On Monday we welcomed Salo into our lives! She’s a beagle/hound born June 18 2010. She loves her chewing stick when she’s inside resting on our laps, and she loves eating grass, rocks, sticks, and plants when outside.

Hopefully we’ll have her house trained in no time with some patience and calm assertive energy, as Cesar says!
  

I’ve finally worked up the courage (IE – my brother in law is throwing a jack and jill party and wants to auction off one of my items and so he’s offering to advertise for me) to put my items up for sale. I’m excited and scared at the same time! Thanks Chad!

Everything is available on ETSY and I should be adding a few more things in the next few weeks.

It’s time to get busy!

Luckily I had some great friends who helped me get everything together.
Our friends Aimee & Jean made us a fabulous wedding cake and now Aimee is trying to make her way in the cake industry.

Check out her website: http://bakingaimee.wordpress.com/, this was our wedding cake: http://bakingaimee.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/calla-lilies-wedding-cake/.

Thanks guys it was a beautiful cake!

Then came the horror that is paper faced tiles. The internet says, if you just spray it with water, and let it sit, the paper will dissolve and you can easily peel/wipe it off. Not true. Maybe the glue was too old or something, but it took us one full day, and 5 nights to remove all the stupid paper. Not fun at all. So if you’re ever thinking of getting tiles, and they say its paper faced, THINK IT OVER.

After that was all done, we grouted, which was easy enough, and then we could not get the grout haze off. So in about 10 days, we’ll be able to use grout haze remover to completely clean off the tiles.

It was a lot of work, but I think it looks great. I’m hoping my husband will post a better step by step with the pics, but for now, here is the before and after:

Project 1: Re-doing the front/back door curtains
I forgot to take a ‘before shot’ of my previous curtains for the front and back door, but they were pretty nasty. I was using material from old curtains in the condo and had just trimmed them down to do the necessary covering. Last time I ever work with sheer fabric; it’s super slippery material and back then I had no patience to iron the hems first. My mom has been complaining about them since I put them up, and last week she was over again and, on cue, brought up their ugliness yet again, so I visited the fabric store, found some $2/m fabric, and voila! For a mere $6 dollars we’ve got much better looking entrances.

Project 2: Kitchen chair covers
My old chair covers I did a long time ago, and really didn’t know what I was doing back then. They too were a quick fix, so when you sat down your butt bones wouldn’t eventually end up grinding into the chair. I have become a better seamstress since then, at least I hope I have. I was visiting the fabric store while waiting for my husband to arrive from the subway, and saw this incredible fabric. I thought nothing of it then, until I got home and realized what I could do with them. So the next day, I head back to the store, and it was gone from the clearance section! We searched and searched, and luckily, we found 2.25m left in the clearance section but at $4/m. So for $12, I got our new kitchen chair covers with some material left to spare. My husband’s one request was that they don’t slip around on you anymore when you sit down, so instead of doing ribbon like before, I created velcro straps and sewed the non-slip material to the bottom of the cushion (you can’t see that part). But I think they look a lot better than before, and I had him test them for their immobility. Worked like a charm!

That’s about it for now. I think I’ll go back to sewing non-house related things!