Happy Chinese New Year!

Confession time, though this probably isn't a shocker (especially to you, Nicole!): I hate Valentine's Day. And not just because I'm single, though that does have a great deal to do with it...the whole holiday is just an overcommercialized glorification of coupledom, and coming less than two weeks before my birthday, it pretty much just dumps salt and lemon juice all over the papercuts of aging singleness. But I also hate it because I don't believe that people that really love each other should attempt to show that just because the greeting card companies and florists and sellers of cheesy heart-carrying teddybears decreed that the entire world should do so in the middle of February. What's so romantic about it if everyone else is doing it? And I also don't think it should be so focused on couples. What about your friends? Or your kids, if you have them? Or that random stranger you walk by on the street that could use a friendly smile? Why does it have to be so focused on having significant others, to the point where it's really hard not to feel bad about yourself if you don't have one because you've been bombarded with it all over the place ever since New Year's?

Ok, rant off. I'll admit, this year's mid-February has been a particularly rough one, given that the upcoming birthday is #29...the end of my 20s, and therefore making it highly probable that I'm going to still be single into my 30s. Which is something I never wanted to happen. So after spending the entire morning fighting off depression and getting really irritated with myself for still checking Facebook and therefore subjecting myself to all the mushiness, I decided to distract myself by enjoying Chinese New Year instead. So I treated myself to some takeout, watched an entire disc of Avatar: The Next Airbender (I know, anime is more of a Japanese thing, but this one seems to be rather Chinese-influenced to me), and worked on a sewing project. Remember this brocade thing I was playing around with?
Antoinette made a comment that she'd been keeping an eye out for brocades while trying to avoid the whole Asian theme...and I have to admit I was kind of chuckling to myself about that as I read it, because my plan all along was to embrace the Asian-ness of it!
So now you get to see what my secret project is turning into--the dragon in the center was the inspiration for the whole thing. I took it pretty much as far as I can today, since I underestimated how much of the velvety ribbon I need to complete the project. So feel free to start guessing what I'm making!

Also, I've still been working on the quilt, though I have no pics of that yet. I'm a third of the way through quilting inside the blocks. And I have to say, I don't think quilting is going to become my new favorite hobby! At least not the free-motion quilting...I had multiple issues with the first long row, so I'm kind of dreading the center, which is probably going to be next. My mom says it's due to the size of the quilt--since I'm making it as a bedspread to reach down to the floor, it's actually turned into a queen size rather than a twin size, which is making it much more cumbersome to work with. Hoping to get another good chunk of that done tomorrow, since I only have one lesson to teach tomorrow. Weather-permitting, of course...there's a threat of snow again. I only worked a total of one hour last week because of it, so I'm really not excited about that. Of course, this is one of the two students that actually came last week, so there's a pretty good chance I'll still be teaching tomorrow.