what is this thing called free time?

I am very impressed by those who are committed to all handmade gifts this season.

Obviously none of them work for catering companies.

just one more bite, maybe...

...er, maybe not. This one has gone BAD.

Where did these things come from anyway?

The bathroom mirror in our house is dynamic. Since we have such weird work/sleep/life patterns, we find ourselves with things we would like to share without waking each other up. And so, there is the dry erase marker. Luckily, he is as bored with the idea of knitting sweaters as I am, so he has no problems with the bookshelves becoming overrun with weird critters. In fact, I have pressed him to contribute, and so the mirror gives me fun projects. Sometimes, though, I'll get a proper sketch:

And that is just all the more frustrating because, dammit, he's pretty good with a pencil and I've been just making this stuff up as I go along... (Patterns, what happened to using patterns?) But I take my best shot.
I totally dig the eyebrows, but could never do this again because I have no idea what I did. Regardless, the quadtropus.

Apparently I am making a giant eyeball next. (Also for the record, totally doing crochet with round stuff and knit with straight because I haven't figured out how to crochet a square.)

Yeah I finished something

Close up of the pattern




All right gals look and behold I finished a quilt! Woo Hoo for me. Granted it is only a baby sized quilt for my older brother's first child, but I am excited I have been able to finish one project completely since the birth of my little one. It took me a week to complete it with most of the work taking place over this past weekend. Why the rush now you may be thinking, well the baby had decided to come early so I had to finish this sooner than later. Hubby watched the little one while I was in my sweat shop for the weekend.

My younger brother wife is pregnant with their 1st and that baby is due in May...I think I will start that quilt now just in case :)

PS I have even crochet a little more of my blanket...sigh one day it will be done.

Mochimochiland is having a photo contest...

... should I enter the deviant beet? I'd probably reshoot the picture, but hey, the name "beet of my heart" is soo very perfect to ensure they knew what I started from.

Halloween fun abounding!

Okay, so this is going to be a somewhat lengthy post. Let's start with the costume parade. The good news is that I managed to finish both kids' costumes in plenty of time for the Halloween Carnival in my neighborhood. The bad news is that my son up & decided that he did not want to be Diego anymore & has decided that he hates his costume. *sigh* Oh well. The better-than-the-good news is that there were Moms coming up to me left and right at the Carnival complimenting me on Julia's costume! *huge grin* That almost made up for it. I'm just disappointed that the boy didn't like his. I thought he'd be excited about Rescue Pack at least, but he flatly refused to wear it. :( Without further ado, here they are:



Just to shamelessly brag on my cutie pie a little bit, here are a couple of extra shots of her & her sweet face:




Okay, so costumes done, I decided it was High (pun intended) time to actually carve a real pumpkin. There is a contest on the KOL forums for pumpkin carving, so Kathy and I got together & created the Lihc & the Gargantulihc from the game. Like so:



After snapping the photos necessary to enter the Pumpkin carving contest, we were not content to leave the pumpkin as-is, so we doctored him a bit, then a bit more, and a bit more...More. MORE! Until finally we ended up with this creation:



I'll try and snap some more pics of him at home in the evening, when maybe you can actually see him lit up. I'm woefully bad at that, so I will try.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Ha!

You Knit What?

The name says it all....

Cake, meet ice cream

I'm sure these two will be fast friends.....


also, I have been teaching myself crochet. My first finished crochet was a cat toy, filled with catnip, which my cats have been studiously avoiding since I gave it to them. I should stick with food.

Some of these people actually started by felting their own materials...

We took a field trip today, my sweetheart and I, to the Center for Puppetry Arts downtown. They added the Jim Henson special exhibit since my last visit (I SAW THE REAL SWEDISH CHEF HELLO!) and if ever there was a museum for crafty folk this has got to be it.

Papercraft puppets, wooden puppets, fabric puppets, puppets from hundred of years ago and of course, the detailed craft work that went into all the Henson stuff...I mean you could see how some of the stuff was stitched together. Also interesting was to see some Muppet characters from the films - as was pointed out to me, it's obvious that Henson was aware that you could capture much finer detail on film. Fishface from Labyrinth and the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal were both great examples of this:
I don't know how much you can see from this detail, but the costume alone is an intricate work. It is delicate layers of aged, torn, once highly intricate laces and velvets. The kind of fabrics that manage to suggest long-faded nobility. Not that you could see the detail in the movie, but the overall effect is something you would respond to subliminally.

What defines a "master" craftsman? Well, thereyougo.

