Late last month, I got a rather urgent call from my SQO. He was over at his Aunt’s place, and was going to be there a little while longer than planned, because they had to wait for the EMS.
His mother was visiting as well, and, upon exiting her car, she misplaced a foot. The difference in elevation between the driveway and the lawn snagged an unwary victim, and she ended up falling out of her car.
Diagnosis: she broke a hip.
Now, if we ‘age’ this wonderful lady by her attitude, I’d put her in the late teens. She’s a fiery person in a chronologically-correct 80 year old shell. So, with bones having spent that amount of time defying gravity’s pull, her doctors decided to replace the joint, rather than immobilize and let it heal naturally.
I had an opportunity to visit with her in the hospital…and made her a little something to brighten her room.
The flowers are sprouting ALL over my little corner of the Earth. Winter is back in the coat closet 😀
I started this post with a weird title: I got Nothin’. When I started typing, I didn’t have an idea what I wanted to write, so I randomly typed out the usual bemoaning of an author fighting to get past a blockage.
About 3 paragraphs of bitching in, I had an idea.
I love it when I berate the muses, and they throw a good idea my way. Well, that, and I loosed the earworms on them again. They just can’t get enough of that damn banana-flavored love machine.
A lady on my chainmaillers group on the Evil Book of Faces was showing off her decoupaged scales, and I casually asked if she can do this extremely AWESOME artwork on the inside of the scales as well as the outside. I had a ducky idea in mind.
She could, and she did. So now I have a ducky in my flock sporting some very intense artwork across his beak and down his tale. I like to call this guy the Fire Water duck.
He’s all ready and listed on my Esty shop. And, I wrote up a little story for him on the shop, too.
In fact, all the ducks on the shop have a bit of a tall tale behind them. I just can’t resist giving them a blurb of backstory when I list them. Guess I just like to personify my creations?
I make no apologies for the content of this post…I need to drain the brain, such as it were, so be warned…weirdness inside…
now that I’ve scared off the timid…
Last night, I went to my favorite ring vendor to drool, dream, and torture my credit card. What do I see front and center?
The duckies are spreading 😀
And how appropriate – for a Tweet to appear featuring one of them? Maybe I can convince Twitter to start calling them ‘Quacks’ instead of ‘tweets?’
To celebrate, I went to my Etsy account, and scheduled a sale…from March 22nd to the 29th, I’ll be knocking off 15% of the sale price of any of the Duck YEAH sculptures listed on the site, so I can spread them far and wide.
And, in COMPLETELY unrelated news…we’ve shifted our clocks again to be on daylight savings time. Not sure what daylight I’m saving by this move (as far as I can tell, the sun shines the length of time it’s gonna shine no matter what our clocks say…), and I’ve gone from getting out of bed while the sun is JUUUUST peeking around the buildings to it being dark and cold again. I’m sure there was some little toadie in some office somewhere in this country who thought it would be nice to get up BEFORE the sun, and everyone should be so ‘lucky.’
To which I say “Dude…get a damn cat, and leave the food bowls empty overnight.” I can guarantee you’ll be getting up at Feed-me-O’Clock and the rest of us can sleep in!
And…slightly related but yea, that’s a stretch here…I had a hard time falling to sleep last night, partly because of the yearly issue with the aforementioned clocks and sun, but also because I had an earworm running rather loudly in my head.
The fun part (or annoying, as this one was chasing off the illusive ZZZ’s…) it the worms were singing it wrong. I now am utterly convinced there’s a line in Weird Al’s ‘Tacky” song that goes…
“banana-flavored love machine…”
I may have to step away from the iPod for a few days…
I listed out my stainless steel dodecahedron July of 2016. It languished on the site, got some views, some favorites, but never attracted a buyer. I priced it higher than most of the goodies on my store for a couple of reasons.
It’s 16 gauge stainless steel rings. A LOT of them.
Stainless is a right royal bitch to work with. It fights (and sometimes BITES) back.
It took several hours of hard work time. It also spent some time languishing in the “what…how…am I doing this RIGHT???” project pile on a corner of my desk. While there IS a tutorial on M.A.I.L., it’s one of the very scaled down ones, and didn’t offer much help besides: just study the form, it should be easy…
It wasn’t.
It was proceeded by older brothers who never really got past the ‘well, THAT didn’t work’ pile, and got deconstructed.
It was the first time I EVER successfully completed a 3D form.
Early this morning, someone bought my ball.
I’m kinda on the fence with this one. On one hand, I’m happy that someone appreciates sculptural forms enough to purchase one from me…but on the other hand….
it’s kinda like selling my first born.
Once I got over the sentiment, I wrapped him up in paper and a box, plastic on the outside of that box, more stuffing and a bigger box, which I then taped the living hell out of. He’ll make it, as safely as I can make it, all the way to California.
It’s also the name of a brand new – never before configured – chainmaille weave.
