To Posterous or not to Posterous

I thought I'd just use Posterous for the ThingADay posts, but I've found it especially useful to post via email. I'm sure I can do the same on WordPress, but I just found a site explaining how to configure mine and it's very late now my mind is a little too tired to digest… so, I thought I'd cheat and send this to my TAD auto-poster and let it do its WordPress magic. Thoughts I want to put out there:

1. I'd like to know if my swap partner has received their swap in the mail yet…??? Is it OK to say who it is now?

2. Last week, I decided to make more stuffies. So I'm now in the process of deciding which (stuffed) animals I'll be making next and knowing very little about them, I've had to do a lot of looking around… I don't even really know where to begin looking, so I've done searches like "animal kingdom" and "animal classes" and clicked on a bunch of links several layers down from that. I just realized how many animal websites I've visited in the last 2 weeks and probably learned more about animals in that time than I have in the last 30 years. It is a foreign curiosity, but currently I am compelled, so I press on.

3. Is there really going to be a summer TAD? What happened to the weekly? How's March going for you?

OK, so tomorrow (or when I get around to it next), I will read the WP config again and probably leave Posterous for the next TAD adventure (we'll see). Until then, if you want to stay in touch, find me here www.karizmatic.com

from karizmatic’s posterous, thing-a-day

Stuffing

For those of you who don’t know me well, I don’t have a great history with animals. I’ve been bitten by dogs more than once (once by my own dog) and I’m also allergic to most furry things  so we’ve never really had an opportunity to mend fences… it’s mostly a fear of dogs these days. Over the years, my relationship with animals has improved and although I no longer have panic attacks when dogs bark (yes, even the little tiny ones), my heart still does race when they do, so I don’t exactly feel any urges for a pet-and-sneeze session.

In the last part of Thing A Day, I discovered a great way to use up the little bits of furry fabric scraps I had and it propelled me into making animals. Call it therapy, if you like. I call it, “Maybe I can finally clear out all these little pieces of fabric I’m hoarding without having to throw them away (I am even using the remnants from my own cuts as part of the stuffing)”.

I’ll be honest – a couple of weeks ago, I made this mouse and when I stuffed the tail and was smoothing it out, there was a moment of creep factor that crawled up my spine and I actually momentarily dropped it before I realized that it was just fabric. Aside from the panic-and-run reflexes I’ve had to practice calming down, I’ve found that it’s actually a great exercise for thinking about making patterns 3-dimensionally (hopefully this will help when I come back to making clothes).

So, in this last project, I decided to see if I could imitate a dog I know. I found some pictures of her at varying angles and picked out a few of her distinct characteristics like her spots (hence the “black eye” on one side); the fact that she likes to rest her head on things – so, I made her head stick out a bit; and the fact that her mom says it’s hard to put a leash on her because her neck is about as big – or bigger –  than her head, so I tried to keep them about the same. I think I should have probably used a matching colored thread and there was a part of the belly that I didn’t quite have enough fabric for and I thought it would come out OK, but I do see now that it makes the legs look a bit too close together, but lessons learned for the next one, I guess.

tad 2010-28 You Say Goodbye and I say Hello

Hello, Hello!

I started this hat this week and just finished:

  

My husband says that I also need to show a pic of the top:

Thanks to everyone for the collective push for making! It was especially great to get on board the friends & family plan this year with p0ppy, katstuff, & amster! See you next year!

from karizmatic’s posterous, thing-a-day