New Year's Projects

I am motivated to work on a bunch of projects. Here's the lineup.

1. Card making. I am going to make big batches of cards to use for the rest of the year: Mother's Day, birthday, and Father's Day. I may even start to put together design ideas for Christmas cards. I started a prototype of my all-purpose birthday card for the year.

2. Get rid of a bunch of stuff. This one scares me. I've set my DVR to record Hoarders to help me be unsentimental about giving stuff away. My parents saved most of my childhood toys. I'm not sure if I'm going to try to sell some of them or just give them away and get a tax write-off. Maybe a bit of both.

3. Sewing. I'm not as scared by this as I once was since I've already made a few projects. I want to make some pillows and a quilt for the guest bedroom first of all, and then I have some other projects waiting.

4. Knitting projects. These are ongoing as I work on them as I veg and watch TV in the evenings.

5. Digital preservation of slides and negatives. I recently bought a slide scanner (that will work with my Mac) so that I could scan in slides for my dad. It will also be great for a lot of our photos that are predigital. Then I'm going to make a movie on Apple's iMovie for my dad of the trip he took to Europe when he was 17. I also need to digitize some records of the trip to include in the movie. I'm hoping that I can work on some cards in the craft room while these slides are scanning in.

I'll be posting my progress!

The Best Popcorn

Some time ago my dad gave me this used popcorn popper. I tried it once and kinda forgot about it. Then recently Heinz read this article in the New York Times about people at a popcorn plant getting sick from inhaling the chemicals used in the butter flavoring. (The danger is inhaling the chemicals as the popcorn pops, not actually eating the flavoring.) So Heinz made me throw away my microwave popcorn. I hesitantly got this popper out and realized how easy it is to use. It doesn't need oil or anything. You just pour in up to half a cup of kernals and plug it in. That's it. And the popcorn is tender and fluffy and tastes so much better than any from the microwave. The popper is cheap on Amazon and it has great reviews. I highly recommend getting one.