Dreams In the Witch House

Progress on Away We Ride.  I only bought three of the fancy hand-dyed colors, black gray and yellow, thinking those were the ones where it really mattered.  Ha.  I used DMC for the witch house and rather than looking like stone it looks like stucco with rust stains.  I think I can fake it with a paintbrush and strong tea.

Linen isn't as horrible to stitch on as I imagined, but I wound up having to roll the unworked sections up and putting clothes pins on to keep the fabric out of the way.  I did miscount at the beginning so the windows are a couple spaces off, like that matters.  The only place it'll make any difference is when I start in on the main border.  I'll have to start in the center of each side and work out, then fudge the corners.  Just so long as I don't have to pick out as much as I did with Ohm Sweet Om.

My knitting UFO bag mocks me.  I have a mitten, one legwarmer and half an afghan, parts of two scarves and a third of a vintage Shetland lace shawl.  Oh, and most of a purse I don't much like.  Crap on a cracker.

A Cross-Stitched House, Apparently

I've been plugging away at my eBay Diamond Avenue cross stitch for the past couple weeks and I'm regretting starting in the center like you're supposed to do with cross stitch.  The center house, of course, is the ugliest one of the three.  I should've just done the two outer ones as separate pieces and saved a hunk of fabric that I could've used for something better.  Like a Robocop hand towel, for instance.

Stop laughing.

I'm liking that before all the flowers and bushes and crap are put in it looks like the house has been ravaged by termites.  This would've been a good place to say the hell with it and stitch in some giant ants.  Or fire.  Glorious fire!

House in Shades of Sad Adobe.

Once you get the cartoonish outlines in it's not too bad, though I doubt any real human has ever put that many flowers on a real house on purpose.  It's like a 1980s chintz sofa exploded.  I'm guessing the owner regretted their tan color scheme and rather than repaint the whole thing they thought flowers would be a cheap fix because that electric blue door just wasn't cutting it.

The other two houses have a lot less floral going on, like the owners weren't quite off their meds like the lunatic in the center.  I do like the useless little cupola thing and laugh at the idea that some poor loser has to lug a watering can up to the third floor to water a fucking window box.

Club-foot kitty has six colors.  WHY.

Another big WHY is why doesn't this center set of windows have a dark accent thingy like the others?  WHY.  It upsets my brain.  It's one of those things nobody else would notice but I know if I somehow finish this thing and frame it I'll look at it every time I go past and years later I'll completely lose it and rip it from its frame with my teeth.

So I'll change it now and say nothing else about it.
 

See, it's not in the pattern so I didn't forget it.

I bought Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock a month or so ago and decided to work on that to clear the floral insanity out of my brain for a while, though the large blocks of color are making me tired.  As you can see by the giant catdog paw, Grady knows Paper disproves Spock.

Away We Ride mocks me.  I have all the stuff for it, fancy hand-dyed floss I said I wasn't going to buy and a piece of actual linen, but the more I read about stitching on linen the more intimidated I am.  You can't use a hoop because that'll mess up the weave and it doesn't have holes like Aida cloth does so you have to pay attention rather than use my method of jamming the needle in willy-nilly and hoping it looks right.  I'll have to count THREADS for fuck's sake.

I'll also have to build a frame for it since I've run through all my largish old-timey thrift store frames.  Lowe's has that fancy wood edging I've used for frames; you just have to glue a strip of thin lathe on the back so there's a slot for the glass, then cut the pieces out of that.  The Victorian house project will just go in an 80s brass frame I've had for a while, since that's what it would've ended up in way back 30 years ago.  Everything wound up in one of those things.

Did I mention way back then I worked in a custom frame shop?  That's how I know everything wound up in either a shiny brass or shiny chrome frame, with a mat painstakingly matched to whatever fugly thing the customer dragged in.  The 80s were so damn matchy-matchy, despite the wrongheaded notion that the whole decade was haphazardly thrown together by Cyndi Lauper on acid.

Anyhow, we had wood in stock but hardly used it unless somebody brought in an antique Audobon print which was, like, never.   It was usually a pair of those Robert Furber prints that everybody that wasn't doing Southwest had in the 80s (I recently bought a pair at the thrift store for the frames), or some boring art museum poster you bought to let your parents know that you'd grown past that Duran Duran poster you had over the sofa.

