I've gotten into machine embroidery lately and am loving it! I love digitizing my designs and watching them stitch out. So much fun.

Halloween Minis

I haven't posted in awhile. I went through a few months of not feeling creative. Lately I've been working on some new projects though. Here's one of them.



Since Halloween is my favorite holiday, I decided to give my ponies some Halloween accessories! (I'd love it if we ever got an actual MLP Halloween playset). If I ever find one of the G3 buildings at a thrift store again, I'm going to pick it up and repaint it to look like a haunted house; I could kick myself for not having picked one up at Salvation Army a few weeks ago. Round-n-round kindly volunteered to pose for the picture.



Some of the sculpted items were made from Crayola air dry clay (I don't like using this stuff at all but for the uncomplicated stuff like the pumpkins it worked okay). The crayola clay was used for the pumpkins, gourd, candy corn, and bone. I used air dry polymer clay (much easier to work with!) for the cauldron, wand, mortar and pestle, fortune cookies, and chocolate chip cookie.



The two orange cylinder-shaped beads are going to be candle holders once I can get to the store and pick up some birthday candles; I didn't make the beads though. I used wet herbal tea bags to dye the paper for the scrolls and book pages. The broom is made from a twig that I whittled the bark off, then painted and sealed; the bottom part is made from pine needles. For the leaves, I used a scrapbooking punch. I'd like to find a punch for maple leaves.

This is soooooo cute. I was at Hobby Lobby the other day and towards the front, they had little Japanese food erasers...and I found a My Little Pony sized Bento box!

Ponies in Wonderland

I made a little hat (I tend to think of them as mad hatter hats, but I guess they're really Dr. Suess hats) and a little set of bunny ears for my chibi ponies. ^_^

Someone mentioned Bento lunches on another site I'm on...and I looked it up. Boy, am I glad I did! These are soooo cute and awesome! They're box lunches, originally from Japan. Sometimes the food is made to look like cartoon characters. So here is my very first attempt at Bento...






I've been feeling creative lately...putting up Christmas stuff I found a couple of ornaments--the type that's foam balls covered in string-- and decided to make a snitch from the Harry Potter books after seeing someone make a snitch antennae topper on The Leaky Cauldron webpage. I was pleased with the result.

Diet and Exercise, Bah Humbug

All right, so I'm doing the new year's resolution thing. You know, eat right and exercise. Fun. Joy. Crapola. Me and some people I know are doing this Biggest Loser contest, and the winner gets a bunch of money. Money motivates me. A lot. So far, I feel like I've half-starved myself and almost killed myself working out at the gym (you try doing an hour on a stairclimber thingy and then a 45 minute boxing class and see if you don't feel half-dead too!) Yup, boxing class. I went to my second one tonight. It is intense. I couldn't move hardly for two days afterward (and then Thursday, it was back to the gym for an hour and a half on the stair-climber thingy. I think they call it an AMT or ATM or something. And then 10 minutes of weight lifting. And then Friday I did an hour on the AMT, 15 minutes on the treadmill, and 15 minutes weight lifting.)

Then I'm doing the low carb thing. I haven't really been able to keep it under 20 grams of carbs like you're supposed to on the first two weeks of South Beach, but I have (mostly) kept it under 80 grams. I'm getting really tired of eating dead animal. I bought a ton of veggies and even a couple pieces of fruit as a treat today. So this week will be (mostly) veggie week.

Okay, okay, so, after all of this, I must've lost a ton of weight, right? Right? Hah! I lost a measly 2 pounds. Two. Pounds. @_@ The week before I spent sleeping and eating nothing but junk food--snack cakes, chips, candy, chocolate, McDonald's, etc--because I knew it'd be awhile before I'd have them again. And guess what? I lost six pounds THAT week! I laze around and stuff myself full of junk food and lose six pounds, then the next week I bust my butt at the gym and half starve myself and only lose two pounds.

Sigh.

I'll give it another week. If it doesn't work, I think I'll go on the junk food diet.

'Tis the Season to be Jolly...Bah humbug!

I've been sooooo busy lately. Hopefully things will settle down soon and I'll be able to post more.