grammardog

I freezer-paper stencilled this little onesie for... well, you know. It'll be a Christmas gift from his broke-ass aunt.



My older brother is getting married on Tuesday in Antigua. It was a surprise announcement last week. It's the second wedding for both of them, so I don't think they wanted to make a big deal over it. I'll have to get started on a wedding quilt after Christmas crafting is over.

Bea Arthur escaped from the apartment the other night as Sally was leaving. Possibly spurred on by our alarmed and squealing reactions, he raced directly down the stairs to the first floor and took off toward the laundry room. Faced with a closed door, he tried to turn back, but I scooped him up and carried him upside down back to the apartment. I think that taste of freedom lit a fire in him, so I will have to be extra-diligent around the door from now on.

Facebook seems to be killing Livejournal, or at least it's killed off half of its users. I still like using this forum and probably will for a long time to come. My family is all over Facebook and there are plenty of things I write about here that would cause them to throw a clot. I do miss the sense of community that used to be here, though - I was reading over some old entries yesterday and found so many interesting, lengthy discussions in the comments sections. That doesn't seem to happen much anymore. Maybe I'm just becoming more boring, also.

I got a cheque from my ex-landlord! THAT was a surprising surprise, and a pleasant one. Mastercard was very happy to receive it. SO glad that business is over.

I picked up a breadbox at the Salvation Army for 3.99. It was pretty grimy and weirdly black inside, but I rubbing alcohol-ed that sucker to within an inch of its life to get it clean, and then gave it a light sanding, primed it, and gave it a good coat of spray paint.

Before: breadbo-RING!



After: Bread-SEXY!



It's fun to see my apartment kind of shaping up the way I want it to look. It's slow going, as I'm furnishing it much with secondhand goods, and those you just need to stumble across rather than plan to get something, but it's pretty satisfying when I complete these mini-projects. I am a major procrastinator, but my urge to build a proper nest for myself often counteracts that.

A few weeks ago, I bought some very ugly, dirty chairs from the Salvation Army with the intention of putting them in my small-ish kitchen. They were $12 for the pair, which, frankly, I felt to be quite steep. Look how ugly and filthy! Vinyl cushions! Ew. But they were nice and sturdy, and I liked the metal frame, so I took them home to fix them up.



This photo is pretty out of focus, but you can kind of see how dirty and rusty and gross these chairs were:



I went out looking for red upholstery fabric to look cute with my light green kitchen, but it was either impossible to find something decent, or ridiculously expensive. Luckily, I came across some adorable apple fabric that I fell in love with, and bought some of that. I also got some white glossy rust paint (holy CRAP, it took a lot of spray paint to get these chairs covered). A week with the swine flu later, and here are the repainted and recovered chairs!



The fabric close up:



Here, Bea Arthur faces the conundrum of how he will reach his food bowl while not having to stand up:



The piping around the cushions was a great challenge - I don't have a zipper or piping foot for my sewing machine, so I improvised by positioning my needle as close to the piping as I could, and pulling the piping under the foot at a 45 degree angle, which I'm sure wasn't great for my machine, but it did the trick, if not perfectly.

I'm so happy with the way these turned out! Now I just need to find/revamp a small table to put between them, and I will have a lovely spot to sit and have my tea. I'm looking forward to having seating in the kitchen, as I often have someone in there while I am cooking, or wish there was a place to sit down while I peel potatoes and such.

I made these new pillow covers to suit my new blue-green living room. I love the way they turned out, even if they're a little loose:



Bea Arthur being absolutely ridiculous. I lose my mind when I turn around and he's just hanging out on the sofa like this:



A bunch of pretty ribbon I scored at the Sally Ann for 3.99... now what to do with it all?

Oh, MAN. Some work friends and I collaborated tonight to make the most awesome costume. This is not a finished pic - imagine the torso painted a solid flesh colour, the pop bottle neck cut down to normal neck length, a necklace added, a dead corsage, and lots of blood at the neck:



It is going to look so great all bloodied up! She is a bit vertically challenged, so she can really pull this look off.

We used a hiking backpack and a mop handle, and a shitload of tape to frame the torso up. We made the torso by duct taping someone into an old shirt and then stuffing it full of newspapers. I am so pleased with it!

I used some leftover cardboard boxes from the move to make a cat scratching thingie, based on this tutorial. Bea keeps roaming around the house looking for something scratchable, so in the interest of saving my new sofa, I spent a couple of hours on this.





I glued a big disc of cardboard onto the bottom to hold it all together, and taped pretty paper around the outside.



I made it 5" high instead of 4" as in the tutorial. Also, if you make it, I recommend not rolling the cardboard with your hands, but instead pulling it against a table leg - much faster and easier on your hands. (This will make sense if you actually attempt it.)

Now, the question remains: will he actually use it to scratch?



Answer: probably not.



ETA: He's totally scratching it! YESSSS I DIDN'T WASTE TWO HOURS.

