I knit, really

I'm making Knitty's Calorimetry currently. The purple and orange will be rather exciting with my current hair color (pictures of that when I finish). The yarn was purchased long ago and sort of destined to be a present for my mother, but I didn't have enough of it and so it's been languishing in my stash for a couple of years.



The colors are rather more vibrant than that in real life, but I'm never home during daylight to take better pictures. Plus my camera is rather elderly.

Domestic Arts

Here's some proof that I've not been up to nothing. I have of course been up to grad school, but also the making of exciting things. First of all, my bed is finally finished. It's been in several stages of "almost finished" for a while, but since I added hooks for pajamas and things a couple nights ago the only thing I'd change about it is the squeaking. And I'm not exactly sure how to fix that.



This picture was taken standing in my closet. In the normal course of things, my room is not large enough to get that far away from the bed. As you can see, all of the mess in my room has now been relegated to the space under the bed. It's not nearly so noticeable when there's not a camera flash illuminated the space under there, but I'll probably add a curtain eventually anyway.

I'm particularly proud of the built-in bookcase:



It doesn't hold anything like all of my books, but it's a start.

Eventually I'd like to put the bed up on Instructables, but I'm not sure I took enough pictures along the way. So I might have to wait to do that until the next time the mattress comes off.

More recently, I've been baking lots of bread. My roommates think this is awesome. Here's the most recent four:



In saran wrap: strawberry bread. Almost gone: banana bread. The big whitish loaf: rosemary bread. In the bowl: cheese bread rising for later. There was also my attempt at Irish soda bread, which is gone now. But it had currants and caraway and was delicious. I do however really, really need to learn that I should not begin baking after midnight. Especially not on a weeknight.

When I get pictures back I'll post about the Thing 1 and Thing 2 costumes a friend and I made and wore for Halloween.

Halloween festivities

I carved a pumpkin. Look:



(My roommate seems to take a lot of silly pictures of me.)

Here's a better shot of all of the pumpkins:



I also carved a very small green squash, but I haven't got a picture of that yet.

Dyeing my hair is like a craft...

It is all bluey green now, and will remain so for a bit.

Someday I will update this more, really I promise. The bed is in limbo as I've lent my drill to a friend who wants to use it to make his own bed. I must go steal it back from him.

Also I've started grad school and this is, not surprisingly, time-consuming. I should update the subtitle on here.

Bed!

bed parts, originally uploaded by alicen.

I'm working on constructing a loft bed from (mostly) 2x4s to provide some extra storage in my room. Here are some of the boards for it. I've now cut all of them, and just need to start bolting them together.

green dress

green dress, originally uploaded by alicen.

A dress I made a while back. From a pattern, though not in the recommended fabric and I omitted the zipper. The fabric has small green vine things on it though, which I rather like.

Anime does things to my head

Look! It's a project!

So a while back Dash and I watched Ninja Scroll, a movie with a plot that might as well have been designed by 13-year-old boys. This was the result:


(The shirt, not the utilikilt.)

Here's another:



The whole thing is decent quality cotton. It's pretty thin (not like something you'd wear to tae kwan do, which is usually very heavy, almost canvas). It took 3 yards with no wasted fabric. I did french seams inside to make it more durable, and 1/4 inch hems everywhere that didn't have a facing.

The black facings are black cotton with medium-heavy weight interfacing inside them to keep them from getting all scrunched up when washed. They're all just long straight strips, folded over and sewn down. Nothing fancy.

It closes with hooks and eyes, like so:



The original plan was to add frogs along the black bit at the top, but I couldn't find nice ones and ran out of time to make them. I just moved to Seattle, so I'm now in a different state and not going to continue working on the shirt. I did promise to make another one for another friend, though, so maybe I can refine the design with that.



In other news, I've been living out of a suitcase for nearly a month and am really sick of it. I move into a more permanent place on Friday, thank god. Pretty much all crafting has to be postponed until then.