Turtle Power

There's going to be a sequel to Amigurumi World and Amigurumi Two!, so I need to start saving my pennies or get a job or something.

From Ana Paula's blog I wander onto the Flickr group and saw the best use ever of the sea turtle pattern: Baby Mutant Ninja Turtles.

And I think I've already got all the necessary yarn colors.  Excelsior!  (Pale blue and pale purple felt will probably be my biggest challenge, but everybody knows that Donatello is the worst one, both in artists and ninja turtles.)

By rearranging the accessories and sewing the limbs on in a slightly different position, it probably wouldn't be too difficult to make small teenage versions.

Today's big project: fancying up the flower plot by the neighbors' fence.

Apparently Angry Sun accepted my challenge from last time and decided to be even more of a dick today.  There's nothing quite like digging small trenches in the hot sun while your father sweats enough to turn dirt into mud.

In the first picture you can also see the new birdhouse pole.  I don't know if squirrels can jump from the deck railing onto the little house, but they can shimmy up the pole.

As a delicate lady, I did lady's things, like dig out the loose dirt after my father used the pick and nearly pass out in the sun.  I also added some more plants in once the good dirt was added.  If they thrive, I might take some more pictures once there are actually flowers.

Technicolor pachyderms are really too much for me

Since Michelle and Thessaly were going to be meeting people in Williamsburg, and at least one of them loves elephants, I decided to make the elephant from Easy Crochet Critters.  I bought some light turquoise Red Heart yarn awhile back--I think possibly for an Ana Paula Rimoli elephant.

This one is a more realistic elephant (my other patterns are for bipedal pachyderms), and there were fewer pieces to make and sew together--the head and the body are all one piece, starting from the elephant's butt and finishing up at the tip of the trunk.

You can see the color fairly well in this extremely flattering picture of me sewing the legs on.  Kristen helped stuff the legs, but could not be conned into sewing the legs on.

Here the yarn looks like a pale grey/blue-grey.

The pattern says to use 6mm eyes, but those looked too small and beady.  When I make an elephant, I want him to look trustworthy.

And here is the elephant in action.  I may need to send some blunt needles and some yarn just in case the trunk remains a popular hand hold.

Valdeez nuts

This week's goal: finish belated birthday present for elderly father.  Fortunately Kristen's arrival this weekend gives me an awesome excuse for delaying.

The important thing is that I haven't gone blind, and isn't a sighted child the best gift any father could receive?

Other projects: turtle scrubbin' rags to send to the Gulf.  Craft Hope is collecting sewn, crocheted, or knitted washcloths and hand towels to clean up marine birds and mammals.  From the comments, it looks like some people are cutting old towels down to the correct size (10x10 for washrags, 14x27 for hand towels) and cutting the backs off old T-shirts to send.

The organizations (Institute for Marine Mammal Studies, Audubon Nature Institute, and  Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge) can also use Dawn dish soap, and here's a link if you'd like to donate directly to IMMS.

I'm starting with cotton yarn left over from some of my other projects (acrylic yarn is fine, but cotton is better).  When making blankets for the Snuggles Project I've used the same color yarn since even though the animals don't care, I figure that makes it more likely for the humans to want to hang on to the comfort item.


For something that's going to get covered in oil, I'm not too concerned about it looking nice.  And it's not going to--tied to the end of the variegated green is a little piece of hot pink from the Zoot Bed Project.


Rainbow Explosion is just rows of sc, but I might use some Attic Yarn in this dishcloth pattern.  It's few stitches, so a smart, efficient person would've used that pattern to begin with.

Shine On, Harvest Moon

My weekend hasn't been all about drinking rum and watching Nicktoons.  Today I decided to finally start planting some of those prison flowers that've been sitting by the driveway, waiting for me to take a break from straining my liver and watching whatever Netflix Instant pukes up.

As my reward for my honest toil, I discovered that one of the rosebushes has actually started blooming.  The other two are...possibly dead.  According to eHow, rosebushes are like Juliet--they may only be tricking me into thinking they're dead, so I probably shouldn't kill myself over it.  Unless I want to speed up the rosebush's recovery by having it revive as soon as I've already swallowed all of the deadly poison.  Oh, cruel staging choices!

Unlike the two lazy/dead rosebushes, my Kroger oxalis has come back to life.  In the background, you can see the newest bird feeder.  My cunning plan was that the squirrels wouldn't try to gnaw pieces off it since they could just walk in and take the seeds.  The one flaw in my cunning plan: squirrels will apparently just sit inside the little house until they've eaten all the seeds.  So, cunning plan step two: wait for squirrels to become fat and slow enough for the cat to catch.

I didn't mind feeding the squirrels until I realized they will destroy your bird feeders, and they are greedy little binge eaters.

Since the old woman wanted to be able to look out the kitchen window and see flowers, I did a lot of planting near the rosebushes.  Until I posted this picture, I didn't realize quite how ugly this spot was.

Over in my hated side garden, some of my seeds are finally starting to bloom.  I celebrated with the traditional oak seedling genocide.

The prison tomatoes are doing well, even though I forgot about them for a few days and left them to their own devices in the hot, cruel sun.  There's currently a green tomato that I'll probably ripen in the house once it gets big enough.  The little woodland creatures cannot be trusted, and Garfield was the Teddy Roosevelt of Simonsen cats.

These green wires are left over from the grape plant I got from K-Mart.  It failed to thrive, and my attempts to buy grapes have failed miserable.  So, tomatoes.  Which I assume can be fermented if one gets desperate enough.  I mean, you can ferment any fruit, right?

