she's crafty (or trying to be)

one thing i really like to do but almost never have the time (or resources) for is sewing. in the states i made all sorts of things - pillows, chair cushions, skirts. in london, i don't have a sewing machine or the space to make a giant mess with fabric. adam's mom kindly lent me her 1964 singer machine for a bit, and i spent several happy hours hemming jeans. sad, i know.

however, part of my new year's resolutions involved trying to be more creative. this coincided with the arrival of a care package from my mama, which included my copy of amy butler's book "in stitches". i've had this book for several years and have always fantasised about making this:



the pattern is seven (!) pages long and in addition to using a lot of scary quilting-related words, looks wicked hard to make. i really yearned for a cozy quilt to put on my bed (blanket makes a better afghan. and he sheds) but i wasn't sure how wise it would be to spend £100 or more on fabric and materials only to find that i actually suck at quilting/hate sewing lots of quilting lines/etc.

so i went hunting for a class to take in london and came across this at the make lounge: log cabin quilted cushion. i liked the idea of something non-committal, e.g. a cushion. if things failed i would only be out £56 and would at least get a pillow out of the deal.

i showed up to the make lounge after work, which meant i was exhausted, slightly frazzled, and more than a little sniffly with a stubborn cold that just refused to go away. i had registered for the class weeks in advance and i was seriously considering ditching to go home and lie in my bed and watch mindless television. i'm so glad i didn't! i was the last one to arrive, which meant that the fabric selection was kind of picked over. normally this would bug me but instead i was thinking "who cares! it's just for practice!" - so i had fun and pulled a bunch of fabrics that i wasn't entirely sure went together. i did choose a "unifier" swatch though, which represented all the colours of the random fabrics i had chosen in one piece (i think i learned this tip in the interior decorating class my mom and i took about 8 years ago!) my unifier fabric looked like this:



surprise, surprise, the fabric designer of this one is amy butler. i really love amy's style and the fact that she's a fellow ohioan. she somehow manages to make even the most country-style farmhouse stuff seem chic.

anyway, i digress. as i mentioned, the type of quilting we were doing was log cabin style, which means you start with a central square and then attach different rectangles building as you go. normally i find that i'm too impatient for things like measuring, cutting, etc. but it was really therapeutic and there was something very satisfying about building my little cushion!

after all the pieces were stitched together to form a big, patchwork square, we spray glued the patchwork to batting (fluffy cottony material) then spray glued it to a backing piece. then came the hard part - measuring and drawing on the quilting lines. the quilting lines are what hold the piece together and give it a bit of texture. our instructor said we could do 1/2" or 1" space between each line. i opted for 1" because i really didn't want to be there all night sewing straight lines. i'm horrible with math and measurements and so was slightly terrified at the prospect of messing up, but it was really easy with the clear rulers the studio provided us. sewing the lines was even easier than i thought and actually went very quickly! before i knew it, i had finished quilting and was sewing up the easy peasy envelope piece for the back of the cushion.

in a mere three hours, i managed to produce something that looks roughly like a quilt!



and the fabrics that i chose willy nilly? i think they look pretty good together, all things considered. at any rate, the class made me realise i would really enjoy creating a full quilt and gave me the confidence to start hunting for fabrics. if only i had the space... :-)

copenhagen!

adam and i celebrated our one year dating anniversary this week! to commemorate the event, we decided to go to copenhagen. i have been wanting to venture north for a while and it's really, really cheap to visit denmark right now (probably because it is really, really cold). of all the places i've visited in the last year, copenhagen is one of my favourites. clean city, friendly people, super easy to navigate, and beautiful. i could have easily stayed a few extra days but alas, these weekend trips always go too fast. we stayed in a little three-star hotel called hotel maritime, which was tiny but cheap and clean. the shower was actually a wet room and true to its name, the whole bathroom was wet by the time i finished bathing. was kind of fun though.

a few pics from our adventure


we were struck by the clean modern design of the airport, although it took me a minute to figure out what i've dubbed the "star wars" bathroom. you have have to stand in front of this door here and it eventually opens automatically. it felt very intergalactic.


