Love N Dancing

Love N Dancing. Not "Love & Dancing," but just Love N Dancing. Lame name and pretty much a lame movie, with one redeeming quality - it's a movie entirely about West Coast Swing dancing.

I somewhat suspected the movie to claim that the dance was "West Coast Swing" when, in reality, it was some stupid combination of Lindy aeriels and moves (ie. when Benji Schwimmer competed in So You Think You Can Dance the first year and they gave him a "WCS routine" which was really a Lindy/jitterbug/random aeriels routine.... grrrrr...). However, I was pleasantly surprised to find several WCS pros (Jordan & Tatiana ::sighs dreamily::, Benji Schwimmer & Heidi Groskreutz, and Kyle Redd & Sarah Van Drake, etc) dancing away on my screen with their usual talent and skill.

I made it through the movie solely because there was real WCS dancing that composed 80% of the entire movie. The acting was just interesting enough that it didn't pollute my enjoyment of the dancing, but horrible enough that if the dancing hadn't been included, I wouldn't have made it through the first 15 minutes.






My recommendation: Don't watch this movie unless -

1) you ran out of WCS competition videos to watch
2) you want to laugh at bad acting and directing
3) you are stalking Jordan and Tatiana
4) you are stalking Benji Schwimmer and Heidi Groskreutz
5) you are a WCS pro stalker in general
6) you have nothing better to do, you are bored out of your mind, and you don't mind suffering through a bad script for a story about a girl who discovers the wonder of WCS.

So there you are. Go watch it or not.

[the end]

Mission Impossible: Organize

This morning my brain = tired. Which is what happens when you stay out until 3AM every morning and wake up at 8AM that same morning. Generally speaking I like to go to bed when the hour is in the PM and wake up when it again reaches the PM. Skipping the AM altogether is quite suitable to me.

Now that I've sufficiently warned you that this post may be filled with typos and runon sentences and things that generally don't make sense (due of course to the lack of sleep mentioned above), we can move on to discussing Operation: Organize, Revitalize, and Design.

This is currently the quilting/computer room:



[yes, I do quilt on the floor]

I'm hoping to get it to the point where it looks something more like this:



I like the organization of the above photo, but I will definitely be removing all touches and traces of all things remotely "girly" (minus the obvious quilting supplies).

I'd love to get some ideas/suggestions/recommendations from everyone about different techniques that have helped them organize, fun crafty ways to make the room "pop", and any other advice or suggestions that might help a girl decorate her sewing room with a modern, ungirly, and fun theme.

1.....2.....3... Go!

106th!

I made it past my 100th post and didn't even know it! This is officially my 106th post. I know it would have been cooler if I had remembered to make some special post about the 100th post, but this one will just have to do! Here's to a hundred (and six) more posts to be written!

On Community

Regarding the below post, if anyone is interested in reading about the adventure of two families who have already begun a living-together-in-community-household, my cousin Brittany and her husband, Dan, have already begun to enter the world of "having all things in common." You can follow their adventures at their household blog -

http://theruscliffe.blogspot.com/

Mandi!

Please hold your breath while I impart to you fellow bloggy friends the good news!

Our dear friend Mandi will be moving in with us!! While many of you just read this sentence and wondered how a happily married couple could possible consider having a new room mate as good news, please let me provide some illumination.

First, Andy and I are incredibly social people. We like love having people stay at our house for extended periods of time. On top of this, Mandi is one our favorite people in the whole world and we adore spending time with her. So we're thrilled that we'll have a new member of our family for the next 9 months until she gets married.

Finally, even after she moves out when she gets married June 2010, we're still considering filling our house with people. We are becoming strong proponents of community and we've always wanted our home to be a place where the people in our community feel welcome and at home. We are beginning to believe, more and more, that God created us to be in community with other believers. Not just the "go to church on Sunday and Bible study once a week" style of community, but the living/eating/sleeping/sharing type of community that happens in a family. When we look at the early church we see so much of this type of church community, and we wonder whether we've lost some of the blessings that God intended for the church by separating ourselves into our own private little homes.

We're excited about experimenting in this "home-style" version of community. :D

Yay for Mandi!

Blogging more

I will blog more. I will blog more. I will blog more. I will blog more. I will blog more. I will blog more.

Maybe if I repeat this little mantra in my blog, I'll actually end up blogging more.

Although, if I actually do end up blogging more it will probably be because wedding season is over and our life is returning back to a somewhat human pace again.

So let's raise our glasses (and our determination) to blogging more!

