Just a way to keep track of these for my own amusement.

Marimba Ponies official site and YouTube collection

Peanut Butter Jelly Time

Japanese Animated “Numa Numa”

Yatta

Ievan Polkka (short looping version) and the full-length live version

The Llama song

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done any knitting. I have a half-done katamari-related project, but it got set aside months ago, and the closest I’ve come to knitting is trying to organize all my craft stuff and get my yarn into one place. But, a month or so ago, Phaedra asked me if I could knit her some arm warmers, because it’s very cold in her office. Well, Phaedra is at a new job now and isn’t so cold at work, but I decided to go ahead and make her some armwarmers. I sent her a ton of links to armwarmer patterns and the one she liked best was the Supple rib knit arm warmers because of their minimal bulk around the hands. (She works at a computer all day.)

I recently learned about a yarn shop that opened less than two miles from my house, so this project was also a good excuse to check out Yarntopia. I got to meet one of the owners, Sheryl, and she was very friendly and helpful. She showed me a wonderful selection of yarns I could substitute for the Knitpicks Shine and Twist, but I ended up getting a skein of some gorgeous Handmaiden Sea Silk in Yarntopia’s signature colors of brown, burgundy, and blue. The Sea Silk is absolutely incredible! It’s got a beautiful shine, a supple drape, and it simply feels wonderful in your hands, as a hank and knit up. I played with the swatch at the store for several minutes. I’ll have to make some adjustments to the arm warmer pattern because the Sea Silk is closer to a fingering weight than sport weight, but the pattern’s simple enough that I just need to cast on more stitches (in a multiple of three).

I started on the project late last night, but I wasn’t thinking too clearly and just guessed at how many more stitches I should cast one, and only two rows into it, I could see I’d cast on too many. But two rows also showed that this colorway is going to look great knitted up. I’ll have to frog and restart the armwarmers tonight, but I’m looking forward to it. I think I’m going to enjoy working with this yarn.

We’re living in a 1-story 2100sqft 30 yr old house with a 10 yr old air conditioner unit. We’ve known the A/C is dying, but replacing it is not up to us. Every few weeks, the repairman has to come out to MacGyver it back to working. It’s flat-out died twice. During the middle of summer, it runs continuously but can’t keep up with the heat. We’ll have it set to 74° but it’ll be over 80° in the house. This frickin’ KILLS our electric bill.

I just received our latest electric bill. It’s over $450. And this is only the beginning of June. It hasn’t yet reach the hottest temperatures of summer in Houston. *cry*

Update: Dale just talked to his mother (our landlord) and she’s going to call the A/C guy about replacing the unit. Yay!

Last week I did some Googling to try and find a good, stiff, lightweight interfacing. Multiple sites had good comments about Timtex, so I turned my search in that direction. While I found several online retailers who sold it, the manufacturer seemed to offer the best price. Early Friday morning I placed an order at The Timtex Store for 10 yards of their 22″ wide “LowCarb Timtex Interfacing.” By that afternoon, I’d received email confirmation that my order had been shipped. My Timtex just arrived! I was pleasantly surprised by the quick shipping and even sent them a thank-you email.

Now, I have to get back to work on my second mini-messenger bag and see if this Timtex lives up to the hype.

Finding and returning lost property is just a nice thing to do. Finding and keeping lost property that can be traced back to you and still refusing to return it is stupid. Especially when the person seeking the item’s return has pictures and contact info for you along with a small army of ‘net investigators out to utterly humiliate you until you give back the property. Let’s hope these people really do learn How NOT to steal a Sidekick II.

Yesterday was a really nice day, but it had a number of low points. When we arrived at Moody Gardens and got Olivia out of her carseat, we realized she needed a diaper change, which wasn’t a surprise. What was, was that she’d had a blow-out. Fortunately the bloomers she was wearing contained it all, but there was a LOT of mess that escaped her diaper. We went through a ton of wipes cleaning her up in the back of the car, then I took her into the ladies restroom and washed her leg there. After taking her back out to Dale, I had to return to the restroom to wash out her bloomers. Luckily for me, the mess washed off and didn’t stain or smell after a thorough soaping.

Towards the end of our time at Moody Gardens, Olivia started getting a little fussy. It wasn’t until we were back in the car and on our way to the beach that I realized we hadn’t fed her lunch! Normally, she has breakfast, plays a while, takes a nap, then has lunch. We had planned to have her nap in the car, but it didn’t occur to us how we were going to deal with her lunch afterwards. We stopped at a grocery store and I ran in while Dale fed her star crackers. I got a large fruit cup and snacks for him and me, then I sat in back with her and fed her the fruit on the way to the beach. She enjoyed it a lot.

Olivia REALLY didn’t want to leave the beach, so there was was some fussing over that. And though we’d prepared to clean off sand by bringing extra wipes and some towels, we didn’t think about just how clingy the sand could be. We went through a number of wipes before pretty much giving up on Olivia’s hands and feet and just put her in a dry diaper. (We’d also forgotten swim diapers.) Since we hadn’t thought to bring a change of clothes (which would have been used up after her diaper blow-out at Moody Gardens), and her current clothes were soaked and covered with sand, we ended up stripping her down and putting her in her carseat wearing nothing but a diaper. At least I had a small blanket to cover her with.

Since it was past dinner time and there was no place we could take a naked baby to sit down and eat, we got fast food. Olivia and I got McDonald’s, since she can eat their burgers. When I got in the back seat to feed her, I realized she’d pooped again. We drove a block down to Taco Bell, where Dale wanted to get his dinner, and I was going to take Olivia into the restroom to change her while he got his food. Unfortunately, we discovered then that we were out of diapers. We had to drive to a gas station across the street where I picked up a pack of Huggies (not her usual brand) and some generic wipes. Then we went back to Taco Bell.

