Feeling all smug in a MacGyverish sort of way

Lazy Husband was just getting ready for bed and discovered a rather troubling steady drip of water that is coming from the top of our bedroom window frame and splashing loudly on our windowsill every 0.65 seconds. Aside from the hideous mold this leak is probably causing in our walls and attic, the sound is enough to drive you insane while trying to go to sleep.

Putting down a towel on the sill didn't help, it just made it into more of a splat than a plink, and at the rate the water is coming out the towel would be completely soaked before morning, anyway. Lazy Husband was about ready to give up and sleep in the guest room tonight when I had a brain flash.

I grabbed the leftover (organic, unbleached, undyed, ridiculously expensive) cotton yarn from this hat, taped one end to the wall above the leak, ran the length of it so it touched the drippy point on the frame, and stuck the other end in a plastic pitcher. Once I wetted down the yarn along its length, the water ran (silently!) down the yarn and into the pitcher.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, craft gods, for helping me get some sleep tonight. Because I'm going to need it when calling repair people tomorrow ...

Look! Pattern development!

Yeah, so with all the mermaid tail production and sock knitting and vacationing, it's been a little while since I've introduced a new pattern to my shop. I've got a new one on the machine now, though, and once I get it written up I think it will be pretty popular. Here's a taste:

It may be a few days before it's available, though, since I have Important Things to do, like go to the observation class at Lazy Kid's dance studio.

Serendipity

When we moved a little over a year ago, I was so excited to be back near my preferred quilt shop that I splurged and bought fabric for a bunch of different projects. Most of the projects are finished, but a couple were of the "not-such-a-great-idea" variety, and those have been sitting at the bottom of the to-do pile for months. The fabric would get used eventually, I figured, even if it wasn't in what I originally planned. But every time I looked at the fabric, I saw wasted $$. Good thing the pile kept getting deeper, so deep you could barely see the offending prints sticking out one side.

Then today I finished up a quilt top that's a prototype for a new pattern ... and also a gift for a friend who is expecting her first baby any day now. Most of my prototypes have muslin backs to save material costs, but since this is a gift, I wanted to find something a little jazzier. Most of the fabric for the front came from my stash, but I didn't think I had anything large enough left for the back ... but it was worth a try, if only to keep me from having to wake Lazy Kid to go to the fabric store before dinner.

After digging through my drawers of full-width fabric and finding nothing that wasn't too small or too ugly, I was ready to give up when I spotted one of the "not-such-a-great-idea" fabrics out of the corner of my eye. Yes, that $18 piece of red flannel was exactly the right color to coordinate with the quilt top, and it is - get this - exactly 2" larger than the top, all the way around.

For once I have exactly the right piece of fabric in my stash, exactly when I need it. Praise Jeebus and pass the ammunition, I may be able to finish this sucker after all!

Here's a sneak peek ... Kylie-Ann, don't scroll down unless you want to ruin the surprise!
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Sometimes I'm silly

I ordered a photo cube a few weeks ago, and it's been sitting in a (big) box on the floor in my living room while I dug myself out of a pile of housework and projects. Today I finally had the time to put it together and play with it for a little while, and boy, was it fun! It's amazing how much crisper and more professional everything looks in a well-lit white cube.

But on to the silly part. What was the first thing I photographed? One of my SWAK blankets? An amigurumi animal? Nope. It was a Happy Meal toy I put together backwards and have been saving for just this occasion, because it makes me giggle every time I see it.

Much more fun than photographing blankets, even if it doesn't pay me anything.

How I'm milking the system for all it's worth

Yesterday I put into place the first part of my plan to mooch as much free cash out of my purchases as I can. It was easy - I went to the grocery store and bought a combined $100 in gift cards to other stores where I was planning to shop.

My grocery store shopper's club keeps track of your purchases, and every $50 you spend gets you $0.10 off per gallon of gas at their stations. Given how expensive groceries are now, it doesn't take much to whack quite a bit off the price of a fill-up ... especially since the gift cards count as double points toward my gas discount. So $100 = $0.80 off per gallon, which if I wait until I'm on fumes and almost fill my gas tank translates to as much as $12.

And I paid for the cards with a credit card that gives me cash back on my purchases ... where I earn twice as much for grocery purchases. That means I earned about $2 from the credit card company.

