Summer Vacation, From LA to San Francisco Part Two

San Francisco Day Three: Golden Gate Park

Day three was spent at Golden Gate Park, home of the California Academy of Sciences (pictured here), the Japanese Tea Garden, and the San Francisco Art Museum, among other things.  The Academy of Sciences was our first stop.

It has a giant glass dome with a rainforest inside!  If you look close, you can see some butterflies flying around.

They had lots of animals in the rainforest exhibit.  I liked the colors on this snake.

This guy was just huge.  He's getting ready to shed his skin.  You can tell because his eye is grey, that means the scales are coming loose (they have scales over there eyes in lue of eye lids).

I'm pretty sure this is the biggest toad I've ever seen.  Unfortunately, his scale is hard to tell from the photo.

I liked the look of this little gecko's eyes.  Those guys can stick to anything!

The brown gecko's friend, who was much brighter. 

After we toured the rainforest, we went down to the aquarium part.  Since it was quite dark, I wasn't able to get many good pictures.  But here's one of me and a coral reef!

These jellies were completely clear, so they had colored lights shining on them.  It was so cool!

More jellies!

This is a cowfish.  His scales are completely fused into a box so that only his mouth, eyes and fins can move.

I never could get this one into focus, but it was so colorful I just had to add him in here.  The chubby purple guy is a sea slug.

Just a couple of electric eels, ya know, hanging out.  

This is the roof of the Science Academy!  It's a 'green roof'.  They say that it saves them a lot on heating/cooling costs, and it looks pretty neat.  This was last of the decent/interesting pictures from the Science Academy.

Next, we headed over to the Japanese Tea Gardens.  They were so amazing, I took almost 100 pictures in there.  This is the entrance gate.  Most of these pictures are just gorgeous, so I'll let them do the talking.

This has to be the coolest bridge I've ever walked on.

We ended our trip to the Tea Garden by actually getting some sencha tea and dango with sweet soy sauce.  It was amazingly delicious.   The rest of the day was spent trying to decide where to go for dinner, and then hitting the hay early for the 6.5 hour drive back to LA.

Our last picture in San Francisco... We drove down the curvy part of Lombard Street!

Summer Vacation, From LA to San Francisco Part One

Photos, photos photos!  Thats what this post is all about.  I'll let the photos and their captions tell the story of our vacation.  A little bit of background first... We live in Yuma, Arizona.  Which I like to think of as the butt of the country, for many reasons.  Least of which is the geographic location.  Also, its hot.  Really hot.  So, that lead us to the decision to make a trek up to San Francisco, where it is not hot.  My hubby's parents live north of Los Angeles, making it a great setting off point.  Now on to the pictures!

Can you believe I've been around LA for 3 years and this is the first time
I've been to City Walk?  The Chinese Theater was so cool, and also crowded.

Yep, I'm a trekkie nerd... I just had to get a picture of the cast of TOS Star Trek's
 square.  Too bad there were too many people around to get a good, full shot of it.

Pismo Beach

The next stop after LA was at Pismo Beach.  This is me standing at the end of the Pier.   Pismo was pretty uneventful, although I did have some tasty buffalo style fried clams.  (And yes, I made that fab bag, I loved it so much I had to keep it for myself)

I thought this was a lovely scenery shot of the beach from the end of the pier.  The only other thing of note from Pismo is that I got an awesome comfy dress for $20 at the outlet mall there.

San Francisco Day One:

The first thing we did after finding our hotel and nabbing a parking spot was walk to Ghirardelli Square.  This fountain is right in the middle and it is so picturesque!   

Then we found Cellar 360, a wine bar right at the back of the square.  I decided to try my first ever wine tasting.  It was awesome!  I learned a little bit, and enjoyed some great wines over a full spectrum, from a sweet white, to a blush, to a "hardcore" red.  The cheese was necessary for the reds.  I don't think I could have drank them without it.  But it was a taste I think I could acquire, given the chance.  I got to keep the cheese board too!  Oh, and our wine pourer was super nice.  I highly recommend checking this place out, if you're ever in the area.

I know its a huge attraction, but this is about as close to Alcatraz as we got.  Would you believe this picture is taken from the Cellar 360 window?

