Little Carrie's Christmas Presents

Yes, I've been doing a horrendous job keeping up with the blog. I've been meaning to post this for a long time now, and I should seriously be ashamed of myself for blogging about Christmas presents in May… but you know how it goes… the road to hell is paved with good intentions. :)

Carrie sewed together presents this year for all of the women in our family… because she's sweet. And I have to say, they are quite nice.

Since childhood, Carrie has been the messy one.

But something has changed here in the last few years and she's gotten to be quite meticulous… sewing together intricate little bags, baby quilts, pot holders, purses.

We're very proud.

(I'd be a little more proud if she'd make me the skirt that I've been asking for for the last year…)

Bad-Boy Soup

This is our sweet boy Rudy… (as many of you probably already know)… and we think he's the greatest.

Whenever we're busy with a project… either on the computer... or laying out quilts, Rudy will usually start to feel neglected... and, as a result, he'll act out to get our attention. After his many failed attempts to entice us to play with his "Headless Bunny", "Dead Squirrel", or "Baby Duck" (his three favorite toys)… he'll plop down, right in the middle of whatever it is we're doing and look up at us with the most adorable expression, as if to say, "What, you didn't want me to sit on top of the fabric pieces that you have been painstakingly arranging for the last hour?"

So when our fabric arrived in the mail, I planned on using this bad-boy-habit of his to my advantage… my plan was to lay out this entire color-wheel of fabric, while ignoring him completely... with the hope that he would eventually wander over and sit in the middle... allowing me to snap some nice photos.

When I finished, Rudy was off by himself looking for salamanders to "play with"… Completely unconcerned with me and my color-wheel.

(On any other day, this would have done the trick.)

Since my plan didn't work, we then tried other techniques, like burying treats inside of the fabric... but this just made him frantic and a mess.

Then we tried using the age-old "Sit" command. But, for some reason, when Rudy learned this command way back when, he learned it in combination with "Roll Over". And, oddly enough, he's never been able to separate the two. He'll sit for a second, then immediately throw himself onto the ground in order to "roll over".

We spent about a half hour trying to get this little dog to act right... but to no avail. The collage of photos shows the results of this little photoshoot.

(A few years back, one of us started telling Rudy that it's a good thing he's cute… otherwise we'd have to make Bad-Boy Soup.)

This particular day was definitely a Bad-Boy Soup Day!

Thanksgiving With The Fam

I know what you're thinking...and yes, we do realize that it is, in fact, January, and we are a bit late on blogging about our Thanksgiving.

But the fact of the matter is, we Jung's had a rather fun filled Thanksgiving which (luckily for you) yielded many great pictures.

While eating copious amounts of food and watching football all day is fun in itself, what made this Thanksgiving so much fun was that I managed to convince almost all of our family to convene in Spartanburg, South Carolina for the holiday...which, if you think about it, was quite the feat, as half of them live in Pennsylvania or New Jersey and my husband and I live in New Mexico.

Pictures documenting the whole vacation can be seen below. Enjoy!

Our pre-meal hike in the woods behind our house took us to an abandoned day camp...complete with an adorable little chapel, play ground, and dunking tank

Grammy and Rudy got along swimmingly...once he realized he could easily convince her to play fetch with him.

Dad served us the long awaited feast! Lauren was lucky to have gotten such a nice shot, as we were all pretty hungry by this point and irritated that the photo was getting in the way of starting the meal.

Poppop helped us solve the world's problems after dinner.

Thanksgiving #2 was held the next day at our cousin Blaine's house. After the meal we were sure to check out his new 3D TV (hence the funny glasses in the photo on the left) and Lauren made everyone check out the new Birds and Berries strikeoffs. (Which turned out awesome too. We can't wait to debut the line in May!)

The next day was reserved for hiking with Dad!

As you can tell, we had a rather fun filled and action packed Thanksgiving. We apologize about the delay in the post...but better late than never I say! I'll go ahead and blame this on Lauren (kidding! sort of) and the fact that there was an insane amount of Lauren + Jessi Design business that needed to be taken care of in the weeks that followed.

What's a little sad though... is this is not the most pending of our posts... We still have to blog about Christmas, and our recent trip to NYC to attend Printsource, as well as my wedding which happened a year and half ago. Way to go, Lauren, and your amazing time management skills. :) Kidding. Sort of. :)

A Pretty Fly Dragonfly

Could you guys help me out in a competition that I entered on Threadless... Just go here to vote for my dragonfly t-shirt!!!

I've been wearing Threadless t-shirts for years because they're awesome and the designs are all so unique and quirky... And then last week, it occurred to me that I should try to design one too. So I did. This is my first attempt here... and after checking out some of the other t-shirts, I'm a little worried that my style might be a little too girly for them. But, well, there's nothing wrong with pretty... and as the old saying goes, nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

Anyway... If you're game for helping me out... could you please go to this link and give me a nice high score!

And then after you click on the 5 ( :) )... it will prompt you to sign in... (I guess to prevent people from voting multiple times). You can sign in through Facebook! Which is super easy. And then if you don't have a Facebook account, you'll need to set up a super basic account with your name and email and password... that sort of stuff. It's really easy and I would REALLY REALLY appreciate it!

Then lets just keep our fingers crossed!

Since this is just a first attempt, I'm not getting my hopes up too high... I'm choosing to keep a "glass-is-half-full" attitude here... and make this a learning experience. :) Anyway, thanks for your help and I'll post about the outcome later. :)

Julie Rocks (Part 2)

Have we mentioned that Julie Sebire of Narioka, Australia rocks? Well...she does...and for the second time, she has blown us away with her awesome project for the Moda Bakeshop.

A few weeks ago we got word from Julie that she would be contributing yet another pattern to the Moda Bakeshop AND said project would be made out of our new line, Flora! And thanks to my new obsession with making bags, I was pretty anxious to check out her Hexagon Flower Bag for myself.

The bag itself is a really nice size. I also love that it allows you to play with multiple fabrics, rather than committing to just one or two...giving it a nice patchworky feel!

And after reading Julie's full tutorial on the Moda Bakeshop, I think I may have to add her bag to my ever growing list of projects I plan on starting.

Be sure to stop by Julie's blog, Narioka where she's got many more project ideas and copious amounts of photos for inspiration.

Thanks again for sending these beautiful photos of your Hexagon Flower Bag, Julie! We love that you love Flora as much as we do.