I’ve been busy with various RL things. Nothing scary or depressing, just busy. Hair appointments, dentist appointments, more hair appointments, parties, bird rescuing, computer blowing uping. XD Yea. My laptop battery blew up this morning… like literally blew up. LOL For about a month and a half, my trackpad stopped responding accurately. This morning, my keyboard stopped responding too. When I turned off my computer to check my battery, I noticed the battery back was bloated and sticking out from the back of the computer badly. Like… BAD. When I took it out, the back side lid popped off by itself and the plastic batteries inside looked fat and bloated and kind of leaky. It was scary.
So I replaced that today. Cost a lot– $130 :( but the good thing about it is that now I can finally carry around my laptop with a working battery. YAY!!! I haven’t been able to do that for a year now. The new battery also fixed my keyboard and trackpad problem, so my Mac is back up in peak condition. Great!
This week I plan to spend painting. I didn’t get a chance at all to work on Hippolyta’s stuff last week to my dismay. So I’ll be doing hers, and a few other heads for myself. I’ll try to update as I complete each head. Hopefully I won’t burn myself out on painting. XD
After painting, I will finish my books. After that I have several projects I want to do. I need to write them down before I forget though.
This evening I was at my friend’s house, cat sitting and saw she had a 1890’s Sears Roebucks catalogue. Oh man. LOL In the medicine section they had all these crazy cure-alls. What cracked me up, you could order opium from them back in the day. Yea. LOL The labels were hilarious. “Bust Creme And Food“, “Brain and Nerve Pills for Sexual Excess, Etc.” Hehehehe. Just cracked me up. Of course none of them clearly stated what they were made of… they only said “pure vegetable oil” which I think is not like our cooking oil. At least I hope. XD I think a lot of older jars in Miel’s kitchen will be labeled as such.
Anyway, enough rambling. I’ll update more later this week.
This is a quick weekend project that I decided to work on yesterday. Mini vintage leather bound books! :D I pulled the images off the web from various sources and edited them to reflect my usage. These will be old manuals, tomes and textbooks for my students to use at the library.
My laser printer apparently doesn’t like card stock, so I had to use the cheap ink jet POS I have. I’m so ready to pull out the big guns and hook up my giant Canon printer finally. But it just seems so wasteful for tiny things like these books. The covers are mediocre since the print job was so sucky. I want to build them up some and give them a little 3Dness, but I don’t know how that will work with the ink jet ink. I originally was thinking my laser would handle it but of course things never go the way you plan right? LOL
I’m tempted to fill their innards with actual pages from old books such as the Malleus Maleficarum… But today we’re having a big BBQ thing going on so I have limited time to work on this before guests come. I might glue in some tea-stained paper and call it a day.
Huzzah! I finally finished my window. Phew! This project took much more time than I had wanted it to, but it turned out fantastic. I had a lot of problems painting it. I originally spray painted it… but as usual, the spray paint didn’t want to work. I had primed it first with grey but when I did, the wood started turning all bumpy, even though I had sanded it down previous to painting it. On top of that it started raining while I was spraying. I sanded it down again after priming (and probably released all sorts of lead in the air XD) and sprayed it white. The white didn’t want to stay either. I thought to give it a day to dry out and maybe remove the stickiness but the next day it was still somewhat sticky and when I tried to seal it the white turned yellow. Just my luck! >X( What I ended up doing was sanding it down again and repainting the whole thing with acrylics. I carefully sealed it with Mr. Color so it won’t stick any more. It’s a much much better result.
So afterwards I finished up my Figurvore weather challenge. These are the before and after photos. What do you think? I did everything in photoshop and it took me about an hour to do it all. It was a fun challenge!
Aaaaand, my second project came in the mail! I ended up doing a trade with Hippolyta. She sent me some shirts and in return I will paint some heads for her. I’m sooo psyched about this! LOL What got me was that I was expecting like… one or two shirts, but she sent me five freaking awesome shirts! *dies* In return I hope to paint some interesting characters for her stories. She gave me general direction for color but the faces are up to me. I spent the day drawing out some faces on paper and have come up with a few faces I thing are suitable for each very different hair style. Tomorrow is a busy day so I won’t be working on anything but this coming weekend I hope to tackle them. Which reminds me I need to buy a new paint brush tomorrow!
