Shiny new things :)

First of all, I got my new laptop today! So far I'm very happy with it, it has Windows 7 and everything :D No more Vista for me, yay! It's so tiny, it's pretty much the right size for Bollan! Perfect for posting her little tweets :)

Sorry for the bad photo quality, I took the picture with my phone, which isn't exactly brand new any more... But it has bluetooth, and so does my computer, so I can finally transfer all the pictures from my phone :) I've been wanting to do that for a long time!

Second, I also got new shoes today :D I started training for my new job this morning (the job I'm supposed to have this summer, the other one was just a substitute thing), and after almost five hours of walking and standing and cleaning things my feet hurt so bad I can hardly walk :/ It's especially bad under the heel and the part behind the big toe. My right big toe has been numb for days, I think I've been walking on a nerve or something... I thought I'd get over it from the week at the other job, because I'm not used to that much walking after seven years as a lazy student, but it's only gotten worse, so today I finally gave in and decided to get some more comfortable shoes. The ones I have are not at all uncomfortable - I think they are the best shoes I've ever had, but the soles are not very soft, so I guess that's bad... Anyway, I just wanted to post the picture of my new shoes beside my new laptop - to give you an idea of how tiny it is (or how large my feet are!), and again I apologize for the quality:

After the big day

This will be a fairly short post, I had a really long day at work today, my feet are hurting, it's getting late and I have to go bed soon. Just a quick summary of the market yesterday: it was great fun! I sold lots of stuff, talked to a lot of new people, met some old friends, AND I made it through the dreaded play :D I survived, haha :p The play itself went very well, too, the "actors" and the sound was well coordinated and everyone played their parts as well as could be expected. The audience loved it!

I do not have any pictures to put in this post, because my laptop went totally crazy a few hours ago and I had to do a system recovery or whatever it's called, so all my files are now gone from my computer. Luckily I was able to transfer everything to an external drive first, so I'll find the pictures and upload them later :) Oh, and I've also just ordered myself a brand new laptop, because I just can't take the frustration with this one anymore. I get headaches from less... My new laptop is tiny (10'') and red, and I hope I can pick it up some time this week :D

Ooh, I just remembered! You could always look at my Facebook page for a few pictures from the market :) I have no fans yet, but I've been updating the page for a while now anyway. There you will find only craft related stuff, and no tedious ranting about computers that don't work :p

Before the big day

I am absolutely exhausted! I've been at work the last three days (scrubbing walls, doors, windows, floors, tables & chairs etc. at a school - kids are dirty creatures!), and today I've been preparing for the market/fair tomorrow. Well, "preparing"... We were supposed to rehearse the play (for the first time!) until we got it right (we are few people with many roles, and there's a lot of making stuff up as we go - there's a storyteller with no script, so it's never the same twice), but of course that didn't happen. We did the play once, and then we were going to get the sound system up before we did it again. That took about four hours... In the end it got so late before we could start again that people had to leave, and the whole thing became pretty amputated and somewhat half-hearted :/ Hope we have time for another rehearsal tomorrow morning, with full cast and a working sound thingy...

I still need to make a list of my things/prices and price tags for the items/boxes. I have no idea what kind of table I'll get, or even where I'll sit - outside or in a tent. Right now I feel pretty disheartened (is that the right word?) by the whole thing, like I never want to do this again... I'm so tired and grumpy I don't even want to be around myself :( My feet hurt from all the walking and standing and I think I have a fever...

*sigh* Don't know when I get home to my mother's tomorrow night, and I have to work on Monday (more cleaning), but I promise to tell you how it all went when I have time and feel a little more awake :)

New patterns and stuff

The past few days have been busy (I've suddenly got a job and everything, but more about that later), but I've still managed to publish two new patterns :D And one of them is free, yay! 

Strawberries, anyone? This is the first free amigurumi pattern I've made in ages, so now I felt it was time for another one :) I know there are several free strawberry patterns out there already, but I hope you enjoy these anyway. I really like that bowl thingy, I found it by accident when I was looking for something in a cabinet, and I knew I had to make some fruit or something to put in it :) So I made three of these berries in an afternoon, in between painting my grandmother's garden furniture. You can find the pattern HERE.

The other pattern is a new set of Dudes, volume 3 of the Forest Dwellers: beaver, skunk & mouse :)

So far I have only added the pattern on Ravelry, because I'm considering giving up on my Etsy shop. Except from one sale I've only sold my patterns through Ravelry. The latter is also a lot cheaper, which for me is a very good reason to ditch Etsy for selling.  A while ago I got both an Etsy bill and a Ravelry bill, and they were as good as identical. The difference was that the Etsy bill was (except for the one sale) all listing fees, while the Ravelry bill was only for actual sales! I'll naturally keep my Etsy account to buy patterns, but I think I'll just let my current listings expire and not renew them. We'll see...

