Rey is Ready for opening night!

My Impossible Girl in her Journey to the Center of the Tardis Cosplay

K went to her first convention this summer, Con Kasterborous.   She wanted to be Clara in the dress from Journey to the Center of the Tardis.  Not an easy dress to find.  

So we decided to make one.  First we had to make a new Ducky K, she has changed shape a bit since the last time we made one.  Just an old t shirt, some duct tape and PVC Pipe.

Then we found some red material with a bit of black and white in it.  It's not a rayon type fabric like the original, just cotton, but it worked fine.  Bob helped keep that material right there on the floor. 

 We used one pattern for the skirt, one for the bodice and another for the sleeves.  I made a toile, and I

it went together pretty easy.  Ducky K II really helped with the fitting.  Makes it soooooo much easier.  And doesn't fuss when I stick pins in it.

After we had everything cut out,  I stenciled the pattern on the fabric with white acrylic paint. I used a piece of an old thin plastic cutting board and Xacto knife to make a stencil.  It went faster than you would think.   It's not perfect, but its a good approximation to the pattern.

Bob, helping again.

K made all her accessories.  I tried to find enough old ladies watches, super cheap, drove all over.  K went to Michaels, found all the bits and made her own bracelet for under 5 dollars.  Perfect.

And she made herself a History of the Time War book purse.  Just a cardboard book box, paint, thin foam and metal foil.  It was a big hit.

Con Kasterborous was AWESOME!!!!  We had so much fun!   Her clara Costume was a big hit.  There were tiny children in the Tardis that went traveling with Clara!

Mr. Man was her Doctor for the day.  So sweet.

There was an amazing full size remote controlled Dalek!

K got to go to Dragon Con for the first time too and had a blast! She went with her "Accompanying Doctor" and her friend the Dalek.

 And the Dalek's dad, Akbar.  Best costume ever!!!  IT"S A TRAP!!!!!

Can't wait till next year!

"Is that how it works, Doctor, you don't interfere with affairs of peoples or planets unless there's children crying?"

Yup.  Jennifer Lawrence is the Doctor.

I'm not a huge celebrity follower.  Fangirl of Fandoms, yes, absolutely, I need help.  But not the actors.  They are just people who are as flawed as the characters they play, just in different ways.

But I am so very impressed with Jennifer Lawrence.  She is a mess, but from what I've seen, in a very honest way.  In a Hey, this is totally awesome, and I have no idea what I'm saying, and I'm tripping over my dress, but I'm gettin' up and goin' on, cause this is all just awesome,… SQUIRREL!!!!!

I am sure she will do something just awful very soon, cause she is in an awful business and very, very few can escape unscathed.  But I will always remember her now, as this young woman, who is really very admirable.

You're a wizard B!

A young friend of ours turned 11 the other day.  He found a little something on his front porch when he got home from his water park birthday party.  There was a white feather under the letter.  There was almost no wind, thank heavens.

He's a huge HP fan, and his mom said he was LOVED the letter, thought the detail was very cool.  He suspected I might have had something to do with it, I have made him HP stuff in the past.  After he read the whole thing, he ran to his mom and said "Tell Mrs. pj I know it isn't real because,... Albus Dumbledore is dead!"  Yup, that's why it isn't real.  Funny!

He told his mom at bedtime "This is one of my best birthdays ever!"  Cool!

 

Long, long ago, I designed this.

We're on Craft Magazine Blog today! How cool is that!

Check it out here:  Craft Magazine.

From the way back: Bees: The good the bad and the just plain evil.

My friend Pren asked about this post and I actually found it.  So I thought I'd repost, corrected for spelling and grammar.  Oh my.  Silly me.

I just read Pren's harrowing tale of bees and garbage cans and gas pumps and jerk bystanders and I just had to share my life with bees.

When I was a kid, my folks,... well lets just say they were city people of the earth.  Good Neighbors took it just a bit farther than my folks, but it was not all that far off.

We lived in the suburbs, not the city, so it was OK to cover almost every inch of yard with garden.  And converting the old septic tank to rainwater storage was perfectly sanitary (they had the tank chemically sterilized first.)  And digging up flower beds to plant tomatoes was almost as pretty really.  And I'm sure the neighbors found the 12 foot pole bean tee pee in the side yard amusing (mainly because in the fall, my mom would help me cover it with blankets and all the neighbor kids would come over and have pow wows and dance and fight to the death(figuratively, not literally, it was so cool!)  And raising rabbits was not illegal, and made the veggies grow beautifully.  And my mom would go to the co-op and buy huge sacks of flour and rice and beans, and all the neighbors could buy smaller amounts from her.  And the tomato canning parties were really fun and her homemade cream of tomato soup was to die for and she shared.  And sneak your extra zucchini onto your neighbors porch wasn't just a day, it was a whole season and it was really fun, cause I got to do the sneaking .

