Craft Rage

Okay, so it's either really sweet, or really creepy, but The Hotness and I don't exchange purchased greeting cards. You know, birthday cards, valentine's day, etc.

Instead, we exchange handmade cards, which are ostensibly made by the cats. Paw-made cards, as it were.

You may gag on the sweetness now.

Are you finished yet? Good.

So anyway, this started after we'd been together for just over a year. The Hotness is an incredibly hard worker, and though he makes a concerted effort to be home for special days, sometimes his work doesn't leave him enough time to shop.

Plus, when we first got together, we decided to exchange one piece of information about our ex that drove us mad. He said that if we made it to the point where marriage was an option, I was not, under any circumstances, allowed to take my engagement ring back to the store and exchange it for something else without at least warning him. I told him that I wasn't really a fan of purchased cards, and that honestly, I'd be perfectly comfortable with a hug instead. You see, my ex, for every single occasion, be it birthday, Christmas, whatever, would take me to Wal-Mart, stand me in the greeting card aisle, pick out a card, hand it to me, and say "There's your card. Read it and let's get out of here."

I'll pause for your laughter.



So anyway, as you might imagine, I developed a slight dislike for greeting cards.

For the first few special occasions, The Hotness gave me a purchased card, and I liked them, because I know he spent time actually picking them out - his family is VERY big into greeting cards for every occasion.

Then, he had to work on Mother's Day, and since I have no actual children, I didn't think anything of it. But that night, about a half hour after he got home, he presented me with the ugliest, most awesome card I've ever gotten, badly misspelled and partly shredded, but with pictures "drawn" by the "cats". I love using "air quotes" but it doesn't have the same effect on my blog as in person, where I get to use my fingers. Anyway, I LOVED that card, and still have it packed away.

Then, for my birthday that year, I got another handmade card, also "made" by the "cats", but also including a fairly fresh hairball. So fresh that it was still wet when it was placed in the card, and I had to pry the card open. I laughed for three days. What the hell, I'm STILL laughing!

From that point forward, all we ever exchanged were handmade cards, signed by whatever animals we have on hand. I give you exhibit A - pictures of my birthday card from back in August.


Normally, he's just plain better at this than I am.

Last May, however, I made an extra effort, and gave him a cake "decorated" by the "cats". Please picture the air quotes in your head.

He's a huge Minnesota Vikings fan, so I went online and found this picture of their helmet.
With this picture I made this;


Are you ready for it?


Keep scrolling - I want it to be a surprise!


One more little scroll! And don't forget, you can click on it to see it in all it's 1000px glory!

Labels: crap sieve, family

Well, I've been promising a sewing post, but again, I've been a bit sidetracked. Finally, everything is coming together in a more or less positive way, so I can finally explain why.

Recently, my Grampa had a pretty bad heart attack. And more recently, one of our cats got sick.

My Grampa is an awesome guy. He's not perfect, (he's the first one to tell you that), but he's an excellent Grampa - he taught me how to fish, and how to dry deer meat, and how NOT to dig holes in the driveway for a swimming pool.

Anyway, after his heart attack, he developed pneumonia, as older folk are apparently wont to do, and they put him on this antibiotic that made him hallucinate. Long story short, he didn't hallucinate scary things - he hallucinated that he was James Bond, and had to escape the hospital. Apparently he made it to the parking lot twice - TWICE, ducking through hallways and creeping past the nurses' station.

I hope when I am in my late 70's, I am still spry enough to make two very creditable attempts to escape a hospital!

Now that Grampa's on the mend, my attention turned to Boobah.

Boobah's got a ton of personality, so when his behavior started to change, we noticed it right away.

Monday afternoon, Boobah started acting funny, hiding, not jumping up on the furniture, that sort of thing. You'd think I'd be happy about this turn of events, but really, when you're used to cuddling scolding the cat for jumping on stuff, and suddenly there's no scolding, usually it's a sign that either a) your cat has been abducted by aliens and replaced with a changeling, or b)something's wrong.

So last night, I...well, okay, I give my cat tummy rubs every night. And yes, when I give him tummy rubs, I talk to him like he's a baby. I suppose it's a pretty common behavior for cat owners, but I still feel kinda lame admitting it.

So anyway, I was giving him tummy rubs, and he felt...wrong. And when I rubbed the middle of his belly, he made a sort of startled growl/meow, and looked at me as though I'd just knifed him in the gut. Cue panic attack. I imagined that he'd eaten one of the innumerable furry catnip mice that reside all over the living room floor in a neat pile by the cat tree, and that we'd have surgery and a funeral, and we'd be sadly short one Spidercat.

Long story short - he's constipated. Just your garden variety "I-horcked-out-on-too-much-dry-cat-food-and-was-too-lazy-to-go-to-the-water-dish". Thank goodness. Our mutual punishment (he for being lazy and I for having opposable thumbs, I guess) is that I get to feed him medicine every eight hours. He doesn't like it much, but whatever.

I bought pet insurance for the whole cat-family on Saturday, and when Boobah got sick on Monday morning, a couple of hours after the coverage went into effect, I honestly felt just a little bit like I'd cursed him. And seriously, how do you explain that to the insurance broker? "I know he's only been covered for 12 hours, but could you please write me a cheque for $1800.00?"

On the upside, I got to see an X-ray of my cat - intestines are cool! And also, in protest of the X-ray, he "expressed his anal glands" which is the technical term for squirting stinky tuchus goo all over the table. Which means he doesn't need to have his anal glands manually expressed now! Way to save us $100.00, my friend!