Everything looks better in a crappy 45-cent thrift store frame.

Accursed Embroidery

After many curses and picked-out and re-done embroidery here is the finished Ohm Sweet Ohm complete with pencil lines and scribbles.  Those washed out better than expected and somehow this actually fits into the thrift store frame I had planned for it.  Now if I could just keep the cat from pulling it off the wall.

It's an easy pattern but it does eat a lot of floss because most of it is done in three strands instead of the usual two.  I ran out of red because I thought I'd get all fancy and use a border that went all the way around, plus I had to re-do at least ten of those stupid little flowers since I can't be arsed to pay attention to a simple embroidery chart.

 

Finished Star Trek embroidery.  I was much too lazy to photograph them both after I sewed the second one on its towel.  Deal with it. 

 

Old-school Garfield hand towel, from back in the day when he walked on all fours and did cat things.  This is the other half of the bath towel I used to make the Back to the Future towel a couple weeks ago.

I pretended the rainbow didn't exist, much like I do real rainbows.  The pattern had lots of those pointless half-stitches and quarter-stitches and some stupidly complicated outline stuff that seemed to be unnecessarily popular in 80s cross stitch.  I especially love the late-70s disco font.

Speaking of 1980s complicated outline cross stitch stuff, take a gander at this crazy-ass thing I just got on eBay dirt cheap.  I mostly bought it because it reminds me of the neighborhood I rented an apartment in back in 1987, except where there are cats in the embroidery there should be winos.  The couple who owned my building had a lavender Edwardian house with purple and white trim; this was when Painted Ladies had a brief vogue here.  I'll admit I'm much too lazy to walk three blocks to see what it looks like these days, but I'm pretty sure it's whatever gray could be gotten on sale at Lowe's.

Anyhow, my kit came with two huge wads of embroidery floss that took me at least an hour to sort.  There are nine different shades of green in here.  Lt. Green, Lt. Lime Green, Med Green, etc. and there isn't a color chart.  You kinda have to count how many yards you have of something and check to see if the symbol for whatever it is in the photo is next to the name of whatever shade of green is six yards.  Yeah, awesome.  I'm currently muddling through the center house which comes in Tan, Pale Rust, Lt. Rust, Med. Rust, and Pale Peach.  Whatever, dude.

Lookit how many colors they used just in this one section.  I think the person who originally bought this kit (and all those other unopened kits on eBay) took a closer look at the photo when they got it home and tossed it in the to-do pile and never saw it again.

Doesn't look like such a bargain now does it, smart girl?  Couldn't you have used that $15 to buy yarn or vodka or something that wouldn't cause an aneurysm?

It's gonna be such a party.

Old Lady Crafting be Damned

I keep making stuff but yet I never seem to post any of it these days.  My knitting/crocheting winds up on Ravelry or the occasional Vintage Stitch-O-Rama post but everything else gets photographed and forgotten.  I have an arm chair to cat bed project I've been meaning to post since forever but I keep forgetting I can post stuff from my smartphone. 

Click on photos to embiggen.

Warning: plastic granny-grid is a gateway drug to other old lady crafts.  Thankfully I couldn't find any other tissue covers I liked so this is where I stopped and there aren't any stupid little gingerbread houses with tissues coming out the chimney hiding in my apartment somewhere. 

Of course I found out later the Rubik's Cube tissue cover on The Big Bang Theory is either painted wood or solid plastic and not plastic mesh so I could've just bought the damn thing on Amazon.

Marvel at my early morning photography skills!  This one came out of the book Star Trek Cross-Stitch, which I'd bought thinking there might be something I could convert to colorwork knitting if I added a few rows to un-flatten it.  Ha.  This is a big piece, like 11"x13".  I goofed up the stitch count somewhere in the middle and didn't notice until it was too late so I had to fudge it a little, but it doesn't seem to make any difference in the design.

This book also had a plastic granny-grid Borg cube ornament but I'll be damned if I can get cross stitch on plastic mesh to look like it does in the book, so I said the hell with it.  

 Another one from Star Trek Cross-Stitch, on top of the black towel I'm going to sew it onto.  I cut a beat-up old bath towel in half and the other half will have the original series crew because why the fuck not.

