Button Jewellery!

I recently channeled my inner Helen Tran and made some jewellery.

Since it's me, my necklaces had to involve buttons. Obviously.

To complete this project I used buttons, metal jump rings, two pairs of pliers, some chain that I bought special, and a chain from a thrift store necklace. My pliers also include wire cutters. If yours don't, you might need some of those as well.

I don't have step-by-step pictures, but here's the basic rundown:

1. Split the chain where you want to put a button.
2. Use pliers to open up a jump ring. This is where you want two pairs. I've used one pair and my fingernails before, and ended up with painful, ragged fingernails. Not recommended.
3. Feed the jump ring though the last link in the chain and through one hole in a button. With one pair of pliers, gently press the jump ring closed again.
4. Use another jump ring through another buttonhole to connect to either another button or the next piece of chain.

This was tons of fun. If I hadn't run out of rings, I would have kept going all night. Buttons! Love 'em.

Salvaged Wood Shelf

In July a family up the street from us replaced their deck. They piled bundles of old, dirty, splintered wood on the boulevard for the city's waste collectors to pick up.

"Let's take some!" I said.

Under cover of darkness (because we're shy, not because this was illegal), we made off with a wheelbarrow full of wood.

"What are we making?" my boyfriend asked, quite reasonably. To be honest, I just wanted to have some wood. Before I moved to the city, I always had access to wood, and tools, and whatever I might need to make or fix whatever came along. It's just a requirement of life, right?

But I said, "We'll make a shelf." We did need something to keep our gardening things organized and up off the ground. Also slightly sheltered from the rain. So we did some sanding.

We did a lot of sanding.

And it turned out the wood was pretty nice underneath it all.

We figured out a design that used the lengths of wood we were able to salvage. The four posts are joined with one-foot lengths of wood, and the shelves sit on the one-foot lengths. Three pieces of wood snug against each other on top make a roof/work surface, and extra wood at the back will keep things from tumbling off.

Ta-da!

And here it is in its new home. I love building things! It's so satisfying. When the humidity drops enough we'll weatherproof it, but for now I'm really happy with the look and function.

Ice Buckets, Gratitude, and Impactful Books

A funny thing happened to me this week.

Well, maybe it's not all that surprising. I am pretty introverted, and even though I like to talk about myself perfectly well in some situations, it's always on my own terms.

So this week, when I was nominated in quick succession to participate in the Ice Bucket Challenge, Five Days of Gratitude, and the "list 10 books that have stayed with you in some way" game, I froze. I like all three of these things. I enjoy watching my family and friends participating in them. I would happily chat about any of them with anyone, anytime. But I could not post about them on Facebook.

I can't explain it. I just couldn't.

So I came back here to my poor, neglected blog, to talk about them my way.

The Ice Bucket Challenge

Grade two was a difficult, lonely year for me. The person who made it bearable was my school's grade five teacher, Mme. Francine LeBrun. She took me under her wing, let me avoid recess by doing little chores in her classroom, and always had time and a kind word for me. I couldn't wait to be her student.

I think it was the next year that Mme. Francine stopped teaching. She was diagnosed with a disease I had never heard of. When she came to visit at Christmas and spoke to me, I couldn't understand her. A few months later when she came to hear our choir sing, she had to write down her praise. I don't remember anymore whether she died that year or a little later, but I know it was fast, and confusing, and devastating.

My donation to ALS Canada is in honour of Mme. Francine.

Days of Gratitude

1. I am grateful for the time I spend with my boyfriend — time which, after a year of living together, is still as wonderful as when we were living five hours apart.
2. I am grateful for my close relationship with my family.
3. Speaking of family, I am grateful for my two little nieces (yes, they've multiplied since I last blogged!)
4. And speaking of babies, I'm grateful that my many, many friends and relatives who have had children in the last little while have all had safe, healthy, joyful births.
5. I am grateful for long weekends!
6. I am grateful for the financial flexibility to spontaneously go to the movies or the Ex. 
7. I'm grateful that after a frustrating dry period, I'm finding writing to be fun again. Still work, of course. But satisfying.
8. I am grateful that I work for a company that values my contribution and creates books I believe in.
9. I'm grateful to authors who have written books that entertain, move, and inspire me.
10. Ditto for poets.
11. I'm grateful that although my apartment has some problems, my landlord is very receptive to requests for dealing with them.
12. I'm grateful for the community I have found in my new neighbourhood. 
13. I am grateful for chocolate. 
14. I am grateful that as a kid I was surrounded by people who believed in me  - and who also believed in me taking responsibility for my own success or failure
15. I am grateful for all the people who, in spite of grim newscasts, persist in believing it's worth bettering their little corner of this world. And other corners, too. 