I've been working! I have proof!

Okay, so I recognize that I've been woefully neglectful of this blog of late, but I have actually been working. In fact, I would have posted sooner, but I just kept forgetting to have my camera & a computer occupying the same space at the same time. Without further ado, here are some shots of the costume I've been working on. You might remember me mentioning that I was going to make a little fairy costume for my daughter and her very Elven ears. I'm still working on it, but it's nearly complete. I have a few layers of leaves left to put on & I'd still like to do a little headpiece.

Now, some explanation for why this costume has taken me so painfully long. I was under the delusion that if I sewed the flowers onto the bodice that they would be less likely to fall off, and it would generally look nicer. After about 3 weeks of getting 3 or 4 flowers sewn a night, I said "Screw this" and took out my hot glue gun. Can I just tell you - I LOVE my hot glue gun. It is an absolute boon for projects such as these.

Here's where I was a couple of weeks ago(pre-glue gun):

And here is where I am now. I thought it would be best to try it on her to make sure that it would still fit (thank goodness it does - albeit it's a little short when she stands up or crawls, so I'll be buying a pair of green tights for her to wear...maybe I'll tack a few blossoms or leaves onto them just for fun if I get the boy's costume done in time!)

Here she is modeling it:

Once this is done, I have to move on to Dallan's costume. He is going as Diego from "Go, Diego, Go!" I chose this for several reasons: 1) He is still too little to really "get" the Halloween concept, so I can still choose for him. Next year I won't be so lucky. 2) This is what Diego looks like:



Easiest. Costume. Ever. I have purchased a Diego lunch bag that has the little badge that's on the vest, which I can then cut off, and, you guessed it, HOT GLUE to the vest. I bought the vest from LLBean & we have cargo shorts & hiking boots already. All I have to sew is the Rescue Pack. Hopefully that will only take me a couple of hours. (Famous last words)

Craft Store Confessional

It was a little thing really. I successfully purged two whole bags of old clothes from my closet and wanted to find some weekend project to celebrate my liberation. So, I went to the craft store.

OK, I live in a world where I barely know what day of the week it is, the actual date retains an elusive mystery. So I found myself at the craft store on 1. Saturday 2. Of a three day weekend 3. before a major decorative holiday season.

I realized I hate the craft store.

First off, since I have the dreaded Allergy to Acrylic there is a certain amount of frustration inevitable. Oh look, this yarn is nice!... oh. And hey this looks like fun!....um. Nifty, and I'm not going to even touch the package. Right. Add to that the hordes of people prepping for the Great Octoberal House Makeover and yeah, I bought $3 worth of fabric to recover a pillow and then spent a long, long time trying to get out of that place.

I find it hard, sometimes, to reconcile my crafty streak with the projects in the big craft stores. Most of them look dated, lifeless and dare I say it, tacky? Thankfully the internet gives me hope. I see people using the same techniques to do things creative, stylish, inspiring.

Now if I just had more time...

Also, making monsters is sooo much more fun than making these booties I'm working on. Which is probably part of the reason they aren't done yet.

do NOT mess with this computer, man

i will totally cut you.

this is so a monster waiting to happen....

hooray for the discount rack having something non-acrylic! And now I just need to make it...

I've heard of Tipsy Cakes...

... but Surly Cake is a new one on me.

It makes me very, very happy, though. Surly Cake is adapted from this pattern. I'm very tempted now to go to various restaurants with Surly Cake and snap pictures of him with their dessert plates. Because I'm just that way.

Thanks for the birthday wishes. P.S. Rach, how do you bake a card? :)

Imagine

Imagine me quilting, knitting, crocheting, scrapbooking or baking a great big, homemade card for Kathy saying
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

Yarn Cthulhu

The title says it all.

http://www.myconfinedspace.com/2007/08/29/yarn-cthulhu/

For Kathy's other hobby.

I know, what use could this possibly have, but I like it anyway.

I made a shiny ball of mud.

I really don't know why the japanese art of hikaru dorodango is so fascinating to me. Maybe because it is meditative. Maybe because it is fascinating watching something made simply of earth become a shiny sphere. Maybe because it is an elevated reason to PLAY WITH MUD.

I don't know.

That aside, this is a cheap, and interesting way of creating a lasting memory of a very specific place - the color and shine of the dorodango are directly related to the dirt you are using. This ball here is forever a piece of my backyard in Alpharetta. Now I want to collect dirt whenever I travel. Won't that be fun for airport security?

