Did you have some happy holidays?

Did you enjoy the holiday season? Topher sure did! He decided this bit of wrapping paper was a bag and crawled right inside -- you can see his tail in the corner of the couch on the left side, barely. He's also been enjoying the shoe box that the paper was wrapped around, as it is perfectly Topher-sized. Plus there's been so much tissue paper to shred! And we haven't even reached the big gift exchange with my family on the First. Truly, it is a good season to be a Fluffmonster.

Anyway, now that Christmas is past, my Etsy shop is open once more! And starting this afternoon I will be back to listing items in my continuing quest to get all of my current stock listed in the shop. Plus I will keep making new things, so be sure to check this blog regularly for in-progress posts and pictures of the goodies I'm making for myself.

Kitteh in a box!

It's a special Sunday blog post! Just wanted to share this picture of my big fluff-monster Topher squeezing himself into a shoebox. All boxes that come into this house immediately belong to the cat, whether or not he actually fits in them.

A picture of my nemesis.

Yesterday I decided that I was going to assemble my new crafting desk/table. The box was inconveniently in the walkway, and it was way past time to open that box and put the thing together. I planned to do it by myself, for two reasons: because I could, and because Chris was sleeping off his cold in the bedroom. Daisy assisted me in her capacity as Construction Dog* but since she doesn't have opposable thumbs, all she could really do was offer moral support.

Things were going fine until I got up to adding the slider for the drawer, and I discovered that the tiny screws used (of which there are about 50 used in various places) are made of cheapola metal, and that using a power screwdriver on them totally strips the head. So I soldiered on with a manual screwdriver, which also occasionally stripped the head. What the heck.

Many curse words were uttered, but I was resolute. I was going to finish the desk! I felt like even with having to do almost everything manually, I could probably finish it before bed if I stayed up a little late. I was feeling energized, partially by the great feeling of putting something together by myself, with no male intervention, and partially by the two liters or so of white tea that I had drank throughout the day, not to mention the holiday chocolate that I'm still working my way through.

And then -- disaster struck! The top of the desk/table features a little side table that folds down when not in use, thus taking up less space. I had already attempted to attach the main top to the base first, and then attach the side table, but this required upside down screwing, which the cheap screws could not withstand. So, as per the directions, I assembled the two-part hingey tabletop and prepared to place it on the base, which would require lining up 8 holes with their associated pegs.

The assembled tabletop was rather heavy and awkward, perhaps too much for a 5-and-a-half foot tall, 110 lb, pipe-cleaner armed young lady to handle on her own, but fueled by my pride and the success that I'd already have doing things All By Myself, I did not listen to the little voice that told me to ask Chris to give me a hand for a moment. Hey, the man was sick, I figured I should let him enjoy his video game, and I, being perfectly well**, could handle the grunt work.

Most of you already know what happened next, thanks to e-mail or my Facebook status. The hinging desk hinged, and pinched both of my forefingers. OW! My right finger got out of it with just a little pinch. My left finger, however, got a huge, nasty gash which is currently wrapped protectively in a magical pink-and-purple faerie bandage. And thus ended my desk-constructing dreams.

So now it's sitting, mostly completed, in my living room. But wait... is that a cat in that cubbyhole? It certainly is. Topher wasted little time in discovering that there was a perfect kitty-sized cave in the new desk.

*Daisy is a dog of many talents. She's also the Science Dog, the Cooking Dog, and the Laundry Dog. She pretty much likes to be wherever we are, and will sit there and watch very attentively, in case there is any dropped food or petting involved.

**Yeah, that didn't last. I woke up today and found that I had Chris's cold.

Take a picture of ME!

Earlier today, I was taking BFAC pictures, and I thought I was all done, but Topher disagreed. There was one more important item to photograph -- HIM! Actually, he really likes to get into my photo tent. I had to lock him into the office while I was actually taking the pictures, because he wanted to get inside with the items. *sigh* Luckily I grabbed him before he could sit on anything important.

Oh yes, he's sitting on my dining room table. Isn't it pretty? It has a row of big metal studs running along the edge, which gives it a rustic medieval look. The chairs are made out of the light wood, with studs along the back, and have puffy cushions in micro-seude that almost matches the dark wood. It's a spiffy dining set. We love it.

I'm really quite tired now, and I can't coherently organize my thoughts, so I'm going to wander off.

Shhh! I'm hibernatin'!

Please don't mind the clutter in this picture, the area around Chris's desk is one spot of the house that I really don't clean.

My kitty Topher just loves paper of all sorts. He likes to chew on it, shred it, play on it, scratch it, whatever. So it came as no surprise to me that he staked his claim on this chunk of brown paper that was used as packaging material in a recent delivery. He kept jumping on it and playing around, to make it make crinkly noises. Then, when he got sleepy, he trampled it down and made himself the perfect little nest... awwww.

