12wbt update w1d3

Weigh-in day. Wasn't sure what to expect and was pleased with a further 500g reduction this week. Only just over 4 kg from goal weight now.

Eating: off-plan. Not too crazy, but probably 20% over target. Time to start reining in the extra eating again.

Exercise: completed 10K-training run plan for the day which only totalled about 4-5 kms, some in slow and steady jogging, some in slow sprints, and some in run-your-guts-out sprints. I can feel my body getting faster and more powerful in the sprints as I do them each week. What killed me a month ago I now float through. Nice. Burnt only 268 calories in the half-hour but put in a good solid effort on the sprints so got my endorphin hit for the day.

A busy day with gym, visiting, being visited, and going to Autumn's start-of-school-year bbq and fair. Great fun! And check out Autumn's fabulous face painting by Deborah Lane!

12wbt update w1d2

Eating: A very off-plan day. More sugary food than usual and a big dinner with a low calorie beer. Skipped breakfast, which usually leads to trouble. Made individual chocolate puddings for dessert, tried making mine a bit lower-calorie by using Splenda instead of regular sugar. It made my pudding a bit rubbery compared to D's appetisingly fluffy one. Served with lite icecream which actually seemed the same as the full fat one.
Exercise: 273 calories, a high energy strength workout. I went up to the Advanced Lean and Fit programme this round, last time I did intermediate. This is going to really boost my muscle power! I intend to make the cardio follow the 10 km run training plan where I can.

Today I kept very busy out of the house. Procrastinating a bit, really, about working on defining my goals for this 12wbt round. There are several already set from my 6-month outlook for last round:

3-month goals

• Run a sub-60 minute 10 km (this seemed very pie-in-the-sky 12 weeks ago, but my 1km speed trial has dropped from about 6.45 to 5.15 over 12 weeks, so maybe it really is achievable to do this in 12 weeks' time at the Mother's Day Classic!)
• Run 14 km in under 1 hr 45 (in readiness for the 2013 Sydney City to Surf on 11 August)
• Be successfully training for my first half marathon (22 September)
• Reach my goal weight of 65 kg
• Become comfortable with keeping my weight within 2 kilos of my goal weight (this is a life skill: my intention is to keep my body as fit and healthy as possible for the next 40 years or so, and keeping my weight within the healthy range is a key element of this)
• Be ready to celebrate my 40th birthday this July in the best physical condition I've ever been in!
• Inspire and help others to work toward their own health and fitness goals
• Attain a good, stable and positive mental state

1-month goals

• Improve my mental health to the extent that there are no longer strong swings or low periods lasting more than 1-2 days
• Complete a slow and steady 10 km run
• Be able to wear most size 12 clothes very comfortably
• Reduce my weight by a further 2+ kg
• Wear my sleeveless knit bridesmaid dress in mid March with pride, sporting strong, toned shoulders, arms and bum
• MINI MILESTONE: Complete a 5 km run with both kids in under 42 minutes

I'll have to do a bit more thinking yet about new 6 and 12 month goals and the steps I need to take to reach these goals, but I'm confident that the experience I've gained in the past 12 weeks will stand me in good stead.

12wbt update week 1 day 1 (Michelle Bridges 12 Week Body Transformation)

I do some stuff. Not lots of stuff, but some. And I keep pretty busy. This past 12 weeks, most of my 'busy' has been spent on kidwrangling my beautiful preschooler Autumn (4 this April) and my baby boy Zane (4.75 months old now), and participating in a round of the Michelle Bridges 12 Week Body Transformation program (12wbt).

The next 12 weeks will involve some serious work on my cake decorating in preparation for my best friend Mel's wedding, more kidwrangling, some sewing and embroidery (I hope!), writing, decluttering the house before I really do lose my mind in this mess, and another 12 weeks of body transformation work. If I have time I'll do something about the yard, but I don't think that's very likely. ;-/

I am starting a new round of the 12wbt today, and instead of spamming my Facebook friends with 84 more daily updates, I am going to use my blog. Right here.

I am behind on my preseason tasks - need to reset my goals for this round yet. I'll post about that tomorrow.

For now, here is today's *final* 12wbt update that I posted on FB.