I wrapped the blanket around Olivia to carry her into the restaurant, and I’m glad I brought it. The restroom didn’t have a changing table, so I placed it on the floor and put Olivia down on top of it and changed her that way. They were also out of soap, but I was able to at least rinse all the sand off her hands. It didn’t occur to me until later that I could have gone back to the car and changed her in the back of it, which is preferable to laying her on a public restroom floor. I’ll chalk that up to being really tired and frustrated.

After the Taco Bell change, while I was putting Olivia back into her carseat, I realized her last poop had been a small blow-out and there was some poo in the corner of her seat. Since I couldn’t effectively clean it (and the new wipes I’d bought were just awful), I folded up a piece of paper towel and put it over the spot. We finally got back on the road.

Olivia ate about half of her hamburger with my help, refusing it after she got a couple of bites containing pickles. I gave her some veggie crackers then was able to start eating my dinner. Just as that began, I saw a mosquito in the car, probably the same one that had bitten my ankle while I was putting Olivia in her car seat. I caught it and killed it, then its little corpse fell into the McDonald’s bag, probably into my french fries which were right on top. *sigh* It was probably just as well, because after the 15-20 minute delay between getting the food and starting to eat, the fries had gotten cold.

I had gotten some sweet and sour sauce for my cheeseburger and thought dipping her hamburger in that might entice Olivia into eating some more. It didn’t work, and I ended up spilling the container of sauce on my leg.

All of that happened before we even made it off the island. Shortly after getting back onto the mainland, I thought Olivia had pooped again. We pulled off the highway and stopped in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen. We got ready to change Olivia in the back and discovered she hadn’t gone to the bathroom at all. While Dale put her back into her carseat, I went into DQ to get us some ice cream. Though there were few customers, they were amazingly slow in Dairy Queen. The kid working the register was a trainee and had to go and get help with every transaction. The other 4 or 5 employees were in constant motion, but it was still taking forever to get any orders filled. The guy in front of me said he’d been waiting 30 minutes for a Blizzard and two pre-made Dilly Bars. While I was waiting for our order, I realized that the poo smell that had led to this pit stop was coming from me. I must have gotten some on me during the Taco Bell change and hadn’t realized it. And I couldn’t find it on me. I just kept smelling it. It was probably 20 minutes before I got our ice cream. By then, I didn’t even want it any more. I ate a little of it, then put it into an empty drink cup.

At least the rest of the drive home was uneventful, but poor Olivia didn’t get into bed until almost 11pm.

While working on Halcyon’s Guardian Demon messenger bag, I decided to make a scaled-down version for Olivia, using another one of Halcyon’s drawings on the flap.

I made new pattern templates in smaller dimensions out of cardboard, settling on final dimensions of 8″h x 10″w x 3″d. I omitted the smaller patch pocket that’s attached to the inside zipper pocket, and I used a toddler-friendly magnetic snap instead of a buckle closure. Other than that, this version was constructed the same way as the original bag. I used some natural cotton twill that’s been in my stash for years for the exterior, but I used the same hot pink fabric for the lining, and the zipper pocket was made using the metallic star fabric from the original’s patch pocket.

An aside - I only bought 1/8th of a yard of the star fabric originally, but I ended up liking it so much, I went back to get more. After searching for half an hour, I was thinking that someone must have bought the rest, but I finally found it tucked in amongst some other bolts. I ended up buying the rest of the fabric, which was just under a yard. While making these bags, I learned the hard way that I can’t use a hot iron on the fabric. The heat fades the colors of the stars, and too much can even melt them off the material.

I constructed this Guardian Demon similarly to the first one, but I didn’t back it with felt this time. I overlaid bright white cotton with tulle for a bit of texture for the horns and used this fabric combo to back the entire demon. His heart was cut from one of Olivia’s baby washcloths after I backed it with some stabilizer, it was then glued in place on the demon, which was glued to the bag flap, then I used a loose stem stitch and size 5 cotton floss to embroider all the lines. After the stitching was done, I ran extra threads through the stitches to bulk them up some more. Hi eyes are just simple French knots.

I started having some trouble with my sewing machine while making this bag and had to finish the strap stitching by hand. And, after nearly finishing it, I decided to completely redo the lining because I wasn’t happy with my zipper insertion. While I was working on the second lining, I realized I’d made a mistake in my body template and the dimensions were coming out wrong, so I wound up cutting and sewing a new bag shell too. I also decided to make the flap longer, so I recut that fabric as well.

I was getting really frustrated with myself for making stupid mistakes (like sewing the bottom of the bag shut before adding the side straps), but I toughed it out and corrected the problems when I found them, so the final bag came out nearly perfect. (Except that I cut the lining two inches too long and didn’t realize it until everything was done. Some day, I may go back and correct that, if it can be done without disassembling the entire bag.) And I really learned the importance of using new, sharp needles in my sewing machine.

I did save all the miscut pieces and will be making a second mini messenger bag from them since they’re already proportioned to go together, which will be a gift for Olivia’s cousin, Allison. I’m just trying to come up with a butterfly or flower theme for the flap.

I don’t have a picture of Olivia with the bag yet, because she’s not very interested in playing with it, though she does wave and say ‘hi’ to it, and she’s even given the demon kisses. The strap I made is too long for her, so I’ll probably make a short, fixed-length strap to use on it until she’s older.