I love sleeping critters. They're just so adorable, with the way they curl up, and the content expression on their face. When Topher sleeps like this, he always reminds me of some woodlands critter, curling up in a den to hibernate the cold Winter away.

I wil be up in Marana house-sitting tomorrow, Thursday, and part of Friday. I may or may not have internet access, so I may or may not make blog posts! I just hope it's not cold and rainy while I'm up there, as I was looking forward to a little Christmas hike with my doggie pal Gobi.

In case I'm not around to blog on Thursday, I want to take this opportunity to wish everyone a safe and happy holiday!

What I did tonight:

Sad to say, but that's every holiday present in the house (not counting whatever Chris has for me). We really cut back this year, and Chris has barely started shopping for his family. Heck, two of those gifts are late birthday presents for my mother-in-law. Nonetheless, they are gifts and they are wrapped!

I'm not big on traditional holiday stuff, so I made due. While wrapping these presents, I had some nice festive cinnamon incense burning, and I went through a few CDs: A Very Scary Solstice by the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, the Projekt Dark Noel collection (which reminded me of why I don't listen to it ever), and then because I was out of Christmas music (because the other HPLHS CD is missing), I kicked it old school with some Mary Chapin Carpenter. I also brewed myself some tea, but it was horribly bitter, so I forgot about it until it was also horribly cold. Oh well.

To successfully wrap these presents, I had to make a few sacrifices to the Dark Lord Topher. As a cat, he's naturally drawn to wrapping supplies, especially tissue paper and ribbons. So I gave him some tissue paper that was in a package we received recently, and put it on his cat tree. Then I cut him off some ribbon that was already too damaged to use, and I draped it over him. Plus I let him play in the box that all of the bows had been stored in. The best part was when he jumped onto the tissue paper, with the ribbon wrapped around himself! Ah, kitties. They're entertained by the silliest things.

I love my Maggie dog!

It's Saturday, so I'm going to gush about my dogs!

When I set out to get a corgi, I wanted a red and white one (like Daisy). That was what I thought of when I pictured corgis, and in fact, until I started researching them on-line, I didn't know that they came in other colors. The pictures I saw showed that black tris were beautiful, but I still had my heart set on a red and white.

Maggie has completely changed my mind, and now I love black tris at least as much as red and whites. Her black fur is so shiny, her markings are beautiful, and those little brown eyebrows make her so expressive. She's an adorable little dog. She constantly makes Chris and I laugh with her smiles, her stretches, the way she jumps puts her front legs up on our legs and stares at us adoringly (even though she's not supposed to...), and the funny wookie noises that she makes when she wants attention. Not to mention her utter and complete infatuation with Topher. She'll follow him all over, bark at him to try to get him to play, and sit down and stare at him sadly when he ignores her. I swear, she has a schoolgirl crush on him!

For Topher's part, he's gotten a lot more tolerant of the dogs. He always comes out into the beadroom with me when I let them out back, and he used to run away as soon as they came in. Now he just sits there, and they come in and sniff him and maybe give him a couple of little licks, while he looks on with slight disgust. He's also more likely to be in the same room as them, or even on the same couch. I suspect that come winter, they'll be snuggling together.

In beading news, I'm about 4" along on what will eventually be 16" of spiral rope to go with my frog pendant. I had all kinds of other ideas, but the truth is I only have 1 of the three greens in size 11, and I didn't want to do something complicated in 15s, not with a deadline looming. Hopefully next month's challenge will be more up my alley and I'll be able to make something cooler! I think it will be announced within the next week or so.

Tomorrow, I'll gush about Daisy!

We're home, and tired, too!

Green chandelier earrings, inspired by the earthy ones I made for Denise. Created last week, listed on Etsy today! Tomorrow I'll get back to the Daily Design Challenge.

The four of us made it safely home. Daisy and Maggie were great on the ride, they slept most of the time and didn't make a fuss at all. Now they're exploring the house, much to Topher's dismay. Lira is content to pretty much ignore them, just puffing her tail a bit, but Topher hisses every time they come near. I sure hope he comes around! I don't like to see my fluffy beast so unhappy.

We spent about 9 hours in the car today, and I've been up since before 7am NM time (6am my time), so I am really quite beat. I'm going to grab a shower and watch a movie with Chris and probably crash not long after that. I'll try to make some sort of intelligent trip report tomorrow.

My cats... getting along?

Yes, I'm afraid the end times are upon us, my friends! On Sunday I snapped this shocking photo -- my two cats, lying pleasantly side-by-side! Usually Lira can't stand Topher, and will stay quite far away from him. For them to be lying next to each other was quite shocking. At first I attributed this to some magic power of the pants they were lying on (someday, Chris will stop leaving his dirty clothes on the couch). However, hours later, when the pants had been removed, I found them like this:
What could cause this sudden and unexpected feline unity? I'm fairly certain that they've heard me talking about my desire to get a dog, and they've decided that they must join together to combat the canine menace. It was a warm day, so it's not like they were snuggled up to share body heat.

