Zombies!

My husband purchased me the book Creepy Cute Crochet, by Christen Haden for Christmas and so far I had only made the Grim Reaper for my brother:

Apparently my husband actually only bought me the book because he wanted an army of creepy cute zombies in our house, not because he thought I would really like it. Which I do, so it worked out for both of us. he has been begging for more creepy cute monsters, since the only one I made, I gave away. I finished the "Corporate Zombie" two days ago, with a few modifications. This is what the real corporate zombie looks like:

This was made by Ravelry user RSPS (you will need a Ravely account to view link).

I left off the hair, per my husband's request and changed the skin color to green. I used Lion Brand's cotton yarn and the colorway for the face is Avocado:

The pattern calls for the tie and blood to be cut from store bought felt, but I decided to needle felt the tie and blood instead, since I had the stuff at my house to do it that way. the eye is made from white and black polymer clay and the eye and mouth are in embroidery floss.

After I made that one, my husband was full of ideas for more zombies. His next request was a priest zombie. I think he wants me to make all the main zombies from the Dawn of the Dead or Day of the Dead. I'd have to watch the movies again to see what accessories would be required to distinguish the different zombies. I finished most of the priest zombie in a few hours last night.

I had to improvise on the jacket and collar, but I like how it's coming out so far:

I can see I've crocheted some cat hair in too...oh well. I made the eyes and the white "priest collar" thing, too:

But I was blogging while they were in the oven and I forgot about them, so now they're burned garbage. I might use the eyes anyway, since a zombie might wave torn up eyes, assuming he's been through a lot that day. I will either remake the "priest collar" thing out of clay or needle felt it.

If it stays in one piece that long:

Felted Friday

I apologize in advance if my posts have been "cat heavy" lately. However, I thought I'd post some pictures of a few needle felted "thingies" I've made recently, because Bubsy (the cat) tends to destroy all felted items quickly. At least this way I'll have a record of them.

Exhibit "A". You may remember a post showing a wet felted pineapple.

Here it is today:

Sucks, right? The piece didn't come out perfect, but it was the first felted thing I ever made, which made it special. While, I'm sure Bubsy did this, perhaps Penelope was trying to frame him. This next photo is Penelope while I was trying to photograph the damage.

Exhibit "B":

The felted pineapple thing above was on a high shelf, which Bubsy actually ripped off the wall to get to it. Sigh...wool is irresistible.

Because these following items will surely be destroyed soon, here they are now for your viewing pleasure. When I first learned how to needle felt, I made a little pineapple. A wee pineapple. It has since been eaten. The fruit thing became somewhat of an obsession for a while.

Here's a few:

This is them on a sewing machine table, so you can get a better idea of the size. (The table is dusty! Where's my house husband?!)

Finally here's a cat toy I made to discourage eating of my other felted stuff:

Giving this to the cats is probably just making me an enabler. Oh well.

Ticked-off Tuesday

Remember the recent post about my awesome cats? Well here's a story about one of them being particularly un-awesome.

McFluffin is the biggest cat we have, yet he is the biggest scaredy cat. Penelope is a real bitch for some reason and hisses at him every time she sees him. (Which is quite sad, since I hoped they would be boyfriend and girlfriend.) Her and Bubsy were weird at first, but after a few weeks everything was fine, they would snuggle and love. Then when we got McFluffin, Penelope hated everybody! She started hissing at Bubsy and McFluffin. Bubsy goes after her too, but that's because he's so stupid he thinks she's playing. McFluffin however runs away and hides like a baby, even though he could knock her lights out with one swipe of his gigantic six-fingered hand. But he doesn't. He's too much of a lover, I guess.

Well, I was worried because McFluffin has been with us about 3 weeks or so and he still doesn't want to come out of the bedroom. He lives on the bed. I call him my "bed-time bear" because he lets you spoon with him and he's always in the bed. My sister-in-law said that he always snuck out at night to eat and use the "facilities", so I assumed that's what was going on, until he gets more comfortable and Penelope gets over her attitude problem. (I think she'll be fine eventually, since her and Bubsy are friends now.) Au contraire mon frère!

I was laying on my bed yesterday evening and I saw McFluffin hop into a shopping bag from the store Express, which I keep my old notes from weaving classes as well as many yards of fabric for weaving. "How cute, McFluffin's in a bag. Aww." HE WAS TAKING AN F'ing PEE IN THE BAG. I was afraid to startle him or try to stop him as he was peeing because I was picturing his pee spraying all over the room. After I recovered from the shock of losing all that fabric and my treasured weaving notes being used as a toilet, it dawned on me...where's he been pooping? If he isn't brave enough to pee in the litter, where is the poop? Well friends, let me tell ya where the poop was. In my closet! Yay. I don't have a regular closet since my apartment was an old post office and there is only one closet in the whole place and it isn't in the bedroom. I use one of those portable type ones from Target that is made of metal rods that fit together. I hung curtains from the frame of the closet so it looks nicer than that nylon covering that is supposed to zip up over the "closet".

