craft supplies – Imaginary Sunshine

Thrifting, couponing and dolly meet

Michelle — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 04:47:07 +0000

I’ve gotten over the shock of having short hair now (amazing what a week does!) and I have gotten used to it to seeing it short. It still feels weird because I keep reaching for hair that’s just not there anymore, guess I’m just used to having long, long hair! But it’s a nice change (or maybe I’ve just forced myself to adapt to to change).

Work for the last week has been busy, gotten a lot of work done while trying to keep sane. Keeping sane involves a lot of tea drinking and I keep having late lunches – I don’t like that one bit. But such is life and the sacrifices made for work… I get a little testy when I haven’t had food for a while, so I’ve been bringing lots of little snacks to have throughout the day. Apparently hearing me munch of on apple slices is distraction (but then, it’s probably more acceptable than me snapping at people so I ignore the fact that people find me munching on apple slices to be distraction).

On Saturday I spent a lot of time in stores, heh. I went to two thrift stores and got some things… At the first store, I got a vintage queen-sized pillowcase with absolutely no wear to the fabric or to the tag (score!) at $1.99. Then there was two pieces of pretty Pyrex. White divided serving dish was $2.99, JaJ ‘Harvest’ casserole dish was $3.99 (missing lid but the pattern is in amazing shape and I should be able to find one for a dollar though).

Then at the second store I picked up a bunch of vintage Singer books. The two propped up (knitting) are actually for machine knitting, but a lot of the techniques that they talk about (especially regarding shaping!) can be used in hand-knitting ($2.49 each). Then there are three sewing books (prices from left to right are $1.99, $0.99, $1.99)

My sister D and I had also gone into Zellers because they have Campbell’s soup on sale at $0.54 and she had 6 coupons (yes, 6 – her condo gets newspapers delivered twice a week, they’re put in the lobby and whoever wants them can snag them. She snags some of the extra inserts only if there are good deals and if there are papers left over the night before the next delivery date.) for them, making it $0.04 a can. Zellers has it in their coupon policy that the phrase “one coupon per purchase” means “one coupon per transaction”. All other stores that my sister and I had ever shopped at took “one coupon per purchase” to mean “one coupon per item” as a purchase is for an item and a transaction is for all the items. But the cashier was quite snippy and was all “You can only use one coupon per transaction it says so in our coupon policy” (but she couldn’t actually show us the coupon policy – I looked it up later and it was true that they’re kind of whacked with their definitions). So my sister just smiled at her and said that she could ring them up. Individually. And we didn’t even have to wait in line 6 times either.

So six cans, six receipts. $0.04 per receipt. It would have been a lot easier if she would have just rang them all up together (and would have saved paper too).

Today (Sunday), I headed out to see the local dolly enthusiasts! It was such fun, I got to do a little bit of shopping first at this great store in the mall and then we hung around the food court. Some of the security guards were a little concerned about us being there (did we get permission, why did we need three tables?) but one of the ladies I was with explained to them that we were shopping at the mall and eating at the mall and we had about 3-4 people per table – much like the other similar-sized tables in the food court and we weren’t be loud/disruptive and hadn’t had any complaints from other mall patrons, so they left us alone for most of the time after that. It was fun though, getting to see people again and there were new people (yay!) that I hadn’t met in person before so it was neat getting to meet new people and their dolls.

A little of everything

Michelle — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 22:57:11 +0000

I went shopping yesterday with some friends from high school (J, B, A and S). We walked around a lot and our first stop (after the train ride) was to my utmost favourite fabric and notions shop. It’s a great place, they have a lot of basement bargain pricing for a lot of their things and I always have a blast there. The catch is that they only take cash or debit. Thank goodness for my debit card, but I didn’t spend that much anyways!

Mini-fabric store haul. I got 3 spools of ribbon ($0.25/each), 6 fabric remnants that are between half and a quarter of a fat quarter size ($0.25/each), 2 spools of Coast Transparent Nylon thread ($0.25 each) and 1 ball of Regia Stretch sock yarn ($1.99, 50g). I was really impressed that I could find that many fabrics I liked out of their remnants bins (it’s the only places I generally dig through, I buy fabric for sewing doll clothes and I never need up to a whole fat quarter as I don’t want to make six of the same dress in the same fabric, nor do I sell the dresses that I make, so that’s a-okay with me!). Total cost was under $6, after tax.

The complete DVD collection of The Mr. Magoo Show from HMV for $14.99. I used to watch this sometimes on tv when I was younger and was surprised that it was out on dvd since it is so old (my older sisters recognized it, but they never really watched it, I don’t remember when I watched it, but it was sometime in the early 90s). All the episodes and includes a reprint of a comic book, yay.

