Blogging, drinking chai, sitting in front of the fire . . .

. . .well technically it's not a fire. It's my little space heater. Can you tell that it's cold out? But my nice hot drink is keeping my toasty, along with the warm laptop sitting on my lap. I'm sure that having warm, overheating batteries in laptops wasn't an intentional design element going into the development of laptops, but I tell you it was ingenious. I don't even mind it on 80 degree days. I like to be warm.

But really what I should be doing is sewing, not chatting on MSN messanger or typing away on here. I have a day and a half to finish my sewing project before the baby shower that I'm hosting at my apt. on Saturday. Below you'll see the picture of the cloth "building" blocks that I've sewn. I did it all by machine, but now I have to sew by hand the openings where I stuffed in all that stuffing.

There's only 5 blocks, so hopefully I can get a couple finished over my lunch break as well as my 15 min. breaks tomorrow. I'm proud of myself. Tonight I posted one of my entries for my class, so now I feel I can work on this extra stuff.

Now how am I going to relate this all to the library? Try clicking here to search for sewing books (naturally!). And I just discovered myself that we have as a subcategory for sewing a "soft toy making category". Wow there's 33 entries here, granted many of them are about making teddy bears and other stuffed animals, but a couple look promising. I made up the pattern/design myself for the blocks, maybe one of these books would have had a pattern. I tried Googling for block patterns and didn't have any luck. I mostly got hits about quilt construction. This one looks promising and we even have it at my branch: Baby crafts : unique gifts for new arrivals by Lynne Farris. Hmm . . . I will have to look it up when I'm at work tomorrow. But I like my version -- even if they are a little on the lumpy side at the moment and don't stack very high. They are bright and pretty and soft. Enough to cheer up a room and a baby.