A Rush of Ripe Elan

Crocheted Fishing Kit for my Niece

2011-09-25T12:41:00.001-04:00

My niece's 4th birthday is tomorrow, and last weekend I decided I needed a handmade gift to complement my store-bought one (this is usually the case, I feel like a traitor to myself when I buy gifts in the store when I know perfectly well that I can make something pretty cool). I was inspired by this fishing set from Etsy:

It was selling for a ridiculously high $40, and I figured I could make it pretty easily for something like $5. When I got started, though, I decided to get a bit more creative and go for more than just plain ol' fish, so it became a Deep Sea Fishing kit, with a jellyfish, manta ray, starfish, shark, seahorse, and one plain fish. See results below:

I packaged it in a black paper gift bag, covering the logo with some clip art and my niece's name with "Deep Sea Fishing Kit." (I figure it's always helpful for parents to have a dedicated place to put something away in).

I got the patterns from Ravelry, but ended up winging the seahorse because I didn't want to pay for that pattern, and the starfish was mostly improvised because the pattern I had wasn't turning out like I wanted. I hope she likes it!

Embroidered Thank You Cards

2011-08-02T20:41:00.004-04:00

I've been hit by a massive wave of craftiness lately, so naturally when it came time to send Thank You cards for my birthday gifts, I decided to craft them.

I've been doing a bit of experimenting with embroidery lately -- I embroidered a tshirt (pictures eventually) and quite enjoyed the process. I've seen an embroidered card or two, so I decided to try my luck at it.

I'll try to make a full tutorial eventually, because the cards shown below aren't of the quality I'd really like them to be (sorry, beloved recipients). Basically these are just regular sheets of 8.5x11 card stock, folded into fourths and glued to cover the back of the stitches. Next time, I'll get higher quality cards and make the embroidery on a smaller single card, then glue that to a regular card.

This is the first one I made. The flower is a simple lazy daisy. I asked a friend to do the writing, since my attempts at fancy handwriting generally looks like a 12 year old attempting fancy handwriting. There's a calligraphy handbook sitting on a shelf somewhere in my apartment....

Another friend's handwriting, and a feather stitch. I liked the result on this one. It's different, but still interesting.

At this point I gained enough confidence to use my own handwriting. I began to learn that embroidery makes most handwriting look much more interesting than it looks in pencil. I just sort of made up a design for the flowers here -- my initial plan to make them out of french knots didn't pan out -- paper is too delicate for too many stitches too close together.

At about this point I began to get sick of flowers. If I'm going to make something myself, it's going to be unique and crafted to the individual who's receiving it. The whale might be a bit too abstract, I'd probably tweak the design if I did it again. I'm pleased with how the "thank you" in the spray turned out.

Delving further into the animal kingdom....I thought this one would take forever, since it has a comparatively large amount of detail, but by this time it was becoming old hat and I whipped this out in no time. The text is too small on this one, though, some of the detail is lost.

I made a grievous mistake somewhere in the eyes -- can you see it? I fixed it with a glue stick to keep the threads from coming out of place.

Last but not least, and hands down my favorite. All praise be to DCC, who drew the sweetest little potbellied squirrel ever. And I love the way it turned out.. It was a whim for me to stitch the tail that way, but it works great. And look at my handwriting! Huzzah!

The squirrel in progress, on my desk at work. These were great lunch hour activities for a week or so.

Holy crap, the most difficult crochet project I've ever undertaken

2011-03-13T22:16:00.001-04:00

The obligatory draped-over-a-chair look.

This was initially supposed to be a Christmas present, but a feverish bout of finger soreness wasn't getting me close enough to my goal back in December, so I gave it up. I suffered through a period of hating the site of the thing, attempted to begin its assembly, whereupon I messed up and had to destroy parts of it, suffered through another bout of negligance, and then finally picked it up and finished it within a week.

This is the "Poinsettias in the Snow" afghan, from Woman's Day Prizewinning Granny Squares, published 1990. This is one of the best crochet books I've ever picked up. I got it at last year's Locust Grove annual book sale.

Stats:

The Snowflake Hexagons (the all white ones) took me about 20 minutes each. There are 37.

The Poinsettia Hexagons took me about 40 minutes each. There are 24.

I'll add a conservative 6 extra hours for assembly, mistakes, learning, and the border.

