In Which I Violate the IP of My Kid's College To Make Her Custom Merch

So yes, I DID violate the IP of the kid's college by recreating their school logo in fabric and appliqueing it to a decorative pillowcase, buuuuuut I also own several pieces of properly licensed merchandise purchased from the school bookstore, AND by the time she graduates I'll have paid the school far more than my own personal net worth in tuition.

So let's just call it fair, yes?

I cut and assembled the patchwork applique D during my mending group's monthly volunteer day at our local public library, in between mending holes in several pairs of leggings, teaching a child a couple of different hand-sewing stitches, and patching holes and rips in what I believe to be every pair of ripped jeans in the county:

I finished satin stitching the pieces of the D later that night at home, forgetting that I still had a heavy-duty jeans needle installed in my sewing machine until I was halfway done so that now I'm rightfully paranoid that the pillowcase is going to rip at the edges of the satin stitching, sigh:

The stitching looks so tidy and the colors are well-matched, though! And if the fabric does split where the heavy-duty needle was punching through it, well... the kid knows when and where our local public library's Mending Day happens!

I also made the envelope-back pillowcase from scratch:

I perhaps shouldn't have trusted the label on the pillow form that indicated that it was a perfect square, 16"x16". I crafted my pillowcase to match, and the vertical measurement of the finished product seems to agree with the label, but the horizontal measurement clearly does not. Look how snug it is at the sides, dang it!

Whatever. Maybe it just needs to be punched some more to redistribute the stuffing... as long as that doesn't cause the fabric to rip at the satin stitching.

Gentle punching, then.

On the long drive to drop the younger kid off at school this August, I amused everyone in the car by reading them posts from the various college parent Facebook groups that I lurk in. There are a LOT of moms crashing out on public Facebook groups about their crippling grief and loneliness, y'all. And there are a LOT of college freshmen, apparently, calling their parents crying and asking to come home before their parents can even finish driving back after dropping them off. One mom reported that her daughter called an Uber and came knocking on their hotel room door in the middle of the night and telling them she didn't want to stay. Like, Baby, they JUST dropped you off! Unless your roommates are actively worshipping Satan, and by that I mean not just putting on the robes and painting the pentagrams and lighting the black candles but, like, actually calling up a physical incarnation of the Prince of Darkness himself and offering you to him as his bride, you really need to sit with your discomfort for at least a semester. And if you can hold out for one semester, see if you can try for two. 

Honestly, even if the kid's entire college looked exactly like that abbey from The Nun, I'd still be all, "Honey, you can stick out a demon nun for four years. She's the leading researcher in her field! See if you can TA for her and get her to write you a recommendation letter for your grad school application."

Anyway, all that to say that I am now following a Facebook group devoted to sending themed care packages with punny slogans to one's college kid:

And along with the Twizzlers, spiced apple foaming hand soap, snack-sized Pringles, and Stranger Things-themed Chips Ahoy cookies, a decorative pillow with a half-red school logo fit in just perfectly!

Now to figure out what pun I want to use for this month's Halloween-themed care package...

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Am Learning to Crochet. Please Admire My Washcloth.

When I asked the older kid what she wanted to do over Spring Break, she said she wanted to learn to crochet. 

I have had no interest in crochet, and not a single crochet skill, but when has that ever stopped me from commencing a craft project?

Well, at some point or other, *someone* must have had *some* interest in crochet, because I pulled out this full set of Clover crochet hooks while I was digging out the stash yarn, but y'all know how bad I've always been about buying shit whenever the kids expressed even the mildest interest in something. I hit that homeschool strewing lesson hard, and kept hitting it, ahem.

It's not a hoarder house, y'all. It's a hoarder HOME.

Anyway, this hoarder home comes with a complete set of Clover crochet hooks and enough cotton yarn to do any number of crochet projects (it's also great for latch hook!), but the how-to books you've got to get from the library.

Might as well get them all, then!

Of these, Everyday Crochet has the best illustrations for how to do a slipnot, a foundation chain, and single crochet. I've never even seen someone crocheting before, so I really relied on the illustrations.

Side note, but this is another way that generations lose this type of cultural knowledge. If we'd seen people casually crocheting all our lives, then the very act of how to hold a crochet hook and yarn wouldn't feel so foreign, and learning the skill set would be loads easier.

The kid also used this book to figure out how to translate everything into left-handedness. It's like regular crochet, only backwards!

Here's my glorious foundation chain:

I had a rough time figuring out single crochet, so I switched back and forth between Everyday Crochet and Crochet: Learn It. Love It. Neither really made it clear to my muddled mind exactly how to count your stitches or where to put your first stitch after turning, so the kid and I spent a lot of time crocheting a few rows, then frogging it all and trying a different way.

This got frogged, lol:

At this point I'd just about cracked how to keep my edges straight, but I had not yet cracked keeping even tension, ahem:

Couple of wobbles on the edges, but look at that mostly even tension. It's a keeper!