One of my favourite stops was this great used bookstore that sold books in English, Japanese, I also believe Chinese and maybe Korean? Anyways, I somehow managed to find the craft section in the Japanese magazine aisle and found the only doll clothes sewing book available. Bonus was that all the clothing is for Licca dolls and that’s a bonus because Blythe happens to be the same body size as Licca (despite having a much larger head). I was pretty excited to find this for $2.00.

I went to volunteering for the first time in a while. I missed last week and the week before. I lost my voice one weekend and I had a mild fever the other weekend and because I volunteer with generally much older people who have weakened/poor immune systems, I always stay home when I’m even remotely sick as I don’t want to chance getting them sick. But I went in today, as I was feeling great, and had a wonderful time (despite the fact that I attend “church service” and literally know none of the words, or the tunes, or anything like that) and helped out and got a lot of smiles.

How has your weekend looked like so far? What’s something fun that you did?

The game of Guess the Price

Michelle — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 01:43:27 +0000

I had initially planned to go to the craft store for other sale items – but nothing ‘spoke’ to me, and then my sister pointed out bins of small strands of beads marked for clearance at $0.25 each! So I picked out a few.

2 strands of beads of 2 beads each (yeah, super small strands, lol) – glass.

6 strands of beads (top 4 strands have 4 beads each, all glass, bottom 2 strands have 8 beads each, all glass).

Now then, the game is this: How much do you think the strands of beads were initially priced at if I bought them on clearance at $0.25/strand? Keep in mind that all of the beads are glass and that I live in Canada, so prices were in Canadian dollars.

Price for large rectangular milky glass beads?
Price for the strands of 4 beads (blue and green)?
Price for the strands of 8 beads?

Closest guess gets the knowledge that they accurate guessed the original retail value of the bead strands! (I still need to look up the laws and such on doing giveaways on blogs, heh.)

Craft supplies ftw.

Michelle — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 03:58:11 +0000

I may have went shopping today. And these photos may be photographic proof of what I bought today…

Round Multi Jump Ring Mandrel (by Beadalon! My crimping pliers are by them as well).

2 pieces (obviously) with the following diameters: 1.5mm, 2.0mm, 3.0mm, 4.0mm, 5.0mm, 6.0mm, 7.3mm, 8.2mm, 9.0mm and 10.0mm. I commonly use 4.0mm, 5.0mm and 6.0mm. Bought this on clearance for $5.38. I don’t use as much jumprings as, say, someone who makes chainmaille, but I use enough that buying them premade from the store gets to be a little bit (okay, VERY) pricey after a while. I have wire already and I’ve made some before so I figured I’d give this a try. (Just so everyone knows, wrapping wire tightly around a wooden dowel and then trying to slip it off without hurting yourself is a difficult task – keep bandages around.)

3 vials of beads at $2/each. All glass beads (striped glass, they sort of remind me of candy; matte white glass; frosted rainbow assortment of glass seed beads, all very uniform in size).

Shell beads! ‘Taupe’ coloured flower-shaped shell beads (the label says ‘taupe’, I say ‘honey’ or ‘caramel’) and rectangular pink shell beads. On clearance at $0.99/strand (16″ long) from $12.99.

Swoons, my favourite part! Vintage silver bead caps (10 pieces), vintage spacers (haven’t counted, but it’s 20+ pieces) and teeny little flower spacers (swoons) (too many pieces to count just yet, hah). All three bags for $5 (which I honestly would have paid for just the vintage bead caps alone).

So all in all, a good day. Didn’t buy anything essential (for instance, I really need a new pair of roundnose pliers!), but I love having new components to work with. =)

Hope everyone had a lovely day.

And then, the world went poof, just like that.

Michelle — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 21:50:58 +0000

So today started off pretty well. I only had one class today (no lab because my plants lab final is next week) so I was only at school for a short period of time. I went to the crafts store to pick up some things that I needed for a project that I want to start and new yarn needles as they keep on disappearing on me (boo). So I showed some self-restraint and left without spending more than $15, which was a pretty awesome feat (hah). Things that I bought:

1 close-ended zipper (light brown with silver metal teeth – for crocheted Sack Boy that I’m freestyling – yes, I know that in the images for Little Big Planet, he is clearly knit, but I don’t have the skillz necessary to freestyle knit an amigurumi)
1 ball of Nashua Wooly Stripes in Blackened Jade (for knitting doll hats to felt)
3 balls of Rowan Ribbon Twist in colour code 115 (for a cowl, for me!)
2 balls of Regia sock yarn in shades of greys and blues (for first attempt at knitting socks or for making doll clothes)
2 metal yarn needles/darning needles (… because my sister keeps on losing the ones that we have)

All in all, it was an excellent and oh-so-productive trip. Beyond the colours of yarn that I had bought, they didn’t have anything else new that I was interested in.

