So much to say!

Hello all. How are things? Hopefully January is progressing well for everyone.

Things here are...exciting. And so here we go. A look into 2008 thus far:

Joe and I have been busy. He's working on my spinning wheel, making all the little fussy complicated parts that make a spinning wheel...well...a spinning wheel. He's making amazing little tiny pieces to turn this old spinning wheel into a functioning tool again. Frankly I'm very impressed. I had no idea he knew how to do woodworking. It's nice to be surprised like that, isn't it?

Me? I've been busy trying to learn HTML (still) and (now) Photoshop. This whole website business thing is great except that I'm having to do it all myself - I can't afford a designer or webmaster. But it's interesting. I'm learning a lot. It's just slow moving.

The day for layoffs at my company is Tuesday. It's been all over the news, and I have good reason to think that I'm out the door. It sucks in a way - they're taking away a good paying job that I did well at. I will have no health insurance until I get my own independent policy. And I'll have to start the job hunt again. While the sewing business is wonderful and all, I can't expect it to take off right away and/or pay the bills for a long time. So I need to get at least a part-time job to pay the bills til I can get going.

Anyway. So that's happening this week. I may get a transition period to finish up major projects, but I might not. Will keep you posted. At least I can say I learned a lot at this job, and I feel like it's helped my confidence a lot. Which is good. :) I've also been able to do major wonders on my credit cards!

So in the meantime, I've been working on my photo galleries for the website. You can go to http://www.savvyneedle.com/ and look for the website address (unfortunately it's not a live link yet). I've put in some new photos and galleries for everyone to check out.

I've also been doing stuff like this:

Designing clothes. hee hee. This is fun. I just taught myself how to draw croquis (the figure for designs to go onto). I drew these to go into the tutorials that are going on my website. I'm pleased with them.

I'm also working on some sewing projects, but unfortunately they've taken a bit of a back seat as I've been plugging away at the website stuff. It'll all come together and be (hopefully) very cool. At any rate, it's a fun project and I'm really enjoying it.

One other fun thing that I did last weekend was repot a bunch of my plants (photos will be forthcoming). I had some pitiful looking orchids in my office, and wanted to give them a new home (they looked ROUGH). One of them had no soil. NONE. It was a ball of roots and some old mailing peanuts (for drainage I guess). The other one had mostly dead roots with white spots. I'm not so familiar with fungus, but it resembled fin rot. And I know when my fish got fin rot it was serious. So I cut all the dead roots off, and am glad to say that orchid seems to still be living. I can't wait til they bloom - I have no idea what the blooms will look like! So I decided while I was doing all of the orchid replanting, I'd repot some others too that were in desperate need. I also planted some herb seeds, and am pleased to report that we have ELEVEN basil plants already sprouted. (This is exciting particularly because they're supposed to take 7 - 10 days to sprout, but these came up on day 4!). I also planted some cilantro and some mint. It's so fun to grow things from seeds, and it's been a long time since I've done this. Funny - it's such a simple little thing, but it makes me so happy. :)

You know what else makes me happy? Pirate Mouse! Yarrrr!!!!!

Hee hee. This was the only thing that sold from that craft fair I went to a few years ago. Nice.

Happy Layoff Week!