Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a great holiday season full of family, friends, and fun. I know I did!

This year for the holidays, I made Nick a new pair of pajamas! I realized that I did not alter the pattern from the last time that I made these for him, so I had a lot of fabric to remove, since the pattern is tall enough for me and has enough extra on the bottom of the shirt, that it could almost reach his knees before hemming. (I’ll have to remember to alter this for next time.)

For this new pair, Nick had some requests. Since I’ve made poor buttonholes in the past, he requested that I not give him any functional buttons. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t have been able to get them over his head, so he had to have at least one button that was real. Because of the sewing classes that I just took, that one button is the best buttonhole that I’ve ever made. It even stays closed! So amazing…

He also requested that I make him a mandarin collar, which I have never made before. After looking at photos of collars online, I freehand cut the collar that went with original pattern. I think it actually turned out good. This set was an improvement on the last few pairs I’ve made for him. Hopefully the next pair will be high enough quality that it could compete with a store-bought pair.

Thanks to my wonderful husband, I have been introduced to Seppy Yoon, the Game Designer/Co-Owner of Fight in a Box. I’ve been helping him design some artwork for one of his games, End of the Line, which is a really fun post-apocalyptic game about standing in line to get goods. (If you get a chance to play it, I recommend it!)

These are some of my logo designs that I have been working on. The set of icons at the top is my favorite, but we’re not quite sure if we’ll be able to fit them into the game. The theme Seppy is going for is Cold War/Fallout. So I’ve been trying to get a bit of a retro feel going.

It’s been a lot of fun and a little stressful too. For part of the design, I have to make characters, which is not one of my strong points. But it’s good to challenge yourself, right? When I get something that’s not to embarrassing to show off, I’ll post it!

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!