Anyways…. Then I came home, and checked my email and by some weird twist of fate, one of the schools that I applied to for their nursing program sent me an email (redirected to my regular email since I don’t regularly check ‘my’ other school emails since I don’t attend their schools) to inform me that I had ‘important information’ waiting for me regarding my student status with them for September 2010. And since I’m not jumping up and down with joy, I’m sure we can all make assumptions on what this important information regarding my student status was… Not to say that I’m not disappointed, I am incredibly disappointed with that. But at the same time, schools in BC have very limited spots for prospective nursing students. For every seat, there’s 4 to 5 students who want that one seat. Competition is… well, competitive. =/ Guess I’ll have to wait and see what the other schools say! I’d be lying if I didn’t say that my heart was pounding so bad when I was waiting for the page to load that I could hear it (it wasn’t as bad as the time for my 19th birthday when I drank too much too fast though, but that was alcohol induced and this was just my hyped up anxiety).

And no, that was not an April Fools Day joke.

Hope you all had a lovely April 1st and that no one pulled any pranks on you with lasting physical impressions, teeheehee.

Catch up, catsup

Michelle — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 04:20:05 +0000

Monday was a somewhat stressful day for me. Had a midterm, found out that my third math midterm (yes, apparently you can have three ‘middle’ of the term in one term!) that I was told by my prof was this Wednesday (a.k.a. today!) is actually next Wednesday. Giving me a whole other week to study for the midterm. So it was a huge relief and yet, at the same time, a source of annoyance as I had been stressing over the third (!) math midterm. =/ Stupid calculus, doesn’t even know there’s only ever one true ‘middle’ to anything.

Tuesday was actually really fun, I had my comparative invertebrates zoology lab and we looked at insects, crabs, lobsters, crayfish and other fun related creatures. They even had live things for us to look at, which was nice. I think I spent about half an hour holding onto a little crab (same species that I did my major final paper on back in 2007!) and letting it crawl from one hand to the next. It was fun, I love crabs (and moving rocks and disturbing them on beaches to scoop them up – that sounds awful, doesn’t it?) and other marine wildlife. Which pretty much means that this biology class is the best course ever. Except, perhaps, second to the course where I did do my final paper on a specific species of crab (and got to play for a few weeks with live specimen!) and human anatomy and physiology (because it was super fascinating). Fun day all around!

Wednesday (today, yay) was pretty low key in terms of actually interesting things occurring in school. I watched videos of spider mating dances (very funny stuff goes when a male’s trying to get things to happen!) and watching spiders mating (kind of boring). Math was actually pretty okay today, we got extra practice problems and a sample midterm to look over (with answers, thank goodness). My plants class was pretty okay, we didn’t do anything too exciting beyond talking about sex in plants. My plant professor did say this at the beginning of the unit though “Biologists are the only people who are constantly thinking about sex.” <- which is probably very true, given what biology is all about. No matter what organism you study, you always want to know how it reproduces and keeps itself going. Hence… sex (and also, for plant physiologists, pollination methods… and subsequently fertilization). You would not believe how long it takes for a pine ovule to get fertilized. Blew my mind.

The good thing about going to Michaels to refund something (ill-fitting dolly-sized glasses) is that I can refund it and get the monies credited back to my credit card. The bad thing about going to Michaels to refund something is that I end up browsing the clearance section again. I ended up with one package of handcrafted glass beads (going to be made into earrings and necklace set!) and two tubes of 11/0 round glass beads in ‘rainbow tiger eye’ and ‘metallic forest’ (a.k.a. very uniform seed beads with a very nice sheen, you can tell which ones are the ‘metallic forest’ because of the more green sheen to them). Oh, and a ball of Red Heart Super Saver in Cherry Red (for amigurumis!).

Also, I have some super important news that is deserving of its own entry, so I’ll be writing about That (deserving of capitalization!) later – probably tomorrow or this weekend.

Hope you’ve all been doing well lately and that you all have a wonderful Thursday!

Good Saturday? I think so!