for grandpa. these were on display in the airport...adam said they were in london at one point.


our first night there, we stopped in a pub whose name i can't pronounce. speaking of which, i tried to order gløgg but wasn't pronouncing it right so i went back and forth with the bartender a few times (glogg? glugg?) before i finally spelled it out and he went "oh! GLOOGG." gløgg is sort of like mulled wine with raisins and nuts in the bottom. my flatmate who is from sweden made some at Christmastime, so i was excited to try it again! very nice when its 10 degrees outside.


front of the pub i can't pronounce


i had a cold during our trip and thought a hot toddy might help (it did). except the bartender made it with rum, which i've never had before? i always thought they were whisky drinks but what do i know!


the danish are crazy for cycling and copenhagen was the most bike-friendly city i have ever seen. it is also a very peaceful, nice city and people seemed to leave their bikes everywhere, some of them unlocked. perhaps i'm being naive but it seemed a lot safer than london.


we made it down to the canals late afternoon on saturday and were amazed that the water was frozen! (my swedish flatmate said "duh! it's winter!" when we told her this :-) the canal looked like a giant slushie. blueberry flavour, if you really must know.


tiny jen next to big frozen canal.


this is about as much skin as i was willing to expose. even with a shirt, sweaterdress, cardigan, coat, gloves, hat, two pairs of socks, and tights i was FREEZING! the wind bit through every layer of clothing, although the sun helped us from turning into blocks of ice.


adam in a postcard.


simply amazing. i could have stood looking at this canal all day, except my eyes were starting to freeze.






i fancy a swim!


is this a toilet? who can tell! funny name though.


i've got my eye on you, bear-hat-guard-man.


hello from the danish palace? we don't really know what this was, we found it on accident.




the original little mermaid. i bet she's cold sitting there on that rock! it took us ages to walk there and adam kept looking at every statue we passed and saying "i'm pretty sure that's it", even if the statue had male genitalia. we really just wanted to hole up somewhere with a hot drink.





for dinner we headed to a small local restaurant/bar to sample the danish fare. the barman next door had recommended it, and so we turned up at 8 pm for dinner. 8 pm seemed late to us but the place was nearly empty when we arrived, save the barmaid and a guitarist. the restaurant had great artwork everywhere, including these sketches.


the man on the right is the guitar player, who came and talked to us before the place filled up. he sang mostly in danish and played all acoustic, but did a few songs in english as well. the restaurant had filled up by then and everyone - lads, older people, etc. - all sang along! it was really fun, really good atmosphere.


we wanted a true danish experience so we asked the barmaid what to order. she suggested pork roast and a danish hamburger for us to share, and said we wouldn't need starters. she was right! the food was amazing. the pork still had scratchings on it, the burger was medium rare (with egg on it) and they both came with boiled potatoes and pickled things. it was like going to grandma's house for sunday dinner (except grandma would be danish). we licked our plates clean.


the restaurant. i can't pronounce this one either.


denmark still have their own currency even though they are part of the EU. we liked that some of the coins had holes in them, and most of them had hearts on them as well. very pretty money.

i would definitely go back!

sunday roast™

the iPad, the stylus, and me

living in london means that my family misses me a lot, which means that i get wicked Christmas gifts like expensive Italian leather boots and all the cookies i want to eat (let's be honest though, Christmas around my house has always been pretty good :-). this year was no exception and santa was kind enough to bring me an...iPad!

yes, that's right. this late adopting, pay-as-you-go-Zack-Morris-phone toting gal has one of these new-fangled devices that does everything save flying me to the moon. sweet. however, i've quickly found that you can lead a technologically backward 31-year old to water but she doesn't completely know how to drink.

i'm catching on. slowly. remember people, i don't have an iPhone so i've missed the boat on things like urban spoon, iFart, etc. sadly i spent the first few weeks using iPad for things like:

- playing Paper Toss (amazing waste of time that i can't seem to stop letting consume me)
- playing hangman
- using the iPad as a digital cookbook. the cover i bought has two heights i can choose from to stand iPad up. handy!
- looking for the video functionality (really? how does this thing not have a camera in it!)

