Tag Archives: danger!

Nov11

Dear brain: don’t leave in a huff

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Sometimes, dear reader, your faithful correspondent is a stupid lazy-ass. Like when she decides to SPRAYPAINT ALL THE THINGS! without great ventilation or any filter mask. Not that I have just keeled over or gotten higher than King Kong’s kite or anything, just that I know that was immensely dumb.

The reason I got into this wild frenzy to do a million spray paint projects in one day is that we’re supposed to have a high of 62 degrees today and 36 tomorrow. So I think it’s pretty much time for the spray paint studio to close up shop so I can start putting my car back in the garage. I have a ton of other things to move around too, like the 4 tires they took off my car when I had snowtires put on and various boxes that need to be knocked down and random crap that I mean to turn into projects one day. There’s also a couple of planter boxes with high trellises that are still in boxes but meant to be part of the big porch project that fizzled out after early summer.

I don’t know why my Big Project Brain is all whirling again — scratch that, no, it’s undoubtedly GISHWHES-inspired. You get in a frenzy to glue Skittles everywhere, and it’s hard to shed. I’ve just traded Skittles-gluing for spraypainting everything that doesn’t move. If my cat were in the garage, he’d be in danger of gaining a hammered bronze coat, too.

So I’m inside for a while breathing respectable air.

I’m sure I’ll have something to post as a project before the day is through. Unless I do keel over.

Whoa, thunder!

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Aug26

Preview: random commentary to come

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Third attempt here; WordPress apparently does not approve this post.

I keep opening the Add Post on my browser window, and then freezing up. Not good. I do have stuff to say, but I haven’t gotten any crafting done. I was considering myself ahead of things last weekend, and I had a guest for the weekend. Though the week I’ve had some intermittent vertigo (Monday was all day, other days more come-and-go), which led to me missing art group night. That’s a bummer, since we don’t have group on the last Wednesday of the month, and I’ll be out of town the next Wednesday. I do have a project I plan to finish up and post today, and I need to plot out what’s next.

And also, I got a tattoo yesterday that’s going to complicate my usual routines for a couple of weeks, which I didn’t really think too much ahead about. It’s on the inner part of my right wrist, and I’m not supposed to touch it or submerge it in water, which is making me rethink a lot of movements I never think about. But I’ve been having some ominous twinges in my right shoulder and wondering how I’ll cope if I eventually have to have surgery (something I experience on my left shoulder), so maybe this is just good practice.

But right now I’d like to write about epic disasters, disappointments and the like. Because just about everyone has seen the story about the elderly church lady who “fixed” the fresco in her church that had seen some damage over the years. Most of the accounts I’ve seen so far have few details, and being a story-brained person, I want to know allllllll the answers. I was planning to write this now, but I just ran across a bunch of delightful comments about it via a friend’s Facebook, so I want to get permission to quote them. Have messaged, am waiting.

Maybe I’ll do some crafting now.

Apr1

Doctor, Doctor give me the news

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Doctor, Doctor give me the news

Finished!! In all its hasty, half-assed glory!

With a break for a run for meds and groceries and another for a phone call with my brother, I got the thing done in about 13 hours.

There is an embroidery needle at large somewhere on the sofa, so that adds this week’s danger quotient.

So here are some process pictures and the finished project.

It's sloppier on the inside.

While I like playing around with six strands of embroidery thread, it can get hopelessly knotty on occasion. As it did way early in the embellishment stage. But y’know, this project was meant to have a screen-friendly microfiber partial lining, so I said to heck with teasing the whole thing out. It wasn’t going to budge.

My eye doc recently gave me one of those nice glasses cleaning cloths, which I figured would make a good liner to keep the scratches on the screen to a minimum. Unfortunately, not big enough to line the whole cozy. But microfiber is a bear to push a needle through, so it’s just as well.

Then I had some additional embellishments and the closure to add, and here’s the result. With trademark imperfection, but I rather like it.

Unfortunately the call box sign is a wee bit off kilter, but I am not going to mess with it further. Its imperfection is charming. Isn't it? ISN'T IT??

And here’s a closer view of the closure. The loop is made of elastic, which I had to run out and buy, since the package of elastic I remembered and dug up in my sewing kit had the Woolworth’s label on it. (!) Got some nice multiple-purpose 3/8″ white elastic. I had a brainstorm as I was contemplating how I wanted to attach the elastic loop. I took a set of Sharpies I’d bought some time ago and drew stripes along the elastic.

Remind you of anyone?

Like last week’s project, this was all repurposed stuff, or something from the stash except for the elastic, and I did actually have elastic, but it was a good 12 plus years old — well, five years older than that, because Woolworth’s closed in 1997.

So…very…tired… Am nodding off at the keyboard now, and I have work in the morning, so it’s nighty night for now.

And a moratorium on felt. Next week I’ll see what other types of trouble I can get into.

Feb8

Why so dangerous?

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Let me count the ways:

• First there’s the obvious. Like the time I was dyeing a wool/silk scarf in the microwave and completely spaced on Rule #1 of microwaving and put a couple of straight pins in my ombre-dying experiment of scarf wrapped around chopstick. And felting needles, the crafty gal’s fishhook. OW.

• Money. Every craft aisle or craft store is like a densely populated drug corner. All so shiny, so ripe with possibilities. (So full of mixed metaphors. Just go with me here.) First one’s not free, kid, but it might be cheap. Just this one time, what can it hurt? ::cue dark, evil laughter::

• Time. Which subdivides into housekeeping time and cooking time.

* Space. I have seen more than one episode of Hoarders where someone says, “Don’t throw that away! I’m going to make something with that!” Some of them are even crafters, and one had a hoard of perfectly organized, plastic-binned crafty stuff — it’s just her house had been reduced to a rabbit warren by the towering piles of bins. The tricky bit is, most crafters have projects they started and put aside for a year or two, or a medium they haven’t touched since they bought it, and then suddenly it all comes together into something amazing.

• Future arthritis or carpal tunnel?

• Disappointment. There was such a beautiful vision in my head, and what I wound up with was just a sight. Sometimes it’s that my skill level isn’t up to what I want to do, sometimes I’ve half-assed a project. Both these can be fixed over time.

• Pinboard. See Time, above. Man, is that a time-suck, but it’s so inspiring too. I have a feeling a good many things I make over the next year will be projects I found there.

• Some projects tell the world that I’m a big ol’ geek. You know, the Tardis makeup case or Supernatural toilet paper cozy. There is no help for that, because I am going to make them.

• My own personal danger zone is my love for crafts with unknown outcomes. I got interested in fiber arts via a class on dyeing silk scarves with flowers and/or vegetables. Even when I tried to reproduce a color or effect exactly, I might get something entirely different. It was cool because I’m not talented at drawing or painting and I could make really beautiful things, but sometimes the results were much less exciting than I’d hoped and expected (wildflower scarves, I’m looking at you).

• Another dangerous factor for this year will be the Random Tutorial Generator. I’m going to pick a point sometime this year when I use it to determine a project, though I’ll probably mitigate the terror by giving myself a few rolls of the dice if something totally unsuitable comes up, or if I have to buy a mangle to achieve it. (Maybe I would buy a mangle. Because I just love saying mangle. (In Barney Fife humble-brag casual tone: (sniff) “Yeah, I just bought a mangle.”)

Anyone still with me? What are your personal danger zones?