Michelle — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 02:23:17 +0000

Yay for Saturday! I went out this morning with my parents and we went out for lunch (at a shabby restaurant that my dad said that he wanted to go to, it has really bad service, they just plunked down the dishes and chopsticks and left, just a stack of bowls, cups, plates and chopsticks – and they miscounted) as well as some shopping. I went to a dollar store (yay!) and Michaels (double yay!). Oh, I also found out how much pinking shears cost today and have resolved to check out another store and/or wait for that lovely 50%-off coupon…

In other news, I got my second math midterm back – I passed (yes!) but not by much (boo). And there’s another math midterm coming up soonish. The term is so close to being done and there’s still midterms to be taken (and a week after I’m done all my lecture midterms, I have my first lab final exam – so unfair).

Dollar store find that made me giddy: cookie cutters! They usually never have anything interesting beyond circles, hearts and stars so when I found these ones, I felt really happy. I mean, who doesn’t want dino cookies? Or elephant cookies? Or to bite the head off of a cookie shaped like a boy? Or, more important, making two hand cookies and labeling the left one as ‘right’ and the right one as ‘left’? Good way to screw up all the learning a preschool student has done!

Other dollar store finds: butterfly boxes in packages of 8 (all different colours with flower prints! I use these for packaging jewellery), mini zipped baggies, playing dice (package of 5).

And then there was Michaels… I forgot to print out any coupons (in my defense, I wasn’t planning on going today!), so I limited myself to only clearance items. Package of faceted glass beads (120 count, $2.99 from $5.99), metal leaf connectors ($2.99 from $11.99), strand of metal turtle connectors ($2.99 from $5.99). Not shown is a pair of dolly-sized sunglasses (too small though, so I’m returning them whenever I can).

I love craft supplies. Especially in the form of beads and connectors (you can never have enough beads, or connectors, if you make jewellery). Ahhh, beads and turtles. What could be better?

Anyways, off I go back to making studying charts and tables! Do you know the difference between megaphyllous and microphyllous leaves? I do! (Well, I’d better know it… Only thing that’s been consistent in the vocabulary since my break!)

And… Happy birthday, sweetheart.

Team Me has sock yarn!

Michelle — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:41:20 +0000

Another Monday, another day at school. The weekend just seemed to go by too fast this time. I didn’t get a whole lot done this weekend (a little thrift store hopping, a little shopping, getting stitches removed, getting new glasses, catching up on reading for biology and biochemistry and deciding on a topic for my biology paper), I wish there had been more time to do more of what I would have liked (I had planned to bake cupcakes, but never got the chance because someone used up all of the sugar and didn’t a) say anything when I said I was going to bake cupcakes and b) didn’t go and buy more. Grrrr.

School was pretty tame today. Got to see a bunch of videos of Celphalopods (squid, cuttlefish, octopuses, etc.) doing crazy things. Seriously, glow-in-the-dark eyes of an octopus are pretty darn creepy. But the videos were pretty awesome. I didn’t learn too much in math, only because some idiot in the front kept on trying to argue with the prof that the math was wrong [(1/√2)² = ½ but the student kept on arguing that it was really ¼]. Oy. Plants biology was pretty fun… Once my prof could actually connect his laptop (which had the powerpoint file) to the podium (connected to the projection system). So overall, school was pretty tame today. Nothing out of the ordinary. My scheduled (mandatory!) biochemisty tutorial was canceled for the week (I only have it on Mondays, and it got canceled for all tutorials). And since I wasn’t expected home until later anyways… I went shopping. But not before a classmate in my plants biology class asked me this question:

Are you Team Edward or Team Jacob?

I expected a question like “Do you have white-out I can borrow?” or “What did the prof just say about [insert figure here]?”. She’s friends with my friend, R, so I don’t really know her all that well. She said that she just “discovered” Twilight and really wanted to know if I was more for Edward or more for Jacob (she’s still reading the series and just finished New Moon). And all I could say was “Erm…” Definitely not Team Edward and definitely not Team Jacob. And it would have been narcissistic to claim to be Team Me (lol), so I just claimed to be on my boyfriend’s team and that satisfied her curiosity. She was wearing a Team Jacob shirt today (and said she had an Team Edward shirt that she was going to wear on Wednesday. And that it was covered in glitter, ack.)

Ahem, moving on… My thrifted hoodie (from Saturday!) in the most cheerful print ever. There’s hearts, trees, suns, clouds, flowers, stars, ducks and just so much all over it. They look like doodles, but it is an actual print (not just the product of a bored person’s imagination with a few permanent markers). It’s definitely a wear-to-school hoodie. Or a sit-at-home-on-the-laptop hoodie. =) Which is just fine by me, since I’m at school 5 days of the week anyways (might as well wear something that I like! Just need to remember not to wear on lab days, I would consider crying if I got toluidine blue on this hoodie).

Close-up of the scribble-doodle print! Can you tell why I love it?