however, things like "app of the week" and corporate lunch n' learns are helping me to see the light, so i'm making my way into more interesting apps beyond those that provide mindless amusement. last week's app was penultimate, which was on sale for £.59p and very exciting to me, because it made me think "maybe i could use this bad boy at work for, gasp, productivity!"

visions danced through my head of combining my various to-do lists, client notebooks, etc. into one beautiful application that organised it all AND allowed me to email everything to myself. imagine the trees i'd save, the impressed looks i'd get from clients when i whipped out iPad in meetings. "isn't she savvy!" they'd think as i scribbled effortlessly, digitally, all the fruits of our labour into the wonder that is iPad.

eager to make these visions a reality, i dashed off to curry's last weekend to pick up a stylus. of course you need a special stylus for such magic, and of course apple don't make one. luckily, proporta saw a gap in the market (ok, so the stylus is actually for the iPhone but nevermind) and it only set me back £9.99. such a small amount for such an incredible investment! i couldn't wait to get the four-inch, rubber-tipped stylus out of its clamshell packaging and onto the touch screen.

in all the excitement, it seems i forgot that nothing is ever as easy as it looks and that like anything else, it would take time to perfect my ability to make a piece of rubber and a small computer produce something that looked remotely close to jen writing. i spent the first night desperately hoping to achieve greatness but alas. not so much. what i DID achieve were a lot of scribbles, mess ups, and generally illegible characters. after twenty minutes or so, i managed to produce this (never mind what it says):



twenty four hours, many failed attempts, and one very sore hand later i was able to produce something that actually looked like my handwriting (again, not the work of shakespeare but merely an attempt to write basically ANYTHING):



it's all in the angle, is basically what i discovered. i had the system down to a t when i realised that to achieve such perfection, i had to be curled up on the couch with the iPad resting on a raised knee. maybe not the best for client meetings?

needless to say, i am still practicing how to write on this thing when i am in a respectable position e.g. in a chair at a table. i did, however, discover that it is more fun to draw with the stylus than with my finger:



back to the mindless entertainment again, it seems, but i haven't given up and have been using iPad all week at work. it's for internal meetings only at this point, until i can get my skills to the next level OR until i can remember to turn off the eraser tool when i'm through editing. we'll see which comes first. in the meantime, i'm working on some serious calluses for my thumb and middle finger. ;-)

no boys allowed

seriously. unless you fancy reading about annual, er, ladies' checkups, then only girls will be interested in this post. (assuming said girls have any interest in seeing how government healthcare compares with private)

for those of you still left reading, i had to go in for my "wellness" exam last monday and instead of making an appointment with an ob-gyn, i had go to my general practitioner (GP). my appointment was set for 9, so i let my boss know i would be out of the office for at least an hour and trolled off to the doctor arriving five minutes early (a small miracle for me). in the states, i would have had to fill out a very long form, give someone some money, and then wait about 20 more minutes before being taken into the back room, getting weighed, handed a gown, and then made to wait about five minutes more before the doctor arrived.

this visit was a little different.

the nurse called me back after only two minutes of waiting, which was actually BEFORE my original appointment time. not so bad. we went into her office, which also had an exam table in it. we chatted for about 60 seconds as she explained the process would be pretty similar to what i went through in america. she then told me to lose the bottom half of my work getup and proceeded to putter around the room looking at the wall.

no gown. no privacy. interesting.

the "exam" was over in about 30 seconds and to the nurse's credit, was about the same as it is in the states minus the stirrups. except. that was it. no poking, no prodding, and no checkup for any of the usual stuff: blood pressure, heart rate, weight, etc.

so i asked some questions about why other parts of my body weren't included in the exam. the response was a short lecture on medical studies stating the ineffectiveness of having doctors do things like breast exams (women are supposed to do these themselves, which i do, but i always liked having a professional checking things out anyway), why pelvic exams aren't necessary, etc. i didn't bother asking about blood pressure because i never know what those readings mean in the first place.

she was very polite and answered all my questions, then said if i didn't have any more questions that someone would call me in two weeks. she also mentioned that i wouldn't need another appointment for three years.