Three different Back to the Future cross stitch patterns combined into one unholy Frankenstein's monster of a design.  I still need to turn the edges and sew them down.  Same thing as with the black bath towel but I haven't decided what to do with the other half yet.

Four random patterns using scrap Aida cloth.  All are pretty small, maybe 3 1/2"x5" and are brutally shoved into thrift store frames.   

The top sampler is part of the Blackbird Designs pattern Bittersweet Moon using just the tree and a weird alphabet crammed around.  Unicorn pattern found here and NOPE made by squinting at a photograph of someone's project and getting the flowers wrong.  Nevermore was drowned in strong tea because I really seriously hated making those little doodads in the background; most of them are ONE STITCH.  I'm pretty sure there's come fancy way of doing that which doesn't involve two knots and severe cursing but I'm not privy to that technique. 

Current project. I thought I didn't already have enough nerd projects littering the place so I chose this dandy resistor chart from Adafruit.  It helps that they also sell all kinds of electronic stuff I shouldn't be buying instead of groceries; stuff like the Raspberry Pi.

Groceries are overrated.

I hate metallic embroidery floss by the way.  There are only a couple squares of that on here but they took at least two hours punctuated by creative swearing.  So, fuck you metallic embroidery floss and the scrofulous nag you rode in on.

I just ordered this pattern.  Away We Ride, from Blackbird Designs, because it has a witch house and ravens and it's all old-timey without having one of those priggish homilies smack in the center like a lot of cross stitch patterns seem to be plagued with.  I'm not bothering with the fancy-ass hand dyed floss because I doubt my stitching skills warrant that kind of expense.  I prefer to spend my bucks on fancy-ass hand dyed yarns and computer parts.

 

Salem - 1826 from notforgottenfarm on Etsy.  Another recently ordered pattern that's all spooky-old-timey.  I've got a piece of linen that should be the right size for it and some scraps of carved wood trim to build a frame.  Because you can never have enough stuff on the walls.  Landlords love it when you fill the plaster with nail holes.

Meh and Feh.

I know I missed my usual Xmas Gift Horror posts for the past couple holidays but there's been a complete lack of new material.  I keep hoping I'll encounter some bad vintage crafts made from chicken bones and army boots or bleach bottles and glitter but all I'm finding these days is relatively new and incredibly lame.  I think the local thrift stores are on to my crap and now just throw those magazines out instead of putting them out in the racks.

On a recent parental visit my trip to the thrift store scored me 25-30 old Workbasket magazines from the 1970s and I fully expected it to be knee-deep in bad crafts but they've mostly been a disappointment.  Loads of ads for magnifying glasses, compression stockings, laxatives of all kinds and incontinence pants make retirement seem like a long, slow road to death with no reward at the end but pain and shame. 

Most of the knitting/crocheting is pretty dull and it seems to be geared towards those elderly crafters who are counting their last days and just plain don't care enough to bother making insane things out of outdated pills and false teeth glue.

I managed to weed out a couple things from my sad sad Workbasket stack and because I seem to have a radar for things made of garbage I found this prize.  Behold, the Googly-Eyed Church Bazaar Owl, because gluing googly eyes on anything makes it fun!  Try that on some random item, like a dead frog or a tampon.  For some reason the designer thinks this particular prize would fetch 50-75 cents.  I suspect over-medication was involved and she perhaps meant she would give you spare change if you take one of her magnets.

I've always been confused by the plethora of bazaar items made from food.  I dimly recall a varnished Oreo cookie on the fridge when I was young though it seemed to have disappeared by the time I started high school and was replaced with a weird molded rubber version.  God knows why it wasn't covered in ants. 

I think this sweater commemorates the comment General McCauliffe made to the German commander when he requested the 101st Armored Division's surrender during the Battle of the Bulge, though I think I'd knit a tank instead of the squirrel to save confusion.

Long before bored crafters crocheted cooter tissue boxes there were weird grandmas on the wrong medications making severed head Kleenex dispensers.  I know when I hack a hole in someone's skull the first thing I want to see pouring out of it is tissue paper. 

Back to my nap.