And when I made my purchases today, anything in excess of the amount of cards I purchased went onto the same credit card, which is the one linked to my UPromise account. I earn UPromise money at Bed Bath and Beyond for any purchases made with that credit card, so that's another $1 or so. And I get the cash back on the credit card purchase, too, which is another $1 or so.

So basically it boils down to this: Buying the gift cards at the grocery instead of just paying with the credit card at the store earned me up to an extra $13, in addition to the $3 I would have earned if I just used the credit card linked to the UPromise account. Not too shabby, considering I was at the grocery store anyway, and I was going to buy the same stuff at the same stores whether I had gift cards or not.

Now, I know why the companies offer their cards for sale at the grocery. They're hoping that if you spend $25 on a gift card from Bath and Body Works, and your total comes to $22, you'll throw in an extra purchase so you won't have to carry around a piece of plastic that only has $3 left on it. If you buy one extra thing in addition to what you would have bought if you weren't using the gift card, they're making money off of you. But if you have the willpower (and purse space) to walk away from the extra purchases, gift cards that earn you extra grocery store credit can be a very deal.

Now I plan to go clean the store out of Home Depot cards so I can buy a new sink for our bathroom ... bwahahahahahahaha!

Crafty birthday

LazyToddler is now officially LazyKid, having turned three years old earlier this week. We had the party today, complete with garden-themed birthday cake and food. I'm not usually a theme party kinda girl (last year she got cheap pizza and an ice cream cake, and the year before that we gave her a Kroger cupcake three days late), but I had fun this year. The cake was the best part ...

LazyKid helped make the "seed packets," and she helped mix the cake, but I decorated the whole thing after she went to bed so the final product would be a surprise. Decorating a cake after 10pm leads to flights of fancy that may include (but are not limited to) ...

... giant worms ...

... and bunny turds.

I was a little bit worried that the cake was going to be awful - I monkeyed around with the size of the pan so I'd have plenty of "garden" to decorate, and it took almost twice as long to bake as the original recipe suggested. I even had to wrap the edges of the pan in foil partway through to keep them from getting overcooked. That worked pretty well, actually, and the edge piece that I had was just as moist as the middle.

I was also a little bit concerned because I didn't notice until I was halfway done making the frosting that it never gets cooked or heated after the raw egg is added. But I solved that problem by feeding a healthy dose of extra frosting to LazyHusband last night and watching him carefully for signs of food poisoning. It's excusable to throw your spouse under the bus in an effort to keep kids from dying of salmonella, right?

All in all, it was a fun party, even if I didn't get to do some of the more elaborate things I had planned. I guess if I had gone all Martha Stewart on the decorations and games, my friends would have had to slap some sense into me, and that would have been unfortunate. So we'll just save the "pin the center on the flower" game we made for next year, and thank our lucky stars that the "toss the bunny in the rabbit hole" game never got finished.

And if there's any lingering doubt about my ability to give Martha a run for her money, you need look no further than my attempt at Ladybug Pizzas to see ... I'm not even in her league.

Who knew canned chopped olives looked so disgusting? Oh, well, at least they tasted better than they looked.

Out of retirement

I retired my large rotary cutting mat a few months ago when I switched to using a piece of antique furniture instead of my wobbly cutting table. Since then, it's been languishing in the attic ... until our friend forgot to bring his terrain maps when he came over to play Dungeons and Dragons minis with LazyHusband.
Yes, they were so desperate for "adult" game time that they made a war map out of a rotary cutting mat and some of LazyKid's blocks. I wish I had a photo of last weekend's Bristle Block cavern of doom, or whatever they were calling it.

The Goddess of Craft - she is a vengeful, spiteful thing

1. You are happy because you sold eight of your SWAK blankets in a week, so you bought a lot more fabric to make new ones for the shop? Okay, now you won't sell anything for three weeks. Bwahahahaha!
2. You have a deadline looming and a sample quilt to make? Okay, your stash no longer has three fabrics that coordinate. Bwahahahaha!
3. And you're out of chocolate! Bwahahahahaha!
4. And your toddler refuses to take naps! Bwahahahahaha!
5. You get up early to get some work done before your toddler awakes? Okay, now she'll get up at 6:40am, but only on days when you wake up early. On days when you sleep in, she'll sleep until 8:30am, thus depriving you of 90 minutes of time that could have been spent in the studio. Bwahahahahahaha!
6. Trying to entertain the kid for an hour while you get some work done? Okay, now the portable DVD player is broken ... but only when you try to use it in your studio. Anywhere else it works fine ... but all of the work you have to finish requires that you be in the studio. Bwahahahahahaha!
7. You have no deadline and a huge pile of scraps you're trying to use up? Okay, your stash is now chock full of fabrics that coordinate with the scrap blocks ... but you don't have enough yardage of any of them. Bwahahahahahaha!
8. Oh, and the cat puked on the pile of fabric you stored on the floor because you were too lazy to file it. Bwahahahaha!