There are a couple of websites that explain the method for making these. I used this one. Basically, you start with barely damp earth (think good sandcastle dampness) and you try and make the most round of round spheres you possibly can. OCD is an asset here. Then, you let it dry a bit - some methods suggest using a ziploc for this, I didn't - and from that point you just add layers of fine, dry dirt, rubbing as you do, until you develop the gloss you want. It took a few hours to make total, and a good portion of that was sitting in front of a movie while my hands were adding the last fine dirt layers.

The dorodango lightened in both weight and color as it dried and now it is sitting on the mantle above my fireplace. There is a scale of shininess that rates dorodango from 1-5, 5 being super ultra glossy awesome explosion. I'm figuring this around the two to three range, but I'm hoping for a four for the next one. On Moh's hardness scale, I'm figuring it's around a 2, because I like to classify these things.

I did try a second one, but rubbed too hard and cracked it, so I have to attempt again. I've got some super red dirt from near one of the restaurants I used to work at. Shiny red mud ball...

Wedding shoes

First post! w00t

The only photo I have of a current project right now is the shoes for my wedding. I put a bunch of beads on them to dazzle them out of their $7.00 upbringing.

Most of my crafts are born out of one of two things: The innability to sit still or the innability to pay money for something that I think I can make myself. The shoes are a perfect example... when shopping for wedding shoes, I think I threw up in my mouth a little when I saw how expensive they were. Poor upbringing... or just shear stubborness, I'm not sure. Its also why I started making corsets. As you can probably guess, this will largely influence the crafty things that I post on here. (Thank you Julia for inviting me! *Kevin and I sent you something in the mail too)

I was told I must post this for Julia

So Kathy & I were talking & I was also thinking about the previous post about knitting things out of cat hair. This prompted me to go searching, since I found such an interesting plethora of links on doing things with plastic bags, I thought surely there is something similar for that sort of thing.

Well, here it is:

http://www.knitting-and.com/spinning/ruffy-wool.htm

Oh yay the interwebs & the wonderful things that we can find on it.

Enjoy!

It's a gazillion degrees outside, let me wrap my hands in warm fiber.

Record heat and humidity. Everyone is being told "Stay indoors or we can not be held accountable for your immediate raisinification". (Hey, if spaghettification can be a scientific term, so can raisinification.)

Of course, I have been knitting.

I made a pop tart phone cover which made me very happy and which I promptly gave away, so I have no pictures. It looked a lot like this, only without the evil evil acrylic yarn, instead using happy sugar and cream cotton yarn.

I made an mp3 player cover in an effort to work my way into making a good looking mp3 player cover. No pictures.

I also completed a hat for a person-to-be. It is blue, much to the chagrin of the mom who really really wanted a girl. I went to take a picture and the camera batteries are, shockingly, dead. I really should go out and buy some new rechargable batteries.

Ok, is anyone particularly good at switching colors in knitting to make a design? I feel like there is something I'm missing when I do it, probably relating to the word "intarsia" which I have no clue about. I tried to make a pickle on the mp3 player cover, but it came out all lumped and embossed looking. No, I won't take a picture and show you. It's weird.

I blame JK Rowling

Okay, so since I finished the quilt, I've literally done nothing but read Harry Potter. I reread books 5 & 6 & just finished reading Book 7 last night. I've been close to 3 weeks, and over 2000 pages entrenched in nothing but Harry Potter. Now, I'm done, so back to work!

So I think my first order of business will be to start the bath mat that I mentioned earlier, although I think I've changed my mind about what to put on it. Sadly, my kids are not so into Sesame Street as I was. My son loves Blue's Clues, and there is a character on Blue's Clues called "Slippery Soap" who is, you guessed it, a bar of soap. I think I'll try & find something with him & make that into the bath mat.

I have the canvas, the yarn (or at least some of it), and the latch hook. Now I just need to make a pattern & go.

She will always be taller and younger and thinner, now this!?!

My sister is cooler than me.

Not only did she find red plastic bags to knit with, she told me what she is going to make with them and it is excellent. However, when we were on our travels together and we found a random convenience store that used red bags, she totally understood that I had to ask the cashier for extra bags. Now I just have to think of something that isn't a copycat of what she is doing.

As for an update with my plastic bag knitting, I've revised the plan slightly for how the final plastic mat will come together. Instead of icord forming the the majority of the mat, I'm braiding instead and will use icord for design purposes. We'll see how it all comes together...

