Been a while since I posted, but I wanted to share some crafty goodness I’ve been doing these days!

I got myself some round and long knitting looms a while back, and I’ve had a few skeins of yarn lying around forever. I mean, I can’t remember when or why I got most of it, other than I guess it was on sale/clearance and I thought it was pretty. Those are good enough reasons, right?

For some reason, I got it in my head the last couple of months that I really wanted to try loom knitting. I blame Pinterest. There are so many cute projects out there with free tutorials that I made time to break out my Loom Knitting Primer and a round loom. Here’s what happened:

It wasn’t perfect, but I was happy with it for a first project. I made the mistake of picking a loom by the size of my head, but I realized that was a bad idea (AFTER I was finished, of course). I learned my first “Knitting in the Real World” lesson: Knitted things contract coming off the loom. Like, a lot. This hat might fit a small child.

So, on to project 2! This was a slouchy beanie tutorial I found on Instructables. First of all, I am in love with this yarn, and I apparently can’t stop saying that to anyone who will listen. It’s Homespun by Lion Brand in Prairie. The swatch on the LB website doesn’t do this yarn justice. It’s just gorgeous and super-soft. Bonus: Machine washable! The only drawback to this yarn is because it’s already textured, stitch details get completely lost. Any project you make with this yarn needs the yarn to be the focus, not the stitch pattern.

Here’s the finished product, in all its horribly-lighted-bathroom-mirror-selfie glory:

My third project was a garter-stitch hat with the same LB yarn which I didn’t take any pics of because I screwed up one row halfway through the round and didn’t notice until the thing was already off the loom. I think I’ll reclaim that yarn at some point.

Continued in Part 2!

As promised earlier on Twitter, here’s a link to download my exhaustive PDF list of DI 1.0 figures and discs.

It seriously took me like 2 weeks to research and compile this thing from various sources, so PLEASE, someone other than me, find this useful! XD

DI 2.0 and 3.0 lists are coming soon, now that I’ve worked the kinks out of my work flow…stay tuned for those!

[ddownload id=”2355″]

Check out my Downloads page for checklists for ALL Disney Infinity versions! Whee!!

Ok, so this is one of my all-time pet peeves since I started taking Lola to the dog park regularly a few years ago.

People seem to think that park = park, whether it’s for kids or dogs. Allow me to say how absolutely stupid and dangerous this is. Here are just a few reasons why:

1. Dog parks do not have playground equipment for kids and the ground is covered in dog pee and poop. There is nothing in a dog park for kids to play with except filthy tennis balls, chewed frisbees, sticks, and whatever else you can find on the ground. All of this is therefore also covered in dog pee and poop. Some dogs that come to the park aren’t regularly dewormed, and do you know what kids do with stuff they find to play with? Either the “toy” or the hand that touched the toy goes right into the kids mouth. Do you want your child to develop a potentially deadly parasitic infection?

2. Dogs love a moving target — that’s why fetch and chase are such great games to play with them. Run, pounce, bite/mouth, repeat. You can see how this can end badly when a child is the object in motion. Dogs can scare or seriously injure kids, and I don’t have much sympathy for people who let their undisciplined kids run amok in the dog park — just like I don’t have much sympathy for people who let their undisciplined dogs run amok out in public.

3. Most kids do not know how to behave around dogs. Even if a child was raised with a dog in the house, it’s still ONE dog (or just a few dogs), and every single dog is different. Just because your kid is great with your dog, that doesn’t mean your kid will be great with every other dog they meet — or that your dog will be great with every other kid they meet. Kids need to be taught early on how to behave around strange animals, and no matter what, they should be supervised with ANY animal. Trust to know when your child is uncomfortable with a situation, and that other animals’ owners know what their pet is and is not OK with.

I’m ranting like this because of our dog park visit this afternoon. A young father had his *maybe* 2-year-old son inside the main enclosure. This kid was toddling around by himself with a stick in one hand and a frisbee in the other.

I’m not even kidding a little bit.

Lola is anxious around kids anyway. She loves infants (all the soft fabrics and the baby smells, I think), and she’s OK with teens and adults, especially after she’s met them once. Children, though, are noisy and unpredictable…they run around erratically and make loud sounds and are just generally CRAZY. She will run up, barking an alarm, and effectively scare the shit out of whoever she’s barking at. She doesn’t have a mean bone in her body — she’s just warning them that she’s got her eye on them, and they’d better not do anything nuts.