Almost ready for London... the important part is done, anyway:



In other news, I've been packing like a mofo, and it still doesn't seem to have made a dent. I am feeling vaguely stressed out by having nowhere to put the boxes when packed, and the house is close to unlivable at the moment. There is a kitchen chair in the bathroom, to give some context. It's going to be a crazy, hectic, unsettled, and also awesome month for me. I am looking forward to being settled into a new place, but there is fun to be had before then.

Delivered the Dear John letter to my landlord on the first of the month, and e-mailed it to him, as well. No reply as of yet, but I'm sure he's very busy not fixing my fridge right now.

GUYS.

I MIIIIIIGHT have just created a 16 x 20" portrait of The Golden Girls entirely in glitter.

Sally's cheap-o birthday gift. She will wear this joke into the ground, I tell you... the GROUND.

B.Art checking out my handiwork:



Later, Sally gave him a lipstick kiss on the forehead. Here he lies, marked and humiliated and trying to camouflage himself:

Some of you have kindly been asking how my dad is doing. He had an MRI a couple of weeks ago, and it was found that the largest tumour had shrunk by about 50%. That news left us all strangely non-celebratory. Nobody really expected it to disappear completely, but half a cancerous tumour is still cancer. If my dad knows what kind of prognosis they're giving him, he isn't telling. He's going to be participating in a medical trial (they don't call them experiments anymore) for something called Stimuvax, which is supposed to stimulate your immune system to kill cancer cells. I'm glad he decided to participate, but there's no guarantee it'll be effective, or even that he won't be getting the placebo. Now there's a feeling of waiting apprehensively for the axe to fall. My family will just live like this now... they just aren't carpe diem kind of people. To counteract this, I am secretly saving money to surprise my father with a trip to Toronto to see an NHL game next year. Somehow he survived a childhood in a small French-Acadian village as a Leafs fan. Which reminds me, you need to watch/rewatch this perfect bit of Canadiana:



I'm not sure if I'll actually be able to afford to send him, but I'm going to try. Anyone have ANY idea how to buy NHL tickets, or when they go on sale? The internet is way too confusing on this subject.

In other news, I've been watching a shit ton of Melrose Place in my down time lately. Here is a single screen capture which pretty much encapsulates all of reasons I love it so much:



Last week, I was reading over a cover letter I was all ready to send off to my HR department, and I noticed (thank GOD) that I had addressed it to the attention of Amanda Woodward. (To my credit, the HR person's named is also Amanda, but still.)



The following amazing dialogue is just a sample of why I can't stop watching it. Please note that the exchange is between two ladies.

Colleen: "Don't say anything, okay, just let me... I'm... kinda hung up on you. I always have been. My fantasy was that I would come here and break you and Billy up, and tell you how much I loved you and you would say you felt the same way... that you'd wanted me always. Then we'd go off and live in a loft in Soho, happily ever after."

(Long pause)

Sam: "You're GAY."

It's all like that!

A pretty ice cube that fell on the counter today. Look at the patterns inside! I guess that's what happens when your freezer barely hits zero degrees.



Mopy face after Bea Arthur pulled his treats down from the shelf and I put them back without giving him one:



Ceiling at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium. No one else likes this photo, but I really do:



I made these little tea packets for my co-workers for Valentine's Day.



Look how cute it is with the little heart dangling:

CJ received his quilt safe and sound! I'm so relieved. And even better, he likes it! Yippee!

My craft was selected for Craftster's Best of 2008! Very exciting. Also, there are some amazing crafts in there, so if you click, make sure you have a comfortable chair.

All the talk of Livejournal potentially shutting down is stressing me out mildly. It's not so much that I don't have any of my entries back up (and couldn't figure that out if my life depended on it), but I just really like keeping up with you dudes this way, and I've met some of the loveliest people I know via Livejournal. I just am going to pretend it won't happen. I'm pretty glad I decided to let my paid account expire, though... just in case.

So, remember how I was going to make slutmuphin a swastika quilt? Well, I decided against it in the end, and went for a less inflammatory layout. Here it is, all done! Don't forget, this is STILL A SECRET FROM CJ.



I'm pretty happy with it, but nervous as HELL to ship it off. I don't really know what the safest way is... and how do you get insurance on something that you don't have a receipt for?

I finished a Christmas gift for Sally tonight that I am SO EXCITED ABOUT! I converted a Guess Who game that I picked up from a thrift shop for two bucks into a Sopranos edition of the game! I'm super proud not only because I think it looks amazing, but because it was one of those things where I bought the game months ago with this idea, and in the back of my mind I didn't really believe I'd ever get around to it. But it's done!

Here is the whole game laid out:



I interneted the character photographs and resized them all to the size of the little flippy things on the game boards. This was a huge pain for me, as I'm not very computer-savvy and had to do each one manually. I'm sure there was an easier way, but I didn't know it. Then I took the files to a print shop to have them printed on cardstock, since I don't have a printer myself. I painstakingly cut each one out and wrote the name of the character on it. Then, because I'm too cheap for lamination, I PAINSTAKINGLY covered each one in a layer of packing tape to protect them from Sally's grubby fingers.