Late Comer

Hi All. I'm Rachel. Since this is my first venture into the on-line world as anything other than a reader, that's my only identity. I come to you through Kathy, who I met when we worked together several years (and for her Several jobs) ago. My craftiness runs more toward kitchen craft. I've been known to do ribbon embroidery but patience, my cat and now a 1-year old conspire to convince me that's not to viable a hobby now.

So here I'll venture my occasional entries on cooking and thoughts on the herb plants I'm growing as I try to cultivate an interest in gardening. Occasionally sharing these thoughts with a pastry chef might be intimidating but I have taught Kathy a few things: like the cheese bread recipe that, in part, won my husband.

When I resigned from my job last year to stay home with our daughter I thought there would be plenty of time to dedicate to cooking and baking. Nope. For the first 6 months the little one was disinclined to nap; since then I've been disinclined to do anything *anything* to wake her from a hard won nap. Dramatic but true.

Drumroll, please...

I finished the Puzzle Quilt!




I didn't meet my goal of having the horizontal ditches sewn before my trip to Texas, but I managed to knock all but 3 of them out the day I was leaving. I finished it up today. I got on a roll working on it last night & it became like a book that I was close to finishing...I just had to see how it was going to turn out! Also similar to finishing a book, I now feel an empty space as though I don't know what to do with myself...Fairy costume, here I come!

Here are a couple of closer up shots so you can see the border stitching & the individual pieces:

And here is the back with a close-up of the outlines of the puzzle piece stitching:

What do you guys think? I think it looks pretty nice for a first "solo" effort!

I always knew I had deviance in me.....

My sister demands pictures and well, what else could I do but supply them, which meant finishing this little critter here. Ok but wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.


Like I said, I've been all up ons the mochimochiland little projects... anything that I can accomplish in a day makes me feel better about the universe.

So The first I made was the misshapen multicolored heart. The shape was as much a product of that yarn as it was my way fabulous knitting skills coping with a new way to increase and decrease stitches I had never tried. Then came the Blade of Grass. He's a bit more minty green than you can tell in this picture. So much fun to make this, I have no idea why. But then... I went awry.
It's not like I have to follow recipes to the T or anything, but I lack confidence and skill to depart from most crafty patterns. But that's what I did. That orange guy there? He was a heart. He became the Deviant Beet. I even deviated from my sister's suggestion for the leaves! Craziness! And then, to make matters worse, I made Purple Robot there without a pattern at all. What am I turning into?

Well, apparently, someone who knits plastic bags. Eventually this will become the welcome mat that can be stolen without heartbreak. For now, I'm still odd.



Just wait, someone asked me to make them a beanie this week.

I had a great time at least

Well it turned out I did most the driving so no "car time" to crochet :( Here is the photo of my progress...i got the blanket in the bag, hook, yarn and scissors and there they stayed snuggled for the entire weekend. I need a new pedicure too!

I was unjustly fired from my job yesterday...i suppose no one ever says they were justly fired, I just wish I would have been fired for cussing out my boss instead of not meeting his unattainable demands. 2 good things from this event are 1) i don't have to work with my dumb-a** boss 2) I will have plenty of to work on unfinished projects or at least start new projects that can hang out in the Corner of Unfinished Projects

I understand the idea of diminishing returns but i hate the rechargeable batteries anyway.

One of my coworkers today mentioned something about needing a part-time job because he had "too much free time" right now. We haven't really hit the slow season at work, but we're very close and I admit, my work weeks have been hovering under the forty hour line. But what is this free time of which he speaks? I know no such thing! Then I realize two very important factors of the equation:

1. He is a kind-of-single manwhore who has a veritable bevy of suitors desperate to do things like his laundry for him. Seriously, they even do his ironing. I should enjoy such perks in my world.

2. My house has sprouted knitty, crafty things. Not quite sure how it happened, and it is probably due in part to all those cute little projects on mochimochiland. Seriously, I even finished a bunch of these things! And made up some stuff on my own!

I blame this website.

Stay on target

Ok Gals I hoping the guilt of this BLOG will keep me on track this weekend. I am bringing the blanket I began crocheting last year on a road trip. It was supposed to be done by Nov. 18th last year (original due date) but my little one decided to come early (6 weeks). So this project was shelved as were my visions of having her swaddled in it while we snuggled by the fire. sigh.

I will be at a gaming convention this weekend and will have lots of road time and maybe even time while playing to hook...is that what one uses as slang for crocheting? Wish me luck. Report back Sunday or Monday with my progress.

True to form, my pics are behind my work

So I've been working some more on the quilt. Here are the latest pictures with the borders in tact & the backing:



(Yeah that's my foot. I'm standing on a chair to take the pictures.)