And I’m the one who did it 😀
insert bragging rights here…
See…I had an idea.
Yea…me & ideas. Usually make the household run for the hills…
I’ve been playing with Celtic Visions, which is the core chain weave used to make those little flowers I’d been messing about with.
These…for a refresher…
I took the flower form, and turned it into the balls I then gifted for the holiday.
Here…have a ball…
And it’s also featured quite heavily in the holey grail/Tree of Life forms I’ve been developing…
Soooo…with this weave currently occupying the ‘hot seat’ in my head…
The muses LOVE to muck about with that hot seat stuff…
I really, REALLY wanted to sheet the weave.
‘Sheeting’ a weave, in chainmaille terminology, is when you add additional rows to a chain weave to make a larger-than-a-single-row chain of any chainmaille pattern. Useful for making armor, belts, bags, and other sculptural elements out of little metal rings.
If you haven’t already guessed, I’ve got a rather large weakness for sculpture made outta those little metal rings…
So, with the Muses fully fueled with starches (well, it WAS the holidays, and I DID cheat more than just a bit on the Keto thing…) and pliers in hand, I started to play with the pattern.
BAM!!!!!!
Dutifully, I posted a shot of the weave on my chainmailler’s group on Facebook, looking for someone to ‘name’ the weave. See…I figured if my logic strings wandered along these easy pathways, someone HAD to have configured this weave before, and I wanted to give it the proper name.
The enthusiasts I associate with in my group are big on keeping the names of patterns ‘pure.’ No sense in having a dozen names for the same damn weave, after all. We often quote the website M.A.I.L. as the leading repository of weave names, descriptions, and a LOT of tutorials.
Imagine my surprise when I find out this new weave does NOT appear anywhere on the M.A.I.L. website….
That means I get to claim it and name it.
In my mind, calling it ‘Visions of a Celtic Bastard’ is perfect, because that’s essentially what I did – I bastardized the original Celtic Visions weave simply by dropping one ring out of the chain form, and stabilizing it once it spreads to a sheet form.
My chainmailler’s group has gone completely berserk over this new weave. So far, I’ve had multiple deman…er…requests for a tutorial. Someone wants to take the weave and make a ‘badass guitar strap,’ someone else has suggested it would make a fantastic watch band, and yet another wants to do a complete chainmaille vest outta the stuff.
So…if you don’t hear from me for a bit, I’m currently ‘chained’ to my computer, writing a how-to for a new weave.
Every December, WordPress puts little flakes of snow on my blog. They drift, they dangle, they electronically attempt to put everyone in ‘the mood’ for the Holiday season.
I tend to ignore these things when they happen, because the beginning of every winter is my biggest time of denial.
I refuse to accept the existence of the fowl white stuff, therefore, it canNOT be snowing right now.
OK…so it never really works, but a girl’s gotta try, no?
So, it’s snowing in WordPress, the same as it’s snowed on WordPress the last three Decembers I’ve hosted my blog here…am I just THAT slow that it’s taken me THIS long to realize the snow drops in the direction you drag your mouse?
And yes…I played with it for far longer than was probably appropriate, given my age. I still take great glee in popping virtual bubble wrap, too.
The pliers have been HOT, and the creation process boiling over in my head. The muses must have gotten a hold of some serious caffeine pills.
Nothing stronger, thanks. I don’t think I could handle THIS…
Got the Mobyzan hearts all lined up on Etsy and ready to publish, both the tutorial and the finished forms…just waiting until November 1st to do so, so October isn’t so ‘listing heavy’ when it comes time to renew the things.
I also started playing with the weave used to make the dice again. The first time I went ‘off the tutorial’ I created collars from a single strip of the weave.
These ones, in case you’ve forgotten…
And I have once again wandered afield with this weave to pair it with a different focal.
See – I wanted to see how Metal Designz does their kits. If I was going to approach them on kitting out either the Dragon or the Mobyzan, I wanted to assure myself that what they were sending people was quality stuff. So I bought a new tutorial I’d drooled over for a while called Her Majesty’s quilt and picked up a kit from Metal Designz.
All for research, donchaknow (at least, that’s how I justified the spending 😀 )
Nice kits, if I do say so – I’m happy they’re going to be putting together supplies for the Mobyzan.
The Her Majesty’s Quilt necklace, when constructed as written, however, needed a bit of a punch up, as I was slightly unimpressed at the length of chain winding around the form.
Enter the muses with the aforementioned caffeine pills…
Because the weave used in the collars and the capture of the crystal in HMQ are both square – I thought “Why not?” and mashed the two together.
Can my muses cook, or what???
If any of you want to rip this beauty off my neck…it’s up on Etsy here.
I did it…I got the tutorial done for my dragon design.
YEA, ME!!!!