But when they brought home the bee hives,... things got a wee bit tense.

Now, honey bees are in fact very docile, very calm, very beneficial insects, and unless you bounce a baseball off the side of their hive more than three times in a minute, they really don't want to attack.  (Yes, my brother and I did extensive testing on that and lived to tell about it.  We are neither of us allergic to bee stings by the way.)  I was only ever stung once by our bees (see previous parentheses) and helped my folks work with the hives for years: harvesting honey, marking queens, splitting hives, capturing swarms,...  Yes, I have been elbow deep in many a hive and absolutely covered in bees.  I was of course wearing protective gear and had my trusty smoker at the ready.  Really though, if you smell clean, and don't throw baseballs, you can walk right up to a hive and they just leave you alone.  And the honey and the wax are fabulously worth the work.  I still have some bees wax from when I was a kid.  Smells like summer.  *sigh*

The neighbors were very understandably, not pleased with my folks beekeeping aspirations.  At first.  But my folks listened and explained and shared honey and then the first swarm took off and my father and I captured it, and set up a hive in our neighbors yard,... and then another, and another, till every house near us had a hive and everyone was beekeeping together and it was really kinda cool.  I have very fond memories of those days and although I have no desire to be a suburban beekeeper myself, I would recommend it to those how have the desire, and a good rapport with your neighbors.

Wild bees are another story.  They are just plain evil little stinging machines.  Honey bees can only sting once, the stinger takes part of their abdomen with it and they just die.  Stinging is not in their best interest, therefore, they really don't unless provoked, i.e., baseball.  Ground bees on the other hand, hornets, yellow jackets, wasps, etc, they can sting to their hearts content without even a dull ache, they like it, they are evil.  We killed them at every opportunity and still do to this day. Sevin is fabulouss stuff.  Use it wisely.

K is terrified of bees, because she is also not allergic to bee stings.  She has never provoked them though (how my mother lived through me is a mystery), all her 6 stings were dumb luck:.  Wasps under the porch, ground bees in the yard or in the wall of her playhouse.   We keep a can of bee death handy at all times now.

And like everyone else, I always thought that running and flailing was a bad idea, because with honey bees, it is.  So naturally I always told K  the same thing.  Well, last summer, we were in the Smoky Mountains at this little picnic area that turned out to be beautiful, but one huge ground bee nest.  K was being careful and Mr. Man and I were watching, but the bees were everywhere.  So she and this boy she had met were playing near this little stream and all of a sudden there were bees everywhere.  K takes off like a shot, out distances the poor kid,... who ended up getting stung three times, two in the EAR.  She didn't get stung, but felt really bad that he did the right thing and did.

So now I say, RUN!  Run like the wind, but be faster than everyone else, and don't stop till you can't hear buzzing.  And, if you're running, why not flail.  At least it lets everyone around you know whats going on, so they can run, and flail.  Soon the whole thing look like a scene from The Birds, except with hornets.

Oh, for heavens sake, just run!!!!

Eggs!

This years eggs.  We dyed a few.



And I made a musical egg, cause its a musical year at our house.  Bob LOVED it!






And we've started beading eggs.  We know Michael Chemsak, he made the 2006 White House Egg representing Alabama.  He got K interested and we've been working on these for a while.  K made the red one and is working on the one with the black.  I made the green one.  You glue one seed bead on at a time.  Yes, we've gone bodmin.



And then we had a bit of fun.  The Doctor and River look a bit concerned.



And just because I love this egg : Long ago, I was very bored, and this happened.  Memories.

Actually, it's a pencil.

OK, am I the last person on the planet to find out there is a RIPTIDE PENCIL!!!!!

Seriously, it has RIPTDE printed right on it!!!  Right on the side!!!

And why do you ask, am I so very excited about a cheap mechanical pencil?

Because you can make Handmade Percy Jackson Valentines with them!!!!

(Do I care that it isn't a pen?  Heck no!  Perfection, pffff!  Get over it!)

Remember these?