I spent another couple of evenings crocheting while watching TV (don't tell the copyright police, but the older kid also taught me how to bitTorrent, and then we got caught up on Our Flag Means Death), and then Everyday Crochet taught me how to fasten off and weave in my ends.

And now I have the one thing that I've always, always wanted: my household's fortieth washcloth!

I meant for it to be square, but I got thrown off by the fact that 25 stitches long is not the same distance as 25 stitches tall. Is it supposed to be? I haven't learned gauge yet.

Whatever. I love it.

Check out Luna guarding me from the neighbors, who have the audacity to be outside on their own property:

I don't know if it's her age or the older kid's absence, but she has gotten SO protective of me. There are a couple of badly-behaved free-ranging dogs who interlope on our property (the one thing that I HATE about the country. Well, that and the giant Trump flag flying on a literal flagpole in front of another neighbor's house. Why on earth would it occur to you to mount an honest-to-god FLAGPOLE in your yard?!? And he doesn't even fly a US flag! It's literally just I Pledge Allegiance to Trump over there!) and they genuinely frighten me, but when Luna's with me she makes it very clear to them that she will kill them before she lets them get anywhere near me.

She also investigated my yarn to make sure it was safe for me.

It was!

If I was smart and methodical, I would make two more washcloths so I could learn double and half-double crochet, but seriously, this time last year the younger kid died on the hill of having a specific and exact number of towels and washcloths in a specific color to take to college, and to achieve that amount in that color at the lowest price I bought towel sets that came with washcloths, then another whole set of just washcloths, but then when she actually saw what the whole kaboodle looked like she obviously walked her request back, because I promise you it was an objectively absurd amount of washcloths, but just kill me now I'd already washed them so now we still own an objectively absurd amount of washcloths, but they're in my linen closet where I have to look at them every day, and not in the kid's dorm where I could have happily forgotten about the whole thing.

So Jesus Christ NO, I'm not going to make two more washcloths.

Instead, I'm amping up my skills by learning how to change colors, and I'm making myself a pair of striped fingerless mitts. 

Counting stitches and counting rows are not going great just yet, and I'm currently ignoring the fact that I'm definitely making this too big for my hand, and I thought my two yarns were the same weight but now I think they might be slightly different and it's messing up the tension or something, but I'm confident that come next autumn, I'll be walking Luna with the perfect striped fingerless mitts of my dreams on my hands.

Also, if you want anything crocheted for you that's rectangular and done in single crochet on hook size K, I'm your person!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Day 9 in New Zealand: Across the Southern Alps to Christchurch

In all the New Zealand travel Facebook groups that I joined in preparation for this trip, pretty much everyone else in every group was all, "I'm going to spend three months in New Zealand--where should I go first?" or "I'm going to buy a car in New Zealand, travel in that car for eight months, then sell it before I go home--any free car camping tips?"

And I can see why! There is SO much to do and see that it was agony to narrow down our itinerary to a doable nine days, and then even more agony to stick to that itinerary once we were there. So cool places like Milford Sound and Lake Taupo will have to stay on my must-see-someday list, as will, I am so bummed to say, seeing the Southern Cross with my very own eyes. I'd measured my expectations, because I'd read that it can be pretty rainy in the Spring, but come on! Not even one clear night for stargazing?!?

Next time, I guess!

But we DID get to every other must-see-on-*this*-trip on our lists. The kid wanted to see kiwis, albatrosses (she actually saw plenty of those at sea!), and a rainforest, and she did. I wanted to see glowworms and geothermal stuff, and I wanted to show the kid her first glacier--and I did! My partner wanted to see Hobbiton and Weta Workshop, and the Southern Alps by train--and on this day, he finished off that list!

We had plenty of time that morning for the drive back up the west coast to the train station in Greymouth, so we got to stop whenever something looked pretty, and browse around the little towns we passed through:

I also did the last of our souvenir and Christmas stocking shopping in one last grocery store--the Cadbury and Whittakers did okay in the checked luggage on the way home, but the smaller chocolates and the Jaffa Cakes got mauled nearly to crumbs, dang it. 

In the early afternoon we returned our rental car in Greymouth, and boarded the TranzAlpine train to cross the Southern Alps. It was so pretty!

We spent a LOT of time out in the open-air observation car, where the best views--and the best photos!--lived--

--but it was a five-hour trip, so we also had a lot of time to just hang out together, which was really, really nice, too:

Like, even though we'd been practically living in each other's pockets for the past nine days, almost all of that time had been either sitting facing the same direction in the car, or doing some kind of activity that required most of our attention and all of our breath. We're not really restaurant people, so we'd actually spent very little time facing each over a table and chatting. It was nice to have all the downtime in the world to chat, trade crossword puzzles (the New York Times Wednesday puzzles are our sweet spot) back and forth, and set out all our snacks for a proper feast:

We didn't see much more of Christchurch than the view out of various taxi driver's windows, so add that to my to-do list for next time, too! I also didn't see much more of my kid, as she was booked on a separate--and MUCH more convenient!--ticket. Even though her first flight left Christchurch just an hour before ours, she ended up getting back to Indianapolis TEN HOURS before us! She was nearly to Auckland by the time we boarded our own flight there--

--already in the international terminal and getting ready to board her flight across the Pacific by the time we arrived, and by the time we had settled in to our long layover in Houston, she was picking up our car from the economy parking lot at the Indy airport and heading home for a nap and a shower!