The box in my closet which contains my prized Coach bag was covered in cat barf. Luckily, the bag was safe. (I think it was upsetting his stomach to switch foods, but I have to have everyone eat the same stuff. I wouldn't know how to regulate the cats eating different food.) When I picked up the Coach box, I saw it. A mountain of fossilized cat shit. Nice. Disgusted and feeling betrayed, I look further. I decide to pull all my clothes out and really evaluate the situation. Guess what! My clothing that was hanging on the lower bar (there are two bars top one is pants, lower one is my button up shirts) WAS ALL COVERED IN CAT PISS!

Have I been wearing piss clothes and not known it? I do have kind of a lot of clothing from the 3 years I was the women's merchant for the Gap, so maybe I kept getting lucky and didn't pull out piss-clothes. Maybe I've worn sweaters everyday since we've gotten McFluffin and since I keep those folded on a shelf in the linen closet in the bathroom they were not victimized by my cat. (Yes, in the bathroom with my towels. No closets, remember?) I threw out all the white/light colored stuff that was violated and I am washing all the dark stuff that I am assuming was pissed on, but I can't be certain. If it smells funny after washing, I'm tossing it. I do not know how I didn't smell any of this in the bedroom.

So, if you've thought that I smelled like cat piss for the last few weeks, I apologize.

He is...McFluffin!

I know this isn't the coolest thing to say, but I'm going to say it anyway. I love my cats!

They are so funny and they all have such different personalities. I know this sounds totally pathetic and you probably didn't realize that you were reading the blog of a 60 year old woman, with the crocheting and cat talk and all. Since we moved out last year, we've only had one cat, Penelope (pronounced Peen-a-loupe, rhymes with cantaloupe. It's from the movie Club Dread. RENT IT.)

Then in September, we bought Bubsie. In this picture I am wearing drawstring pants and he is fighting the drawstring. This is pretty much Bubsie in a nutshell:


And finally, big beautiful McFluffin! (Like McLovin from Superbad). We just got him and he used to belong to my sister-in-law, but she has a German Shepard, and the two did not mix. He is a Maine Coon, about 3 years old and we got him cut into a "lion cut" to make all that hair more manageable. Mr. Fight wears only black and the cat's hair was a freaking mess. I couldn't sleep on my pillows without cat hair in my eyes and up my nose. Here he is:

Here's the back view to show off the full splendor of his ridiculous tail:

There you have it! The loves of my life.

Mah brain hurts.

So I've been busy once again fooling around with the ol' blog layout. I guess I should start working on some, um, CONTENT, for this thing, not just add buttons and links all day. I must say that I am in no way technically minded. I got an iPod for Christmas like four years ago and I can count on one hand the amount of times I used it. I couldn't deal with all the downloading and the instruction booklet seemed all mumbo-jumbo-y to me. So I finally pawned it for like $10. Whatever. Give me NPR. I can tune a radio.
That's more my speed.

As you can imagine, my barely existing technical skills can be quite the handicap in this here digital age. For the roller derby, I am the keeper of the Myspace-juvenile, yes, but a great way to get promotional information out en masse-and that has been good for me to learn compooter skills on. However, despite my tendancies to glaze over when it comes to this complicated code stuff, I do want to have as "fancy" a blog as I can muster. That plain template looked WEAK! And I think it's super fun to have fancy page and pick all the colors and whatnot. Getting the computer to make all that stuff happen, is not. I now think graphic/web designers must be some of the smartest, most focused people on earth. So with my minimal html knowledge, I have done my best to add jazzy features to this page. I managed to get the elusive 3rd column! That nearly killed me. I also managed to add the "Grab a button" thingy. That also was a a total bee-otch to figure out, so please grab a button! In conclusion, I am very proud of myself. Enough about that. On to more exciting things.

On Friday last week, my friend and co-worker Amy had me come over to have some felty fun! She and her husband have the good fortune to live on a great big peice of land, which I want to call a farm, but I think a farm needs crops, no? It's farm-like at the very least. She has sheep! And goats! And horseys! Thrifty fiber lovers that we are, we decided to clean some of the wool that Amy and Chris sheared off the sheep earlier this fall to help us feed our need to felt stuff. We thought this would be an economical way to have enough natural colored roving to use as a core material, and save the expensive pretty stuff for the outer layers. We may dye some too, so that will give us even more options. I do like the natural sheep colors too, so we'll see what we do with it.

In any case, I don't have the images to upload right now, so consider this a big tease and I'll post the photos of my Farmland Adventure as soon as I can.
I do have this picture of my cats, though: