Month: April 2006

I’ve been bringing my iPod to work, and have been worried that with the moments on my purse it was just asking for scratches. Never one to pay $35 for something that I could make, or one to turn down a crafting opportunity, I headed over to the craft store and picked up some felt. Two hours later, I had the following:

Once again, my camera fails completely to pick up the periwinkle, so you’ll have to make that blue a bit purpler in your mind. I included a hole in the bottom of the iPod cozy for the sync cable and the FM car transmitter, and added a snap to the top between layers of felt to hold it closed.

I was originally thinking I’d have to go back to the store to look for ribbon to wrap it closed, when I realized that it would be much easier to make use of what was already there:

In the sad news department, though, this means I now only have two snaps left:

I’ve been whittling away at these since the late eighties for doll clothes and other usefulness. I have to wonder how old they even are. Anything bought in Stamford, CT was definitely Mom’s from way back. (I’m hoping I was gifted these and didn’t appropriate them.)

Taking the snaps into account, the grand total cost comes to 42 cents (20 cents for each of the pieces of felt, and 1.875 cents for the snap). I am feeling smug.

Our tang has been with us three weeks, and is looking great.

He spends his days munching Nori and zooming round the tank. It’s very hard to get a picture of him. After about fifteen pictures like the one above, where I caught him mid-direction-change, I had a brainstorm of using our scraper to lure him to the glass. I don’t know why (does it look like a tang? Like something good to eat? A little tang demigod?), but he dearly loves the scraper, and swims tight circles around it whenever we put it in the tank. This is something of a godsend, since he still panics a bit when we put our hands in the tank, and doesn’t like when we stand next to it, even to put food in. But the second he sees the scraper, even if it’s in motion, he comes zooming over, and will follow it around the tank until it gets pulled out again. I would love to know what’s going on in his little mind.

And one more for good measure:

One more week without issues and he can go into the big tank!

I always think that Seattle has the oddest reputation for weather. After the long, dark winter we’ve had, I will no longer protest against the cloudy stereotype, but the “rainy” one still seems wrong to me. There seems to be two types of weather in Seattle: grey and blue. The first consists of low, deep clouds, maybe the occasional raindrops, and has everyone reaching for the coffee. The second means the lakes are gorgeous and the mountains are out. But both kinds of weather are subdued, and kind of prozac-ed. You’ll see seven weeks in a row of the exact same thing. You don’t get scorchers, or thunderstorms, or hail or snow. When TV shows (Grey’s Anatomy is guilty) show Seattle as a dark city plagued by driving rain and lightning storms, you know that the computer effects people were working overtime — there’s no cathartic hard rain, and I’ve counted four bolts in over a year and a half.

Which is why, driving home on Monday, I was amazed to see an enormous bank of dark clouds descending on Seattle. It wasn’t a tall thundercloud, but looked like someone had taken a brush and textured them up a few thousand feet. If you saw a photograph, it wouldn’t look real. (I was gushing about them to Kevin later, who didn’t seem so impressed until he saw a shot of them on TV, at which point I think he got it. They looked like something out of one of those climate-change end-of-the-world movies.) I got home, made tea, and took this picture out the upstairs window:

As with the fish, it doesn’t do the scene justice because you can’t see the motion: the clouds were boiling by, and the two tall trees were waving back and forth wildly. True to form, we only got a few drops of rain and no lightning, but I appreciated the drama of it.

This weekend was wildly productive. (Not the phrase that typically comes to mind when describing my weekends.) I cleaned, recycled cardboard boxes (my natural inclination is to hold onto them, in case they might come in useful, but my apartment only holds so many.), cleaned out my closet and donated three big bags of clothes to the Goodwill along with Kevin’s old skis and boots that were sitting in the hallway, cleaned out my files, recycled two big trashbasket’s worth of paper, vacuumed, finished the yoga bag, and made this pillow:

After I made the first two, which I still love, I decided to make a third as a sleeping pillow. The other two are for the most part slippery, fancy fabric, so they aren’t comfy to use for naps. I had enough to make another from the extra fabric I used for the round pillows and the backs of the square pillows, and I decided to line it with fleece, so that it would be soft to lie on and wouldn’t slide around on the pillow insert. And then I added the ribbon, which I bought last year on a lark because it was so pretty. It works really well with the futon and other colors, and though you can see a bit of bunching with the flash on that shiny fabric, the fabric is so dark that it really isn’t visible sans camera.

Sunday morning marked the very last of the i-cord, and now the yoga bag is done:

I hardly even know what to do with my hands now. 🙂 The final specs were:

Yoga Mat Bag (pdf) from Stitch n Bitch Nation
Yarn: 1 ball and about ten yards of Lion Kitchen Cotton, color #108 (Morning Glory)
Needles: #7 for the lace body, #5 for the i-cord straps.

I initially went down two sizes for the needles because I didn’t have dpn’s in a 7, but it ended up making a stiffer and less stretchy strap, so it was actually ideal. I looped the icord through the lace at the top of the bag to make a drawstring, then attached both ends to the bottom. Functional, easy, and I like the double strap.

And, so that you can see how close the color is, here’s the bag scrunched down a bit:

The mat’s a bit shiny, but otherwise they’re nearly dead on.