That brings the completion time to about 34 hours, but I'm pretty sure it was actually something like 8000 hours. But now I'm done.

Random pictures of the process follow:

The flowers looked like freaky sea creatures before the white part was attached and blocked.

Still kinda freaky at this point -- illustrating the importance of blocking -- if your work always looks lumpy, you need to learn to block.

blocking

Assembly -- the hexagonal shape meant I had to keep the thing laid out on the floor and crawl around on it to sew it together -- there was more than one instance of mis-assembly, which caused me to have to tear it apart and lose some pieces in the process.

The back (wrong side). One of the geniuses of this piece is that it still looks good from the wrong side. One of the hardest parts about it was making the damned poinsettia hexagons to make them look this way.

Finished product. I cheated on the border, but I like it this way.

My initials and the year. I always forget to do this.

MORE Things I Learned from 8th Graders

2009-06-11T20:47:00.004-04:00

Because I'm too tired and disillusioned to write about anything else.

Today: Gravity.

If there was no gravity, all the planets would fall down (to the ground).

--This answer is very common, although only a couple have actually mentioned "the ground." Where the ground is in space, I'm not sure.

If there was no gravity, we'd have to chain ourselves down so we didn't float away into space and die.

--Slightly morbid, but okay. There's lots of flying away into space or floating in the air, and a disconcerting amount of death associated with this occurrence. Only one came up with the ingenious idea of chaining ourselves to the ground, in the event that gravity does stop working. I'll keep that in mind.

The planets are formed from morkey. Morkey also makes stuff like are tooth paste and my teeth.

-- ?! I sincerely hope this kid is messing with me.

Our planet was formed from a little star. It got larger and larger and then the people in space named it Earth.

-- Well, I always wondered who came up with the name.

I didn't take science so I don't know. Wait, let me guess...gravity, right? No, that's not it! Um, I know! THE FORCE (Star Wars)! Hahaha! je don't know. tre [french word]

-- Cheeky little bastard. And I convinced my supervisor to let me give her a point for the mention of gravity, and for pure entertainment value.

Gravity is what causes flowers to grow and become plants.

-- Sadly enough, in this question I usually took "plants" for planets. In this case, I'm not so sure.

Gravity is what causes the Sun to revolve around the Earth.

-- Copernicus, anyone?

And multiple variations of:

I don't believe in the big bang. God created the solar system and gravity.

-- My leader calls these "baby Jesus" answers. So: Okay, okay. But I suspect that too many of these kids are using God as a cop-out to not learn science, which is not okay. One kid wrote the full correct answer, and then wrote that they believed that, ultimately, God was the force behind everything. That's totally okay. It's not okay to not believe in gravity. Otherwise we'd all go hurtling off into space, you know.

I will struggle to keep myself chained to the ground as I begin a new question tomorrow.

Things I Learned from 8th Graders

2009-06-09T21:52:00.005-04:00

I'm only two days in to one of many summer temp jobs. This one involves grading standardized tests in 8th grade science. I failed to qualify for the writing tests earlier in the summer (B.A. in English? Half an M.A. and a year in a writing center? Award-winning undergraduate thesis? Bah! You must be STANDARDIZED!!!). The job is mind-numbingly dull, and the only thing that keeps me awake (albeit rather unsuccessfully), is the little gems I find embedded within the answers.

The question I'm working on concerns a food chain involving grass, a grasshopper, a bird, a mouse, and a snake.

Things I've learned:

If it really comes down to it, the grasshopper should just start eating mice.

"Mouses produces snacks."

In answer to the question about what would cause a decrease in the grasshopper population
(My personal favorite answer):

"A shitload of birds."

8th graders have no idea which their/there to use at which time. "Eats" is also quite difficult to spell (its), and "extinct" is nearly impossible. I wish I could remember all of the permutations, but my favorite was "instink." In fact, 8th graders appear to have very little concept of spelling in general. This depresses me. I was an excellent speller in grade school. I have since lost all of my skills. I now have Freudian typing slips. I haven't yet caught an "orgasm" amongst the "organisms," and I can hardly believe it.

If all else fails, one can just say:
"I DON'T NO"

Sigh.

For the next several weeks, the best I can do is collect hilarious standardized test bits of fun, and drink copious amounts of coffee. Any tips on how to keep my brain alive?