12wbt update: Well, yesterday was the last day of my Michelle Bridges 12 Week Body Transformation challenge. I had to wait until today to complete my final fitness test but the results are in, and they are great! Having met most of my goals and exceeded my expectations for the 12 weeks, I can't recommend this programme highly enough to anyone who's looking for guidance in getting fit and getting rid of some excess weight.

Weight reduced by 7.3 kg (9.5% of body weight)
BMI reduced to 26.2 - from the top end of 'overweight' to the lower end of it
Total cms reduced: 37 - including 6cm from my hips and each thigh!

Although I've been a bit slack with the eating plan, I have eaten far less crap in the past 12 weeks than I used to. A huge reduction in my sugar intake has helped my body and mind feel better.

I have trained pretty consistently throughout the 12 weeks, I think I got my 6 workouts in for at least 9 of those 12 weeks. I've learnt a lot about how exercise and food intake affect my body and my moods. I have also discovered that no matter how hard and how often I train, I am still really struggling with postnatal depression. I'm much improved, but am still really not myself.

Thanks to my FB friends for the support and encouragement, I really do appreciate it very much. I'll stop spamming everyone with 12wbt updates now - I'm starting another 12 week round today, to start preparing for my first half marathon, which I'm planning to do with my sister Jo in September.

Well, I didn't get around to posting that disappointing-progress pic of my little cross-stitch angel, and have cake decorating to write about as well, but today's post is about what I did this past weekend.

I joined the Saturday Crafting Session and Sunday morning's stencilling workshop at Sew It Together's 2012 craftbloggers' get-together in Canberra. I'm so glad I went - it was wonderful to meet so many friendly and interesting women and the many and diverse projects that others were working on at the crafting session. I took along my little cross-stitch (but didn't get it out in the end; too much concentration needed so too likely I'd be doing something wrong constantly on it).

I also took along my bag of knitting UFOs. The main item being a black baby romper I started over 4 years ago and abandoned around 4 years ago. As it turned out, I'd almost completely finished the project, apart from knitting a not-very-fancy edging on to the hand flaps by picking up and knitting from stitches perpendicular to the stitches in the hand flaps themselves; a new-to-me skill made harder by there being 41 rows but the instructions saying to pick up only 33 stitches.

After some agonising, I just did 41 stitches and it seems to be working out fine. I am positive the reason I put the project down so close to the finish line was the worry over that 41>33 issue. So now the hand flaps are finished. Less than 2 hours of knitting was left to do, and that includes re-doing the first hand flap edge after I worked out the tension a bit better on the second one. Sheesh.

Remaining work to complete this project:

A back, 2 fronts, the hood and 2 hand-flaps. Yep, pretty much all of it was already knitted.

1. Duplicate-stitch a smiley jolly roger onto the back of the romper - first I need to re-chart a jolly roger design as I'd created a 20x20 stitch version based on a 50x45 stitch version belonging to another project, but now I've realised out how small 20x20 will actually be, I need something more like a 30x30 for this little back-patch

2. Sew the romper's pieces together (easy peasy!)

3. Add a zipper (my first zipper-into-knitting effort; a bit scary)

There were plenty of other bits of knitting in the UFO bag including several WTF items. One pair of black partially knitted pieces seem to be a false start on the baby romper, done in a different yarn. I don't really remember doing that but the yarn does seem very shreddy so it was probably not enough fun to knit with.

Some of the other pieces are remembered-abandonments of disappointing results, and others are simply impossible to place. Exhuming the UFOs was a productive exercise and I am now keen to finish my romper so Baby2 can wear it when he arrives in September.

What else did I do? Apart from picking up some cool stash at the pop-up market stalls on Saturday, I also enjoyed trying out fabric stencilling at Sheridan's workshop on Sunday morning. Much easier to pick up and do than screen printing, so it's a more realistic craft to experiment with. And it was really fun playing with the paints and seeing the completely different ways others in the class approached their stencilling. I will definitely be doing more of this - my quest for something that yields quick results in crafty play seems to be answered by the lure of fabric paint.

My stencilled bag- happy with the shading technique

The bag I stencilled was a good exercise in how to do shading (and how not to). I am such a slow stencil-cutter that I only completed this bit in the end. I cut another stencil but was not completely happy with my drawing so will probably recut the stencil using somebody else's artwork for my next effort. I know how I want to colour it, and am looking forward to giving it a go.

