would get a cactus next. Spite is a great motivator for me, and I’m proud to say that violet #2 is still alive 3 years later.
https://tallystreasury.com/2011/05/paper-plants-a-lovely-possibility-for-mothers-day-gifts/
