First Flower

February certainly seems early for the violas to come up. Of course now it snows.

Garden Plans

It was warm today which led to wandering around the garden and suddenly realizing the amount of work I have in store for March-May. All the wood planting beds have to be removed to cut down on the termite food sources, and all the plants in those wood beds need to be replanted elsewhere. The veggie beds need to be reworked to get more of a yield in the space, and the pond needs to be rebuild as it is currently full of termites. The veggie beds will likely be getting rebuilt from cement blocks just because they last forever and are cheap. The shed needs to be finished, the plastic wall won't survive another winter. I also need to start veggies inside soon, according to the obsessive calender I made last October.

Seams

Here's a picture that will mean just about nothing to anyone but me. I wear t-shirts maybe 90% of the time. I have one long sleeved shirt, I like the design, but it had awful cuffs on he ends of the sleeves, and I don't like sleeves anyway so I never wore it. I caved last week and bought a double needle for the sewing machine. The entire reason was to fix that shirt. I did it. I chopped the sleeves off and ran the double needle along the new sleeves. It worked great. Admittedly, the seam allowance on the sleeves doesn't quite match, and definitely doesn't match the hem, but they are the same length and I'm mighty happy about being able to wear the shirt again. Even better since the dryer works now I ran my painted shirts through the wash, and the paint set perfectly. Now I have to make a few more.

Pushy Helper

This is my view of my design buddy, Max. If I just turn my head halfway I see a giant out of focus cockatiel. Then she chews on my eyeglass frames trying to get attention.

Dryer

I should be nowhere near as excited about this as I am, but we have a new dryer. For the past few months we've been without a dryer at all, well technically it's my mother's dryer, but i was using it. Nothing makes you appreciate having a dryer so much as having your clothes washed then hauled off to dry and having to plan which days you can wash them. I also just started sewing again, and have fabric that needs to go through a dryer to be preshrunk before I can do anything with it. I didn't want to haul stuff to a dryer (let's not lie, have my dad haul stuff) that wasn't clothing.

Handsome Valuable Pins

So I spent this morning picking pins out of dress shirts and getting them on hangers. The funny bit was on one brand of dress shirt. The shirt pins had tiny embossed words, HANDSOME and VALUABLE on each one. I found it funny enough to bring some home. A less pleasant annoyance was one brand using a plastic shirt collar support with the words please recycle written on it, but they didn't bother including a recycling number.

Freezer Paper Stenciled Shirts

So I may have a Pinterest problem, but there are so many fun ideas. I played with freezer paper stencils yesterday. It took me two tries to get it right. The one above, a space invader stencil, bled a little when I added paint. As you can see my second attempt, decepticon logo, went much better.

Tips I recommend. Foam brush, dab, don't brush. Iron for as long as you can stand to get the paper stuck. Cut carefully. Simplify the design as much as possible, but it can hold detail quite well if you are careful about placement.

I already have some other ideas I want to play with, batman comes to mind. Other link I found about them.

Freezer Paper Stencils

So, I have an unhealthy obsession with Pinterest recently. Mostly I browse the craft pages looking for ideas. The best one so far has been freezer paper stencils. For the measly price of $2.79 I can now put whatever I want to on my many blank shirts. My shirts are blank of course because they're so much cheaper without anything printed on them. Since I own almost exclusively t-shirts I'm going to have some fun with decorating them as i figure out what I want. There is a very faint square of film around the stencil that I'm hoping comes out in the wash. Otherwise I'm quite happy with the usability. I did do one other shirt, but I didn't iron the freezer paper down enough, and it bled a little, kind of ruining the effect. Now I just need to decide what to put on them.

Non-Productive Design Help

Invariably if I'm working at the computer I get serenaded by shrieks if Max thinks I'm ignoring her. So out she comes, and then proceeds to wander all about the desk, trying to eat any paper and sometimes the desk itself. I've found it's hard to use a tablet with a cockatiel attached to the pen. Since her other hobbies include eating my shirt collar and seeing which wires taste best I seem to spend quite a bit of time chasing her around my desk. At least she's cute.

Clouds

Clouds from some parking lot somewhere in 2009. It's fun digging through all my old photos.

Getting Bigger

My kenyan sand boa is just hitting 12" long. I just dug around but didn't find any great size comparison pics for this guy. I either took pics of him sitting on a hand or on a bland white background. He doesn't like being out in the open and starts panicking if he can't feel structure around his body. That would be why even after 2 years I'm still hand feeding him. I can't put him in a separate container to feed as he ignores the food in favor of trying to escape. In his cage he can drag the food into his sand which I don't want him eating. He loves burrowing so i don't want to put him on a packed substrate, so wrapping him around my fingers and steering him toward food is the current way. At least he is a very calm snake and takes handling quite well.

More Snow Wishes

According to the weather we'd had 5 feet more snow this time last year. No wonder I'm pining for snow. The bulbs are starting to creep from the ground and it's only February 3rd.

Snow How I Miss You...

it was creepily warm today. You could wander outside with no jacket and just basrely feel a chill. Where's my snow? Where's my ice? While I'm enjoying not having to pay an arm and a leg to heat my house, I'd like some nice fluffy snow for payment of putting up with these short dim days.