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Archive for the ‘rant’ Category

Happy Halloween!!!

Posted in personal, rant, self made..., Whatever on October 29, 2013| Leave a Comment »

I know it’s a couple of days early, but as I probably won’t have time to post on Halloween itself, here is the beauty I carved this afternoon. Also, though it’s a little early, but…. Happy Halloween!!!!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

As you can see I didn’t carve the usual ugly face, but a cute little fairy instead. (At any rate I hope it’s recognizeable as a fairy!). In case you are interested in how I did it, here are a couple more pics of how the fairy ended up on the pumpkin. 😉

For the fairy I just googled for a suitable pic, which I printed out. You can also see a couple of different sized knitting needles and pins in the pic. They are for the fairy dust, which surrounds all fairies. 😉

Tinkerbell 1Here is the beheading and de-gutting: … in case you are wondering, why there is a second pumpkin in the pic, that one got turned into a proper scary Halloween face. (I’ll probably blog about him another time.)

Tinkerbell 2To keep the fairy pic in place I simply pinned it to the pumpking…..

Tinkerbell 3….and then I just used a pin to copy the fairy outlines directly onto the pumpkin:

Tinkerbell 4Here is the fairy already cut out:

Tinkerbell 5And here she finally is all cut out and ready for a candle:

Tinkerbell 6As a finishing touch I added a bit of fairy dust using different sized knitting needles:

Tinkerbell 7We don’t actually celebrate Halloween here, which is a real pity for that way we miss out on all the fun. No witches, zombies, ghosts, trick or treating and other fun stuff. Still I always have a great time creating at least some decorations. Anyway… Happy Halloween!

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My “Innocent Smoothie” Hats 2011

Posted in knitting, personal, rant, Whatever on October 16, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I made these hats for this year’s big “Innocent Smoothie Hat Knitting”: http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/bigknit/get_knitting/inde…

Innocent Smoothie Hats

Basically it’s a kind of charity thing… each sold smoothie, that is wearing a hat, brings a donation of 30 Cents. The money is used to get elderly people  through the winter. 🙂

My 2 fav. smoothie hats

To be honest I don’t like those smoothies much… but I had a wonderful time knitting those hats. Besides it’s a wonderful way of using up left over yarn (of which I seem to have tons).

While knitting I watched several episodes of “Breaking Bad”. I’m now in the middle of season 3. It’s simply awesome and so far I haven’t been bored for even a second… just very disgusted now and then. The only thing that has changed is my opinion of Walt. In the previous series I could kinda understand why he did certain things, but now some of his actions are totally incomprehensible to me… f. ex. towards the end of season 2 he just stands by and watches a girl die…

Also I’ve finally finished listening to “Marked” by P.C. and Kirsten Cast, that teenage vampire high school story I ranted… er… blogged about earlier. 😉 Well, the story did improve towards the end and they finally dropped that forced sounding pseudoteenage language (and also some of the constant whining), still I didn’t like it much.

Anyway, back to knitting. As usual here is my ravelry page with all yarn/needle details (no pattern details though, as I made all of them up while knitting): http://ravel.me/aravis83/ywc1

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Knit Socks… again ;)

Posted in audio, Books, knitting, pattern, personal, rant, Whatever on September 7, 2011| 1 Comment »

And another post to show off yet another pair of knit socks: 😉

9 to 5 socks

The socks turned out absolutely wonderful and I just love how intricate the pattern looks, though it was actually easy to knit…  after I figured out how to do those cables, that is. 😉 Also the socks are incredibly stretchy which makes them doubly comfy to wear.

While knitting I listened to “Marked” by P.C. and Kristen Cast. It’s the first book of the “House of Night” series, which basically is yet another teenage vampire high school story. The story is ok and there is a lot less whining than in “Twilight” (don’t get me wrong… there still is a considerable amount 😉 ), but nothing ever seems to happen… and there certainly is no creepyness or blood or anything I’d expect of a good vampire story. Also Zoe the main character is of course the typical, totally insecure teenager (and constantly going on and on and on about totally uninteresting things) and she of course has super special powers which none of the others have.

Anyway I haven’t quite finished listening yet. So maybe the story will get awesome all of a sudden, but so far I don’t like it much. Also the language of the book sounds a bit forced… like the authors were trying too hard to sound like teenagers (and failing miserablely).