This is the San Francisco skyline, as viewed from a Rocketboat.  This was probably the most exciting part of the whole trip.  The boat was basically a huge speed boat, going up to about 45 knots.  We did twists and turns in the water and our hair got all messed up.  It was awesome.

A funny store front from Pier 39.  We ate dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe, and then headed back to the hotel for bed.

San Francisco Day 2:

Day 2 was Asian Stuff Day.  We went to the Asian Art museum, which was amazing.  We even managed to get up and navigate the buses to be there right as it opened.

This was really cool buddha statue from the museum, I loved how the colors were so bright.  We weren't allowed to take very many pictures, and a lot of the ones we did take didn't turn out very well.

This wall of jade was so cool!  They had a whole room devoted to jade objects.  When we were done looking around, we had lunch in the cafe of the museum.  Unfortunately, it wasn't very good, but we made up for it in Chinatown...

The south Chinatown Gate.  I didn't get many pictures in Chinatown because we were too busy shopping and then getting lost on the way to a restaurant I had scoped out online that offered Sze Chuan style hot pot.  I did pick up quite a haul of Japanese gummy candies and Hello Panda cookies.

Me and my hot pot.  This must be the most delicious style of food known to man.  I was even able to get a soup base that had real Szechuan peppercorns in it.   It wasn't quiet the same style of hot pot that I was used to from my favorite restaurant in the Chi-town Chinatown, but it was good.

After Chinatown, we also went to Ripley's Believe It or Not and the Boudin Bakery (for some real San Fran Sourdough!) but we forgot the camera at the hotel.  I'm going to end this post here, since day 3 was a nonstop photo-op, and I have tons of pictures to share!

How I Got My Groove Back

Hello again!  It’s been too long.  Life caught up with me the last month or so, between the 4^th and our vacation to San Francisco (there will be pictures in another post).  In the mean time, I’ve come up with a fantastic new idea for some totes, so I’m going to talk about that today, in narrative form… Story time!

A little backstory to start:  Ever since we got back from our vacation, I’ve been be fairly uninspired.  Call it a creative slump, heat induced laziness or general mild malaise, I just wasn’t getting much done in the way of making new things for my Etsy shop, or marketing.   However, two things happened yesterday that kick started my creative juices:  I went to Joann’s and found a set of hanging closet organizers that were 50% off, and ¾ of a yard of clear vinyl in the remnants bin.  These items aren’t related to each other, but they both gave me the collective kick I needed.

The fruits of my labor!  A stuffed, but 
organized closet.  Also, I hate proper folding.

Firstly, the closet hangers… I’ve been meaning to clean and straighten our closet for a while.  I like organization, but sometimes I just can’t seem to pick up that shirt from the growing pile on the floor. Our lack of storage space doesn’t help either.  Buying the closet organizers was the perfect motivation to get in there and pick everything up.  The closet itself is huge, so it took me about 2 hours to root around, pull everything out, and then put in the organizers in and put everything back.  Now our stuff is wonderfully neat and tidy.  The cleaning even spilled over into my work space and I tidied that up as well.  As any woman can tell you, cleaning/ organizing something can be great source of inspiration, motivation, mood elevator, well of happiness, ect (am I right ladies?). 

The other kick came from the idea I had when I saw the vinyl.  At first I thought, “$2?   But what the heck would I do with it?”  Then the idea just came to me… I could totally use that to put picture pockets on a tote bag!  How awesome would that be?  It’s a great way to personalize a bag.  I have so many ideas of what they could be used for… school tote bags, friendship totes, a fancy bag for a gift, and so on.  So I got it, and stashed when I got home so I could tackle the closet.

So, when I got up this morning I got to work figuring out just how I was going to put something like this together.  I wanted to frame the vinyl rectangle with fabric, so that I could then attach the fabric frame to a tote.  I went through several ideas before I decided to try bias tape, and this is the result: 

There is vinyl inside the frame, you just can't see it here... cause its clear!

I think it turned out really great! I just designed this little tote bag to go with it, so I’ll post again when I finish it.

Yes, I did sketch my design on the back of an index card.

Moral of the story:  Creative rut?  Go clean something, and all will be well.

The next big post should be all about the vaca, with lots of pictures!


Update:  Here's a picture of how the tote turned out-

I love it!  You love it too?  Check this link and you can buy it.