Rayen

This vintage cross-stitched piece, labeled as a dragon napkin, is one of four finds I made in May at our local antique mall. I love this one booth where the owner staples reproductions of old photos to bags of stuff. These blue buttons will embellish a lot of projects now and in the future. Have to support our local beaders, so I picked up this pretty bracelet for my favorite person. Finally I invested in a jar of jewelry and beads. Stop buy tomorrow and I'll show you what's inside.

Real time Rayen here. This week I'm starting on my summer art quilt project, which I'm making out of pink-only fabric. Here's a rough idea of my design. A disclaimer upfront: there are some small amounts of other colors or white backgrounds in some ofthe fabrics, and a couple have more of a salmon pink tone, which looks a bit orange. But everything I use is predominantly pink. I wrote this poem for the quilt, and I'm having it printed on fabric (and yes, I know I made a punctuation mistake. Of course I didn't notice until after I placed the printing order! Ha.) It will take about a week to get here, but in the meantime I'm going to be cutting, piecing and otherwise figuring out the design idea. Stay tuned to the blog to follow my progress.

I've heard web dramas described as snacks for longer drama lovers, in that new actors are given the chance to get experience and show their chops before they can star in the latter. I don't know if that's true, but these short episode/limited series productions are becoming very popular on Viki, with fierce debates on whether or not they're worth the watch. I've watched two now and I think they're charming in a slightly goofy, wholly gratuitous, completely implausible way. Since I fell hard for Ryan Ren in Moonlight last year, I decided to watch two of his web dramas, the first being Love in the Edge of Divorce . Aside from the prepositional poor choice, this is a very melodramatic series about two people forced to marry to each other for a business merger but never meet, and then when they do they fall in love. The female lead then does literally everything she can do to keep the male lead from discovering she's his wife. Yes, it's that silly....

Hey, it's me in real time again. My Scrappy Saturdays idea hit a snag when I made this crazy-quilted tote. I wanted to hand-quilt it with circles, so despite working on it for the last month I'm only about half-done. I'm not making much of a dent in the scraps bin, either. Time to try a one-day challenge and see what I can make in 24 hours, and post the finished projects at the end of the day. Here are the results: a quilt top, a dog mat. a diagonally-pieced runner and a little gift pouch. Not bad for a crippled old lady with crampy hands. :)

For my second go at using up scraps on Saturdays I pulled a bunch of blue scraps at random to do a tote. I usually hand stitch the piecing of these totes, but for the first time I tried using the Singer to do that. It's a bit tricky when you're sewing on top of a layer of batting, but I managed to get most of the big pieces fixed the the tote canvas and batting that way. Once I started working on the quilting and embroidery I couldn't keep rushing this project. Now it's going to take me weeks, if not months, but even made from scraps it's important to me. I'll post a pic of the finished tote eventually. :)

As a birthday gift to myself I bid on and won a lot of quilted runners that arrived the day after my birthday. They were much prettier in person, and all appeared to be new, unwashed and they had no storage smell. I'd say someone made them to be a donation. This first one is a delightful take on breakfast, and since I often make pancakes I think it will look lovely on my dining room table. This is my personal favorite. Love the greens. Romantic roses -- maybe for Valentine's Day? Summer fruits! I really appreciate the neat fabrics the maker chose. Another romantic runner. The patchwork is very well done, and it was long-arm quilted. Some three dimensional flowers -- more of a wall hanging than a table topper, I think. From the weight of this mat I'll guess it's a well-insulated hot pad. A summery runner. Finally, a pretty lavender, green and white floral runner. These are some of the nicest quilted pieces I've ever th...

I watched the Korean movie Crazy Romance a few years ago, and since I didn't want to rush watching the episodes of the romance series I'm currently working through I decided to rewatch it. It's 110 minutes of seeing two people who absolutely should not fall in love with each other do just that. Advertising exec Jae Hoon (Kim Rae Won) has his heart broken when his fiancee nixes their wedding on the day they're supposed to marry. He then becomes a habitual drunk who does semi-hilarious things (I'm not a fan of self-medication by alcohol.) A new hire at his job, Sun Yeoung (Gong Hyo Jin), comes to his attention after he sees her have a nasty confrontation with her cheating ex-boyfriend. When Jae Hoon drunkenly contacts Sun Yeong, they ignite a strange half-loving half-hating relationship that helps both deal with their issues. This is the most western-style movie I've ever seen come out of Korea, complete with ribald and crude references to sex. There ar...