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Showing posts from March, 2019

What I'm Reading, Watching, Playing March

What I'm Playing This month Gunnar, John, Diana, Erik, and myself are finishing up a 2 year long Dungeons and Dragons Campaign! Gunnar is the DM and the game is set in a Steampunk Era Middle Earth. My character is a halfling rogue named Ledagrace Took (yes, descended from that  Took!) who, in our last session, just got married to her longtime smuggler boyfriend while a Gorgon/Kraken hybrid destroyed the city. Diana's mermaid character (a priestess) performed the ceremony for us while John's destitute Prince and Erik's bear-kin character held off the giant thrashing tentacles that were attempting to destroy the church and kill all the guests. It's been epic. Some of my favorite quotes: We needed a dwarf to help us craft something and had just returned from the funeral of a longtime friend NPC dwarf named Loni. Me: Anyone else have a dwarf friend? Mine died. DM: The swarm of bees is attacking! Erik: I'm good against swarms! And I'm in bear-form! I t

Flannel Party

A while back Joann's was having a sale on flannel, and so even though I have tons of projects in progress and hardly any energy and a huge fabric stash...I bought some! I took a few evenings and whipped up some jammies for my boys. James has Batman, of course, and Jack has sharks. The shirts are extra t-shirts that I had from a school decorate-a-shirt project that were just in a pile in my closet, so I spruced them up a bit because they like matching tops and bottoms.  The "J" on the back was his request! I freehanded it in sharpie and then used a simple zigzag stitch on my machine to appliqué  it on.  And for Jack, shark print flannel! The pants are a little short since I modeled them after some of his size 6 pants and really he wears more size 7/8 pants. The shirt is a plain white t-shirt that I appliquéd a shark onto the front, like with James' shirt, using a zigzag stitch. I drew the shark freehanded too. Skillz, huh? The picture is terrible, but I

Catan Hexagon Quilt Update #2

Since my last update I've gotten a TON of work done on this...it's starting to come together! I've also decided on placement and worked out some of those details, so it's easier to actually quantify how much I've done and how much I have left to do. Previous Installments: Starting My Dream Quilt Update #1 The biggest thing is that I decided what it's going to look like when it's done: Once I decided that I definitely wanted big hexagons made of hexes, I cut out different sizes of megahexes and played around with them on my paper mock-up until I found a pattern that I liked...semi symmetrical, but not perfectly. I was also working with the fact that I had completed one of the big 7 Hex megahexes so that had to be part of the design. No way was I going to pick out any of those once they were sewn into a big landmass! I also really wanted to include some of the 3 Hex sized megahexes because that's the size of the original Settler's of Catan g

The Fish Tank

Did you know that you can keep shrimp as pets? I didn't until about a year ago, but apparently it's really popular among aquarium keepers now! And we have some! They aren't the big ugly looking gray ones that you think of though, these are cute little "cherry shrimp"  scientific name neocaridina davidi. They are tiny, bright red, and fun to watch. I was worried that they would be hard to keep, but they have multiplied from five to thirty since we first got them last August. and they don't look like they're likely to slow down. Also living in our tank is a school of guppies. They started out as 3 ahem   male guppies but apparently a mistake was made because now there are 30 of them. I am desperately trying to give away as many as possible now that they are growing bigger because our little 10 gallon tank is not equipped to deal with that many fish! The other inhabitants include a yellow mystery snail (fun to watch, and lays a clutch of eggs every

What I'm Reading, Watching, Playing February

What I'm Playing Dinogenics is a board game that my husband backed on kickstarter a long time ago, which reached it's goal and shipped out to backers early this year. So far we've played it three times and I LOVE IT. My favorite board game of all time is Agricola , a "worker placement" style game with lots of rules and a medieval Little House on the Prairie kind of theme, and this game takes my favorite mechanics and fits it into my husband's favorite theme--Jurassic Park. In the game each player is a corporation competing against the other players to make the most successful dinosaur theme park. A successful park has lots of dinosaurs (with amazing dinosaur meeples!) lots of attractions (detailed little tiles that you get to arrange on your island) which which to attract visitors and make money. There is intrigue where cards allow you to sabotage or take advantage of other players, random happenings like typhoons and pest dino infestations, and a good amou

Pinwheel Quilt Block Tutorial

Full disclosure, I learned to do this from Youtube:   Learn to make fast and easy pinwheels - Missouri Star Quilt Company Check them out! Or if you just want a quick step by step, keep reading!  Pinwheel Quilt Block Tutorial  Start with 2 squares the same size. Mine are 9.5" x 9.5" Pin them right sides together Sew 1/4" around all four sides Sewn around all four sides! Cut corner to corner across the diagonal Cut corner to corner across the OTHER diagonal You should have 4 little pieces that look like this.  These are called "half square triangles." Iron them open. "Square them up" aka cut them all so that they are exactly the same size. Mine are 6'' x 6'' It can help to line up the diagonal with diagonal line on a big square ruler like this.  Turn them the other way and square up that side.  Arrange all 4 half square triangle into a pinwheel--or whatever shape you w