So as I mentioned, I've actually done some more work on it since I took these shots. I have actually cut the batting, and pinned it all together. I also got 2 of the ditches stitched one night last week when I was waiting up for my niece to come in from visiting her boyfriend.

I am hoping to have all of the horizontal ditches stitched before I have to leave for Texas. There are 7 of them, so I'm not overly optimistic that I will actually meet that goal, especially not now that Dallan has returned from his 3 week travels. We'll see. I have discovered, though, that making my sewing maching stitch sideways is not as difficult as I thought it would be. There are some very, shall we say, "creative" looking lines happening on this quilt, but I'm hopeful that when it's all done, all the wonkiness will simply add to its character.

Eventually I'll just start spinning yarn out of cat hair to cut out the middle man.

Kathy called me up (left a message, actually. Curse the need to mow the lawn over the weekend!) saying, "I've deviated from the pattern. Now I have a problem, but I think you can help me."

Well, I suppose that's exactly why we started this thing; now we can help each other out, and provide visual aids! Rad.

Let me provide a little back story, though. See, Kathy is a pastry chef. That means she has to be good at following recipes, because if you fail to follow a pastry recipe, Bad Things Happen(tm). Me? I am not good at following recipes. In fact, I actively chafe against recipes, and, as a general rule, if I want to cook something I've never made before, I look through 5 to 10 different recipes for that thing, get the gist of what I am going for, and then fly blind when it comes to actual meal preparation. This tends to work much better for me than actually following a recipe would. I'm not completely sure why, but I am guessing it probably reflects some general need to blaze my own trail. (Listen, it's not my fault I'm the youngest. And no, I don't buy into any of that birth order crap, thank you very much.)

Point is, Kathy made a beet instead of a heart. And I am very proud of her! But now the beet needs greens, and she's stuck. So she called me, and since she rejected my initial idea of latch-hooking (she wanted proper leaves, apparently), I had to invent a leaf pattern while we were on the phone. So here is one side of the resulting leaf:and the other side:Here's a closer shot of the leaf to show the neat little vein detail:Now for the pattern:
Notes - when I say "m1", I am referring to the make one back increase that you can see a video for here.
cast on 3
do a 3 stitch i-cord for whatever length is appropriate for your stem
k1, m1, k1, m1, k1 (you should now have 5 stitches on your needle)
k1, m1, k1, p1, k1, m1, k1 (it's a seven stitch palindrome!)
repeat the following two (marked in square brackets) rows until the body of the leaf is as long as you want it:
[knit across the row
k3, p1, k3]
k2tog, k3, k2tog (should be 5 sts on your needle now)
k2, p1, k2
k2tog, k1, k2tog (three stitches left)
k3tog (one stitch left!)
bind off your sad one stitch. So lonely!

That's it! Pretty easy, right?

Kathy also has been begging me to post an update on the status of my halter top for about a week now. So here it is:I swear he sat down and started glaring at me like that before I had even finished putting the damn thing on the bed. Apparently this particular item did not yet contain enough cat hair. For crying out loud.

I took this picture while holding him out of the frame with my left hand. No small task, that cat weighs 14 pounds, and it's all muscle! Well, and fur. And a shockingly large number of facial whiskers (seriously, check out the eyebrow whiskers in the previous picture. My cat practically has a cuttlefish growing out of his face.) Anyway:So, yes, I am, in fact, making progress. And I haven't started any other projects since I posted about my excess of projects!

Well, I haven't started any knitting projects.

...except for the leaf for Kathy. And that hardly counts, right? I SWEAR I CAN STOP ANY TIME.

As if I didn't have enough irons in the fire...

Okay, so for about 3 years now I've had this software collecting dust in my basement that will convert a digital picture to a cross stitch pattern. (It also has a sweater designer, and a personal pattern maker for children, btw). So I got the idea that I would use it to make a pattern for a latch hook rug for the kids' bathroom with Ernie from Sesame Street & his Rubber Duckie.

Like so:


Now, the trick will be in the fact that the software doesn't really do latch hook patterns, but it does let you specify the type of canvas you're working on, the number of stitches per inch/centimeter, and the dimensions of the project (in # of stitches.) So I think I can do it. I'll just have to muddle through getting the right colors of yarn. I'll also have to figure out the appropriate length for the strands of yarn & then cut it. *sigh*

Kathy's Being Modest

Check out the awesome present she made for my little boy:




Thanks, Kathy!!