Stay tuned - later this week I plan to slice off the end of my finger with a rotary cutter, then set my studio on fire with a shorted-out iron. And, if things go as planned, the kid will pee on a finished quilt that's ready to ship to a customer. Should be fun!

Well, fine. Be that way.

Dear LazyToddler:

Okay, fine, you're almost three. I get it. You don't want to nap, you want to stay awake and become increasingly cranky as the day wears on, finally dropping from sheer exhaustion around 7:30. That's fine with me, as it gives me time in the evening to spend with your father, time that can be spent completing sentences and not speaking in the third person or telling stories about a fairy named Liza.

But I need time to work on Lazy Mama stuff, and since you aren't taking a nap with any regularity anymore, I thought I'd be smart and get up an hour early to get work done before you wake up. You get up around 7:30 am most days, so I'd get up at 6:30 and get a whole mess of stuff done despite still being in my pajamas. And it worked great ... the first day.

But now you've decided to start waking up earlier and earlier, no matter what time we put you to bed. Yesterday I woke up at 6:40, and you were up at 6:49. That's not even enough time to pee and get the computer turned on and operational, much less make any significant progress on the pattern that I HAVE TO HAVE FINISHED BY FRIDAY NIGHT. And when my alarm went off at 6:30 this morning, you were already stirring and making up stories with your stuffed animals. I just gave up and laid in bed for an extra 15 minutes, reveling in the hard rock station you apparently tuned my radio to sometime yesterday. Nothing like "BBBBBBBBBBad to the Bone" to start your day off right, I always say.

So now you're at preschool, and I have one and a half glorious hours to finish this darn pattern ... only I don't feel like it. I feel like blogging about your annoying sleep patterns, and the deer tracks I found in the backyard, and the yummyness of the pork roast I made for dinner last night. Oh, I'm going to get around to the pattern - I always do - but I'm not happy about it.

So you'd better be ready to take a nap this afternoon, kiddo, so I don't have to pull out the Sesame Street video again (although you're getting ridiculously close to being able to read, thanks to the darn video, so it's not all bad to have a DVD player as a babysitter, right?). Because despite my name, Lazy Mama isn't feeling so lazy today.

Sincerely,

Mama, aka "George Gershwin" (don't ask, Internet, it's not my fault that she's decided I'm a character from a stupid bedtime story involving Rhapsody in Blue and a little fairy named Liza ... at least I'm not Herr Drosselmeyer anymore)

Button, button

I just spent 15 enjoyable minutes sorting through a box of buttons my mother picked up at a yard sale last summer (I think it cost $1). It's one of those squat round metal boxes that used to house butter cookies, but now it's the repostitory of two pounds of the Ugliest Buttons in Ohio.

I have found that if you need a button sorting cohort, a potentially OCD not-quite-three-year-old is the perfect answer. I'm telling you, she was picking up on MY mistakes ("That's blue green, Mom, not green blue!") and was fascinated by the whole experience.

The tackier the button, the better, as far as she's concerned, which makes the whole process more interesting. Rhinestones, spangles, sparkle-embedded-resin ... she's all in favor of it, and she has to show every "coooooool!" button to me for inspection and approval. This gives me plenty of time to muse about the rest of the mundane buttons, trying to figure out what sort of outfit they might have come from. I mean, there aren't that many uses for 2.5" purple plastic buttons that would end up leaving them with huge deep scratches across the front (and who would save such a thing, which would only be useful in the case of a Huge Button Emergency). And why are there a dozen teal shirt buttons in there, each still attached to the metal bale that stuck it to the display card in the store?

Any suggestions on how to store these suckers once they're sorted? I'm thinking one of those hardware caddies from Home Despot, but I'm open to other suggestions. I need room to store about a handful of about a dozen colors of buttons.

And now, if you'll excuse me, she's shouting "Let's play the button game again!" so it looks like I might get to finish sorting out the navy buttons tonight, after all.

How lazy am I?