K and her friends loved these during their Percy Jackson craze, goodness that must have been,... 4 years ago.  She heard from one of her friends just last fall that he still had the cheap white pen with the faded sticker on the side.  Handmade creativity for the win!

Well, now all you have to do to make Percy Jackson Valentines for all your friends next year, (and you know you will want to) is:

Aquire this stuff:

Card stock

Printer

Riptide pens

clear tape

1. Print out the template on card stock.

2. Cut out the cards.

3. Write your name by FROM:

4.  Tape on a RIPTIDE pencil!

5.  Repeat to make a bunch and give them to all your friends!

I am so ridiculously happy!!!!

A lil' something for K's Birthday.

My first attempt at metal stamping.



I used the Vintaj Natural brass altered blanks, my ball pein hammer and my table vise for a hammering surface.  These blanks are very thin and I found less is more when it comes to the hammer.  These need very little hammer action.  Though I kinda liked how the blank buckled.  I just kinda mashed it with my rubber hammer till it was pleasingly flatish afterwards.

K was pleased, even wore it to school that day.  Though she had to take it off to play her bass at school.  The chain is long and kept clanging against the side of the bass.  The chain and jump ring are from the Tim Holt Collection.  The brass matched very nicely.

I gave the extra blanks and punches to K for her birthday.  She's all excited.

"Make a teenager an necklace and she can wear it till she looses it.  Make her the necklace, AND, give her the tools to make the necklace, and she can loose the necklace, make another, loose that one, make a third, make a couple for friends, loose hers again, make a fourth, and so on, and so on,... forever."

craftylilthing

Harry Potter Book Page Wreath

I like how this one turned out.  For the next one, K want's to just use the chapter pages only.  And I think I'll use less cones so they will be larger and the pictures show a bit better.  Luckily used copes of the HP books are fairly readily available at the moment.

BIG!

          I'm slowly cleaning up from Christmas/Flu fest 2012.  Part of the cleanup is finishing all the crafts we planned to make over the holiday.  Instead of sewing and baking and beading, we spent our holiday coughing, sniffing and moaning.  Fun was had, but it involved more laying around than sitting up.

          Any who, I finished this ginormouse Sheet Music Wreath the other day.  It's about 30 inches diameter, made with 32 full sheets of music.  The cones are not all exactly the same, and I wasn't sure I would like it, but I really do.

          This one is for us.  It looks really nice against the brick of our fireplace.  The next one is for the Youth Orchestra office.

One down, only 6,200,321,201 projects left to complete.

Christmas Crafting!!!

Sheet Music Wreath for my MIL and K's Piano Teacher.

String bass ties for K's Bass teacher and AP World History Teacher and her conductor and Uncle R and Mr. Man

Christmas tree earrings for Grammie and me and K's Language arts teacher and her Geometry teacher!

And tiny (5 inch) Nutcrackers in their Marching Band uniform with tiny mellophones for Mello buddies and a drummer one for her boyfriend.

Merry Christmas to all!

I am so going to wear this to school!!!!

For Halloween, K wanted to be a pirate.  A steampunk pirate to be exact.  She needed some kind of bodice, so we decided on a leather(ish) laced waist cincher.  It took a couple of days, mostly because I had made a basket the day before and my hands were torn up: cuts, scrapes, raw all over.  I wasn't being careful and I mangled my hands.  Good thing it was black, the blood stains don't show.

36 eyelets.  K LOVED it!

This was the full costume

 The baby kitties loved it.  All swishy and ribbons galore.  She exchanged the Fez for a black cap and Quiddich goggles.  It was very cool.

For Trick or Treating, she just kept the pirate bits.

Fun was had.

Oh dear. What a bother.

I accidentally deleted loads of photos from my flickr account.  I was updating my mac to mountain lion and moving photo libraries, of which there are three, to an external drive and iphoto asked me a question and I made the wrong choice.

Bugger.

Any who,  I will be spending the next few... months uploading the photos, which were not lost, back onto my blog.  Please forgive the broken link mess.

Not really all that upset actually.  Should have done this long ago.  And the trip down memory lane is rather fun.  Lookie what I found

I made this scarf for a friend of K's, years ago.  We haven't seen them in years, but we've heard she has worn it to school, to church, and once used it to as the garland on a christmas tree.  She's an amazing young lady.  And her brother is really cool too.

Fall is in the air!

I've put a few little autumn bits and bobs in my etsy shop.







This way if you're interested.

More to come.  Maybe even a plushy blue box!