Thanksgiving Weekend 'n Crafts

Happy Thanksgiving! (Day or so late :) )

Despite all of the business that’s going on (cooking, cleaning, spending time with cousins I haven’t seen in two years), I’ve still managed to write about 5,000 words this weekend (yes, that does include this blog post). I’m supposed to be at 41,667 words, but I’m only at 37K. Four thousand words behind is fixable, though. Five thousand words today, and I’ll be back to where I need to be. Almost to 50K!

Came to my parent’s house to discover that my sister is using an old glass coffee pot as a tank for her fish. Isn’t it cute?

I recently bought a sewing machine, and used it to finish up a couple of projects I’d started a couple of months back with my embroidery machine. You can purchase machines that both embroider and do regular sewing, but you’ll get products that are a little bit nicer (if more expensive) if you just get one machine for the embroidering and one for the sewing.

The first project is a bookmark (I’ve got about three different versions of these on my Etsy store – I’m a reader and a writer, after all). This bookmark was embroidered onto felt, and then I cut out the rectangle, cut out a plain one, inserted a cardboard piece between the two of them for stiffness, and sewed all of the pieces together.

Since I’d used gold as the border when I embroidered this, I used gold thread for the top, and purple thread for the bobbin thread. I’m really happy with the result! It is a bit on the small side for a bookmark (just about five inches, not including the ribbon), but it’s about the biggest that I’m going to get with my embroidery machine.

I also placed this embroidered owl on a small tote bag.

Came out cute! I didn’t make the bag or anything, but in order to have a flat single layer of the bag (otherwise I'd just embroider right though the whole thing), I had to rip the stitches out of the sides, embroider the owl, and then re-sew the sides back up. Very easy to do, just needed a sewing machine. So that’s why I had sat on this project for so long.

Both of these are in my Etsy store now, but, though I need to adjust the pattern for it, I also made a cloth headband that I want to put up for sale soon.

It’s reversible, so you can switch it around for a different pattern:

I’ve played around with making these before, but this time I included some embroidered designs. They’re supposed to sit just a few inches above the right ear (did it wrong for the brown side, as it places the flower designs above the left ear). The headbands are only about 2 ½ inches wide, which means the designs have to be no more than about an inch wide. Turns out I don’t have a lot of tiny designs, but the ones that I have came out nice. I also think I should’ve done a bright yellow for the daisies, instead of the orange, as it kind of fades into the dark brown of the fabric.

I also don’t want the fabric to come to a square end when it connects with the elastic – I want it to be more of a point. I’ve got an idea for how to do that, but haven’t had the chance to work on it yet :).

The elastic is a thick and woven type, so it won’t pull uncomfortably on anyone’s hair or skin. I always hate it when I find a hair decoration I like, but then it hurts too much to wear. For this one, I made the elastic too long by about an inch, so that’s something else to adjust.

Most of the fabric I have is cotton, but I do have some satin, so I wonder if that is something people would like? At any rate, I think these will make a fun addition to my shop.

Word Count: 37,303

Coupon still active! 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/WoolRanch?coupon=BLACKFRIDAYWEEKEND

Extra: Free Download!

I can't believe I forgot - this weekend, through the end of May 29, Glimpses is completely free!  Just click on the sidebar of the blog to get to it.  (And let me know what you think!)

Regularly-Scheduled Life

I'm finally getting to be back in my regular schedule this weekend, although after missing a couple weeks of dancing led to me actually having to take a nap after class (instead of just considering doing so).

I did spend a few hours beforehand wandering around the mall with a friend before, but I don't think that wore me down that much :).

Part of my regular weekend schedule is going to my bi-weekly writer's group on Sunday afternoons.  I might've mentioned them before, but we first met doing NaNoWriMo a few years ago, and someone decided to keep it up.  It was initially just monthly, and we've expanded in the last year or so to twice a month.  It's been a great way for me to keep up on my writing, and I have to admit that some months, the only time I do any writing at all is during those three hour sessions.

I'm currently working on a short story challenge for a contest.  I've got until the end of June to finish it.  The way this challenge works is there's about a dozen art pieces (paintings and photos), and you pick one to write a story of 2000-5000 words inspired by the artwork.  Sounds fairly simple (I've done the same thing, for poetry, in a writing class), until I looked at the artwork and realized that all the pieces are modern, real-world, non-quirky images.

