They're here! I've finished! Finally! You can now buy the patterns and instructions (although they're not too complicated) for the three buildings above. Turn your winter-time paper house into a winter-time paper village!

Included in this pack: the grocery store, the little log cabin, the rambler, and several trees and shrubs to add extra interest to your village. Once you've paid your $5.00 and downloaded the file, you can print out the patterns as many times as you like and create an entire log cabin community or a pair of fierce rival grocers!

Thanks to some helpful comments, I've set up payment and download through E-junkie. Once you pay with PayPal, you'll be given a link to the file. Easy peasy! My trial account is for one week only, so if I don't sell many patterns, I'll probably just switch to e-mailing the file after 'manually' processing the PayPal payment (less easy peasy). So buy now! Tell yer friends!

Ready?

[If you enjoy this freebie, also check out the paper house pack I have for sale here]!

So, the other day I was sitting around, trying to decide what to do after dinner. It's that time of the day when I don't really feel like starting any big projects, but it's too early to watch something on Hulu. I have absolutely no recollection of my thought process on this evening, but I grabbed a piece of white card and drew a house. The next day, I cut it out and assembled it, and I made a second one the day after that.

I guess part of the reason I had houses on the brain was because my gingerbread houses didn't live up to last year's. The instructions called for too much water in the icing mix, and all my nice details wound up slowly migrating downwards before they dried. Disappointing.

But I'm totally, immodestly in love with my little paper houses, and I can see making quite a few more in the near future. In fact, while I was in the process of drawing the third house, I stopped before I cut it out and scanned it in -- so I could share it with you!

I've been busy tending to all the things that don't really need doing around here. I used to be one of those people who would start packing two weeks before a trip, but these days I seem to wait until the last minute. Instead, I've been doing a bit of sewing in my spare time.

I rearranged the living room, as you know, part of which was swapping a bookcase for a bench to hold my turntable. Now one doesn't have to magically know where the buttons are as one reaches under a shelf to play a record (although that did keep people from wandering into my house and messing with my vinyl). Look how festive, with the pumpkin. I have to put the grilles back on the speakers, but they need to be de-cat-fluffed first. Speaking of, Beany quite successfully snuck into every photo I took of my living room this morning. But then I had to redo this one, by which point she'd fallen asleep elsewhere.

One of my sewing projects was this quilt, which developed from a few needs -- the need for something better to keep cat hair off the back of the sofa, the 'need' for something autumnal, and the, well, desire to not finish a patchwork project that I'd started a while ago. I had cut and pieced together some strips, planning on making a throw blanket, but I quickly grew bored with it So it wasn't TOO much additional work to turn it into a long, narrow, sofa-back cover.

I also have been working on dresses/tops here and there recently. I made this one a few weeks back, although it's probably my least favourite of the Japanese patterns I've tried out. You can read my various complaints on flickr, but mainly it just comes down to it being too 'cute' for me. I like this one much more, though. I think I have fairly narrow shoulders, in relation to my other dimensions, and both of these recent dresses fit 'just so' with the sleeve placement -- better than most store-bought clothes, and I'm not even having to tailor it to myself. Obviously, I like to wear dresses over jeans; I think people generally fall into two camps (love it or think it's stupid), but you can politely keep it to yourself if you're not a fan.

I suppose that now I've run out of things to sew, I should start thinking about packing. Although I still don't have the perfect camera bag...

So, as promised -- my new wallet. I usually mull these things over for weeks and weeks until I can sprong into action, having worked out all the details in my mind. That was pretty much what happened with this; I knew I wanted to have a bigger wallet, one that would hold cash and cards, but also had a zipper pocket for coins, and which could hold my checkbook as well (there are a few of my usual haunts that don't accept cards).

I actually had one false start: on Saturday, I put together a wallet using the fabric I'd been thinking about, and a design I'd decided on (pockets for cash and cards on one interior side, zipper pocket and space for my checkbook on the other). I got everything finished except for hand-sewing on the clasp strap, and I decided I didn't really like it. It's actually pretty nice, but it just wasn't what I wanted.

So when I was out and about with my friend Alex yesterday, we stopped at Patina after brunch, and I saw a nice wallet whose design I liked -- instead of having pockets on both interior sides, everything was on one end, while the other served as more of a flap. So that's the design I went with.

I found the scrap remnant of this vintage fabric by accident as I sorted through my stash, and I immediately wanted to use it. I'd had the iron-on 'A' applique for a long time now, and this seemed like the perfect project. So, like the wallet I saw in the shop, the top is really only a flap, keeping everything inside secure. The interior has space for cards and my checkbook, and there's a zippered pocket on the outside for cash and coins (I could also fit my phone or iPod in there, if I wanted).

It really turned out just as I'd hoped. The older I get, the more patience I have for taking my time with the details (surprise!) -- stuff like top-stitching and, in this case, making sure things lined up just right; I wanted a bit of the grey lining to show on the front when the flap was velcro-ed down. I think the time spent getting those things right is what makes the finished product feel like a success.

So now I just need to take a few more months to mull over the perfect camera-toting messenger bag. Something that's only exactly as big as it needs to be. And won't cause any shoulder or back pain. Right.