 Ten Influential Books

1. Little Women (The Illustrated Classics adaptation was the first novel I read. And so at six years old I learned the horrifying fascination of a book that has just torn your heart out but compels you to keep on reading through the tears).
2.  Trickster's Choice (I'd like to include all of Tamora Pierce's books, but I picked this one because I'm pretty sure it influenced a fictional world I created ten years ago and am still writing about today).
3. The Secret Garden (Is winter too depressing? Go read about the garden that heals everything).
4. Ordinary People (It was the first book I ever met that shook me so badly I didn't want to finish it. I had to, for school. And I still haven't gotten over it).
5. The Chronicles of Narnia (I'd pick one, but every time I re-read them it's a new book that lances me through the heart and shocks and speaks to me like a heavenly visitation. I hope that sounds as intense as this experience usually feels).
6. Maud: The Life of L.M. Montgomery ('If she can get up at 5 a.m. to write and get published at the age of sixteen, so can I!' said fourteen-year-old Erin).
7. A Game of Thrones (I had it on audiobook as a teenager. Drove my mom crazy. It was just a random pick from the library to entertain me while I finished a quilt, so I didn't even know there were more books. But I wondered about those characters for years until the HBO craze happened. I'm glad I didn't discover the next four books at that young age).
8. Say It! (This is a private memory, but I will say that Charlotte Zolotow can turn the quietest moments into the best picture books).
9. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (I now collect annotated nursery rhyme anthologies. Thanks, Iona and Peter Opie). 
10. Harry Potter and All The Things! (I am of the Harry Potter generation. What more need be said?).

So there you have it. Facebook challenges complete. 

P.S., I made some stuff recently. So I might be back.

New Year, New Idea

It's nice to start the New Year with a good idea.

When we first moved into our apartment, my boyfriend's pet project was to paint panels of mat board with chalkboard paint and stick them inside the trim on our cupboard doors with double-sided tape (landlord-approved DIY!).

My pet project, which somehow took me months to realize, was to find us a regular source of local and/or organic food. That turned out to be Mama Earth Organics, which delivers us a box full of organic produce every week. It's not always local, especially in winter, but it's been a good option for us. I love that the food box challenges us to work with food we wouldn't necessarily choose at the grocery store. But since we don't choose it, we don't always remember it's there. And a crisper smeared with soggy decomposing fennel is not a pretty sight.

Enter Erin's Big (and, in hindsight, obvious) Idea for 2014! Keep a running list of the contents of our crisper. On the chalkboards right beside the fridge. Use up a food? Cross it off. Unpack the food box? Add to the list.

No more letting cold air escape while I peer indecisively into the motley paper and plastic bags we've recruited for produce duty. No more sitting on the couch thinking, I should plan dinner. But I don't want to stand up and walk three feet to see what we have. And no wiping fennel gunk off the bottom of the fridge.

That's right, folks. This is an organization tip that promotes laziness. Try it with a magnetic whiteboard on the fridge or just some scrap paper. Or go the awesome route and make a chalkboard.

This idea has only been in the testing stage for 1.5 days, but early results indicate major successes to come. We'll go into mass idea production as soon as we have more data.

My New Year's resolution involves using Pinterest less. In case yours doesn't, here's a pinnable version of this groundbreaking idea:

 I'll be back soonish with the projects that filled the gap between my last post and this one: Christmas gifts that I couldn't post about until they were given. And I might even start using non-iPhone photography again. The New Year is full of possibilities.

Have a happy one!