And today’s little yarn shopping trip… Regia sock yarn! The one in the top left hand corner is 100g, all the others are 50g. The three balls of yarn on the top are for my sister (enough for 2 pairs of adult-sized socks!) and the bottom four balls (in bright, subdued and pastel!) are for dolly knitting projects. I also bought the most massive roll of twill tape ever for making my own DIY fabric labels to put my name on my projects.

Questions for you:

What kind of craft supplies do you buy (if any)? What kind of crafts do you do?
What is one of your pet peeves when it comes to tweets from someone that you’re following on Twitter? (Only applies if you use Twitter, of course.)
What’s the dorkiest thing that you’ve done today?

My answers:

Yarn, beads, wire, paints, cardstock, ribbon, fabric squares, thread. Crocheting, knitting, jewellery making/design, paper crafts (card making), sewing.
If people constantly swear repeatedly. If people whine over stupid stuff (constantly). If people just bitch and moan about stuff and never explain it (I know it’s not a blog, but seriously, a little explanation if you’re going to curse someone out would be awesome). Or if someone does all of the above and never says anything else. Twitter ≠ place for angsty (and boring) teenagers to complain on. Thanks.
Recited the first 20-ish digits of π.

Merry Christmas (Eve)!

Michelle — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 05:08:10 +0000

Merry Christmas (Eve) – depending on when you’re reading this. I hope you all got what you were hoping to find underneath your Christmas tree. I’m just glad that I have a tree this year – even though I didn’t get to decorate it (it looks fabulous though! More photos of it tomorrow!).

I spent this morning shopping with my sister. She bought my Christmas present for me (… while I was there and picking it out and watching her fork over her credit card for it… -coughs- So yes, I ‘peeked’ at my gift!) and we went shopping for craft supplies (it so happens that there’s an absurd amount of people who also go shopping for craft supplies – mainly yarn – on Christmas Eve). We bought some more yarn as the store I went to on Tuesday got new inventory, I also got some fabric (marked quilting squares?) that were priced at $0.25/each, it’s more than enough fabric to make at least one doll dress out of each, so I’m happy about that, as well as a double-ended crochet hook! I’ve been trying to find one for ages, it’s used for double crocheting and it can also be used for Tunisian crochet if I’m not mistaken – new methods of crocheting to try out!

No baking for today, I didn’t get home until about 2pm-ish, at that point my sister was more interested in showing off our ‘loot’ to my other sister (who went shopping for my Christmas present – on Christmas Eve, apparently the mall were ridiculous!) so we had lunch and then watched a movie (Borrowed Hearts – the only Christmas-y movie that I watch every year).

And then the rest of my evening was spent watching The Sound of Music (yay) with the sisters and during/later, I changed 2 pairs of eye chips on my Blythe dolls (more details, and photos!, over at Little Miss Sophie, my Blythe blog).

Hi, my name is Michelle and I have an addiction…

Michelle — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 06:50:40 +0000

Today was my first official day of holidays. I went to volunteering and watched the residents playing Wii. Have you ever seen senior citizens trying to play golf on the television screen? It was so funny, and they got incredibly excited whenever that they hit the ball. And then… Well… I went shopping today… As you might be able to tell…

The two with the yellow label (lower right hand corner) is sock yarn. The light purple, dark gray, light blue and bright fushia yarn is really yummy merino-wool blend… worsted weight, one of my favourites. The ones that are twisted (that will need to be turned into balls) are wool-alpaca. The colours are amazing in person. The little small ones are a mixture of silk, vicose, linen and nylon. The orange-looking ring shaped ones are kid mohair and wool. The blue ring shaped ones are alpaca. It was a lot of fun at the store. As you might be able to tell, as evidenced by my sudden stash enhancement. Yarn is a horrible addiction. Honestly. To be fair, buying enough yarn to keep me occupied for hours and hours and hours is a lot cheaper than the amount of money I’d need to keep me occupied for hours and hours and hours with beads.

So I lugged my loot around today, heh, when getting home from that area, and then going on the train, and the bus and then at the library. Seriously, I put my bag of yarn down while I was looking at romance novels and pattern books. It was a nice day though, very relaxing and I had a lot of fun. Lonely though, but it was okay overall. =)

Tomorrow’s going to be full of Christmas baking, which I’m looking forward to. I’m hoping to send at least 3 dozen cookies with my mom to work for her current coworkers/my former coworkers for Christmas Eve. And then I’m thinking at least a few dozen for my own family, since we’re seeing some extended family on Christmas Day, so that deserves cookies as well. Yay, baking. Can’t wait, my house is going to smell awesome!