I hope you had a great first full week back at everything! My kids are back in school and I have a lot of time to myself so I have been sewing and interviewing people for upcoming podcast episodes.

Check out this article on using a timer app to take photos. I’ve tried this a few times and it is fun!

I went through a phase of sewing zipper pouches and box bags and this is a great tutorial for the box bags.

The Play Crafts team has some awesome tools for us to play with – check out this one that allows you to randomly generate a triangle quilt pattern. You can pick the triangle size and ask for a new pattern or new colors, or both!

Look at this fun coloring book – it’s the Creative Thursday Coloring Book, right now under $11 on amazon.

The holidays and having everyone home has definitely had me slowing down. I’m sewing and beading, recording episode 18 and 19, planning, writing. I love this time when we are free to do whatever we wish, the holiday season always ends up feeling that way if we don’t go anywhere.

Just a few things this week, maybe a couple are oldies but always goodies.

First up, don’t forget to go buy your 2015 Productivity Workbook and Creative Business Planner. This is so good, I hope you join me in buying one as prep for your year!

There are a wide variety of tutorials for a wide variety of pouches. Check out this one that shows you how to make a dumpling zipper pouch. This is an easy make!

My daughter seems to be cold a lot. She has been a cold girl since she was little. I whipped up four of these hand warmers for her, maybe she’ll only use them around the house but I am hopeful she’ll put them in her jacket pocket in the mornings for her walks to school.

Are you interested in gaining more Pinterest followers?

I hope you had a great holiday vacation, well rested and ready to get back to whatever it is you are most interested in doing!

This week was the last week of school for my kids! We are on to the holiday vacation. Our plans are small – making and delivering cookies, cutting out paper snowflakes, sewing, shopping a little. We are also working on getting healthy. The kids have been sick for a couple of weeks now, with one child missing the entire last week of school. This is stressful to kids, especially living overseas and the expectations of what the school wants from you are different.

This is so fun – have you seen that Maddie at BadAss Quilters Society is having a big celebration because she is thrilled to have reached 8,000 people via the BAQ facebook page. I am so excited to be a part of this, quilting is whatever you make it be and I encourage you to check them out.

I was lucky to meet and have lunch with Carmen of CarmencitaB and I went with her to one of her book signings. She is such a fun woman! I loved having lunch with her and visiting about sewing and her experience being on the The French Sewing Bee and in case you don’t know Carmen, she won. I love this great tote bag she made and has up for sale! I ordered a couple of them and hope you do too.

I have started labeling my quilts (and I need to send labels to the US to be added to quilts of mine that are finished and ready to give away!) and I love this really simple way to make your own custom product tags. I made a lot of small zipper pouches or drawsting bags for gifts and it would be great to be able to add a tag so people remember who gave it to them.

I can’t write anything in this collection of what I’ve been looking at this week without mentioning the series finale of Sons of Anarchy. Here is a finale recap on Vulture. I loved the ending. I have long been a writer – I’ve kept a diary (when I was young, like 10 years old) and a journal (what I’ve called it since high school) for most of my life. What is lost is what I wrote on my computer during two years of college, unless it’s hidden on a hard drive in storage, but I haven’t gone looking. Anyway, I am fascinated with the writing and the story of SOA. Yes it’s Hamlet on motorcycles, but it’s the characters and the development and the changes and the writing of Kurt Sutter’s that draws me in. I’m very satisfied with the ending – Jax did several things to do the one thing he always wanted to do, setting the club on a good path and saving his boys. How about you – satisfied that Jax is gone and the boys are with Nero on a farm?

Whew. The last few episodes of this series were just too good.

This minion pattern for a pincushion is so tempting to make.

I love Christmas and making things around the holidays. Check out these Star Wars Snowflakes you can make! And here’s a book of patterns if you would like more inspiration!

We love watching movies but since living overseas, I think we’ve been to the movies once in a year. And yeah, going to the movies can be expensive so we also wait until something is released before we watch it. Oh, I take that back, we went to the movies twice – if one of the two times was our daughter going with her friends. The other time was us going when we were on vacation – what does one do in Dublin – take in a movie in English! 🙂 But we saw Guardians of the Galaxy and like so many others, we loved it. I can’t wait to get this – and you can pre-order Guardians of the Galaxy now on iTunes.

If you have any of the 18″ dolls and you make clothes for them, you have to head over to Imagine Gnats to make the Chloe cardi and tee (free sewing tutorial!). I had dolls when I was a little girl and I am sure my Mom, Grandma, and/or Auntie made them clothes. I know that Barbie clothes were made, and those are so tiny!

I know the basics of taking a good picture – natural light, but not direct light, pay attention to where the subjects in the frame, natural pics vs pose – but here are seven photography tricks that are so cool! I love the glass in the water one, and using your headphones to click to take a picture. I knew that trick but always forget about it (and I lose my headphones – I’ve lost two pairs recently!). I also like the panodash. Watch the video below.

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