Also I started to watch “Breaking Bad” while knitting. So far I’ve only watched the first 3 episodes, but I really like it. The main character played by Bryan Cranston (Hal from Malcolm in the Middle) is amazingly good… much better than I would have thought. The only thing I don’t like so far is that sometimes a bit too much is shown…. there is a particularly disgusting bit in episode 2 where an in acid dissolved body, well the gooey remains with bits of bone still in it, comes crashing through the ceiling. YUCK!

Anyway back to socks, which were what I intended to blog about. 😉 The pattern can be found here… along with all needle, yarn details and more pics:  http://ravel.me/aravis83/s35hd 😀

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Grrrr!!! (or Cats and their love for wet knitting)

Posted in knitting, personal, rant, Whatever on August 16, 2011| 3 Comments »

Apparently the best place for my cat to have an extended afternoon nap is soaking wet knitting. Grrrr!

Kitty fast asleep on Blinky

Normally she’d never go near anything that looks like it might possibly be a tiny little bit wet, BUT whenever there is wet knitting around she seems to feel the sudden urge to “test-sleep” on it!

And that’s what happens when you try to make her get up and leave the knitting alone:

Taking out her frustration on poor Blinky

She took out her frustration on poor Blinky by sinking her claws and teeth into him and rolling around with him several times. Glad to say, Blinky survived the whole ordeal without major injuries. 😉

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whatever

Posted in Books, knitting, personal, rant, self made..., Whatever on February 11, 2011| Leave a Comment »

At the moment I’m down with a rather bad cold and more or less spent the week in bed. After two days of feeling really awful, I’m somewhat better now… and rather bored.

To make the time pass faster I did a LOT of knitting. I started to knit a dress for myself (no pics yet) and worked a little on the lilac flower socks I started ages ago. In the pic below you can see my “test-dress”… I love the way it looks on the doll. Just hope the real one will look as good.

 

"test-dress" and more brain slugs

Also my Brain Slug now has a wife and the offspring is about to sprout antennae and legs. 😉

Apart from knitting I read a lot. I finished “Farmer Boy” by Laura Ingalls Wilder and I’m already 2/3 done with “On the Banks of Plum Creek”, the next book of the series. I simply love the books! 😀

Oh and I have played almost every video game I could get hold of. Right now I’m totally addicted to “The Creeps” and “Battleheart“. I keep getting stuck and need K. to rescue me almost constantly but it’s fun.

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jinxed red “mushroom” hat

Posted in knitting, personal, rant, self made..., Whatever on January 15, 2011| 2 Comments »

Over Christmas I started to knit a red hat to go with the red mittens, I blogged about earlier. Well, knitting hats is always problematic to put it mildly. For some reason they never turn out quite right… but this one was a true disaster.

Anyway, it all started with my finding the cutest pattern for a hat on ravelry.  Here is my rav page with a link to the pattern: http://ravel.me/aravis83/f2

So I got some lovely Santa Claus red wool and started to knit. But for some reason my pattern turned out looking completely different from the ones shown on rav:

jinxed red mushroom hat #1

On reading the instructions more closely I realized that it was a top down pattern. (D’oh!). So I ripped it all out and started over… top down this time:

jinxed red mushroom hat #2

After knitting for a while and ripping it out 2 more times because I had miscounted at some point and the pattern had started to look funny, I noticed that my hat was rather smaller than it was supposed to be. So I re-read the instructions and realized that the pattern asked for size 4,5 needles and yarn instead of size 3 needles and yarn which I had used. So I ripped it all out AGAIN. ARGH!

As I neither had size 4 needles nor yarn I decided to modify the hat slightly and to practise knitting top down at the same time:

jinxed red mushroom hat #3

It was my first attempt at knitting something that way and it was fun and amazingly easy… I thought. I also managed to include that foliage pattern and was really ,really pleased with the result… till I tried it on:

jinxed red mushroom hat #4

Don’t let yourself be fooled by how it looks in that pic. As it turned out the hat was lovely but WAY too big for my head. Careful counting of the stitches revealed that I can’t count. I increased till I had 144 stitches instead of 128, as I had carefully calculated beforehand. Not wanting to rip it all out again I decided to block it and hope for the best:

jinxed red mushroom hat #5

Well, it didn’t shrink, quite the opposite in fact. Even putting it into the washing machine, washing it really hot or letting it soak for ages in hot soapy water didn’t make it shrink even the tiniest bit. Grrrrrr!