Also, Air New Zealand food isn't the worst, but it's not great, either. The roll and the two glasses of wine were the only real winners here:

When we FINALLY got back, and the kid rolled up to the curb at Arrivals to pick us up, my partner was so hungry that he basically had her take us straight to Wendy's, which was kind of gross and hilarious. We'd joked the whole time in New Zealand that we were on a "corn fast," on account of none of the foods we'd consumed--not even the sodas!--had high fructose corn syrup, so I guess ending the corn fast also meant that our vacation was really over, too!

Here's our whole trip:

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

Day 7: Wellington to Pancake Rocks

Day 8: Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers

Day 9: TranzAlpine Train Across the Southern Alps

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Day 8 in New Zealand: I Meet a Glacier

This day is all about mountain hiking and meeting a glacier.

But first--breakfast!

Serving pancake stacks at the cafe across the street from Pancake Rocks is pretty much the best synergy I've ever seen. OBVIOUSLY we simply had to have them!

Also, flat whites:

Fun fact: I now want a twinkle light kiwi sooooo badly, but probably not badly enough to change up my electrical outlet for it...

It was another beautiful drive, snugged between the mountain and the sea, down to Westland Tai Poutini National Park, where the goal was to introduce our kid to her very first glacier.

Hopefully she'll see many more in her life, but just in case they all melt before she can, she'll always have the memory of Franz Josef Glacier.

I was surprised to discover that you can actually see the Franz Josef Glacier from the parking lot!

Honestly, that's not a bad option if you've got some other hikes that you'd rather do, because the view isn't *that* much better from where the most popular walk ends at the Trident Creek Falls, but still. If 3000 meters is as close as you can get, then 3000 meters is where we're going!

Fortunately, this early in the day the weather was PERFECT for hiking--

--AND for seeing a real, live glacier from just 3000 meters away!

It's kind of a bummer, though, when you look at that long plain of gravel and you realize that if it hadn't melted, Franz Josef glacier would actually be right THERE where you could touch it. Sigh...

We wanted to do another hike in the area while the weather was so nice, so we decided to follow Roberts Point Track to the first of the cool swing bridges I'd read about.

Peters Pool was just as prettily reflective as we'd been told it would be, although you could see that the weather was already changing...

But it was still lovely and light when we got to the first swing bridge on the trail:

My partner isn't much for swing bridges over glacial streams, so he hung back and took our pretty pictures while we enjoyed the bridge crossing:

The big kid and I thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, however. This was our best look at the "glacial flour" that makes the rivers coming from the glacier look so milky:

On the far side of the bridge, we spent a little time looking around while a few other hikers crossed--

--and then we all enjoyed the hike back, especially when the glacier came back into view. 

This was such an exciting warning sign! 

The weather later that afternoon didn't feel workable for the whole Fox Glacier walk, so instead we drove over to this viewpoint outside of town. It was pretty overcast, but fortunately we could still see enough of Fox Glacier to say we'd seen it:

Definitely too overcast to see Mount Cook, though, which was kind of a bummer:

The evening's major adventure was more prosaic: repack all our crap so we could all fly home the day after tomorrow! My partner hadn't been very impressed by my purchase of this luggage scale, but omg did it come in handy, because he was VERY impressed (in a horrified way...) of my purchase of books and crow-like scavenging of lovely rocks over our trip. We had to divvy up the books and the rocks to keep my luggage from being overweight, and we further divided up the delicious snacks so that if someone's bag got lost, perhaps not all of our Whittakers and Cadbury and wine would be. And then I had to practically sit on the kid to convince her not to leave behind her foul weather rainsuit, she was so sick of it, but I'm sorry to say that I could not save her rain boots. I hope that they're happy on the feet of some other New Zealand adventurer right this minute.

Ah, well. I'm sure she'll regret it when she says she needs rain boots for the next round of bizarre environmental scientist antics that she's currently applying to and I tell her that I already bought her perfectly nice rain boots so the next pair is on her, humph.

All packed up and ready to go, we await tomorrow's adventure: the TranzAlpine Train across the Southern Alps!

Day 1: Auckland

Day 2: Hobbiton

Day 3: Driving to Rotorua

Day 4: Glowworms and Kiwis

Day 5: Driving to Wellington

Day 6: Weta Workshop and Te Papa Museum

Day 7: Wellington to Pancake Rocks

Day 8: Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers

Day 9: TranzAlpine Train Across the Southern Alps

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!