What to do with all this time?

Being unemployed is boring. I keep applying for jobs, but I'm letting the application flurry slow down a little bit while I hope to hear back from the jobs I've applied for. (But if you hear of anything...)

So what to do?

Answer: MAKE THINGS.

Here's an up-close shot on a blanket I made last week for my friend's new baby girl. They're doing a bird theme for her nursery and I was really excited to find this adorable flannel print (it's upside down, but it's still clear that those are cute little blue birds). The back is that fuzzy red raised-dot fabric, and you can't see it here, but I put a pink fleece flower detail on the back.















I hadn't sewn anything in a while, so I made this potholder to practice for the blanket (and get my sewing machine's tension right). The fabric is up-cycled from a skirt I got in Mexico as a child, and the lining is a fleece scrap I got a long time ago. When I was going through my stuff, I couldn't bear to get rid of the skirt, so I cut it up and made this:















The materials were essentially free, I got to make the awesome fabric into something useful, and now we have a big potholder. Everybody wins.


Now to shift gears into a different medium -- food. We had Ross's cousins over for dinner last night. One of them is vegan, and I wanted to make a dessert everyone could enjoy. Last summer when I worked at KU Med, Sara over at The Innocent Primate Vegan Blog brought her delicious creations into work a lot, so I know she knows her stuff when it comes to vegan baking. I made these raspberry jam thumbprints from her recipe for Blueberry Jam Thumbprints. They were a hit, and I'm definitely going to make more of them.