So Kara had the brilliant idea of putting a plate into it and trying to turn it into a beret:

jinxed red mushroom hat #6

It actually worked, though it’s still somewhat too bit and looks really great… as long as I don’t wear it.  I look like  a  mushroom, if I do. Maybe I should embroider it with white dots. 😉

Anyway here is the finished hat, which I’ll probably NEVER ever wear:

jinxed red mushroom hat #7

From this knitting project I learned 3 things:

  1. Read ALL instructions from beginning to end BEFORE starting
  2. Careful calculations are useless if you can’t count 😉
  3. Blocking doesn’t shrink

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My tiny Christmas Stocking

Posted in Books, knitting, rant, Whatever on November 20, 2010| 1 Comment »

Just a short post to show off the tiny Christmas Stocking ornament I knit today (and there will surely be more over the next few weeks):

My tiny Christmas Stocking

It turned out so well and was amazingly fast to knit. All in all it took me about 1 1/2 hours, though I went wrong somewhere in the pattern and ended up having a lot more stitches at the end of the “heel” part. (Compensated that with doing a few more decreases in the following rounds…. but in spite of that the outcome is almost perfect.)

The pattern is just lovely and can be found here: http://littlecottonrabbits.typepad.co.uk/photos/free_pattern/stockings6.html

The book against which I’m modeling my tiny stocking is called “Coraline & other stories” by Neil Gaiman. (It’s one of those books, of which I’m not sure whether I will like it or not, but the story reminded me so much of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” that I just had to get it.) It just happened to be on the top of my “books-to-read” pile and also had the perfect background color for my stocking. 😉

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My “productive” villagers

Posted in personal, rant, Whatever on November 16, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Just a short post to show off to progress my villagers are making (and to prove that they are still alive ;))

My "productive" villagers

One of my one and only male villager was very “productive” overnight, as you can see in that pic. 😉

 

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Grrr!

Posted in personal, rant, Whatever on November 10, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I have been playing Virtual Villagers 3 – The Secret City for a while now and love it! The game is just awesome and really, really addictive. (Only the fact that it crashes occasionally without saving is annoying.)

Yesterday I woke up to find my carefully raised and well looked after villagers like this:

 

"my villagers"

Grrrr!

Apparently my so called “master farmers” stopped their farming over night (probably  because they wanted a pay rise ;)) and so all my poor villagers died of starvation!

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Blooper and Halloween Socks

Posted in audio, Books, knitting, LibriVox, personal, rant, Whatever on October 24, 2010| Leave a Comment »

With Halloween coming up, I decided to knit a pair of proper Halloween socks for myself. The pattern is from ravelry.com and a link to it can be found on my project page (aravis83).

Halloween socks

It’s my first attempt at knitting with different colors and it’s a LOT harder than it looks. Actually the whole thing is a real mess… I’m constantly getting entangled, everything twists and turns, there are huge loops of yarn in the back and at one point even a nasty snarl, I couldn’t get rid of. In fact I’ve probably spent more time untangling things than I have spent with the actual knitting.

I’m just glad the Jack O’Lanterns are recognizeable in spite of the hideous mistake I made. (Miscounted the stitches at one point and only realized much later and just couldn’t face ripping it and doing it over again.) Perhaps that’s the reason, why my pumpkins don’t look as scary as I would have liked. 😉

Apart from my “knitting woes”, I’ve managed to produce the most wonderful (and probably most embarrassing) blooper yesterday, when recording the first chapter of “Der Weihnachtsabend” (A Christmas Carol), my new solo.

What I’m trying to say is: “…Der Inhaber einer kleinen, jungen Nase, benagt und angebissen von der hungrigen Kälte, wie Knochen von Hunden benagt werden, legte sich an Scrooges Schlüsselloch, um ihn mit einem Weihnachtslied zu erfreuen…”

I ended up reading the sentence like this: “…legte sich an Scrooges <insert longish pause with a deep exasperated sigh> Schlüsselloch…”! Editing fixed it nicely! 😉

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