what?!?

a lot can change in three years, right? i asked this and was given another lecture on medical studies and how things don't actually change that much down there and that three years was definitely an appropriate lag time between checkups.

there wasn't a lot i could do, and who i am to argue with an entire team of nhs researchers who apparently have a study to disprove everything i have ever learned about women's health? needless to say, i was back at work about 20 minutes after i left. that night i was still feeling slightly cheated, so i asked my flatmate about it. she is on private healthcare through her company and said that she can go every other year, and that the exam includes all of the standard bits i was expecting. every other year isn't great but it is better than every three! i know my company has private healthcare for us but i'm not sure how it works. i shall have to ask but in the meantime, i'm left scratching my head about who's really right here, how often i really need doctor checkups, and what would happen to me if, heaven forbid, anything ever goes wrong with this little machine i call my body...

press for champagne

i have a friend who i only see every few months due to both of our hectic schedules, and we decided we should celebrate Christmas by having a really fabulous brunch. my idea of fabulous brunch definitely involves champagne, so my friend suggested this place:


i loved the pink and gold for some reason

maybe a bit over the top but Christmas only comes once a year and i liked the general idea of being a bit frivolous for once. i got to the restaurant a few minutes early and perused the menu while i waited. frivolous indeed! it was £3.25 for a small cup of coffee! gah. it made more sense to get a cocktail, really. i wanted champagne badly, especially since they had one of these at the table:



you have no idea how much i wanted to press that button. but alas, the cheapest glass of champagne was £11.50 so i "settled" for a hot toddy since my throat was acting funny. it was the best beverage i have ever had, absolute heaven. i was lucky to find eggs benedict on the menu for only a little more than the price of champagne and ended up ok budget wise thanks to the fact that i nursed my cocktail and resisted the urge to ask for any more water. :-)

it is worth noting here that living with four roommates is what affords me the opportunity to see how the other half lives, even it is only for hour-long intervals!

p.s. they also had a power outlet at the table where they apparently plug in a TOASTER so that you can have freshly made hot toast, but it seemed boring to take a picture of a plug socket...

white friday

so, i was scheduled to go to vevey, switzerland yesterday for a holiday lunch, which i was quite looking forward to. however, the day before we were supposed to got, the weather forecast predicted snow for london AND the rest of europe. the alarm went off at 3:55 am on friday morning and london was clear, so our team headed out to heathrow to await our 7 am flight to geneva. there was no sign of delay, but 7 am came and went and the airport staff announced that geneva airport was closed until 9 am (8 am UK time). we called the people we were supposed to meet for lunch, who assured us that while it was indeed snowing in switzerland it wasn't a "disaster" and that we should plan to fly in whenever the airport opened. our team had a spirited debate about whether we should go or not, since we had to fly BACK to london that night, and in the end decided to roll the dice and fly out for lunch as planned.

we landed in geneva to a white-out situation and found ourselves wondering if we were crazy for flying out of a perfectly snow-free city into a winter wonderland. but, the trains were still running fine so on we went to vevey! once we started to get around lake geneva, the weather cleared a little and it was a really pretty ride. vevey was very snowy and it made it look like a little postcard town:



however, as we ate lunch, it started snowing again. hard. by the time we came out of the restaurant, it was hard to see the lake that was only a few feet away:





yikies. we piled BACK onto the train to geneva and i got a text with this picture of london from adam:



london absolutely cannot deal with snow, so this was more alarming than the snow in geneva. luckily we were flying to heathrow and not city, which closes at the first sign of heavy rain. however, our flight was slightly delayed anyway because heathrow had a backlog from having to clear its runways! but, i think we were lucky to get out of geneva at all because a lot of flights were either really severely delayed or cancelled. we were only an hour late, which is pretty good given the weather on both sides.

fifteen hours after my 3:55 am wakeup call, two planes, two trains, and two cab rides later, i was back in my warm and cozy room snuggled up next to my little christmas tree. adam brought curry takeaway over, which i ate...in bed. :-) not a bad day overall albeit exhausting!



merry Christmas from london!