verbminx | Entries tagged with crafts

Happy 2007! I'm up too late but on my way to bed.... :)

I got an embroidery kit with Sublime Stitching designs (the Chronicle Books Stitch-It Kit) for Xmas. It comes with two white tea towels and 35 iron-on embroidery patterns. I've washed and ironed the towels, but I'm having problems because I can't seem to decide AT ALL what to embroider on them. "Mine" and "Yours"? With a cat and/or a dog? Cat on one, dog on the other? Cherries and strawberries? Teacup and teapot and cake?

Auuugggghhh. Clearly the solution is that I need more plain tea towels.

Current Mood: exhausted

Some interesting commentary on tonight's Lost premiere.

Bread and Circuses, a blog about late Roman antiquity.

CRAFT - not a new discovery by any means, but maybe you haven't seen it yet? Lots of good craft links with only the occasional eyeroller.

Oy... so I spent the whole evening making this little headband thing that was supposed to be part of my Halloween costume (the party that is probably the only one I'll get to go to this Halloween is Saturday night). It's a ribbon with a lot of lace trim, which is supposed to look like a lace-trimmed hair ribbon.

Well! I don't really like how it looks on me. It's a little too much like a Victorian bonnet, too face-framing in a childish way, for someone who has a long face. Somehow in the genetic lottery I managed to get both a squarish jaw AND a pointy chin. We'll see how it looks with my hair done, though, and maybe with some bows added to it.

The pattern came from Homemade Gothic & Lolita, a HTF Japanese pattern book that was given to me for Xmas a few years ago. If I decide not to use the headpiece, I'll probably sell it on

egl. Someone there will certainly be into it.

Current Mood: disappointed

Yeah, so I got a wild hair to read some Keats. (or is that a wild hare?)
As if that weren't bad enough, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" just made me cry.
I think I might as well just turn in my Punk Card now, give away all my skull-and-crossbone jewelry, etc.

Um, let's see. I'm feeling better tonight, in that I haven't thrown up in my mouth at all today. (This sets me well ahead of last night.) Still have the evil sinus headache and stiff back. Before bed last night I watched The Cat Returns, which is cute and charming but slight: a Ghibli production, but not Miyazaki. Tonight is Pabst's Pandora's Box. It's silent, so I will have to pay attention to it and probably not work on anything else at the same time.

I finished my Sueet bag last night; now I just have to line it. It was a pain in the butt until the very last stitch. Tonight I finished a ribbon scarf; the ribbon is called India, but I don't recall who made it. Maybe Lana Grossa? My mom suggested wearing it with a turtleneck, which is all well and good, except that I don't look good in turtlenecks (too much boobage, it's unflattering), so I don't even own one anymore. So no idea what I will do with the little scarf; may gift it to someone.

I'm going to keep finishing unfinished projects until I'm caught up. I have a hat to knit for my mom, a mitten to make for myself (for which I need to remember the stitch pattern I used at the wrist), and a sweater to finish, and then I think I'm good to start on new projects.

Current Mood: okay

Sinead O'Connor is on Leno right now. She's a little off-key. She looks good, though. Still no hair. Reggae?

Sick House developments: nausea on my part, which the mom has been experiencing since this morning. I don't feel nauseated enough to throw up, but I almost have a few times anyway, which was surprising and alarming when it happened. (I think this will distress at least one of the well-wishers replying to my last post.) My stomach just hurts very vaguely. I slept a lot today. I also started Jonathan Carroll's new book, Glass Soup.

Tom is over in Tomland - his apartment - and seems to be doing OK.

And I worked on the pattern from Knitty that I started almost 18 months ago, Sueet - it's a little bag made in Berroco Suede. And you know what? It sucks. It hasn't been the least amount of "fun" to knit, and the construction isn't really intuitive (it's one of those projects where circular needles or double-pointeds would have been best and would have saved some finishing, but it's written to be made on straight needles because circs and DPNs scare some people). That's why it took me 18 months to do a tiny project... obviously, I hadn't worked on it a lot in the last year. I still have to line it, which I may put off for a while. But I want to finish all my unfinished projects before I start anything new, with the exception of some hats for the putative in-laws, which I'd like to make before Thanksgiving. That's mainly my sweater in Colinette Tagliatelli and this bag, as I finished my Koigu socks in the spring (and can wear them soon! yay!). And then that's it for me and multiple projects - I will work on one thing at a time until it's finished.

