Small creativity

13 June 2009, 10:41 am by Giggles
Categories: Quilting/Sewing/Knitting/Crafting

I’ve done a few small crafty/sewing projects lately.

At the end of last Fall semester I got back into knitting to save my sanity. It really is relaxing. I started looking for quick easy projects to knit up. I found a few baby bootie patterns and I think these turned out real well. And they were fast. I’m going to have to knit up some more.

Almost two years ago I made this outfit to wear at a belly dance recital:

That night the skirt was closed with safety pins because I hadn’t gotten the zipper in. The sleeve holes were just zigzagged because I didn’t get the sleeves in. And the front of the top was held together with safety pins as well because I didn’t get the hooks and eyes in (I’m notorious for getting costumes finished on the way to the party). When I got home I put it in a sack in my sewing box (one of my sewing boxes) and figured I’d finish it later.

Monday night I was digging through my box looking for flannel actually, to make a small little monster. But I got distracted by that bag, I finally pulled it out and put the zipper and sleeves in. I think I’m going to do eyelets and ribbon on the front instead of hooks and eyes though. But it’s definitely wearable without safety pins now.

After I finished being distracted, I decided the scraps would make a perfect little monster. So here’s my belly dancing monster. I think she turned out great. I’m going to have to make some more varieties of these too.

4 Shared thoughts

I don’t do Czech advertisements

12 June 2009, 10:50 am by Giggles
Categories: News, Science & Tech

Back in January I had an issue with someone stealing my images off my server and using them on their own site, which is a problem for several reasons. First, it’s stealing my intellectual property. Second, it was stealing my bandwidth. Third, they didn’t even give me credit for the pictures I took. That was the metaphorical final straw and I moved servers so that I could add a file in the background of my site that makes it so that any image that someone tries to hotlink will be replaced with another image I designed that advertises this wonderful site. (It’s also stopped google image search from finding me, which is perfectly fine by me, there are some weird people out there looking up some odd images.)

I’d already taken steps at the end of last year to reduce that as much as possible by making pretty much every photo on the site small enough that taking it to use for something else wouldn’t really be worth it. There have been a few exceptions, but that’s why my photos are the size they are. It also helps me to have everything more uniform.

A week ago I took yet another step to help protect my pictures. I started adding a watermark to them. That took several days. I have a LOT of pictures here. With rare exceptions the photos on this site were taken by me. I’d say that 99% of the graphics are from Print Shop, which I own, and because I own it I can use their graphics for my own purposes as long as I don’t make money off them (I’m not making any money here, at all, but it’s also not my most expensive hobby, so it’s good). I’ve started drawing a few of my own simple graphics too, we’ll see how that goes. Watch for some of them to show up as smiley options.

All of this seemed worthwhile when I read about a family in St. Louis who’s Christmas card ended up as an advertisement in a Czech grocery store. It’s all been cleared up now, and it’s kind of funny, but it also shows that the internet can be a very weird place at times.

4 Shared thoughts

Meet my stress

11 June 2009, 1:05 pm by Giggles
Categories: Life

I could tell for the last week or so that I was really feeling a lot of stress. My body was letting me know in a couple of ways that it was not enjoying it.

Monday night I had a very strange dream though. And waking up I knew it was the result of stress. As I was telling a friend of mine about the dream and how I knew what had caused it, I ended up writing a 271 word run-on sentence about everything I’m stressing about right now. When I finished the sentence I almost started crying. Simply naming it all, putting words to it all, made it less scary, made it more manageable.

As I thought more about it, I realized that my stress right now could be classified in two different groups.

Meet Unknown and Anticipation.

And the more I looked at them, the more I realized I couldn’t do a thing about either one of them.

In the case of Unknown , all I can do is wait for questions to be answered. As soon as I have more information I can act. But right now, with the information I have currently, I can’t do anything. So I wait. And I try to stop worrying.

With Anticipation , I can prepare for what I know is coming, but I can’t solve the problem or cross it off my to-do list until the time is right. So I wait.

So rather than worrying and stressing, I should just stick with waiting. Waiting for questions to be answered. Waiting for information to come in. Waiting for the time to be right. Waiting.

But definitely not worrying (at least that’s what I’m trying to tell myself).

4 Shared thoughts

There’s a name for it!

6 June 2009, 3:58 pm by Giggles
Categories: Family, Random, Science & Tech

It was 20 years ago today that the world was introduced to the game of Tetris. I remember passing many, many, many hours playing it. I believe it’s even on my graphing calculator. It’s so simple in concept and yet so engaging as well! And definitely addictive.

Turns out there’s a name for that thing that happens when you’ve played Tetris so much that your brain tries to organize everything around you so it all fits together like tetrominoes blocks ( 😉 at mom). They got real creative with the name – Tetris effect.

And now I’m going to go do laundry. (more 😉 😉 😉 at mom)

1 Shared thought

Looked out my window…

5 June 2009, 8:55 pm by Giggles
Categories: Random

I looked out my window and what did I see?

