One more...

Wow! 3 posts in one day. But Thing 1 worked all day making her very first Dotee doll (an astronaut), and she wanted me to post a picture of it. So here's T1 (post-bath) and her doll:

Another Doll

Can you stand looking at one more doll? This one's for a Swap-Bot mermaid doll swap.

I've been enjoying Spring Break. :-)

purrrrrrrr

Furgie has gone mostly deaf. This doesn't bother her at all, and it has an advantage for me: it means I can easily sneak up on her and take pictures like this one.

7th Sin

So here's the final sin. I'm proud of this one. ;-)

FOs: Socks and Six Sins

Entire civilizations have risen up and then crumbled to dust while I worked on these socks, but I finally finished them last night:

The yarn is Socks That Rock in the Raven colorway, and the pattern is Lenore. Perfect when I'm feeling a little gothy. BTW, that's Thing 1 doing the modeling, and she happened to be wearing those stockings today.

I've also completed 3 more sins, leaving only 1 to go:

I'm not sure which is my favorite, but I am quite fond of Lust. I made her hearts, and the letters and thorny things for Wrath, out of polymer clay.

Back from the Desert

Thank you all for the birthday wishes! I'm now another year older and wiser, right?

We're back after a really nice (but too short) vacation in Palm Desert. This picture is specially for Knatolee:

That's the outdoor temp as we arrived in Palm Desert on Friday. But we experienced snow, too:

That pic is from the top of the Palm Springs aerial tramway, about 8500 feet up Mt. San Jacinto. It was in the 50's up there. And the tramway is a great trip, although perhaps not for those who aren't fond of heights.

We also visited Shields Date Garden in Indio, and the Things got to try a date shake:

Mmmm!

We visited the Living Desert, too, and the Things got to pretend to be birds:

The drive to Palm Desert and back was long (over 400 miles each way), but the desert is really pretty this time of year. Here's a crappy picture I took from the car outside Palm Springs:

And here's another crappy car shot from the Mojave Desert:

All the Joshua Trees are in bloom right now. Along with everything else in the desert. Our allergies sure noticed!

Oh, and on the way to Palm Desert we stopped at a Mini dealership (there are none by our house) and I test drove one. What fun little cars! I want one! Well, I really want a Smart, but they're 2 seaters, so I'll settle for a Mini.

You Say It's My Birthday

Actually, my birthday is tomorrow, but early tomorrow we'll be hitting the road for a long weekend in Palm Desert. It should be fun but internetless.

So today I received a package in the mail containing this:

Not the fairies. Those belong to Thing 2. They just wanted to admire my present, which was made my Raquel's Mosaics, and I believe most likely comes to me courtesy of my sister. Nancy knows how much I like cobalt glass.

I like having a birthday. I'm not traumatized about getting older, even though last week Thing 2 asked me, in all seriousness, whether there were dinosaurs when I was a kid (I think that was the same day she asked me, "What did they make people for"--a question I was unable to answer).

I am making painfully slow progress on that pair of socks. I may be able to turn the heel on the second one tonight. So in lieu of an FO, here are a couple fun bits:

• Spring Knitty is up
• After reading this, I will no longer complain about Ruthie's recent vet bills
• I share a birthday with Matthew Broderick, Rosie O'Donnell, Gary Oldman, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Johann Sebastian Bach. Regretably, I missed Fred Rogers and BF Skinner by a day.

Haircut

Thing 2 got a haircut. She's never had hair this short, but I think it suits her.

Lotsa FO's

No new knitting to show off. I'm working slowly on a pair of goth socks. I only knit them during my free evening hours, while watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD (we just began Season 4). And I haven't had many free evening hours. But I've made some more dolls:

I signed up for a 7 Deadly Sins Dotee Swap. You only have to make 1 sin, but I've gotten carried away. I'm hoping to make all 7. But some of the remaining 4 may be more challenging than Sloth, Avarice, and Gluttony.

