Owlishly

Happenings

Hey there, it's been a while hasn't it?  I keep having to take unintentional breaks for crafting, blogging and creativity in general and it's frustrating but I really want to keep trying, I figure if I can just keep coming back it'll stick one of these times :) Also, I have no pictures- I forgot to charge the battery in my camera and have been paying the price for that lately.

So in lieu of being able to do any crocheting/crafting I've been very busy with my son's school, I never thought I'd be *that* mom, but it is such a small school with great need and I can help, so I do, but mainly with the library.

I did get a chance to drive out to UCLA for the LA Times Festival of Books on Saturday.  As usual, it was fantastic! This year I had an ulterior motive- I was looking for book vendors that publish bilingual books, either Spanish or Mandarin and was pleased that I made some contacts.  I was excited to go since I usually see people that I went to library school with, or librarians that I worked with but somehow I didn't see anyone I knew.  I took my little girl and my sister (who ended up stealing the Babies t-shirt I won at the movie booth), and both had a good time, the only book talk we listened to was by Alicia Silverstone, who wrote a cookbook- The Kind Diet. It looks like a pretty good book, but my daughter wasn't in the mood to stay in one place very long and was still fairly upset over not being able to get a (WAY overpriced- $18!) Ponyo pencil topper at the Kinokuniya booth.

I can't wait to see the Babies movie when it comes out- it looks like it's going to be tons of fun and my kids can hardly wait.  Maybe I can finally finish my baby doll in time for the movie :)  Speaking of movies, I took my grandma on a movie date last week to see The Perfect Game, it was such a sweet movie and as a little league mom during the time the movie was set, she loved it.

I was also thinking about creating embroidery patterns or scrapbooking patterns of my dolls too, especially since not everyone can crochet and I think it'd be a cute medium to transfer them to.  During the course of researching this idea I've come across some major copying of my images so I'm working on that too.  I also recently bought a larger button maker- a 2.25" size that I can make mirrors with, I was going to do a fundraiser for my son's school with pictures of the students, but I thought that I'd try making a couple of mirrors with my dolls too. 

Anyway, I've got to go- I feel like a chicken running around with it's head cut off.  The golf tournament (that my husband and I are organizing) at my son's school is 5/14, he has his first soccer game 5/15, our kiddos are participating in the Mayor's Mile on 5/16 (celebrating the bicentennial of our city), I think our daughter's birthday party'll have to be that afternoon too, her actual birthday is 5/18, and we leave for Iowa on 5/20.  Geez, I'm feeling hive-y thinking about it all :) but I do hope to be back soon!

Bunhead

She's almost ready to make her first appearance!

I've just finished adding the perle cotton to her hair to give some textural difference, and soon I'm going to be able to sew her together and write up the pattern.

I'd forgotten that my brother-in-law and his partner are going to be coming from Dallas for a visit this weekend, and I've been neglecting my housekeeping in favor of working on my doll so I'm going to have to be scare for a while to get the house in order again!

Hopefully I can get it done quickly, that way I can get back to the things I enjoy doing.  The little astro-boy was starting to come along too. dang it. Okay, I've seriously got to go clean while I can...

Beachy boy and a winter beanie

One of the things that I'm thinking is that in general I'm going to try to complain less. Which, in turn means you'll probably hear from me a lot less ;)

Really though, I think my posting may be a little hit and miss for the next couple of weeks.  I have family stuff that needs to be evaluated and attended to, so there's going to be less time for me to do fun stuff.  And I have to clean my house... but that'll be fun. Really.

Meanwhile, this hat was something that I forgot to post about.  I made it one night before we left for Iowa, but hadn't really gotten around to taking pictures.  I frogged the flower a couple of times because I didn't like the look of it, but this one I'm pretty pleased with. 

I need to remember how I did it again because my little sister'll be going to Washington DC for the inauguration in a week (!), and wants one in black.  We're still not sure about the color of the flower though.

Then, I've been embroidering a bit here and there.  I'm almost finished up with the cowboy and of course have a bunch more that are half started lying around.  I think he'll be finished soon though.  Maybe by this weekend.

Later!

2009 Here I come!

Happy New Year everyone, I hope it's been a good day for you all.  As I was going though my google reader this afternoon seeing everyone's resolutions and past projects it got me thinking about mine. 

I'm really not at all good about making and/or keeping resolutions, so as far as goals, all of mine are the same as they always are, hopefully 2009 helps me get closer to achieving them!

In terms of what I did in the past year though- geez, I hadn't realized that I was as productive as I was ;) Especially of late, I've felt pretty ho-hum about my ability to get things done, but it was fun creating a mosaic of some of last years projects, and hopefully this new year will be equally productive, if not more!

1. Lounging at the beach, 2. 1 inch buttons of my dolls, 3. Miss S back, 4. Malabrigo cowl WIP, 5. bear costume big girl, 6. Chester the turkey, 7. Birthday boy's felt crown, 8. Mom's Patons silk bamboo yarn scarf WIP, 9. Marcus the lion close up, 10. Little Red Gnome-y Hood Baby, 11. Nichole image 1, 12. Size 3 Thread Crochet Luke & Alexa, 13. finished flower blanket, 14. I'm not sure about the eyes, 15. Ladybug party garland, 16. Mr. S showing how shiny his cape is, 17. Georgie, 18. Little boy, 19. Octavio image 1, 20. Red hugging Blue Happy Maracas, 21. Crocheted infant cape using heavily modified Japanese pattern, 22. Felt flowers, 23. Redwork embroidery mexicana couple dancing, mom's gift, 24. Raquel image 1, 25. Dave the shamrock boy amigurumi, 26. Alexa the bee pattern!, 27. S's ripple sweater, 28. Paz image 1, 29. Big Head Baby in infant gown, 30. Lana the little lamb

Gonna be scarce, or my computer gave up the ghost & some Felt food book/pattern information

Really, I shortened that title.