Yesterday my daughter and I spent a half an hour making construction paper bunnies and chicks with cottonballs glued on to make them fuzzy. And today we made these:
Four days after Easter, using raw eggs, which ups the Laziness Quotient logarithmically, I think, sort of like the Richter scale. And we may not get around to putting the princess stickers on them until tomorrow. That's how lazy I am.

Pray for me

I'm going to attempt a mitered fancy border on a quilt pattern. Heaven help me, it's going to be ugly in here for the next hour or so.

Not getting much done

I made the executive decision that the best way to get LazyToddler to bed on time after the time change was to grit my teeth and not let her nap for at least the first few days this week, as this usually makes her so tired that she passes out face-first in her dinnerplate. So instead of a nice two-hour stretch of time to work on my projects during the afternoon, yesterday I had five minutes to check my e-mail while she worked some puzzles, and a few minutes to get some quilting done on the double wedding ring table runner while she watched a video on the portable DVD player in my office.

After 10 or 15 minutes, LazyToddler said in the sleepiest, most pitiful voice you can imagine, "Mama, stop sewing. I want you to come watch this video with me. It's really good - please stop sewing." So I did what any self-respecting crafty mom would do - I shut off the infernal machine and snuggled on the floor with my daughter, watching a tap dance video from the library.

(And I sketched a few ideas on a scrap of paper, which I was mean enough to not let her scribble on afterwards ... crafty moms have to be firm once in a while, you know.)

Showing some love

Found at Huntington Beach this afternoon

With love and admiration to my fellow Cleveys who are obsessed with beach glass and stones:

Lake Erie Beach Glass
zJayne
Kimberly Monaco Designs
stonz

... and possibly some others, but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head.

Silly, silly woman

A few years ago I had the idea to collect the signatures of my favorite authors on fabric, and turn it into a reading quilt. I know, I'm just a cesspool of wackiness sometimes.

Anyway, after tracking down a few authors at book signings, realizing a few others were dead, getting no response from a few (ungrateful louts), and getting some by mail, I sort of hit a wall. I was out of people to ask for signatures, but I didn't have enough blocks for a decent quilt. So the supplies for the quilt have been sitting in a nicely labeled shoebox on the shelf in the closet of two different houses now.

Earlier this year it occurred to me that I might be able to flesh out the quilt if I included autographs from my favorite craft authors and bloggers, but I've yet to do anything about it. That is, until the Yarn Harlot announced the locations for her upcoming book tour, and I realized she's coming nowhere near me. Wahhhh!

But all is not lost! My parents live close enough to Philadelphia that I'm actually considering making the trip there in May to see the Harlot's appearance at this: http://libwww.freelibrary.org/bookfestival/visitor.cfm . Might even drag the kid and the grandmother with me and send them off to the storytime tent while I stand in line with my Sharpie and a square of muslin taped to a piece of cardboard.

Or, I could just send the muslin up to Canada and see if I can get her to sign it long-distance. But then I wouldn't get to show her whatever sock-in-progress I have going in May ... oh, the decisions!

Thinking warm thoughts

mobile from etsy, of course

My new secret weapon

Yep, it's a shuffle. Jason got it at a technical conference he attended earlier this month, and he was generous enough to give it to me. I give him credit for not hiding it for a week and presenting it as my Valentine's Day present ... the corporate logo on the back probably would have given him away.

You'd be amazed how many yo-yo's you can sew on during one podcast of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.

How I'm staying sane

Have I mentioned that my daughter seems to think this month is the perfect time to give up napping? Argh!

The only way to maintain my sanity is to give her something she can do while I work on the computer for an hour sometime during the day. Last week that involved peanut butter toast, dress up clothes, and a Bear in the Big Blue House DVD from the library.

You'd be amazed how much crochet you can do during one episode of Sesame Street ... I can finish most of the body of an Easter bunny before it's even time for Elmo's World. If our DVD player and/or DVR break down, my productivity is going to go down the drain.

Aha! Steampunk mystery solved!

Now I know where you're all coming from ...

http://community.livejournal.com/steamfashion/365312.html

Hope somebody sends me a photo of my free fairy skirt pattern under a steampunk outfit, because I would totally post it and love it and hype it within an inch of my life.

Might have a sock problem

Not even finished Jason's pair yet, and I've already purchased this:

http://www.etsy.com/view_transaction.php?transaction_id=7267708

But I might have his second sock finished by the time this gets to my house, so it's okay, right? Right?