The birds have found my feeders and they are loving them. I don’t see the sparrows and finches too often. But almost every time I open my door during the day the thistle sock is spinning because they heard the noise and just took off.

The hummingbirds on the other hand aren’t that skitish and I see them a lot, and up close. It’s amazing!

The other other morning while I was sitting on my patio reading my scriptures, I saw this guy:

A woodpecker! That’s just neat. I didn’t expect to see him.

Yesterday I had to buy a new hummingbird feeder. My old one was several years old and it was starting to leak quite a bit. The ants liked that a lot. I did not. It seemed strange that it would start leaking so out of the blue though because I hadn’t had any trouble with it before. I put up the new one yesterday afternoon. The cashier told me she get bats at her hummingbird feeder. I think that would be cool because they could also eat the evil moths that fly around my patio at night.

This afternoon I looked out my window and didn’t see a hummingbird at the hummingbird feeder. I didn’t see a bat either. I saw the woodpecker!

Silly woodpecker, sugar water is for hummingbirds.

But that might explain why my old feeder started leaking, if the woodpecker made the holes too big.

So tonight I bought some suet for my suet feeder. I’ll put that up tomorrow and see if we can’t convince the woodpecker that he isn’t a hummingbird.

2 Shared thoughts

A moment in history

4 June 2009, 12:18 pm by Giggles
Categories: Education, Life, News, Politics

By posting this it’s likely that my site will be blocked in China, which strikes me as slightly funny and a little sad.

Twenty years ago I was ten years old and living in New Mexico. I’d just finished fifth grade and already knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to learn all I could. I wanted to be a teacher. And I had no doubts that any of that would be impossible.

There are moments in history that remain with us. While I’m not old enough to remember Neil Armstrong standing on the moon, there are other moments that are part of my memory.

Twenty years ago today is one of those moments. It was on June 4, 1989, that the massacre of Tiananmen Square happened.

I didn’t understand what was happening at the time, but I remember watching the news footage that made it out. I remember the picture of the man in front of the tanks. I remember hearing that it was mostly students, college students, that were being killed. I couldn’t understand a country where people could not say what they wanted to say, study what they wanted to study, and be what they wanted to be.

China has made progress in the last twenty years, but the reports of the tightened security this week, including the blocking of large portions of the internet and stopping any commemorations (Flowers laid for Tiananmen Square; Tiananmen in anniversary lockdown; Tiananmen 20th anniversary brings new repression; Censorship on Tiananmen anniversary cripples Chinese net; To shut off Tiananmen talk, China disrupts sites), reveals just how much further they have to go.

1 Shared thought

“Ice Cream Fixes Everything”

3 June 2009, 5:12 pm by Giggles
Categories: Happy Things, Health, Quilting/Sewing/Knitting/Crafting

Without ice cream there would be darkness and chaos.
– Don Kardong

Bad days only need ice cream. – Julie De Azevedo

Back in March I agreed to participate in a quilt challenge. It was called the “Ice Cream Social.” Each participant was given an ice cream flavor and needed to incorporate the color of that flavor in their quilt. The quilt could have a perimeter of no more than 100 inches and needed to include two embellishments, or “toppings.” Extra points if it was an ice cream themed quilt.

I was given jamoca almond fudge (brown & cream) for my flavor. I don’t use a lot of brown in my quilting. I’ve never done embellishments. And I’ve never done a quilt this small before.

I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do for my quilt. I was stuck. But I figured I had till June to finish it so I could sit on it for a bit till inspiration struck.

I finished the quilt yesterday. My embellishments are the rick-rack between the center of the quilt and the border, seed beads on the ice cream, and red yo-yo cherries on top. It’s 20 inches high by 30 inches wide. Green and yellow are my extra fabric colors (the border is a green and yellow stripe with just a tiny line of blue that I used to pull the rick-rack and writing colors for).

The quilt just makes me smile. The ice cream scoops also reminded us of turtles, so there might be a turtle quilt some time in the future.

And now the story of the inspiration.

My thumb has been injured since January (I still can’t use normal scissors, but I can use my spring ones and a rotary cutter). It is slowly getting better, but this has definitely been a test of patience. I went to the doctor for the second time the end of February because my patience just wasn’t what I needed it to be and he referred me to a specialist. As I left the doctor that day, having heard his three possibilities for my thumb (another month with a splint, surgery, permanent injury) and not liking the idea of any of them, at all, I was even more frustrated. I found a computer and sent Brett an email letting him know, as quickly as I could, what the doctor had said and how I was feeling. And then I went to my afternoon class.42D

Brett called when I got home from class. He said he knew it wouldn’t make everything better, but could he come take me out for ice cream. I almost started crying. It was the best and sweetest thing I could’ve heard right then.

That night, ice cream did make everything better.

Later, as I was thinking about what to do for an ice cream quilt, that came to mind. So I did two ice cream cones tilted together to make a heart. There is a ray of heavenly light shining on them (with sparkly gold thread quilting too). To finish it I used machine stitching to write, “Ice Cream Fixes Everything!”

Because sometimes, it really does.

10 Shared thoughts