The Joys of Fabric

Quilting - oh how I love thee! I especially love this quilt -

Isn't it adorable? I just bought the fabric to make a quilt that will end up being similar, except I'll be using bright fuschia (not pink, ladies and gentlemen, but FUSCHIA) to replace the green. While I don't really enjoy FUSCHIA as a color, my little sister Chantel adores it and this quilt is going to be her Christmas present this year. So I'm simply going to figuratively close my eyes to the color and pretend it is green while I quilt it all together. Here's a picture of the fabric pre-quilting!



Also, I've been dying to post photos of the quilting process, but I'm a little reluctant to because most of them will end up as Christmas presents this year and most of the people who actually read my blog will be the recipients of my quilting efforts.... I'll post as much as I can without revealing too much! For example - this is a ________ (insert offending color name here) that I've been working on recently.





Initially, I was just using scraps from my Super-Awesome-Garage-Sale-Find to practice a new quilting technique. For about 3 months I did not permit myself to spend lots of money on new quilting fabric which meant my quilting fingers needed an outlet and this quilt is the product of said quilting-finger-itchiness. Now I'm running out of my scraps in this color scheme and I'm at a loss about what to do with it. My options, as I see them, are:

1. Make a really cute baby girl quilt and WAIT (one of my greatest flaws = impatience) until someone I know has a baby girl....
2. Add really REALLY large borders and make it a twin size bed quilt. However, who really wants a pink quilt???! Seriously, it's offensive.
3. Add strips of fabric in between the strips of quilted-ness and make it a strippy type of quilt... Still, my largest problem remains, who wants a pink quilt?! Ugh.

I've been informed recently that there are girls out there who like pink (and even some boys!) and that, perhaps, someone may appreciate a PINK quilt, but I'm still struggling to accept that someone might like this color scheme. However, since I have put so much effort into this offensive quilt (it literally has taken more time than all my other quilts put together!) and I really don't want it sitting around the house polluting my quilting space with it's offensive pink pollutants, I'm determined to give it away to some unlucky person. I'm thinking maybe giving it to Andy's grandmother, Mimi (if members of the Catts family are reading this, do you know if Mimi actually likes that one unmentionable color??).

On another side note related to quilting, you may have noticed a brief comment about my: Super-Awesome-Garage-Sale-Find! When you read this, you must have wondered - "What on earth did Elisha find at a garage sale?! It must have been amazing to receive it's own title as the Super-Awesome-Garage-Sale-Find!" Well, my friends, family, and random blog stumblers, this is the story of my Super-Awesome-Garage-Sale-Find:

Once upon a time, some brilliant genius invented the Happy Valley Garage Sales (HVGS). For those of you who are from some foreign land and are unfamiliar with the wonderosity of the the HVGS, it is a gathering of many home-dwellers in the Happy Valley area who open up their garage doors and sell furnishings and nicknacks from the comfort of their driveway. Simply put, one can spend days wandering this garage sale extravanganza and still find deals that will make any garage-shopper filled with glee. While doing said wandering, I discovered a discreet bin of fabric. I perused the fabric thinking to myself, "My! what beautiful fabric options to choose from!" However, the garage sale lady wanted $5 per tiny sack of fabric and that was simply too expensive for scraps I may or may not use. I nearly left the garage sale saddened by the fact that I didn't have such a great store of scraps in my own home to make scrappy quilts with, but instead, I mustered up my courage, fully prepared for a great disappointment, and asked how much the garage-seller wanted for ALL the scraps. Expecting her to quote a number around $100+, I braced myself for her answer. "$7" she said simply. I was stunned. I'm pretty sure my jaw fell to the ground in a cartoon-like fashion. I nearly offered her $10 to make myself feel like I wasn't cheating such a nice old lady (calling her a saint might be more appropriate), but wisely, my garage-shopping instinct kicked in, and I proudly told her I would take it all. While my insides were jumping up and down, I kept my calm exterior as we packed bag after bag after bag after bag of quilting scraps. While I stumbled back to my mom (my garage-shopping partner in crime) with all my loot, her face widened as she remebered the sign that said "$5" for each tiny bag. I'm pretty sure she thought I had just thrown all my money out the window for hundreds of tiny pieces of fabric. I'm also pretty sure she thought I had lost my mind. Until, somehow in the state of my delirious happiness, I managed to inform her that all this beautious fabric was achieved for the low price of $7.

And that, my friends, is the Super-Awesome-Garage-Sale-Find of the century. ::sigh happily:: The End.