dirty words

My sister and I like to do holiday themes, for both decorations (the "The North Pole Threw Up On Our Apartment" theme is particularly memorable) and gifts (every year we say "Your presents have a theme!" and 9 times out of 10 that theme is Star Trek).

This year, my theme was Handmade Holidays. My goal was to have all decorations handmade out of things I already had, and all gifts be handmade, recycled and/or locally sourced for under $5. I was mostly successful! Mostly.

( Pictures and tutorial links below! )

All of this helped me get pretty far on the last of my 2011 Year Of 11 New Year's Resolutions! I've got a super fun resolution planned for this year which I'll post about later in case anyone else wants to join in!

... but on craft it is.

Mama Red, via telephone, hearing stove vent: "Are you making dinner?"
Me: "No, I'm boiling popsicle sticks."
Mama: "To eat!?"
Me: "It's Craft from Stash month and I have an infestation of popsicle sticks, so I thought I'd try this."
Mama: "Why do you have popsicle sticks?"
Me: "Because they only come in, like, packs of 10,000. I've been carrying them around for years!"
Mama: "But why did you buy them in the first place?"
Me: "I don't remember. It probably involved a glue gun."
Mama: "... oh. Well, make sure to make some actual food, too."

Craft. Not even once.

... unless you have a fever and have slogged through work all week with a cold/flu thing and now you're home and it's FABULOUS except for the part where you still sort of feel like your brain is disintegrating into your sinuses.

I've spent the last two hours or so watching paint dry. Literally. To be fair, this work in progress does sort of look to the fever-addled eye like a magical geometric forest of painted cardboard tubes.

( Sneak peek of my new craft space! )

Also, my resistance crumbled to dust and I am now infatuated with Body of Proof and have a new OTP (you guys it's Dana Delany and Jeri Ryan and it's subtext with the emphasis on text and you just pretty much have to) and icepixie is not-so-innocently suggesting that RPF might also be a necessity and I am going to enjoy the heck out of this sick weekend from the comfort of my newly fabulous apartment.

ETA: LIVEJOURNAL, Y U NO RECOGNIZE ORIENTATION OF IPHONE PICS. I have fixed it I hope!

I love notebooks. Love. However, I'm obnoxiously picky about them - they need to have hard backs (none of this flimsy stuff!), but the front cover also needs to be able to fold behind the back all the way, so hard-backed journal-type notebooks won't work. I also want to be able to easily remove pages without making it look ratty. Once I could drive, back-to-school shopping became an epic tour of every stationery store in the state. If I found JUST the right notebooks, it was an auspicious omen for the school year!

I'm not in school anymore, but these notebooks (almost) make me wish I were!!



( Cardboard Book-Ring Notebooks - photo tutorial )

Sucking up to the I.T. department is pretty much the smartest move you can make, particularly if you're an admin trying to keep a field office running. Fortunately for me, not enough people have figured out this golden rule of technology equipment supply & demand, so the bar is set pretty low!

I had hoped to send a big ol' gift basket, but the best I could squeeze out of my office-mates was some Starbucks cards. I added a tiny pot of Marionberry jam for Oregon flair, and assembled a gift box! Shala from Don't Eat the Paste has a great, great selection of free, pretty gift boxes to print and assemble... since I'm still getting mileage out of being "that admin with the lolcats," I modified one of her templates to use pictures of cats and computers.

This craft is easy, fast, and best of all, is actually a productive use of work time -- it's an investment toward the next time the blue screen of death shows up.

( Lolcat Gift Box )

You know me, I love all forms of crafts and crafting. It saddens me a little that I was not alive in the 70s to make ten thousand macrame plant holders and to clothe myself and my loved ones in clothing entirely created from crocheted orange, green and gold granny squares. My crafting love is true.

However, there is always a special place in my heart for slightly twisted crafting, like the delicious cross-stitch gallery from Kate Westerholt.

If you like that, of course, there's the awesome Subversive Cross-Stitch.

As karma_aster says, cross-stitch is the crafter's gateway drug.

(Since I really don't enjoy graphically violent crafting, my harder core crafting drug is, as always, the delightful knitting vandalism.)

Dear Livejournal:

Depression sucks and I hate it.

Let's talk about some things which are awesome and bizarre that I should be enjoying far more than I am:

1) The Knitty baby bootie pattern "Tulip Toes" is complete and utter ridiculous fabulousness. I am knitting it in a sock yarn by Lorna's in the "Sherbet" colorway that is quite literally so cute that it causes instant squeee and the desire to lick your yarn. (I don't recommend giving in to that impulse.)

2) People who send me messages via okcupid who look like the unabomber. And email me in Klingon. Seriously, there are a lot of them out there. I should cancel the page that my sister and a friend of hers set up two years ago pretending to be me, but I can't do it, for the sheer wtf factor.

3) I found a video game store that sells original Sega Genesis games. That's right. Things only went downhill after the 16-bit glory days. (Important sidenote: We still have our original game system. Still hooked up to the television. I could never figure out all the buttons on the N-64 so, um, we stuck with what we knew.)

Also, pictures! People like pictures, and it distracts them from how I have become kind of sullen and mean:

Oh no! Livejournal won't let me upload those. :( My saving grace has been stolen from me by a persistent login error! Imagine I posted pictures of how we redesigned our apartment, some classic 16-bit goodness, a teddy bear I knit and a card I made, a picture of the doggy we were dog-sitting and a bonus photo found on my camera from God-knows-when of me doing a Captain America pose in a full-body sauna suit.

In conclusion: My life is awesome. I should not hate everything.

The end.