Thanks to a donation from Anthony & Shirley Barrette, you can now read the rest of "Essential for Human Survival."  Cassandra and Groundhog enjoy some crafts and cuddles.

Tags: crafts, cyberfunded creativity, family skills, fantasy, fishbowl, life lessons, poetry, reading, safety, weblit, writing
Current Mood: busy

 Vintage elegance.

Tags: art, crafts, food, photography
Current Mood: busy

A friend asked what to do with old socks. Here are some great ideas. Some of these will also work with other types of repurposed or scrap fabric. Yes, I have a ragbag that I actually use. My grandparents helped raise me, so I'm double-stamped on time period and have nearly Depression-caliber poorskills.

( Read more...Collapse )

Tags: #1, crafts, how to
Current Mood: busy

A friend tipped me to these papercut animals. 

Tags: art, crafts, networking, wildlife
Current Mood: busy

This poem was written outside the regular prompt calls, inspired by the "festival / fair" square in my 4-3-17 card for the origfic_bingo fest. It has been sponsored by Anthony & Shirley Barrette. It belongs to the Officer Pink thread of the Polychrome Heroics series.


( Read more...Collapse )

Tags: crafts, cyberfunded creativity, family skills, fantasy, fishbowl, holiday, poem, poetry, reading, weblit, writing
Current Mood: busy

Today's accomplishments include:

* Picked up new printer from office store. 

* Found superbright tube lights in narrow pairs.  :D 3q3q3q !!!!  We're going to put two pair in the library, upgrading its lighting to brilliant, and one pair in the foyer, bathroom, and closet which do not require as much light.

* Bought six 12x12" mirror tiles for the bathroom.  Determined that fixing the mirror itself is feasible on this trip, but the area around it (where the cheap crappy wallpaper is coming loose) will need to wait for the next round in October.  Our handyfriend is having enough fun to have suggested a subsequent trip.  We are happy with this idea.

* Discussed the possibility of upgrading a bathroom window, currently covered with crappy plastic, to a textured glass pane instead of trying to replace the whole damn thing with glass blocks.  The feasibility of this will depend on the construction of the window, and would have to wait for later, but we were in a glass store and I saw their very pretty display of glass options so I brought it up.

* Looked at more towel bars and found that almost all of them have crappy unstable construction.  So I'm going to see if anything better is available online, and if not, we can get the boring but sturdy one we saw earlier.

Tags: crafts, personal
Current Mood: pleased

 kyleri makes crap free soap.  :D  Check out Beltaine Rising (rose-berry scent, a lovely orchid color) and Dragon's Blood (in color only, the scent is patchouli-plum-cherry).

Tags: crafts, networking, shopping
Current Mood: busy

 Beautiful doll.

Tags: crafts, networking, photography
Current Mood: busy

This poem came out of the April 4, 2017 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from alexseanchai, mama_kestrel, and kelkyag. It has been sponsored by redsixwing.

( Read more...Collapse )

Tags: crafts, cyberfunded creativity, ethnic studies, life lessons, poem, poetry, reading, spirituality, weblit, writing
Current Mood: busy

This is the freebie for today's fishbowl, spliced from prompts by librarygeek and redsixwing.  It also fills the "Internet Friends" square in my 2-1-17 Love Songs card for the Valentines Bingo Fest.

( Read more...Collapse )

Tags: crafts, cyberfunded creativity, cyberspace theory, family skills, fishbowl, free stuff, poem, poetry, reading, weblit, writing
Current Mood: busy

A while back I mentioned Weta Legs, and someone recently pointed me to Digilegs.  These are reverse-bend stilts to give the wearer a digitigrade stance.  Cooooool.

Tags: crafts, entertainment, networking, science
Current Mood: busy

In Session 5, we put together a big gear. The pieces for this finished emptying one of the four slabs of wooden parts.

This is the front view of the gear.  You can see the little pointer on it.


This is the back view of the gear.  It shows some of the working parts on the far end of the shaft. Wedging the parts onto that cross-shaped set of parts was a pain in the ass.

Tags: crafts, personal, photo, photography
Current Mood: accomplished

Is it just me, or does this nebula really look like this timer piece we just built?  I mean, I've described the Universe as a clock before -- you wind it up, let it go, it winds down, you rewind it; Big Bang, Big Crunch -- but I wasn't expecting it to be this obvious.  I'm thinking of the two rubber bands, and thinking of entropy and syntropy, and now I'm imagining God leaning over this nebula and swearing because the laws of physics don't want to go in the holes quite right.  Not to mention the jumpgates in The Blueshift Troupers and how people argue over what powers them, like solar wind mills or subspace waterwheels, and it hadn't even occurred to me that we could be looking right at  some of the moving parts, and just never recognize them as technology. I never would've noticed this if I had not just been working on that part ten minutes ago.

Tags: crafts, networking, photography, space exploration, spirituality
Current Mood: curious

In Session 4, we built a long subassembly.

( Let's build a timer!Collapse )

Tags: crafts, personal, photo, photography
Current Mood: accomplished

In Session 3, we made two subassemblies.

( Let's make a timer!Collapse )

Tags: crafts, personal, photo, photography
Current Mood: accomplished

 I found this fascinating article on the history of tactile maps for vision-impaired people.

Tags: crafts, education, networking
Current Mood: busy

 kyleri posted this lovely piece of jewelry marked "exquisite self-care."  Sometimes what you can do to protest is make beautiful things.  :D

EDIT: I forgot to mention that $5 from the sale of this will go to the ACLU.

Tags: crafts, networking, photography
Current Mood: busy

This is the subassembly we made in Session 2.  It has gears on two parts, instead of just one part like the previous subassembly did.  We had an easier time putting it together after practicing on the first, although still not really easy.

Tags: crafts, personal, photo, photography
Current Mood: busy

Our current project is assembling a wooden timer.  We got it from a crowdfunding project.

( Let's build a timer!Collapse )

Tags: crafts, personal, photo, photography
Current Mood: accomplished

my_partner_doug has this idea about referring to President Pence and his puppet. Then I saw this puppet and thought it would be funny for protesters to hold them up with a sign saying, "Dear President Pence, we want a turn too."

Imagine how Dongus Taint will respond to millions of people shoving their fist up his ass in effigy.

Tags: activism, crafts, humor, politics
Current Mood: amused