As soon as I saw this kid in the central “group” area (lots of donated lawn chairs where people hang out and chat), I snapped Lola’s leash back on and took her to the other side of the park so she wouldn’t be tempted to scare this kid and his dad to death. (He did get knocked down by a dog while we were there, and of course then there was screaming and crying. Then other dogs got curious when the dad picked the kid up, and that was another situation to deal with.)

Needless to say, we didn’t have much fun today. She had to stay on the far side of the park with me, and we were effectively on our own most of the time. A bit later on a friend came over to play a bit, but by then Lola was being a butt-head (since no fun was being had), so we left earlier than we had planned.

TL;DR: Don’t take your child to the dog park. Your kid will get scared (or even hurt — I’ve seen bites happen this way) and you will ruin other people’s day at the park.

I’ve always loved making wreaths, and over the last few years I’ve loved displaying them as well. We’re not just talking the ubiquitous Christmas wreath; I mean wreaths for many holidays and every season.

I’ve started going bigger and bolder with my wreath designs, and this has caused unforeseen strife in our household: The wreaths obscure our apartment number on the door.

In a toss-up between decorating our front door and receiving deliveries in a timely fashion, the wreaths lost. As you can see, our spring wreath started out in a lovely position on the door:

…And as you can also see, our “E” is almost completely hidden. After only a day or two, Peter rotated it nearly 180° and shifted it upward so the “E” was visible again, but the symmetry of the design was lost in that position. Sigh!

Our exterior doors are metal, so when I wasn’t using the upside-down Command hook trick or a proper wreath hanger, I used a heavy-duty magnetic hook. That set off a light bulb in my brain.

Our doors are metal! Why not make a magnetic replacement letter?!

Using my Silhouette Portrait, some Silhouette magnet paper, and a bit of Silhouette matte gold adhesive vinyl, I set to work.

For the first attempt, I found a nice (readable!) script font that attaches each letter — Armonioso — and a serif “E.” I cut the magnet paper and the vinyl separately, then removed the backing paper from both cutouts and did my best to line them up. It wasn’t perfect, but I figured it was good enough:

The “Apartment” text was 6″ wide, and the “E” was a bit more than 2″ tall. Here’s how it looked on the door:

Meh.

Now that I knew what I was doing (and what I was doing WRONG), I took another stab at it.

First, I tweaked my design in the Silhouette software and made a note of the final cut dimensions. I shortened “Apartment” to “Apt” and made the “E” bigger and bolder and italic-er. I cut a piece of magnet paper and a piece of adhesive vinyl to fit.

Second, I adhered the magnet paper and the vinyl to each other BEFORE sticking them to the cutting mat and running them through the Portrait. (No more mismatched cutouts! That was driving me bonkers!)

Here’s the finished product on the door:

Lessons learned:

• Pre-adhering the magnet paper and vinyl is definitely the way to go. Trying to line two very sticky things up after they’re cut is beyond tedious, and it’s highly unlikely you’ll get a perfect match.
• The default cut settings for the Silhouette magnet paper are Blade 6, Speed 1 (lowest), Thickness 33 (highest), Double Cut on. I recommend bumping the blade up to 7 or 8. The magnet paper is very soft and will easily tear if you haven’t cut deep enough and aren’t careful while weeding. I used the default settings and was just able to very delicately extract the cut shapes.
• When editing your text in the Silhouette software, make sure to Modify > Weld to make your script letters all one word shape, and Modify > Crop to make sure your cut dimensions aren’t including any buffer areas around the letters. This will also ensure a more accurate measurement when resizing your shapes.

This was a fun project, and hopefully it will help save others’ sanity when it comes to holiday — or everyday — decorating. 🙂

If you know me even a little bit, you know I love seasonal decor. I picked up some great fall floral picks at JoAnn the other day to make this year’s wreath, and I (of course) had some left over. They looked great on my mantel in a vase, but those ugly plastic stems were doing zero for the overall effect.

Quick, cheap fix: Cut a piece of coordinating craft/scrapbooking paper to fit in the vase to hide those ugly stems. I had some cute Halloween papers and found this orange and yellow pattern that fits in perfectly.