Labels: crap sieve

Well, the Pink Abomination (PA) has taken a turn for the worse. The Crap Sieve kicked in last night, and when I cut the hemline so that it's shorter in the front than the back (per the pattern, I might add - this isn't just me getting creative!), I decided that rather than cutting straight, I'd use the flowers on the lace as edging. Suddenly, the whole thing has taken on the appearance of a skating costume. A large, two-toned pink skating costume. For an ungainly skater, or a transvestite lounge singer. I'll post pictures later, but I just wanted to prepare you for a little bit of amusement and/or dismay.

I myself am quite amused. After all, I have no intention of wearing this dress, though I fully intend to finish it and bead the lace. It's a muslin of a muslin, after all - if I don't practice my technique somewhere, I'm going to end up getting married in a reasonable facsimile of a gunny sack, since the option of just buying a dress is now completely out. If I don't follow through with making my own dress now, I won't be able to live with myself.

Karen, whose blog I stalk all the time (moi-ha-ha-ha!), commented on my last post about how she wouldn't have thought to buy fabric she didn't like in order to jumpstart a project. She's completely right - what sane person would actually buy fabric in a color they detest? Ha! The answer is a NOT SANE person!

The thing is, I have all this fabric I totally adore, but until this dress, I hadn't even managed to make myself cut out a real purchased pattern, with the exception of the blue abomination, (which I made from fabric I have to wear gloves to touch).

I was afraid to cut up any of the stuff I liked, just in case I really, truly sucked. Like, what if I couldn't cut out a pattern without ripping it with my big bear paws? What if I couldn't read the pattern at all? What if I couldn't figure out how to work the iron correctly? Stupidest fear ever, since I've been ironing military uniforms of one variety or another since I was 13 - seriously, I can pull a long-sleeved cotton uniform shirt out of a ball, from the bottom of a cold dryer, and have it on and ready to pass inspection in less than three minutes. I have many useless talents - this is one. Still, ironing a 100% cotton shirt is different from ironing pretty much anything in my stash. Other than my 100% cotton. Wow, Rachelle, ramble much?

Anyway, the PA is probably only half finished, but I already consider it a success. I cut out the pattern, which I've never done before, I cut up some fairly fancy fabric, which I've never done before, I sewed darts, which I've...well, you get the picture. I even successfully set in an invisible zipper, edited the pattern a bit so that the skirt and bodice fit better around my middle, still managed to line up the darts on the bodice and skirt (more or less), and stitched all the pieces together, all while using two very slippery fabrics. As far as I'm concerned, even if I chuck the whole thing now, I'm light years ahead of where I was seven days ago - I'm practically a whole new me!

Before PA, I was scared of every single step. I truly worried that I'd cut up some pretty fabric, get stuck somewhere, and lack the foundational skills to get unstuck. Now, I know that if I DO cut the nice fabric, I might still wreck the project, but I CAN figure it out, and I WILL be able to finish.

Anyway, as far as what's left to do, I'm going to finish the hemline, and if it DOES end up looking like a skating costume, I'm going to embrace that as a theme for the finished product, and I'm going to embellish accordingly. I still want to finish it properly, inside and out, because I need the practice, and when it's all done, I'm going to photograph it extensively, and then find someone to give it away to.

One last point - it's more to console me than to assure you - I got the fabric for the PA off the bridal fabric sale table at Fabricland, and I only needed six metres for this project - three of each fabric, though I did end up with an extra half metre of the lace, because it was destined to become a bolt-end otherwise, and the lady at the cutting table recognized me from the day I bought 66 metres of taffeta because it was on for $1.00 per metre. That's a whole other post, though. Anyway, both pink fabrics were 70% off, so between the fabric, the zipper, the bias binding, and the thread, I only spent $22.62 on this project, including tax. As far as waste goes, I can live with that. Plus, six metres in, six metres out - the stash remains in balance!

Labels: crap sieve, pink abomination

My name is Rachelle, and I have moderate Craft Rage. I'm 34 years old, and I have a fully equipped craft room, in which I can sew, knit, scrapbook, or make paper, among other things. What I usually end up doing, though, is cursing under my breath and trying not to trim off the tips of my fingers with my rotary cutter, then pouring myself a Bailey's and coffee and going to my office to read other people's blogs.

Why do I have Craft Rage? Well, most of my craft rage comes from my complete inability to finish one project before moving to the next. I have eight or nine things on the go RIGHT NOW, and a million ideas for other projects I want to start right away!

The reason I never finish anything is because I have a complete lack of technical skills, combined with a strong desire to teach myself everything, instead of acquiring any of the skills I need through traditional methods like classes. 100% of my craft rage is my own fault. It's not because I lack a sense of style - it's because I know that the smartest thing to do is to get lessons, use a pattern, count stitches, measure carefully, etc. But I seldom do any of those things. I tend to "wing it" a lot. I'm a fan of figuring things out for myself, either through trial and error, library books, or by reading blogs.

Exacerbating the problem is my "crap sieve" - that's the filter between my brain and my hands, where perfectly good ideas turn into junk that a three-year-old would be ashamed to claim as her own. Sometimes I start out fine, and everything is going along wonderfully, when suddenly, without warning, my crap sieve kicks in, and I awake ten minutes later to find myself in the midst of gluing glitter macaroni to the hem of the dress I was working on.

And lastly, the other reason I have craft rage is because my craft room is constantly buried under nine feet of crap that doesn't belong there. I'm going to fix this today, come hell or high water. Pictures to follow!

Labels: craft rage, crap sieve