I recently peeked into my photo archives and found a collection of studios/spaces past and I thought I’d share them with you on this sunny, but freezing Friday.

Space #1: California Street, Richmond District, San Francisco CA

Fresh out of a house full of college girls and into a shared apartment with two (much older) distinguished gentlemen, this was my first grown up space.  As you can see, it’s not all that grown up, but more of a playful poke at the elegance of the Edwardian flat we lived in.  I covered the walls in pink and gold fabric, and added embellishment wherever I could.

Satin and velvet curtains were an absolute must.  Right around this time is when I fell in love with fabric.  Happily I lived walking distance from my favorite fabric store in San Francisco: Fabrix.

More fabric went up above the picture molding, this time trimmed in super wide lace.  I was, and still am, a lover of STUFF.  Lovely clutter was my comfort in a space so far from family and loved ones.

This photo is kind of fuzzy, but you can see that my bed was clothed in pink tulle, squishy pillows and ducks, and quite cozy.  The three pink lamps in the room let off the warmest pink light- I miss my little nugget of a room so much! Even though I really believe that clutterless living is healthy, I do so miss all of that stuff!

Space #2  California Street, Pacific Heights Neighborhood, San Francisco, CA

When Eric graduated from college in Washington, he moved to San Francisco to be with me and after a year we decided that even a couple of miles of distance was too far.  We found an incredible, huge apartment and moved in together.  I’m really sad that I never took proper pictures of the incredible and massive bay windows, tray ceilings, and other details.  I just have a few of these kind of badly cropped pictures, but I think you’ll get the idea.  Here you can see mama bear, daddy bear, and baby bear (Jojo) chairs/bed.

I hadn’t intended to include pictures of people, but this one sneaks in on the excuse of the theatrical curtains around the french doors separating the bedroom and living room. For our purposes I want to point out the scalloped valance.  I made two in yellow and two in pink, and I still have them.    What’s going on in this picture?  I wish I could tell you, but I actually have no idea.  The puppets are from Tokyo Disneyland, and apparently Eric is putting on a puppet show.

Here we have my first ever real dedicated craft space.  It’s chaos, but in beautiful form.  I acquired the antique shop counter from the trash behind a favorite boutique!  I did have to pay movers to get it up three flights of stairs, which wasn’t cheap, but it was still an incredible find, and my favorite piece of furniture ever.

When we moved to Oregon this lovely had to stay at my mom’s house in California ;_;  The new house needs some work before I can bring this giant hulk home for good.  Lucky mom.

Space #3  Mott Street, San Fernando, CA

After Eric and I got married we decided to move back to Southern California, and through a series of wacky circumstances ended up living in my grandmother’s back house.  It was a large studio, but forced me to find space in the main house for crafting.  I rescued a walk in closet with windows and turned it into a tiny slice of pink heaven.

I was so anxious to paint the room that I didn’t bother to take down the sheep clip that I had glued to the wall.  I think it adds a fun touch!

Petina shrouded in pink!

A lovely, green view.  Oh how I miss all that sunshine!

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at my past spaces.  I hope to have my current craft spaces spruced up for a photo shoot in the next couple of months.  You may have seen the sunroom/studio here on the blog, but since that post I’ve moved my office into its own space!  This of course means decorating a new room from scratch!  Keep your eyes peeled, because I promise it will be quite the makeover!

You might have noticed that I’ve been making some changes to the blog lately.  That’s because the PD team is hard at work overhauling the entire blog!!!  Fabric Crush Fridays and Handmade Crush Mondays are just a couple of the categories that will carry over to the new site.

What will the new blog be like?  Aside from capital A, Adorable, it will be quite a bit different from the aimless ramblings that I’ve been doing over the past couple of years.  There will be more projects, more resources, more crafter lovin’, and more fun!  What I really want is to make a cozy little nest where cute lovers can find a variety of purchasable adorables and easy projects to play with.  I want to share my favorite crafty shops, the cutest fabrics.  I want to highlight amazing online fabric shops that carry the most gorgeous stuff.  I want share interviews with indie fabric designers and I want to take you to all the craft shows that I can possibly shop!  My goal is for this to be a place where non-crafters come to explore and dabble in craft, and where crafters come to find inspiration and motivation.  In short, I want a warm and cozy place to play.  So, bon voyage, trusty old blog and hello new blog!

* The new blog will be up later in the week- make sure you’re signed up for updates so that you can be notified just as soon as it goes up!  I’ll be shouting out to Twitter, Facebook, and the Email Newsletter when the blog turns over!

Our POD is finally unpacked,  ladies and gentlemen!  That means that Eric and Polly are vagabonds no more!  After 3+ years of moving from place to place, storing our precious things here and there, we finally have a whole house to ourselves, including all of our STUFF!  It’s been so much fun to open boxes and find nostalgic things that I haven’t looked at in ages.  And it feels really good that our scattered belongings are at last all within our reach whenever we want them.