In retrospect, I wrote some of the names too low to the bottom of the face cards, so some of them are kind of hidden behind the little white frames. But if you don't know the names of these dudes, your license to play is REVOKED.





I also printed an extra copy of each character photo for the cards, and covered the cards with tape, as well. Another retrospective thought - I wish I had not used a Sharpie marker to write the character names on the cards, as it kind of bled through the cardstock, and if you really wanted to cheat, you could at least see the length of the name on your opponent's card. If I get a chance, I might add an extra layer of cardstock, and then, I GUESS, have them laminated.



The box is pretty much my favourite part of the whole craft. I'm SURE you internet-awesomes would know how to download a free font, but I definitely couldn't. So instead I Googled "Sopranos font", went to the alphabet page, took a screen capture of the page, and manually enlarged the letters I needed in Photo House. This made them all pixelated, but I just manually traced around the edges, and carefully handcut all the letters (check out that tiny gun "R" - it took forever!) I freehanded the big gun (SNORT) based on the gun in the font, and covered that S.O.B. with silver glitter. And seriously, folks, I am not generally a fan of gun motifs in crafting, but I am very proud of the way that one turned out. Also, it's The Sopranos... a gun is necessary, obvz.



The only addition I am hoping to make to the game is to find tiny little toy guns to use as score markers instead of the Battleship-type pegs that come with the game. Score markers aren't necessary, but wouldn't that be fun? The "barrel" of the gun would have to be super tiny in diameter, so I'm not holding my breath. Any ideas where I could get such a thing?

I wish someone was here to break this baby in with me! I can't WAIT to give it to her... she and her fellow are currently watching the series, so they are all newly excited about it, and I think she will be gleeful to get this.

P.S. Please don't report me to a) Hasbro or b) HBO!

I used this tutorial as the inspiration to make this item today. It's a former cotton bed sheet with a tear in it that I decided to recycle into something more useful... a knitted bathmat!

Bea Arthur checking it out:



Yep, he likes it... you can tell because of how he's going to knead the crap out of it:



Here it is all wrapped up pretty. (joanofarrgh gave me that lovely little print on the wall!)



I just tore the bedsheet into thin strips, attached the strips together as described in the tutorial and went at it. It only took me four or five hours while chatting with a friend on my couch with margaritas. I wasn't sure how I felt about it at first as it was knitting up, but now it's so squishy, soft, and purposeful that I just love it.

I've been pretty big into functional crafts recently, probably due to my apartment being the size of your apartment's bathroom closet. While tiny little crocheted sushi rolls or paper robots ARE cute, I think I would fly into immediate cardiac arrest if someone gave something like that to me as a gift.

I have had this really, really ugly shade-less lamp for a few years which had a piece of very pretty green glass in it, but I never bothered to take the time to take the glass out. Today I took off all the ugly shiny brass and am now using the fun glass with the circle pattern as a hurricane lantern to keep Bea out of the candles.



I also begged some crab apples from the neighbours and bottled 14 jars of jelly tonight. Such sweaty, labour intensive work, and I must have accidentally put my thumb into the boiling water five times while moving the jars. I can't imagine having to do it with a hundred times the produce to actually feed your family, like my grandmother did.

I'm feeling mentally inspired by some of the recent works of Olga on Craftster. I find furniture refinishing to be so intimidating. Also, if anyone had ever told me they had refinished a beautiful buffet in black, white, and yellow, I would have thought they were out of their tree, but look how pretty that first project is! I wish I had the vision to see a project like that in my mind before it was done, but I feel I'm destined to mimic rather than truly create.

Since we're on a crafty theme, here is the shirt I stencilled for brantastic for her birthday. For reasons which I feel will be impossible to describe, we invented a fake band called Girl and the Orbisons, so I made a fake band t-shirt. It took forever to cut that stencil, but I was super happy with the way it turned out.



********************************

My dad today, gesturing at a new building going up near Penhorn Mall:

"We should sell the house and buy one of those condos right there... look how close it is to Sears."

(Pause)

"We could WALK TO SEARS!"

In other My Dad news, he spent an hour and a half on the phone the other night voting for his favourite Canadian Idol. When I found this utterly hilarious, his only comment was, "It's the finals! Where's your spirit?" He cajoled my visiting aunt into calling with her cell phone and voting for Mitch, as well. At 9:59, he shouted agitatedly at my mother and aunt, who were busy chatting and laughing. "Get READY! The lines are almost open!" The clock turned to 10:00, and Dad frantically dialed the phone number and listened for a ring tone.

"I don't hear anything." (Shakes, then peers at the device in his hand.)

"THIS ISN'T THE PHONE!" (Throws down remote control, grabs actual phone and starts dialing.)

Seriously, that happened. My dad dialed the remote control.

**********************************



Halifax Harbour at Dusk, August 2008

All that's left is trimming the stray threads, ironing out the wrinkles, handsewing on the tag, and wrapping her up.



I love this quilt so much. It's really hard to give this one away.