I also brought home some pottery FO's last night. The moon and stars are components of a celestial thing I'm planning for a bathroom wall. I glazed a rocket ship and planet last night, too. The wonky bowl on the right was An Experiment. And do you dig the lavender color on the squishy bowl? That was a surprise.

Birthday Girl!

Furgie turned 19 yesterday! Here she is on my bed this morning, looking mighty good for a cat who's a year beyond legal voting age.

I Am a Sunflower

I am a Sunflower What Flower Are You?

I stole this from Eve's blog. :-)

Princess Doll

The Things suggested this one, and made some of the fabric choices. I like her scepter the best. And I was happy to find some trim in my stash that was perfect for her crown. I also enjoyed doing the beading on her apron. I think she looks a little smug.

These little guys are kinda addictive.

Little Mermaid Doll

Today's doll may seem less dangerous than yesterday's vampire witch, but I don't know. She looks like she's up to something.

My favorite part of this mermaid is her face, but Thing 2 is enamored of her belly button. Which, T2 insists, ought to be yellow, because everyone knows mermaids have yellow belly buttons.

Haunted Dotee Doll

Suddenly, everyone seems to be making Dotee dolls. They looked like fun to make, and a good way to use up some of the fabric scraps, beads, and so on that I have stockpiled. So I signed up for the Haunted Dotee swap on Swap-Bot, and voila...my first Dotee doll.

She is...a vampire witch, I guess. Anyway, I'm happy with her, and somewhat tempted to keep her for myself. Some of her beads glow in the dark. And look! A good use for purple Fun Fur yarn! But my favorite part of her is her beady (literally!) silver eyes.

This week

So this is my week....

Yesterday I took Thing 1 to karate class, in which she's about to advance from white belt to yellow. As soon as that class ended, I whisked her across town to Girl Scouts, where I was recruited to help the girls assemble tangram puzzles.

Today I'll pick her up right after school and whisk her across town again, this time for Gymnastics.

Tomorrow night I have ceramics.

Thursday night, Thing 1 has a Kool Kats Poetry Night at school, wherein she will be reciting a Shel Silverstein poem about being eaten by a boa constrictor (she chose the poem herself). Meanwhile, on the opposite side of town, Thing 2 will be in Gymnastics class.

Friday, Ruthie has an acupuncture appointment.

I know I have nobody to blame for this schedule but myself. Sigh.

Spring FOs

I realize what we have barely qualifies as Winter, but still, I love when Spring arrives. If I walk one block north of my house right now, I can look at an almond orchard in full bloom, and the crabapple trees in the parking lot at work smelled so perfumey today you could just about pass out. A pair of mourning doves has been all, well, lovey-dovey in our backyard lately, and this morning a mockingbird in the next door neighbors' tree was ribbeting like a frog. I was distracted at work this morning, too, as a handsome boy crow did his very best to impress a girl crow in the tree outside my window. She was mostly ignoring him. He kept sidling up to her all casual-like, bowing his head deeply in front of her, and posing like that until she flapped away to the next tree limb. She mostly seemed interested in eating bugs or something--he's going to have to try harder.

And I have an FO! I sewed on the buttons last night. This is the Small Origami bag from Folk Bags. It was 14" of seed stitch followed by a mile of i-cord, but I like it. That book has a lot of cute patterns.

I've been making some ATCs lately as well. Here are some I made for a butterfly-themed swap on Swap-Bot:

The dog in the upper right-hand ATC was named Scipio, and he belonged to Orville Wright. According to some links I saw online, Orville acquired him in March 1917. I got the photo from the Library of Congress, which has several nice pictures of this dog. He looks like a happy creature.

On Saturday, Thing 2 saw me making ATCs and decided she wanted to create some of her own:

She planned and made these almost all by herself, which just a tiny bit of help from me. Of course, the kid who comes home from school with her pockets full of rocks was especially impressed with my mica tiles, which you can see she used in two of her cards.