Current Mood: sick

Tonight's plans all went awry... the momster and I had planned to sit outside and kick each other's asses at some board or card game, but an unexpected storm came along. We went out for ice cream and, on the way home, stopped at the local Korean store.

The last time I was in there they had a lot of character goods, but the kind that never achieve much brand recognition in the US, not even anything as well known as "Orange Story" or "Morning Glory," just a handful of Pucca items. That was maybe six months ago, and since then, they've brought in some Hello Kitty and MashiMaro, and a handful of other, more obscure lines. Lots of cute things.

They've also started carrying some of the trendier kinds of origami paper. You can get kits for cranes, crane eggs, modular swans, roses (made with rose scented paper), flowers (the classic "iris" model), and lucky stars. For most of the types of items - excluding the modular swan, which requires specific papers - they had a variety of papers, some with "noctilucent" (glow in the dark) prints, others opalescent, others holographic, others fluorescent, others relatively plain. For lucky stars, which require long, thin strips of paper, they also sell various styles with things like "friends forever" printed on them in silver. (Actually, in general, the selection at Opane is pretty similar to the selection at my local store.)

So what did I wind up doing with the rest of the evening? I made a bunch of holographic lucky stars in various colors; this was easy to learn. Not as easy was the iris made from white paper with noctilucent stars in pink, yellow, or blue. The instructions that came with the box confused me, and the better instructions I hunted down online also didn't make sense until the second or third try. Finally, I used each to puzzle out the other and managed to make two irises.

We want to use origami cranes at the wedding mostly because they'll make pretty, cheap, and colorful decorations, so this was good practice. Maybe we'll add some lucky stars to the mix. I used up all my paper strips... there must have been around 40-50 of them... and while they're fast and easy to make, I'm not sure I can imagine actually wanting to make enough of them to make an impression. But I have more than a year to fool around with it, so who knows?

Current Mood: sleepy

I would never, ever buy THIS, but I know people who would, and I have to admit that at one point I might have been one of them.*

Nonetheless, I thought those of you so inclined might prefer to be alerted to it as a crafting idea. Stencil it? Embroider it? Up to you, of course. One good thing here, aside from your money not going to Rick Santorum's career (hopefully) is being able to choose the kind of sheets you use - organic? high thread count? etc.

It's kind of similar to some ideas in some books I've been looking at lately. There's a wonderful book by Paige Gilchrist that came out a few years ago and is called Decorating Your First Apartment. One of the projects is a stencilled or transfer-printed sheer curtain hung behind a bed, with a dictionary definition page including "love" printed on it. It's hard to explain but it has great visual impact, especially for anyone who loves words and typefaces.

Also try Wall Words, although I have to say that I think many of their quotes are on the simpy side.

* On the other hand, despite my general resistance to buying from UO, I really like THIS LAMPSHADE... wish I could afford one or two of them.

Current Mood: tired

Yay, I'm not dead! Now only clear stuff is coming out of my nose, no more yellow/green, and I actually got to go out for like 3 hours today. Books and pajama pants were bought for me. Tonight I watched Closer with the momster and I finished a sock I've been working on for, like, ever... all I have to do is the kitchener stitch that closes the end of the toe, and then weave in ends. I started the pair when I moved up here over 18 months ago, finished the first sock after a month, and have been working on this one for over a year. But not steadily, obviously.

Last night Tom was over & we watched Being Julia... it's very slight. It has a good script, and is the kind of movie that's usually called "charming," but the story never gathers much seriousness or intensity. I don't think it's really worth going out of your way to see. I hadn't seen Tom in a week except for a few minutes on Tuesday, so it was nice to spend the whole evening with him.

Other than that, I had relatives in and out of town all weekend and it was pretty annoying. Nobody was here to visit (therefore we couldn't reschedule); they were all passing through for other reasons and decided to drop in. I told my mom to leave me out of it because of me being sick. This reached the height of aggravation Sunday evening when she went out to dinner with one uncle who was in town, and another (who was supposed to keep in touch with her by phone) showed up at the door and I had to send him and his gf to a nearby coffee place to wait for mom and the other uncle, because, excuse my rudeness, I'm really sick and there's nowhere to sit. They weren't at all offended; everyone understood that I was concerned for their comfort and amusement and knew that they would get neither from sitting in my closet-sized kitchen. (A big walk-in closet, but a freakin' closet nonetheless.)