They've since returned to their usual animosity, so I suppose whatever truce they had shattered quite quickly. It was nice while it lasted, though.

Anyway, I'm about to head off to the bank to sign some home loan paperwork. It's quite exciting!

I'm a kitty godmother!

If you've been to my Etsy shop this week, you've probably already seen this bracelet, but I think it's pretty, so I'm posting it in the blog. I really like this teal and green combo. The light green is an interesting color. I think of it as a green, and use it as a green, but my friend Betcey who I bought it from thinks of and uses it as a blue. I think it's one of those colors that kind of blends in with what you use it with, so with blues it seems blue and with greens it seems green. Either way, it's beautiful, and I'm going to use it again tonight.

The silly title refers to the fact that my friend Deborah of Bead Indulgences just adopted two kitties after a long time of living pet-free. I'm the emergency contact for them, and so now we're joking that I'm their aunt and godmother. Hopefully I'll soon have pictures to share of my little furry goddaughters.

My own kitty Lira (who you hear about less than Topher because she's better behaved) is sitting here in my lap, purring up a storm. It's a little cool again today, so she's been feeling cuddly. Like Deb's two new cats, Lira is also a Humane Society find. I cannot stress enough my belief that if you're in the market for a new pet, you should check a shelter or rescue organization first. Save a homeless pet!

Ok, stepping off of my pet-loving soapbox, and back to beads. I just started listing beads over in my Etsy shop, because let's face it, I have a lot of them. More than I'll ever use. It's about time I started selling some. Of course, I'll probably turn around and spend the money on more beads... but let's ignore that little fact for now, ok? I have a gigantic stack of various leaves (almost all green) that I'll be listing over the next few days, plus some other assorted beads. I like to think that I have pretty good taste, so if you're a bead lover, I'm going to recommend that you watch my Etsy shop and maybe do a little buying.

In absolutely awesome news, I got a cab from Melanie at Earthenwood to use in my BFAC project, and it is perfect. I love it so much! I'll post a picture tomorrow of the kit, plus all the things I'm adding.

What did I tell you?

If you'll recall, when I posted about how I was going to start sewing, I predicted that Topher would "help." Here it is, the photographic proof! Coincidentally, it's also photographic proof that he is one gorgeous boy! His markings are what made me pick him out of the litter, and he's grown up into a rugged example of tomcattery.

Anyway, it doesn't help that the pieces for these pants are so big that I had to put the cutting board on the floor... no way it was going to fit on my kitchen table. So there I am, sitting on the floor, putting tissue paper on cardboard! This is absolutely a place that Topher must be, because tissue paper and cardboard are his two favorite things in life. When he wasn't sitting right on top of the project, as seen here, he was sitting on the empty end of the board, swatting my hand as I tried to pin things down. And as you can see from his expression in the photo, he wasn't the least bit ashamed of himself.

That was only one of the problems that faced me with making these pants. First of all, measurements and sizes. WTH, Simplicity? According to my waist measurements, I'd need to cut out something like a size 20 to fit my waist. To get an idea of how patently ridiculous that is, here's my picture from Ren Faire 2007. Oh yeah, and by my hip measurements... I'd need a size 10. *sigh* Thank you, Simplicity, for rubbing in the fact that I have decidedly unwomanly hips. Since my particular instance of this pattern only goes up to a size 10, that's what I'm cutting out. I seem to recall from my Mom sewing my wedding dress that their measurement/size charts tend to be grossly inaccurate, so I suspect these pants will be too big. This is why I'm starting out with the cheapest fabric I bought!

And speaking of cheap fabric... As you can see, my fabric is very pretty. It's also very soft. If they turn out, these will be wonderful Summer pants. However, it's also terribly unevenly cut. You'd think that after spending 10-15 minutes in line to get my fabric, I could at least get some straight fabric. I didn't realize just how uneven it was until I was over halfway done pinning everything down, and realized that with how it was laid out, I was never going to be able to cut these pants out. That realization came at 12:20am, and this was the point where I said "To heck with this, I'll try again some other time."

That some other time will probably be tomorrow. Wish me luck!

Yippy!

I'm excited, because I'm going to San Diego Comic Con this year! As you may already know, I write a gaming column for the e-zine Collector Times. Our incredibly awesome editor wants a strong CT presence at the convention this year, and is generously covering the hotel rooms for her staffers. Comic Con is a lot of fun, and I believe that this past year, I posted here about how bummed I was at not going. So I'm very happy, because not only do I get to go this year, but it's very likely that I'll get to meet several people who I've only known on-line until now. Yay!