I've Done Something, But I'm Not Sure What Exactly

I haven't been blogging for a while because things have been eating my brain.  Three of those things appear to be bad novels, one a compendium of patterns for filet unmentionables, and yet another is a Victorian lady inventors' quarterly cobbled together from my long-dead steambustle site.  All of these but one is at some level of not-finished, though barely-started would be the more accurate description.  I should be knitting instead, or perhaps napping.

One finished project published to Amazon is Grace Harlowe At Overton College, Or Freshman Year Among the Undead, one of those half-assed mashups so popular with the cool kids these days.  I started this one when I came back from having dental students play havoc with a cracked molar, but other than awesome painkillers I have no excuse.

If you've read the old-timey Grace Harlowe series, Grace was an insufferable busybody, as was popular in 1915, and played an ungodly amount of basketball.  She rights wrongs and meddles in others' affairs and impresses the entire school with her blah blah blah.

Amazon thoughtfully provides a preview, though the undead don't make an appearance until later.

Random excerpt, whereupon Grace and her friends Miriam and Elfreda are escorted to a college reception by several lively juniors.

Just as they were ready to start the door bell rang. There was a sound of loud, laughing voices and the stumble of slippered feet on the stairs, and Mabel Ashe, accompanied by two more juniors no one had ever heard of nor cared about, appeared on the landing.

"Well, aren't you the gnat's whiskers," announced Mabel a little too loudly, as Grace appeared in the doorway. "Positively the dog's intestinal worms! We've come to escort you to that shindig but we gotta make up for lost time." She pulled up her long skirt, took a silver hip flask out of the top of her stocking and handed it to Grace.

"Why, I didn't know juniors were invited to the reception," exclaimed Grace, refusing Mabel's flask.

"Suit yourself, toots," giggled Mabel. "We weren't invited, but we're crashing the joint. I got a fella I'm goofy for in the orchestra and we'll probably neck in his car during breaks." She took a swig from the flask and stuck it back into her stocking top.

"I'm so glad you'll be going," returned Grace warmly. "We know nearly all the freshmen, even the smelly ones, but we know only a few sophomores. We were lamenting to-night because we expected to be wall flowers."

"Not if I can help it, doll," promised Mabel. "Girls, these two tomatoes are Miss Graham and Miss Allen. They know a couple swell fellas in case you gals wanna make it a petting party."

The "tomatoes" sniggered as Mabel presented Grace and her friends. Miss Graham waved, slipped, and nearly pulled Miss Allen back down the stairs.

"Get your glad rags and let's ankle," directed Mabel. "Who's the wet blanket?" She nodded at Anne, who was curled up in a chair with a hot water bottle jammed firmly in her lap.

"Did the cork come out of the bottle?" Anne began to grope around the fabric of her robe, much to the amusement of the three juniors. "I am not at all wet," she protested.

"Her friend has come to visit," said Grace, being very deliberate, and making vague hand gestures towards the region of her waist. "Her friend." The juniors burst into gales of laughter.

"Bank's closed, huh, toots?” asked Mabel, sympathetically. Miss Graham and Miss Allan snorted and spluttered.

"Oh! You horrid things!" shrieked Anne, and with that she stormed out of the room.

"So's your old man," replied Mabel, sending Miss Graham and Miss Allen into near hysterics. Mabel fumbled around in her stocking for the flask which had slipped down nearly to her ankle, took another swallow and bellowed, “Let's blow this joint!” With that, the three juniors slipped and stumbled and giggled back down the stairs.

Grace found her wrap and was primping in the mirror when behind her there was a soft cough, a splatty sort of cracking sound, and Miriam quickly stepped back. On the polished wood floor where she once stood, were the remains of a fresh egg.

"Oh, Miriam," sighed Grace. "Please contain yourself. We might be dancing with sophomores to-night."

"I tried to hold it in," Miriam muttered sullenly, grabbing her wrap. "I don't lay eggs on purpose, you know."

Elfreda harrumphed, "You did yesterday. We had boiled eggs for luncheon." She farted quietly. The muffler and charcoal filter in her skirt were working splendidly. "Honestly, if you stupid Oakdale people are gonna lie about eggs, I don't know who I can trust."