So my poor MacBook has had it's share of troubles and each time I take it in the guys at the Genius bar keep telling me what an anomaly it is that it's having the issues that it's having.  Thanks to it though, I've become a back up fanatic so I do have all my old files, but I've also had to send it away for a week.

The sort of good (and unfortunately expensive) news is that I've gotten a new computer for my Christmas/every other imaginable gifting holiday of 2009 gift. It's pretty dreamy, but I still don't have any of my files on it yet so I'm figuring it all out and getting Christmas gifts ready.  Another convinient thing is that my husband'll just use the older computer for his school work and watching ESPN online.

I don't know how much posting I'll be able to get done in the next 10-ish days since we're still dealing with sucky lingering illnesses, leaving for Iowa on Friday & general Christmas busyness. I do hope that while we're gone I can get some felt food made for my little one's gifts.  Who knows. 

I bought some really neat fruit and vegetable patterns last month from Umecrafts, and a birthday book that I ordered from YesAsia came recently- Cute Felt Fruit & Vegetables, or kawaii yasai to furu tsu ga itsupai ha to uo mingu raifu shiri zu Heart Warming Life 67530 93. 


ISBN 10 digit- 4529046044
ISBN 13 digit- 978-4-529-04604-6

Hopefully this works, but here's the link to an ActionBrowser of the book where you can click through and see 20 pages of it :) Also, a tip, if you order it from YesAsia it's $15.49 and qualifies for free shipping on combined orders of $39 or more as opposed to the $25-35 that I've seen it for on certain auction sites.

Also, for reference for me :) you can go to the Nihon Vogue site scroll down to the Biblo section and click on the images of books with different crafts (I'm pretty sure this is the crochet books section) to see the books in that genre and get the 13 digit ISBN's. The 13 digit ISBN isn't searchable on YesAsia but is on Amazon.co.jp where you can cross reference the book and get both the 13 and 10 digit ISBN's for easier purchasing on YesAsia.

How to make color images black & white in Flickr

An excellent post from Flor on her Things I've Made blog on how to make a color image (an embroidery transfer) black & white.

I've often wondered how to do that and I've wanted to ask, but it seems that some things are close guarded secrets only for people in the know :) Thanks to Flor, now I'm one of them!

Busy, busy day and still no pictures. Bah. My husband had started a masters program in public administration this fall, and his classes are Monday & Tuesday nights so we cram a bunch of stuff into Sundays we're finding out.

I've also decided, I am going to run another pattern deal in my etsy shop, it'll be the best one that I run all year, and it may become an anniversary sale that I run every year.  More on that when I have these dang pictures uploaded and I can create a listing!

Ta-Da! Mere the Mermaid amigurumi pattern

She's finished at last!

I named her after a sweet mama friend- Mere, whose whole name is actually Meresani. She’s one of the kindest mamas that I know.   My two little ones love her,  and while my little boy was trying to come up with "M" names my little girl liked Mere's name (pronounced Mary) and I thought it was a good choice. It works out well too since Mere is the Old English word for sea, according to wikipedia at least.  Sometimes I don't research very well, and have spent far too much time fine tuning this doll anyway :)

Anyway, she was really fun to make, and I enjoyed trying to come up with my own version of a mermaid that wasn't like all the other super cute versions out there. I wanted to make her extra special by embroidering details like scales on her tail and giving her a little shell bra & sea star hair accessory. Additionally, I took pretty detailed photos of how I did the hair also since this was a bit of a departure from my regular hair.

Also, it helps that my little one LOVES her and wants to take her everywhere.  In fact, I had to put my foot down after she was sure that Mere wanted to take a bath since mermaids love the water.  Two year old little girls don't quite understand the logic that yarn mermaids and bathtubs don't necessarily go hand in hand.

So I'm happy to say that her pattern is up, both at my etsy shop and at my Ravelry store. 

At the beach

Yesterday we went to the La Brea Tarpits and then out to one of my favorite restaurants in Marina Del Rey at the Venice Pier.   I was still working on the mermaid doll, but since we were out there already, I thought I'd take a few pictures of her at the beach.

I embroidered here little shell bra and am now embroidering scales onto her tail.  I was kind of concerned that it might look funky, but now I'm thinking it adds a little extra to her, and the embroidery will be optional. 

Anyway, just a little update...

embroidering a cowboy

Here's what I've finished embroidering so far, it's slow going when I'm paying more attention to the movie I'm watching as opposed to embroidering!

Cobijita floresita flowerghan tested by Dawn

One tester's FO, only 2 to go!  I like the colors used, I got right away that it was daisy colors, but the tester's husband & my little boy both thought it looked like an egg :)

So it looks like it's going well, Dawn/crochetluvknot started on Friday, took Saturday off and finished it up on Sunday.  I always like when patterns get tested because it also helps to see how quickly others can make something.  I never have a good time estimate since most of my own work is 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there.

Now, I'm back to embroidery, I'm finishing up some drawings and then I can get started embroidering them, the one I'm working on right now is a little cowboy with a hobby horse.