As a Virginian, I'm going to need cocktails to sip as I look at the veranda from inside my air-conditioned house.  Being outside today was like that level in Super Mario Bros. 3 where the angry sun comes down and tries to kill you.  God, I hate you, Angry Sun.

After digging in the dirt and thinking about how much I hate the Sun, I decided to harvest some of the spring onions for vegetarian chili.  As much as I love sticking it to The Man, organic gardening is for chumps.  Not only am I denying the sweet, sadistic pleasure of dousing things in chemicals, but my scallions are small and feeble.  [phallic joke]

Now, I'm not saying I put a whole lot of effort into tilling my soil and sowing my seeds and tending my crops, because it's me.  I didn't even till any soil since I had my seed starter pellets and my bags of dirt.

But it was still slightly more effort than going to the grocery store and buying a bunch of scallions for 89 cents.  In the picture you can see what I managed to get from two of my Victory Garden scallions.  Thank God we already beat Hitler, because this pittance of seasonings sure isn't going to do it.

Don't phase me, bro

I can't tell if I'm enjoying cupcake drama or if I'm just horrified by almost everyone involved.  Also, I still don't understand why cake in any form would make fat people cry, unless it's locked away or smashed on the floor or something.  "Cups of cake" makes me think about the food in Wall-E and/or makes me want to stab myself in the eye.

Also, $8 for a cupcake?  People will pay $8 for 1/12-1/24 of a normal cake?  And all this time I've been giving it away for free?

***

This week's project: working on the old man's birthday present.  And by "birthday present", I may mean "Father's Day present".  And by "project", I may mean "attempting to purchase a present since he buys all the TV shows he wants and I don't think he even opened the last three books I gave him."  Since he already bought himself a Blu-Ray player, I'm looking for ideas on Amazon.  It's mostly making me think, "Why the hell would I need that on Blu-Ray?"

Anyway, back to actually crafting, I'm once again trying to blind myself.  This time with the slightly smug visage of James T. Kirk. 

I'm still trying to think of a good quote to put next to the face.  I suspect I'm just going to be completely lazy and just stitch the opening narration.  Of which there are apparently far more versions than I had realized (assuming Wikipedia isn't trying to punk me).

Or: "A starship captain's most solemn oath is that he will give his life, even his entire crew, rather than violate the Prime Directive."


I just don't know if I'd be able to stop laughing long enough to actually stitch it.

Excelsior!

I've finally shown Motif 1/2 of my pet bed who's boss.  Motif 5/6...still having some problems.  And does my cat really deserve six different types of squares?  No, she's a cat.  She's just going to refuse to sleep on it, and maybe I'll end up giving it to Daisy.

I might change the colors around for the designs I can actually do.

I've also finished AUDREY bears and mailed it out on Friday.  I don't think it really shows up in the pictures, but I used some of my new Light Effects floss for the eyes.  It's a dark blue that I think has some stupid name like Blueberry Blast or something.  It's also a pain in the ass to work with, especially for two quick little backstitches where you only do a very small area before you have to cut it off and move it somewhere else.

Venus Love Me Chain

Last year Kendra and I had a joint Sailor Moon birthday party because we're ten year olds from 1996.  I've been snagging stuff from Manga Style and Lycentia's SM Graphics to use for scrapbooking, and then I realized something: these little drawings would probably fit on my totally radical artist sketch cards.

Step one to being an awesome manga sketch card artist when you can't draw: Print shit off the internet

Step two: Glue it to your manga sketch cards

I don't know if my handwriting+gold pen is at all legible, but Venus is reminding you that she's not just another pretty blonde.

I'm definitely sure that Venus is Kendra's favorite.  Some of the others...

Kristen gets Mini Moon because Kristen likes pink.  Basically, if Kristen had ever designed her own Sailor senshi, it would've basically turned out like Sailor Mini Moon only taller and less annoying.  And possibly with another shade of pink instead of red.

I really hope the letters on Saturn look better in real life than they do in this picture.

I went for this extremely topical and not at all likely to be dated by the time Jamel gets this in the mail reference since Saturn's in the anime so rarely that she doesn't even get a transformation sequence.  I could probably have looked up her attacks and maybe come up with something, but I'm lazy.  And it's not like this is Harry Potter where Jamel would demand that I step up (and obscurity be damned!).

I thought Pluto was Bridget's favorite, but apparently I was wrong. Or Pluto's her favorite Outer and Venus is her favorite Inner.  The point is, I didn't see her comment on Facebook until after I'd sealed the envelope.

I also considered "Drop Dead Gorgeous" and some Dead Scream based joke that never really worked out, but, like Communism, was totally awesome in theory.

I don't care what the haters (like Kristen) say: Jupiter is awesome.

This caption took forever.  I am very disappointed in the English language for lacking potentially amusing phrases about thunder, lightning, and electricity.  Especially ones that make sense and/or fit on bargain bin comic and manga trading cards.

Which, other than my inherent awesomeness (something else I share with Sailor Jupiter), is why I combined My Fair Lady with Sailor Moon.  I am dreaming the impossible moon cosmic dream action, people.

All of the backgrounds are from Sailor Moon SNES video games. The pink lacy one is the same picture, printed out at different sizes. I still desperately miss my old, pre-Vista/7 image software that would let me adjust the size of pictures to anything I wanted instead of giving me options in normal people photo sizes.  My printer doesn't understand that I have evolved past printing out photos, and now need to do super important things like print out pictures of cartoon characters and painstakingly cut them out with embroidery scissors.