I don't write reality; it's not really my thing.  I gave it a go with a couple of different pictures, but finally decided that I'm a fantasy writer (and abstract-y), I'd write fantasy.  So the story ended up being a mix of fantasy and reality, with the main character losing the ability to tell the difference between the two.  It's only a couple of sentences from being fully written (I haven't decided if I want the ending to be 'strange' or 'horror'), and then I'll have quite a bit of work to do for re-writing and editing it.  It kind of reads like I threw up on the page, at the moment (apologies for the visual :).  But really, it does!).   It's all a bit out of order, I think I'm leaving out certain important details, and there's very little dialogue.  Not necessarily a bad thing, I think, but it's something for me to consider.

I realized recently that a lot of my writing style is based off the older books I read growing up, like random philosophers (Plato, Alexis de Tocqueville), long lists of fairy tales and mythology, Frankenstein, Dracula, etcetera.  Books with very little dialogue.  I suppose the fairy tales saved me from habitually using paragraph-long sentences.   At any rate, it wasn't until I wrote a scene some years ago with five people talking in the same conversation that I actually learned how to write dialogue.  My first story - in it's current incarnation as Nightmare (one of the short stories in my book) - is an example of how I wrote before I figured out dialogue.

Desert Retreat

I'm typing this post up as I'm sitting on a balcony of a hotel room, listening to the desert wind rush through palm trees, birds chirping, and water splashing against the rocks.

Where am I?  Well, I'm in a desert at a hotel, as you probably assume from the previous sentence.  A better question would likely be 'why'.  My workplace is paying for a weekend retreat.  They do this every year, about this time of year.  I missed the previous one by about two months.  (It's a little funny to think of how much time has passed since I started this job - ten months!  It doesn't feel half that long, and yet at the same time I feel like I've been there a long time.  Which is nice.)

It's a bit wild that the firm does this, though I think it's pretty cool.  I've never heard of a job that had that as one of the perks.  They pay for the hotel room (villa.  It's more like a mini-apartment, really) and dinner at a very nice restaurant.  Mind you, when I'm paying, very nice is, well, $20 a person.  So I'm looking forward to tonight's dinner.

I brought my sister with me, and she drove all hundred plus miles to get out here yesterday afternoon, which was great.  I'm not a fan of driving.  We haven't done much so far except avoid the heat (the temperature's a bit high for my taste) by shopping.  She needed a new bathing suit (there's a water slide here we're going to check out later), I forgot to bring sandals, and, as there's a kitchenette in our villa, we grabbed some food to cook for breakfast today, lunch, and breakfast tomorrow morning.

Our plans are a bit vague at this point (hit the water at some point), but the general theme is mainly just to chill.  If anything exciting happens, I'll probably put up an addendum blog, but otherwise, see you next week :)

Guns, Ice Skates, and Lunches

A day late... better than a year late, right? :)

My Saturday started very early, and ended late, and as a result I completely forgot about making a blog post.  Which is probably for the best, as it would've been sleepy rambles last night.

I was invited to go shooting (as in, with guns) in the desert a couple of hours north of me by a friend of mine, whose husband came up with an automatic game system, of sorts.  I can't say much about it, as it's a currently un-patented, but he has an app that lets the targets move in pre-programmed patterns and then it's simply point and shoot at the one that's currently up.   The group they invited up were all beta-testers, helping him with finding issues with either the software or the mechanical part of it.

They had a bit of a competition set up for who could shoot all the targets in a row the fastest.  I didn't participate in that; it's been about four years since I used a gun and I'm very much out of practice of hitting my target (plus they were pretty small, but I don't really feel like that's an excuse.  I think I could've hit them well enough a few years back).  Despite that, though, it was fun.  I pretty much just used small pistols and a revolver - which was quite fun to use.  I also shot a gun that's similar to what the army uses, which I've never been near before.  Very little kickback, and very light.

Afterwards (for a very different change of pace), I went about half-way home to an ice rink that's open for a ten-hour stretch for public skating on Saturday afternoons.  I've never seen a rink with hours like that.  It was a small place, but very nice.  It's been about a year since I went skating at all, but for all that I haven't forgotten anything.  Like riding a bike :).  It took me a couple of rounds around the rink to get used to it, and then I skated for about two hours.  All the dancing has certainly helped my endurance and leg muscle strength, because I'd be very sore today otherwise.  As it is, I actually slept in a bit this morning.

Also, it being Administrators Week (who decides these things, anyway?), the attorneys took out all the non-attorney staff for lunch.  It was very nice; although I've worked in the admin profession for three and a half years (three different places), this is the first time I've received acknowledgement for it.