It was a monster of a project – almost as monstrous as all the design work that went into the form. I lost sight of the actual photo count by the time I finished (added a few last minute shots, dropped a few others) but I had 251 pixs edited and lined up by the time I’d finished the photo work phase.
The final page count for the tutorial is 79 – but most of that space is taken up by the pictures. It ended up a HUGE file in my hard drive.
Now, I’m no stranger to writing (duh!). I’ve done ‘how to’s’ for employers in the past as they attempted to document JUST how a certain job is performed. The writing of those little guides were usually dry, cold, impersonal and boring as hell, because there were higher-up’s involved who wouldn’t know a humorous phrase if it came up off the page and bit their noses off.
When I started the dragon tutorial, this was how the writing ‘clicked,’ because that’s my past experience with guides…a very ‘business impersonal’ style.
Took me a moment to realize what I was doing – and scrap the first draft. I didn’t need to impersonalize this work, because there were no higher-ups between me and the publishing button. The ONLY thing that would stop me from inserting my personality into this work was ME.
Can you see me cackling madly at my keyboard, yet?
If you want to make a dragon of your very own – here’s the listing:
I’ve been in stretchy, ultra-comfy sports bras for a while – as I continue to shrink, more stretchy=longer wear life. Unfortunately for the SQO, sports bras are neither sexy or conductive to activities of a bedroom nature…
He has to demand I FREE THE TATAS! instead of just doing it himself.
Sooooo – to better keep harmony in the bedroom and beyond, the DIL and I are planning an excursion into Madison this weekend for some **real** bra shopping…and I just happen to have the right blog post to get me in the right frame of mind as I go forth and procure a new undergarment for my boyfriend.
Bonus – I buy it ‘for him’ but get to wear it myself. Doesn’t get any better than that 😀
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Anyone else out there count their favorite time of day the glorious moment in time when you are home for the night – shedding outdoor and/or work clothing to slide into comfy pajamas – reveling in the freedom that comes from taking the bra OFF?
Yea…I live for that moment…
As my body shape will never be described as svelte, thin, shapely, or firm, bras have always been a constant source of aggravation. The band is either too tight, too small, too loose, too big, too stretchy, not stretchy enough or difficult to fasten.
With the kids out on their camping/festival tour in MN (they managed to abandon the three pretties I sent along with them with much stealth), and the SQO over at his Aunt’s home (he still helps her keep her house in order) – I had the weekend all to myself.
I love it when the apartment is quiet.
So quiet you can hear a jump ring drop…
So, I put together a couple of new chainmaille things by playing with an older pattern: the Hourglass. I’ll have to create another post and show off some of the results.
Streamed some stuff on Netflix and Amazon. GOT and the Great British Baking Show. I may have also squeezed in a bit of Doctor Strange, but I’ve been sleeping to him, so not sure if that counts.
Did some kitchen stuff.
Got the food shopping thing done.
Sunday – I’m kinda flitting through that dastardly book of Faces – seeing what everyone else is up to, and I catch this:
COME HAVE TEA WITH ME
HAYDEN PARK, WAUKESHA
I’ve never been one to get sucked into the MLM stuff. Remember Tupperware? How about the Lisa Sophia Jewelry stuff. Or Amway? I managed to dodge many such home-party buy-shit bullets throughout my adult life…
Probably because most of my friends know that, while I’m usually an easy-going person, I have the uncanny ability to go from laid-back and personable to the-monster-bitch-from-the-deepest-pits-of-hell in a fraction of a second when confronted by a pushy salesperson.
I generally suggest used-car salespersons have a therapy appointment all lined up before engaging with me…
So I went to this tea party yesterday, determined to be on my BEST behavior…because I got to see KC for the first time in AGES!
The afternoon was fine, if a bit boring for me. I brought along rings and marbles and pliers, and listened to the ladies gathered around the picnic tables yammer while they sipped iced tea. I did briefly explain to all how I’m a crafter, and somewhat quiet by nature, and they were actually happy they could safely exclude me *the outsider* from their discussions about how to generate more parties, the catalog, the home office, the back-stabbing that is evident with some of the individual salespersons, the incentive program…and all the different teas available and how they taste.
KC’s GPS unit totally let her down. Not only was she fashionably late, she also got lost 3 separate times in the boroughs of Waukesha. Not that I blame her – this town had someone on some serious hallucinogens design their streets!
And I gotta admit – some of their iced teas were petty tasty, even without added sugar and junk. I deftly avoided the cookies and cakes and stuff offered with the teas, because…yaknow….CARBS.
And, I got to spend time with a dear old friend whom I haven’t shared the same airspace with for a LONG time.
To make the afternoon all that sweeter – the lady doing the presenting (who was NOT one of the aforementioned pushy ‘used-car-type’ salespersons) gave away some of the stuff she didn’t really use anymore – so I got to bring home this cute little bright orange teapot.
He, Octopot, and my original White Boy are getting acquainted.
The Tempest and the Teapot 