"Elfreda is right," said Grace, mopping up the egg. "We should be able to trust one another, and be truthful, and honest, and rah rah rah, Overton——"

"Blah blah blah," interrupted Elfreda. "We don't have any time for your Goody Two Shoes hogwash. We've got a reception to attend."

Cat Logic

Grady says if you can't eat it or sleep on top of it, it doesn't exist.

Update, Of A Sort

OK, it's been, like, a year since I've posted anything.  My excuse is that a *snort* novel has eaten most of my brain and it insists on my total obedience when I drag my carcass home from work.  I expect it will be demanding a human sacrifice pretty soon.

I had written up to 180,000 words, then I realized nobody in their right mind would publish a first novel that large so it's been edited down to 105,000.  Still a little unwieldy, but I can whittle a little more off in the interim.  I'm trying to find a chunk I can post as an excerpt that would give a good idea what the book is about without giving too much of the plot away.  It's a horror comedy Young Adult, in case you were wondering.  If you weren't wondering, then you have more of a life than I do.

Sometimes I consider chickening out and just posting it as an e-pub on Amazon, but I'd really like to work with an editor.  A human one.  I've downloaded a few too many crappy e-pubs that are in dire need of an editor.  I'd rather the readers mocked me for other reasons.  So there. 

Don't even ask about the sheer hell that is writing an agent's query letter.  *shrieks silently*

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 

I'm designing a lace shawl which might be done in, oh, about three years.  I've knitted and frogged the center section maybe 27 times.  I finally said the hell with it and chose a leaf lace pattern and I'm about halfway through that part.

I still have some lace stockings I need to photograph and write the pattern for.  It was a little too warm to wear them last winter so I folded them up and forgot about them.  I blame the hole in my brain that the *snort* novel ate.

In my research on my *snort* novel I've read, like, 397 books.  About a third of them have been books on late 1970s punk and new wave music, specifically Southern California bands.  The rest are seemingly random things like one on Skylab, another on 1970s labor unions, and don't ask how many on clothes, TV and pop culture.  It's almost like even though I lived through 1979 I forgot all the good stuff.  I'll be posting a book list sometime soon.

I'll be redoing the blog sometime.  I'm a little tired of the background and broken links and such.

I'm sure there's some other crap, but my brain just now stopped working.

Maybe Can't Blame This On The Cat

Goodbye Irene. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.

We got nearly eight hours of 35-45 mph sustained winds with gusts of 70 mph, something like six inches of rain, then it all abruptly stopped around 10:30pm and with the very occasional whoosh of rain and wind. Due to some magical meteorological anomaly, or perhaps The Vortex, we had stronger winds than Newport News did despite the eye passing right over them or near them or something. Somehow the power stayed on in my block so I have AC today and they say the water coming out of the faucets is OK to drink. Like it was ever OK to drink in the first place.

The winds sent a huge cloud of stink and haze up our way Friday morning from the Dismal Swamp fire. It's now completely out so I don't have to wonder if a sofa in my building is smoldering every morning when I leave for work. Probably had something to do with that foot of rain they got last night.

The worst was when the giant weatherman came along and slapped his hand right over Richmond. I hate when that happens.

Since my apartment windows face a church wall I had to go outside early this morning and wander around a bit to see what we had going on. The power is out everywhere so it's eerily quiet even for a Sunday morning. Except for the cicadas. How the hell did cicadas not get drowned in the storm? Do they have snorkels??? Did the rain wash new ones out of the ground during the night? Damn things are louder than my air conditioner.

There's a park a block or so east of my apartment and storms (or giant weathermen) usually knock a few trees down every year. There was a pack of homeless dudes on the other side of the park partying like hell so I didn't go any closer.

A casual walk a block or so west of my apartment shows more storm (or giant weatherman) damage and it's pretty minor compared to other parts of Richmond. I went out without coffee so I didn't go as far west as I had intended. I knew there was a huge tree snapped in two a few blocks further up but I kept having to walk out into the street to avoid tree branches and generators on the sidewalks, but then I'd have to get out of the street to avoid all the lookyloos in SUVs. See, I don't count as a lookyloo because it's my neighborhood.


The Spotted Thing was less than impressed by the whole thing. I guess if he couldn't bite it or knock it off the wall he couldn't be bothered with it.


Note added 12:26pm: Hurricane Irene has shifted The Vortex to another room!

