Saturday, November 21, 2009

Saturday Adventures

Starting a few weeks ago Kevin and I decided to start Saturday adventures. The first adventure was going to the Star Trek exhibit at the Tech Museum. Along with visiting the tech museum we always get Pita Pit which is wonderful since it was one of staple food throughout college. We had lunch and got to the museum quite early and made it through the whole exhibit in a reasonable amount of time. After leaving the tech museum we were not sure what to do, so Kevin decided we should go on a driving adventure. We drove up Stevens Creek Blvd into the hills which was fun, we stopped by the Stevens Creek Dam and Reservoir which was quite pretty and then continued through the windy roads. The roads became more narrow and the cliff height increased making me ever more nervous so I had to constantly remind Kevin to slow down. We finally made it out of the hills into Saratoga and we drove around a little bit considering I have never been around downtown Saratoga. After all of this fun driving we finally returned home. It was a completely fun but rather exhausting day....but it was the start of our Saturday adventure tradition :-)

Last Saturday I got to decide what we would do and I decided that we would go to the Harvest Festival in San Mateo. Poor Kevin was woken up early so that we could drive the 45 minutes or so up to the San Mateo fair grounds. We got there early so that hopefully there would not be too many people. Once in we got to see all of the different booths. Most were clothing and jewelry things, and not to mention the excessive amount of Christmas merchandise. We were able to find the food booths which were our focus for the rest of the festival. Kevin ended up tasting a ton of different food, and in the end we ended up purchasing beef jerky, olive oil and vinegar and a few kinds of delicious fudge (very berry raspberry white chocolate fudge is AMAZING!!!). After looking at all of the booths we sat down and got some food. We were able to listen to the musical acts performing while relaxing and eating lunch. After all of these fun times it was only noon....so Kevin decided where we would have a driving adventure too. We got back in the car and headed to the freeway towards Half Moon Bay. Neither Kevin nor myself had ever been there so it was quite fun to drive around, we made it there and then decided to drive down Highway 1. While on the highway Lionel texted Kevin asking if we wanted to go mini golfing....so our adventure continued. We continued down highway 1 to San Gregorio and took a windy road back to the freeway.....the road was relatively empty but quite beautiful. We made it back to freeway after me freaking out that we would run out of gas and we then headed down to Sunnyvale. We met Lionel and Jillian at mini golf and had a rousing game where Kevin showed off his crazy golf skills and Lionel showed off his excessive putting strength. After the round of mini golf Kevin and I played in the arcade and then headed home. We were both exhausted by the time we got home but what a wonderful Saturday it had been.

Today is the third Saturday adventure for us and we are going to walk to downtown Campbell to the Holiday Craft Faire. I'm sure it will be overflowing with Christmas stuff but it should be fun for Kevin and myself.

After weeks of doing nothing on Saturdays I think we have finally figured out how to make the most of our one day a week together. Hopefully this tradition works out and we have tons of fun...and hopefully I panic less in large groups of people. May the new traditions of our relationship continue bringing us years of excitement :-)

Monday, November 2, 2009

Quilt of Memories

Last weekend Kevin and I went down to Los Angeles for our engagement party and to spend the weekend with family. It was all quite nice and we got to show my parents the Unitarian Universalist church where the wedding will be in 2 years.

Anyways, while there I went through more of my stuff in my old room. I didn't get rid of much stuff....i'm too attached to all of my toys and books that I can one day give to my own children. So the toys and books remain on shelves and in boxes waiting to be used again one day. I did bring back a few odds and ends but the most important thing or should I say things is a huge box of old tee shirts and sweatshirts. Each shirt has a personal meaning to me and I have held on to them for nearly 20 years.

Box full of shirts to make a quilt

I decided that instead of leaving them in a drawer or in a box in a closet I would make a quilt out of them. I thought this would be an easy task. A few snip snips, arrange them in a quilt shape and sew together. Needless to say I was wrong.

Once I started sorting through the pile today I found it difficult to even fathom cutting them up, which is odd considering some of them I have never even worn, I have just kept them because I liked the design on the front. Regardless of that, I looked online for how to make a quilt out of tee shirts and everyone makes it sound as easy as I had first thought....but I have way too many shirts to make just one quilt.

As I sorted through the pile figuring out how big the quilt tiles should be I realized that some of the designs are only about 2 inches in size while some are almost 2 feet. So now I am trying to figure out the best way to proceed since I will obviously need more than one quilt. So to get some inspiration I looked online at many t-shirt quilts that people have done and I found one that I especially like. I found it through google images and it is on keywestquilts.com. You can see it below:

Quilt I found online that I really like

It is a classic style and oddly girlish but I love the simplicity of it. Of course I would never use pink as it would clash with everything I own but I think I am going to make my quilts similar to this one.

After more than an hour of obsessing over this t-shirt quilt I was feeling a little overwhelmed, so I piled everything back in the box and put it in the other room. I guess I'll work on it another time, but at least I have narrowed down how I want the quilt to look.....now to just get up the guts to cut my precious t-shirts. Hopefully with time I will realize that the memories in the t-shirts will be transformed into a quilt of memories.