Aaaaaaarghdarn

I'm not sure if anyone is really following this page anymore, I've really let it go.

At any rate, I'm pretty much just posting this picture here so I can post it on Ravelry to see if someone can help me out. I'm hoping it won't turn out a complete disaster.

Time marches on

...or should I say scurries? Yeesh. Updating my blog has kind of fallen by the wayside lately.

I did some Shrinky Dinks a couple weeks ago and was happy that there was less distorting this time.

I stayed up last night watching all the Micheal Jackson videos on VH1 and making a pair of earrings out of a couple of the luchador masks. I'm going to use the rest for a charm bracelet. (Anyone who's a fan of the "Middleman" comics would note that I used luchador masks from "The Second Volume Inevitability" as inspiration. Sensei Ping, practitioner of the Wu-Han Thumb of Death, is the one in the center.) I'll put the finshed product up in a little while, hopefully, if I remember.

Meet Delilah

It's been too busy around here to work on anything much, so I was looking around for something post-worthy when I came across Delilah.

My husband christined this gal "Delilah Oblongata" and the name has stuck. I actually did not make her myself, although I did redress her. She was a flea-market purchase several years ago. She was in a basket with the really cheap stuff underneath a booth that smelled of a decade's worth of cigarettes and mildew (and this was an outdoor flea market, so that's saying something.) I passed her by twice before finally picking her up for a couple of bucks at the end of the day.

She was probably the oddest flea market buy that I've had in a while, and I think I ended up buying her because she's a bit mysterious. I can't tell who might have made her. Was it a child learning to sew? Was she some kind of home ec project? The materials she's made out of are definitely not "old"--she seems to be made out of some kind of polyester fabric and has acrylic yarn for hair. I have no idea what she's stuffed with and probably don't want to find out. And her face is so cute but odd--I wonder of her maker used a pattern or not.

She was wearing a funky, somewhat misshapen dress that seemed to be made out of a pillowcase. Knowing that historical accuracy and resale value weren't things that Delilah would need to be concerned with, I threw out the pillowcase dress and made her a new one. I was wanting to learn how to do smocking. This was after soaking her heavily in FeBreeze, of course.

Delilah now smells just fine and sits in a basket at the end of the bed with some of the other dolls. She remains as inscrutable as ever, and my husband has been thinking of ways of using her as a character in one of his future comics.

New Christmas stuff

Now that the dust has settled from Christmas I can finally get around to posting a few things.

Ann Estelle here was a present from Andy. She arrived nude--yes, my husband got me a naked doll for Christmas--but the fun thing about her is that she's just about the same size as Bleuette. I've found that the patterns in my Bleuette books will work for her without a lot of adjustment. This outfit is a summer dress from 1919. The embroidered scallops took me forever, so I think I'm going to stick with something simpler for my next one.

Ginny also got a new during one of my last weekends off. For some unknown reason, the pattern has you clipping, turning, and hemming the itty-bitty edges around the sleeves and the neckline. I now know better and will be making facings from now on.

It's finally done!

I don't think my sister really reads this page, so I think I can get away with posting pictures of the baby blanket I finished for my niece before I give it to her. Since she had a girl, I knew she'd be getting piles of pink stuff--I think I also started working on this before she knew what kind of baby she'd be having--so I went with Mental Stimulation Colors for something different. Don't know about you, but I feel like I gain a couple of IQ points just by staring at it for a while.

Will post something here soon, I promise...

Yargh! I felt the need to post something here since I haven't done it in such a long time. Work has been nuts but I have had time to finish a couple things, just not time to take pictures and get them uploaded. I have signed up for the free clip art sampler from Dover Books--I'd recommend that to everyone--it's really fun.

At any rate, I'm also feeling like a Bad Citizen because with election day being tomorrow, I still have no idea who I'm voting for in some of the "other" races. President and governor I think I have figured out, but I haven't a clue about the guys running for representatives and school board and such. I always feel like sort of a cheater moving to a new state just before an election--I really haven't lived here long enough to know what's going on with the local politics or what issues are a big deal around here. Are the schools crappy? Is there a major source of employment that's getting run out of town for some reason? Will there be rioting in the streets tomorrow? I barely have time to pick up a local paper, so I don't know.

But anyway, I'm mainly looking forward to tomorrow so that all this crud can finally be over with for a bit. I won't say who I'm voting for, but can I just mention some of the stuff that I wish would just go away after the election?

1) Is anyone else tired of Christianity being treated like a "base"? Like how a candidate has to throw around the right amount of evangelical-sounding buzzwords to win people over? I'm to the point where having a professed atheist run for office would be almost refreshing--at least I'd know he was probably being sincere about something.

2) The idea that there are only certain Americans that are "real" Americans.

3) The idea that just because some nimrod can write about their opinion on the Internet, anybody else should give a hoot what they think. (Sorry, guess I'll have to include myself in that one.) (But I should mention that this goes double for celebrities.)

4) For the last time, it's pronounced NOO-KLEE-AR, mmmkay?

That's probably enough. It doesn't exactly help that Fox News is always on in the doctors' lounge when I go to get lunch.

In the end, I just hope everyone votes for who they're going to vote for, and doesn't get jerky about it. I think that's the best we all can hope for.

Sunday go-to-meetin' purse

Just one last thing before I go to bed. This is a box purse that I decorated around a year ago. The images came from some postcards that I found at a hippy store in Kalamazoo when I was living there. I made color copies, stuck them on, and went over everything with several coats of Mod Podge.

I never carried this around very much because I originally used one of those "make your own" beaded purse handle kits on it. I took apart a bunch of those wooden "power bead" bracelets that everyone used to have and used those for the handle. It looked very cool, but I found out that if you carry a beaded purse handle over your arm, your arm hair gets stuck between the beads and gets ripped out. I don't have very hairy arms, but this happened anyway. Not very comfortable. I replaced it with the bamboo handle, and it's much more usable now.

I still see beaded purse handles in a lot of the craft stores. They do look cute, but consider yourself warned.