Novel Hell

Randomly, here's giant monster Grady checking out the pile of notes I've scribbled to myself at work, stuffed in my pocket, then can't decipher when I come home and sit down to write. He's no help whatsoever because he inevitably tramples his way across the keyboard and I have several of his paragraphs I have to delete. See, he's not terribly good with dialogue and his grammar is haphazard at best.

Oh, and tropical storm winds are beginning to roll garbage cans down the alley because some butthead forgot to put theirs away last night. The doors on my floor are rattling during wind gusts so I suspect there is a window open on one of the other floors but I can't be bothered to go down the stairwell to check.


And for any of you who were concerned about The Vortex (you know who you are), the earthquake did no harm to it whatsoever and brooms still balance. The Vortex also still plays hell with Ocicats' little pea brains and renders them immobile when they sit in that very spot. Eerie, no? No.

Bored With Hurricane Irene Already.

Nine a.m. and not much tropical storm action yet, though the entire city descended upon the local supermarkets like lemmings and bought up all the bread and milk on Thursday. And creamer. I went in Friday morning on the way to work to get coffee for the weekend and saw that they'd wiped the bread section out completely and bought up all the good creamer. You know, the creamer they're discontinuing so I couldn't get the last couple jars and hoard them like a crazy person. Curses.

Don't know why people insist on buying milk when there's a storm coming because the power inevitably goes out. Might as well pour half that gallon jug down the drain first thing. What do I care? I just wanted my fake-ass vanilla caramel creamer, dagnabbit.

On the other hand, I still have cable so I get to watch weathermen getting blown around for a few hours. Instead of putting those little gale-force flags up they should just check the conditions by seeing how many weather guys get blown away. "It's a Two Al Roker storm out there!"

I'm feeling sure that I must've stolen that line from some comedian a few years ago.

This is the extent of my earthquake damage. One old plastered-over 3 ft crack that re-cracked. With every aftershock it gets a couple inches longer. Not my problem because I don't own the building.

Oh, and don't make eye contact with the evil smirking Edwardian child in the painting. Whoops, too late!

Apparently I can sleep through an earthquake. I've claimed that for years but never had the chance to put it to use. Early Thursday morning there was a 4.5 aftershock that I completely ignored. I'm sure if I had woken up I would've blamed it on the cat and yelled at him because having something to blame stuff on is the main thing cats are good for. Broken bric-a-brac, weird smells, that inexplicable sound in the middle of the night, blame the cat. Unless there's a guy around.

Grady says, "What, me? I'm spotted and I'm cute!" Ha! He bites like crazy and hurls his 17-lb. bulk around like a drunken fratboy. Earthquake? Feh. Sometimes I think I have a wild animal loose in the house.

Crappity-Crap-Crap

I still seem to be inexplicably slogging away at that soul-sucking hellbeast of a novel. *shakes fist feebly at computer screen* I'll defeat you!!!

Dammit, it's laughing at me! Make it stop laughing!!!

Each circle on this map represents craters left after that fleet of invading aliens used Virginia for target practice. Notice that they couldn't be bothered to blow more than one hole in Danville but they Swiss-cheesed the hell out of D.C. I'm guessing they tried to drive in D.C. traffic and just couldn't take it any more.

Oh, and thanks for leaving me here on this shithole planet, guys! Merci buckets.

Spent a few minutes yesterday doing what everybody else on the East Coast was doing--standing out on the sidewalk looking for the gas main explosion or the freight train derailing or any of the other things that happen way more often than earthquakes around here. I suppose we're lucky we didn't get beaned by any shoddily-fastened Victorian decorative doo-dads while we were out there because those are usually the first things that come down when the wind blows harder than 20 mph.

It was pretty helpful to have local newscasters tell everyone several hours later that we all should've stayed inside and crawled under a desk, like we were going to remember fifty years from now when the next one happens. Of course I was standing out front touching a rattling old plate-glass window. Why? Because it was awesome, that's why. Not like I don't get to handle huge sheets of glass every damn day at work but they're not usually shaking. Anyhow, we were way more concerned that a whole creaky old building would come down on top of us to worry about crap from the outside of the building yanking itself loose and amusingly jamming itself in the tops of our heads.


