I hope everyone had a wonderful Valentine's day!  I started mine by putting some Starburst Jellybeans in Ryan's car :) Those are his absolute favorite and I knew it would make his day great.  Then it was off to work...another exciting day.  But it was fun to listen to all the guy engineers talking about what last minute gifts to get their wives.  One guy was really struggling - he bought his wife a card and a tube of clearance mascara (he doesn't even know if she wears makeup). LOL.  I came home to a lovely bouquet of flowers that Ryan picked up for me :)

A good friend of mine recently opened a new Etsy shop and, as a fellow Etsy shop owner, I offered to purchase some of her products and do a review on my blog.  She even agreed to do a short interview.

Shop Name: Rare Earth Bath & Body
Shop Link: http://www.etsy.com/shop/RareEarthBathAndBody?ref=si_shop
Shop Owner: Ashley Helmetag

I’m finally feeling all better (no more sickness) and so is Ryan!  Ryan got some sort of stomach bug and was very sick from Sunday night until yesterday morning.  Then yesterday he finally started feeling better.  He even went ahead and did a little laundry and disinfected any surfaces he may have touched while sick.  I did a little more laundry last night and then went upstairs to work on cleaning my sewing room.  It went from this:

I have decided that every Wednesday I will post a weekly project update to help remind me what my sewing priorities are and hopefully to help see what types of things are causing me delays.  This might not be my only post on Wednesdays but I will try to post this each week from here on out.  Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of my projects to show this week but I will try to include pictures of the progress I’ve made each week so you can see what I’m up to.  Below are the projects I am working on this month, listed in order of priority:

I had a dinner and movie date with Rachel tonight so you know what that means right?  Time for a movie review.  Ok who has ever seen the movie "Phonebooth"? You know the one, with Colin Farrell - where he stands in a phonebooth and talks on the phone the whole movie.  Well that was a terrible movie and this was nothing like it (I mention it because there are some skeptics who seemed to think this movie would be a repeat of that one).  The premise of the movie (as can be seen in the previews) is that an innocent man was framed for stealing a $40 million diamond, escaped from prison, and is now trying to prove his innocence by stealing the diamond (again...to prove he couldn't have stolen it before).  However, he is actually on a ledge...at a hotel across the street from where the diamond is.  He is attracting plenty of attention from pedestrians, cops and reporters as he stands on the ledge (allegedly to jump off).  So what happened?  I'm not going to tell you!  Go buy a ticket and watch it yourself :) But you can see my review below. 

I had a ton of cleaning and crafting that I needed to do this weekend but we ended up being too busy for me to do any of it.  Oh well **sigh**.  I guess I’ll have to be extra productive this weekend.  Oh wait, we’ll be gone again, lol.  Ok I guess I’ll have to try to be extra productive on the week nights then.  That’s going to be hard for me, I’m always so exhausted after work.  I’ll let you know how much stuff I’m actually able to get done this week.

Saturday morning Ryan and I headed up to Jacksonville for our niece Aubrey’s 2nd Birthday party.  The party was super cute – Mel did a Minnie Mouse theme (and zebra print) so everything was hot pink with zebra stripes and Minnie Mouse ears.  She even made labels for the water bottles, little gift bags for the kids, a balloon banner, cupcakes and put little stickers on every single Hershey’s kiss…and everything matched the theme.  I’d say she definitely put a ton of work into getting it all coordinated and it all came out great…go Mel!

So I had this big long list of things I would do if I felt better today, but guess what?  I didn't feel even the slightest bit better so I didn't get anything done.  But I did do something today (aside from television and Pinterest)...I tried my hand at crochet.  A long time ago, when I was a little girl, my great grandmother (Great Grammy) taught me how to crochet.  Unfortunately, I was a little too young to really focus on it and I never finished learning.  Now that I want to learn how to do it, I am sad that she isn't here to teach me.  My Great Grammy was a wonderful woman with whom I shared a special bond.  She was always so delighted to see me and talk about anything I was interested in.  We both shared a love of reading and could sit on her couch and each read a book or chat or just hang out.  She was also wonderful at crochet and made me and each of my siblings a beautiful afghan. Anyways...back to what I was saying. I basically have no crochet experience so I looked for a video on youtube.  I found a beginner's video and started following the instructions.  The first few rows seemed to go pretty well, my stitches were fairly even, take a look.

I had this nice long list of all this stuff i wanted to get done last night, tonight, and tomorrow (I have the day off) but of course...I'm sick as a dog and laying on the couch :(  When I made the Valentine's pot holders for the shoebox swap I didn't finish the ones that were for me.  I also wanted to make a valentines wreath and a couple pillows.  After that I desperately need to replace the needle in my sewing machine, clean out my sewing machine & then clean the sewing room.  

Growing up, I never had a lot of girlfriends and especially not any that were very girly.  I never really learned how to do my makeup or style my hair.  I never had a super stylish girlfriend to go shopping with me and get cute new clothes.  It never bothered me much growing up and it didn’t really even bother me too much in college because I went to an engineering school were there were very few girls and most of them weren’t very girly either.  When I started dating Ryan and we started to hang out with his sister-in-law Mel and her friends…I started to realize just how behind I really am.  As I watch the girls pull out palettes of makeup with hundreds of colors and expertly apply them all over to make a model like look, my puny little makeup collection looks like it belongs to a child.  So over the cruise weekend, I tried to pay close attention to the other girls to see exactly what kinds of things I need to work on and here are some of my revelations: