For the past five weeks, I’ve been taking a sewing class at Treadle Yard Goods in St. Paul. It has been so helpful and so much fun!

I’m so glad I found Treadle! After searching online, most places that I found were project-based classes. And the projects that were being made, were not very interesting to me. (I’ve made enough pajama bottoms, and I really don’t use a lot of tote bags.) I was thinking I would have to go back to school and take fashion classes. Which would be interesting, but I’m not going to be a fashion designer, and I really don’t want to write papers about fashion or study the concepts behind fashion as much as I think they would expect you to in a college class. I’m really only interested in creating clothes for me and my family and making patterns that I want clothes to be made out of. (Which I’m sure would be really boring and low-key for a class where you are expected to make clothes for a runway show!)

At Treadle, the classes are technique-based, and you pick the project. Our class was small, only five people, and we had an arrangement of clothes: shirts, skirts, different types of pajamas, and my project, a dress. There was some class instruction, and then we were turned loose on our projects, with assistance when needed. If the instructor was helping someone with something that she thought would be beneficial for the rest of the class to see, she would call us over and show us what she was teaching that person.

I was a little unsure if a beginner’s class would be right for me, since I have some previous sewing experience, but I’m so glad that I started at the beginner level. I even learned things when we went over how to thread a machine and make a bobbin! And this dress is the best constructed thing I have ever sewn! Unfortunately, it’s a little large for me, but I’ll just have to wait to learn how to fix that when I take one of their pattern alteration classes.

Every year my husband, Nick, finds some way to surprise me for my birthday. He’s gotten me my favorite cake, taken me on trips, thrown surprise parties…It’s always something great. This year, he decided to recreate a TV show for me.

We enjoy watching this Japanese show called Game Center CX. It’s a show where they challenge this guy, Arino, to play old video games and beat them. The challenges usually last about a day, but are edited into an hour. In addition to the challenge, they do some flashbacks on old games and have segments that show different game centers located in Japan. For one of their shows, they decided to do a live challenge, which meant that the show was broadcast in real time. Fans faxed in tips (this was an older segment) and words of encouragement to help Arino reach his goal. Nick decided that he would recreate this particular episode for me.

My challenge was Super Mario World. Just like in the show, I was given an outfit, an array of Japanese snacks, helpers to get me through my challenge, and fans that “faxed” in tips, called, and sent me presents of encouragement. It was so much fun! Nick had me believing that people were watching me play on a live stream (which was a little embarrassing, since I kept dying in some simple parts) and sending in the words of encouragement as I went along. In reality, he had people pre-email him everything, and he printed it all out at random intervals throughout the day. It was so creative and so much fun! And the encouragement that I got from everyone was really creative as well: hand-made gifts, drawn pieces of artwork, poems…

Since everyone had put so much work into this, I felt compelled to send a thank you note, and I wanted it to be something that I spent more time on than just a quick email. So I created the artwork above and personalized the message, when I could. For the background, I just did a quick recreation of a screen shot. I knew I was going to cover most of it up, so I didn’t want to allow myself to agonize over every little detail. For the princess, I found pictures of her online and made a sketch. I then went into Illustrator and recreated her, using my sketch as a reference. I could have scanned the sketch in or just looked at the pictures online as I drew, but I thought this would be more of a challenge than my usual way of drawing. The pen tool is not as easy for me to use if I’m drawing freehand and not tracing!

My birthday was a great day, and I hope that everyone enjoyed the thank yous as much as I enjoyed their contributions! I can’t wait until next year!

 

Over the past two weeks, Nick and I went on vacation! Unfortunately, it wasn’t a two-week-long vacation, but it did span over two weeks…if that makes sense…

It was so much fun! We went to Vancouver, Canada and Seattle, Washington. We went sight-seeing, visited some tourist traps, and we ate a TON! (There was soooooo much good food.) I thought Vancouver was a much prettier city than Seattle, but Seattle had way more to do.

In both cities, we stayed in the Chinatown/International Districts. We went to all sorts of great shops that they don’t have around us at home, and we ate so many things that we have never seen before. Amazingly, I did not come home any heavier than when I left! (Which is really surprising because I went a little overboard on the sugar…cake for breakfast? Yes please!) We came home with so much tea, that my bag got checked by the TSA. Maybe a coincidence? Or maybe they thought the tea was something else…

My favorites on the trip were Green Tea Kit-Kats, the best mocha ever from Street Bean Espresso, an azuki bean crepe from Unicone, Sushi Land, shopping at the Vancouver Daiso, and getting to spend so much time with my awesome husband, who did the majority of the planning.

It was so much fun, but it was nice to get home and sleep in our own bed. I can’t wait for our next vacation!