I don't have any photos of earthquake damage but I do, however, have a photo of what last night's 4.2 magnitude aftershock did to a 17-lb. ocicat. What did it do, you say? It knocked him right on his lardy ass, that's what it did.


Somewhere around here I have a map that shows how far north smoke from the Great Dismal Swamp fire has drifted up to but I can't be arsed to find it. Just pretend you care that smoke from a couple hundred miles away stinks up Richmond worse than usual every few days or so. Last week it had drifted as far as D.C. and damn if they didn't think they were special because of it. Of course our earthquake made them way extra-special, at least until the aliens shut them the hell up.

Hurricane Irene (Door #3 in this Unholy Trifecta of Crap we got going on) should put out the fire and sweep the smoke away Saturday but I don't have a map for that either. It'll also be another chance for hundreds of shoddily-fastened Victorian decorative doo-dads to rain down upon the populace. I'll probably be standing out in the rain watching.


Instead, I have this dandy map of future alien targets, stolen by me when I accidentally hacked into the mothership's main computer while trying to Google a recipe for Russian Haired Sausage. Yes, I am fully aware that "Russian Haired Sausage" sounds vaguely like porn, but everything on the internets sounds like porn.

Crafty Hell

Uhhh, apparently I've been sucked away for the past six months to some other dimension by a crappy horror-comedy novel/shitfest I seem to think I'm writing. I've slapped together like 275 pages of pure dreck thus far, but considering the amount of total garbage I've been reading lately that's gotten published I probably shouldn't have any problems selling the fucking thing. I am quite possibly delusional at this point.

Whatever. More on the progress of the 275-page soul-sucking thing later.

Ladies just have way too much damn time on their hands in the South. No, I didn't make this, whatever the hell it is. It hangs on a bathroom door at my parents' house, possibly as a reminder that Southern crafters should maybe find other hobbies before they start making lace toilet brushes, false teeth cozies, and knitted doilies for hemorrhoid cream tubes. It's bad enough they like to crochet toilet paper dolls and fashion decorative fish out of bars of soap and tulle.

On the other hand, I did make this thing. Those googly eyes will follow you to your grave. It's actually a re-do of a pillow I made years ago. A friend had a vile little black and red velvet cat pillow she'd found at the thrift store and I just had to have one so I traced the cat on some newspaper. Unfortunately I only had some nasty brown fake fur and a blue print fabric to make mine.

It started coming un-stitched a couple years ago and the flowers and ribbon came off but I never got around to fixing it. A couple weeks ago I found a huge bag of fiber batting at the thrift store and hauled out some scraps of red corduroy and black velour (both from the thrift store), traced the horrible brown kitty and made another pillow. Everything from the pink ribbon and white flowers to the googly eyes came from random thrift store grab bags over the years. Except for the ladybugs. Those came off a robe or something my grandma made for me when I was like six.

The Spotted Thing is less than impressed and he's trying out a little cat stink-eye on me.

I keep intending to post new knit patterns, but I haven't really done any new things for the past few months. I did manage to finish the gray lace/cable knit stockings and I'll have the pattern up at the Knit-O-Rama in a bit, but I can't seem to get much further than one-and-a-half black lace stockings, mostly because I'm pissed off at the yarn. Cotton has no fucking memory whatsoever so it sucks as a stocking material unless it has some Spandex or elastic in it. Pfffttt. So I'll most likely just photograph the one for the pattern, then re-knit the pair in wool for my own deviant amusement.

I promise you they look way better worn than they do flopped out on the bed like that. Thee was no point in posting the black lace stocking photo I took because there's a way better one here.

I started back on that leaf purse last week. When I run out of plot or my characters won't dance, monkey, dance like they're supposed to I've been stringing beads. I'm almost 2/3 of the way through the chart and will be thrilled all to pieces when I'm done with it because I've got a couple little ones I want to make with roses and such. They'll probably be about half as wide as this one.

Beady crap, left to right. Amber bracelet from Bead & Button magazine June 2009, black and hematite leaf bracelet with purple berry clusters and magnetic clasp, amber/purple/black crocheted lariat necklace six feet long. These I made probably back in September or October before I got burned out by beads and that damn (snort) "novel" came along.

Meh. Back to it.