"f***ing awesome!"

that's what tg said when i showed him the awesome totoro hat and soot-sprite bootees that i got from loudxmouse for the craftster miyazaki swap! super cool and super cute!!



can't wait to have a real baby to put in them! in the meantime, they fit my old bear pretty well... mum made "poony" for me when i was an infant, and he's still going strong, waiting for the offspring to try to chew off his ears:



and here's a close-up so you can get a better look at the hat. he's awesome!



whee! i'm so happy! in other good mail news, two of the other things i was waiting for in the mail - both of wish i spent cold hard cash on, so i was getting antsy - also arrived in the mail. we're down to a missing-mail count of only one letter. a good thing too, since i bought some sari yarn on monday, and as i was paypal-ing the seller, i started to think: "am i crazy? my mail never arrives! what the hell am i doing!" but now i am at peace again.

now, off to post pics on craftster...

whee and boo

whee! my craftster miyazaki swap stuff finally arrived! i don't have time to open it now (i should be running to the subway as i type), but will open & post some pics when i get home tonight. now, if only the stuff i ordered from ebay and the letter my mum sent would arrive...

also, boo. on the weekend i posted about my adventures in carpentry while the paint was drying on my project out in the garage. when i went back out to finish the job, my drill... died. just stopped turning on. grr! we opened it up and looked inside and it looked fine, so i've no idea what the problem is. so near and yet so far...

wow, it's a while since i've updated, hasn't it?

but it's not for lack of activity. i seem to be consumed by two impulses lately: nesting and napping. and nesting involves a fair amount of work! right now (and for the past couple of weekends... i find i really can't push myself these days, need lots of downtime) i'm working on building a proper sewing table.

have you ever noticed how most of the craft boards rarely touch woodworking? there's almost zero carpentry talk on craftster. for all the feminist talk of the stitch'n'bitch gals, there is still this huge gender divide when it comes to crafts. there are maybe 5 guys for every hundred gals posting on the knitting boards, and women still seem to avoid the more heavy-lifting crafts like the plague. i don't get it. it counts as "around the house" work, so shouldn't carpentry be traditionally done by women more than men? the only historical reason i can think of offhand for why this would be is that most of the traditionally female arts are doable while baby-sitting, but carpentry... well, not so much. the tools are loud, there's all that sawdust in the air (i dream of someday getting one of these), they don't make masks and goggles in infant sizes, etc.

but at least until thumper gets here, power tools are fun! we all need furniture! and more importantly, we all need places to work on our crafts and store our stashes!

while the garage fills with my lumber/varnish/screws/poswer tools stash, the soon-to-be-baby room is over-run with yarn and fabric. so, i'm building a sewing table (it sill be so nice to have something the right size for laying out patterns!) to put in thumper's room, with storage underneath for all of my stuff, and - this is the clever part - gate-legs so that it will fold down to a reasonable size (this is not a big room we're talking about) and conceal my crap as well. i am very very excited!!

also to come - pics of miyazaki swap stuff (when the packages arrive at their destinations). stay tuned!