Many of the other stencillers used the Power of the Stencil and made some great repeat patterns. Others did interesting things using one pattern and paint colour overlaid by another. Many left me in awe of their fast and confident sketching and stencil-cutting abilities!


Earlier in the week I tried my hand at modelling with fondant (cake decorating course #2), but that's a post for another day.

May crafting efforts

Well, I did a little bit more on that teeny weeny angel cross-stitch but it's still well away from being finished. I did take it to show my friend and she didn't hate it, so that's a plus. Maybe it will be done by Christmas...

What I DID manage to do this month is practise my cake decorating skills a little bit more.

My friend who is getting married next March announced in April that she likes the look of buttercream roses. I am decorating the wedding cake as a present to the happy couple, so what she likes - I learn!

Now, I didn't learn how to pipe buttercream roses at the last cake decorating course I did (my first), and it's not on the agenda for the next course which starts in June. YouTube showed me how to make them and I realised I haven't got the necessary piping nozzle (I tried the 'similar' ones I own and they are NOT going to do the job) and would be struggling without a special thing that's like a darning mushroom to twirl about in my fingers as I gaily pipe away. So buttercream roses are on hold until the necessary shopping is done. I now have a darning mushroom thing in my possession.

In the meantime, earlier this month I iced a raspberry swirl butter cake (thanks, White Wings!) with a double batch of homemade buttercream, piped some fancy edgings and had a go at piping flowers with rolled fondant centres. It turned out a little wonky, but passable.

Some of my colleagues were duly impressed, some horrified (the icing! so red!), but most importantly it tasted good and the graduate trainee who was leaving our team appreciated the gesture and the flavour.

I have realised that piping with a cheap plunger is rubbish compared to using an actual icing bag. Have asked for a good set of piping nozzles or a gift certificate at the local cake decorating shop for my birthday. Fingers crossed!

On to working with fondant a little more... on Sunday night I made 12 double daffodils which will tomorrow night be placed on top of 12 vanilla cupcakes for a Biggest Morning Tea fundraiser at the office. They are not consistent, some are fairly wonky even, but they are done, and they were a good learning experience.

I've discovered that to do fine petals, you really have to add the special stiffening stuff to the fondant or else it just flops. If you don't mind chunky petals, they hold their shape ok. If you work too slowly with the fondant, it cracks. It's worth adding strong colours to small bits of fondant, then working smaller bits of the coloured fondant into weaker colours if you want to (eg) change yellow to orange.

Also, making small frilly trumpet things is a pain in the ass. There must be a knack to this that I have not yet found, although the bottom row was the last set I made and I was happiest with those, so I did start getting better at it. These will not be my last daffodils, but I don't plan on doing these every week, either...

So that was May. I'll post a progress shot of the cross stitch at the weekend and try not to feel discouraged at the lack of visible progress. More cake pics in June! One lesson every week and I'm really looking forward to those.

Very slow progress!

Well, it's been a long time since I blogged - most of my online sharing has been via Facebook since my little girl was born. But there is a craft bloggers' convention right here in Canberra in June which I'd love to attend, so here I am, reactivating my blog at long last!


I have been working on this as my only 'active' cross stitch WIP for over 4 years now. In a good quarter, I get a few hour's work done on it. In a bad quarter, I don't even get it out.

It's worked over-one and coming up nicely, but I really wish I'd used a larger piece of fabric.

The border alternates between a block of 4 xs in one thread and an eyelet in a variegated silk. It's been hard to find a fast way to work it but about 1/3 of the way around I finally just went ahead and did all the crosses and am now following back through with the eyelets.

I'm visiting the people I am making this for in mid May, so perhaps now is the time to really get it moving! I'd love to be able to deliver it in person instead of mailing it.

Stitchery

I have a real urge to make things with my hands lately. I think it's because I'm doing a lot of left-brain work lately and need to balance it out with creativity and losing-time in something enjoyable.

At the moment I am very busy at work and have just contracted conjunctivitis, so cross stitching is definitely out for a few days, at least. This is where I'm up to on my main piece at the moment, Mirabilia's Moonlight Lullaby.

I have some christmassy coloured felt, ribbon, ric-rac and stick-on mini pompoms and gemstones in hand, and some afternoons Autumn and I are working on making (unbreakable!!!) ornaments for the Christmas tree. We are not making fast progress, but we are having fun, and that's what matters. :o)