Oh yeah, and it's an excuse to wear COSTUMES! By then I might even be sewing my own!

Speaking of which, today I get to go to JoAnn's and pick up some fabric so I can try to learn how to sew. You know what is going to be fun? Cutting out patterns with my cats. Not only does Topher like to help me craft (remember this picture? and this one?), but he is a tissue paper fiend. Lira is a little more laid back about it, at least, and I can probably count on her preferring to sit in Chris's lap. Note to self: make sure to only cut out patterns while Chris is sitting at his desk.

Yesterday, during our Legend of the Five Rings game, I did a lot of kumihimo. I haven't measured, but my cord has to be about 30 inches, so I think I'm going to make it into a two-strand necklace, with the skull hanging from the bottom strand. I just need to decide on a bail design. Anyway, it's kind of cool. The yarns were all variegated colors, so the cord looks different every few inches. Plus it has a lot of texture due to the different types of yarn. It also reminded me about how fun kumihimo is for gaming, so I'm going to have to do more of it in the future.

Polymer Book Reviews.

This weekend I acquired two polymer clay books. There's nothing quite like the joy of having new books, especially how-tos for arts and crafts. I had the time to flip through both books, although I haven't had the chance to test out the quality of the instructions yet. Nonetheless, both books look pretty good.

My first new polymer book is Cats: Big & Small by Christi Friesen. This is the fourth installment in Christi's "Beyond Projects" series of books, and it continues the trend of being entertaining, informative, and enticing. I never intended to make polymer clay beads, but these books tempted me into it! I bought the Dragon one just because I wanted to look at all the pretty pictures and support a great artist, but then I looked at it and said "Hey, I CAN do this."

As the title suggests, this new book teaches you how to make wild cats and house cats. The projects include beads, sculptures, wall-hangings, and pins. There are even instructions on how to make yarn balls and mice, the perfect accessories for crafts. One thing that I really enjoy about Christi's books is that even if you don't want to make the particular subject of the book, there are lots of little tips that can be integrated into other clay work. In the case of Cats, there's information on how to make an eye cane and how to add artistic fibers to clay pieces.

The second book that I picked up is The Polymer Clay Techniques Book by Sue Heaser. The name says it all! This is not so much a project book as a how-to on various ways to work with and modify clay. I bought it because I jumped right into making sculptured dragon beads without ever learning the basics of polymer clay. Of the small collection of polymer-related books at my local B&N, this looked like the best for my needs. After reading through it at home, I'm pretty impressed. It covers making molds, adding various inclusions, how to mimic stones and other natural materials, how to use embossing powders, mica powders, enamels and more with polymer clay! In addition to showing the bead techniques that I'm most interested in, it also discusses how to use polymer to make sculptures, mosaics, boxes, miniatures and more. It's given me a lot to think about, and I am looking forward to trying some of these techniques out!

Both books are clearly written with lots of photographs of various steps to help you out. If you're looking to try polymer clay, or expand your existing knowledge of it, you can't go wrong with either of these books!


Today's Cool Thing is this beautiful Nymph corset top. I'd love to see it paired with a handkerchief-hem skirt and a pair of delicate faerie wings!

My fight against chaos...

...also known as cleaning my beadroom. Once again I've managed to get fed up with the clutter in my beadroom, and I've spent the past two days trying to do something about it. I say "trying" because really, it's like that traffic jam game. I can move the pieces around all I want, there's still only going to be one empty space! At the very least, my clutter is more organized now. I managed to put a bunch of books away on my super-cute book case, and put away some beads that have been homeless since gem show, and re-organize some findings. One reason why I've been doing this is because the beadroom is currently too messy to work in, which means I have to work at the kitchen table. That means that this happens:
Yes, that is my cat Topher sitting smack-dab in the middle of my beadwork. He has this really fine hair, and it gets all over the beading pad and caught up in the beads when I weave them together. Also, it's hard to make jewelry when he is on not just my beads, but often my needle as well.

It's a constant battle between Topher and I. I want to make jewelry, he wants me to pay attention to him. Sometimes we come to a compromise and he lies down next to my Vellux work pad. In fact, I was just beading a few minutes ago, and he's still waiting there for me, dozing off with the expectation that I will come back and shower him with affection. He's insanely cute when he's asleep, so even though I'm done with beads for the night, there will probably be some petting in his future anyway.

Because I've been focused on beadroom cleaning, I don't have anything made for this week's update. I was just struck by an idea for a really cute bracelet, so I'll probably make that tomorrow. I also have a few ideas for nice woven necklaces and lariats, but I don't think I'll have any done in time for Sunday's update.

Today's Cool Thing is this Triple Fuse Necklace. It reminds me of something that some awesome raver chick would wear in a cyber-punk movie! Yeah!