BTW Miel’s hair is flat again! The waves already fell out. >_>;;;
This past weekend, I took a small break from the grimoire to work on the Figurvore challenge project. The project is to make fake weather. Doing that is easy enough for me and should take no more than a half day working in photoshop for nice effects.
But the problem is, I didn’t have any thing to take a photo of, or more specifically through. LOL I don’t have any windows for any of my doll scenes. So before I can take photos, I had to build a window. I set out this weekend to make one and it has since overflowed into this week, taking up Grimmy making time.
The window is made out of simple craft wood. I used a template I found on the web and blew it up to 1/6.5 scale (I think 1/6.5 is more accurate in size than 1/6th). As I was measuring out the wood though, I saw that the print out was not accurate at all. LOL I would have had one super crappy window falling apart at the unmatched seams.
I redid the image in Adobe Flash since it’s faster to handle than Illustrator for these kinds of things and got to work hoping that my plans would be fail proof. I don’t like planning. For some reason when I plan I make mistakes. Well XD this window was no exception.
Immediately after I had cut up all my wood, I laid it out on my paper template and WTF the wood didn’t match. I failed to account for the width of the saw blade and so my mullions (Window pane dividers are called mullions. See. Learn something new every day. :D) came out 1/8th of inch shorter. DOH! So I tossed those aside and said forget it, I don’t need those anyways. I can still have a picturesque window with curtains and a pie sitting on the ledge overlooking a green yard– mullion FREE. I feel so much better knowing my pie is mullion free, don’t you?
ANYWAY. I wanted the window to slide so I figured out the basic mechanics to it but winged the actual wood layout plans…. so of course when I put everything together I failed to account for the width of the plastic windows sheets and the panes were too tight in the channels. So I spent most of yesterday evening and today shaving this window down in various places to make all the pieces fit together. XD
Finally everything fits now and the project is on hold for the evening. Tomorrow it’ll get spray painted white and glued completely. I’ll post a picture of it tomorrow if I finish it it before the sun goes down.
After that, I’ll set up photos and finish my project then return to Grimmy temporarily before my next temp project arrives in the mail. :3 Yay!
Hey everyone it’s Thursday! That means today was my turn to cook dinner for the family. I am continuing to use the Nintendo DS software for recipes. LOL This time I picked 豚のキムチいため or Kimchi Fried Pork. I’m not sure if this is an authentic Korean dish or if it’s a Japanified version (which is very likely). It turned out good. Not as good as last week’s meal, but still very tasty.
My family likes kimchi, but were not a very spicy loving group. So instead of putting in full strength of kimchi, we only used half and substituted half with regular chinese cabbage. After eating, I think full kimchi would have been better. And since I announced last week that I’m cooking, I thought to take pictures this week. I’ll try to snap a pic each week before I dig in to my plate. Oh the green beans aren’t covered in dirt. XD That’s a grounded black sesame seed sauce.
I’m still working on Grimmy! I finally finished all 80(!) recipes and am now in the process of putting them into page format. I’m also thinking about ways to bind the book. In the past, I’ve sewn the pages together and glued them in the cover, which looks crappy. This time I think I’m going to actually try binding properly since I am planning to have Miel use the book frequently. It will need to open and close without the spine snapping. If that’s the case, I’ll have to do a special layout for the binding. XD I just love doing stuff the hard way!!
I also spent the morning looking at miniature bottles in preparation for populating the kitchen with all these ingredients. I want to buy a lot of bottles of different shapes and sizes. I found a nice seller on ebay but their stuff is for doll houses, they’re expensive and they’re in the UK. *__* So I’m continuing my search. If anyone knows of any good suppliers of doll sized apothecary jars, lemme know!