So far we’ve only had 1.5 tragedies.  1. We couldn’t get the boxspring mattress up the stairs.  It seemed illogical that it wasn’t fitting and we wondered what we were doing wrong, until we remembered that the previous owners slept downstairs so there were no beds upstairs since probably 1945 when beds were smaller or something.  The regular mattress fit just fine and now our bed is just a touch lower than before, no biggie.  And  tragedy no. 1.5 is that two of the screws to the bed disappeared sometime during the move. We put it together anyway and hopefully the bed won’t collapse while we sleep!

Now we get to begin the overwhelming task of making our living room into a living room and not a labyrinth of boxes and assorted furniture.  It’s going surprisingly fast and soon I’ll be back to posting about actual craftiness!  I miss my sewing machine so much!!

I promise that next time I write I’ll  a.) have something crafty to say and b.) I’ll have pictures!

P.S. The pups are LOVING the new house!  They get a really big kick out of running up and down the stairs over and over again- crazy mutts!

In my flurry of travel I never got to share my Renegade weekend with you all!  It’s hard to sum up such an explosion of awesome craftiness, but for the sake of time I’ll give it a shot.

Because I like to hit all my bases I decided to turn my Renegade Brooklyn weekend into a two-week, multi-city tour of craft and family!  First stop- Storrs, Connecticut.  I got to relax with family and enjoy some quality time with my badass, rapping niece, known to rap aficionados as Half-Dollar Hannah.  Not only does Hannah spit some mad rhymes, but she also plays piano, softball, and has some mad skillz at a colonial game called, “graces”, played with something that looks like an embroidery hoop and gigantic knitting needles.  Oh yeah and she SEWS!!!  Love me some niece Hannah!!

It was my very first Renegade and admitedly, I was a little nervous about flying across the country for any craft show.  But I’m so glad that my booth partner, Margaret of  Paper Pastries talked me into it because not only have I discovered that I LOVE Brooklyn, but I got to participate in an explosion of craft and creativity and make a little cash to boot!

I thought I was so fancy when I first packed up my suitcase . . . but then we discovered that it was obscenely heavy and I had to destroy my perfect packing job.  So basically I went from this:

To this:

Don’t ask me- I have no idea how i did it.

Next time around I’ll share a few tidbits about my the Boston and Chicago bits of my journey!

Can I please tell someone how good it feels to let my fingers fly over these delicate and oh-so-responsive keys?!  I tried, I really tried to blog from my iPhone, but that keyboard is sooo tiny!  I couldn’t upload photos so it seemed kinda silly anyhow.  But now I’m home, I’m fed and watered, and I’m ready to get back to my sadly neglected blog!  I guess it’s only been two weeks, but that’s like a million light years in internet time.

So give me a day to catch up with my laundry and I’ll share with you the many wonders of my journey across the country!

p.s. mwah mwah mwah to all of my internet lovelies- I’ve missed you, too!

I have this really bad habit of getting super crafty and forgetting everything else, which is exactly what I’ve been doing for the past week!  I turned my phone off and got to workin’!  And I can hardly wait to reveal the fruits of my labor!  But you’re gonna have to wait for Baz Biz!  It’s big, my friends, BIG!

Have I ever told you that Bazaar Bizarre Maker Faire is my very tip top favorite craft show ever?  Well it is!  This year we’re bringing our favorite helper-bunny, Justene, so Eric and I will actually get to leave the booth together sometimes!  I’m seriously hoping that this will curb Eric from disappearing for hours at a time.  Not that I can blame him.  Where else do you get to watch giant balls of flame erupt while standing in line to use the trailer-sized hand-crusher thing?!

See This Post for more about the Baz Biz San Mateo in 2009

Oh yes, and I have a secret to announce this week! Come back on Tuesday for the thrilling details of the very INTERACTIVE element that I’m adding to my booth!

I’ve been itching to share this ever since we got it!  Eric acquired an iPad the day they came out (for work) and holy moly is it awesome!  We happened to have gotten it right before our big house-hunting trip to Oregon, and I was totally impressed at how much it added to the comfort of the journey!  Here are some things we used it for while on the trip, and since we’ve returned:

* Watching movies on a 17 hour car trip.

* Looking at photos of houses with Eric and my dad while at a restaurant (3 people, full sized photos, at a table full of food, no laptop!!)

* Reading e-books about home improvement from the comfort of the hotel room.

* Showing our realtor photos of houses we liked (while out in the field, looking at houses we hated- she was very impressed, by the way).

* Playing video games (Eric’s been playing them- I have no interest- unless they come out with Sims 3 for the iPad . . .)

And since I’ve returned from the trip I’ve also found a really convenient thing- movies above the ironing board- no laptop!!  I can iron bias tape and watch movies without having to move my ironing board into the family room!!