Oh, and another thing... My Great Big Dragonfly is apparently not a Dragonfly at all, but a Damselfly! Thanks to Weird Bug Lady for pointing it out (on Twitter) :) The difference is in the wings and the eyes. The dragonfly's eyes are very large and meet on top of the head, while the damselfly has separate eyes on the sides of the head. The damselfly also has four virtually identical wings, and the dragonfly has broader back wings. Also, most damselflies fold their wings back along their body when resting, which dragonflies never do. There you have it :) (Though I will not change the name of my pattern, just thought I'd clear things up! I like things to be correct.) Images from Wikipedia:

By the way, my work on the Great Big Fly I've mentioned has stagnated a bit lately, so I don't know when the pattern will be ready... I'm just so tired of making legs :/ I have finished four Bugs so far, including one spider, which makes a total of 18 legs! That's a record of identical parts I've ever made :) I've had little time for crafting the past two weeks (except to finish my stuff for the market), and when I have had the time I haven't felt like doing something repetative like bug legs... I've wanted to do something else, like crocheting strawberries or stitching up a tiny meerkat :D

Over the weekend with the market over and done with I hope to find some more energy to finish the Bugs I'm working on, but I also have a physically demanding job right now, which I aslo have to walk to (20 minutes uphill to get there!), so when I get home I just crash on the couch... I should be done with the job some day next week, so hopefully... :)


Update: As one of my readers pointed out, the number of bug legs is supposed to be 26, not 18 :) However, I have made two of the legs for the fly, so I guess that makes it 28! I think I counted four legs on each bug and six on the spider yesterday. Or something. I don't know, I don't really do math, numbers just get me all confused :p

My home :)

Okay, so I won't tell you the name of the place I come from, but I can show you some pictures :) (And if you are from somewhere around here, you will probably recognize the place!) This is the first view tourists get when they come to visit, in rain or sun:

They pass "the beach" fairly quickly (sorry about the blur - the picture is taken from a moving car):

Then they can stop and watch the Shelduck pair and their ten ducklings :)

Tractor eggs neatly lined up or scattered all over (many people here are farmers, or like to think they are when they find the time):

This is the part where my family comes from - practically the end of the world:

The washed up kelp rotting in the sun smells pretty awful at times...

But the birds love the stuff! At least the bugs and critters that live in it :p

A mother Mallard and her eight ducklings:

Then there's this...

The poor tourists come here to watch the birds and enjoy the scenery, but they often have a hard time getting anywhere because of flocks of sheep in the road. And they won't move until you push them with your car!

You can also meet this lovely cat:

You recognize Achilles? I know I've mentioned him before... He's not mine, but I love him! He is very cuddly and loves people, so in the summer he spends a lot of time wandering round the camping site to meet new people :)

But what the tourists really come to see is this:

The mountain and the birds that live there (well, used to live there, most of the populations are now declining rapidly due to over fishing and pollution of the birds' main feeding areas). The white stuff in the picture is not snow - it's bird poo! There are Gannets, Kittiwakes, Puffins, Cormorants, Guillemots, Razorbills and White-tailed Eagles.  Here is a pair of Kittiwakes, a colony of Gannets and a Puffin:

We can have some pretty awsome sunsets:

But this is definitely the best view of the world, from my grandmother's garden :)

Flock of Seagulls

Remember the band? From the 80s I think. The song "I Ran" has been stuck in my head every now and then since I watched a friend play GTA: Vice City on Playstation some years ago... I have a song on my mind all the time, and often more than one simultaneously :/

Well, enough about that... This is not a post about music, but seagulls. Gulls, anyway :) Don't know if you have been watching, but the nesting pair of gulls on the roof successfully hatched three chicks. Now that they are big enough to roam around, they are not often seen on camera any more. Here are some cute pictures:

I have also met the pair of Herring Gulls that visit my grandmother every year (read more about them in this post). For some reason they are not very tame this year, so they haven't been hand fed yet. But they still come pretty close :) This is the female. We recognize her by a hole in her foot, which has been there for years and does not seem to hurt her.

Another pair of Herring Gulls have had their nest in a very strange spot: underneath a small tree on a tiny field by the neighbor's driveway, and just a few yards from my grandmother's garage. About ten days ago the neighbor cut the grass on the field with a tractor lawnmower, and the gull did not move an inch! So now the grass is taller just around the nest, which I think is a little annoying for the neighbor but perfect for the birds :)

The two chicks have started to go out of the nest now, but they haven't moved very far yet, and the parents are always watching over them. They let us come very close, but they do "bark" at us sometimes. Here they are ten days ago:

These pictures were taken yesterday, less than ten yards away:

Aren't they cute? I would like to just pick one up and give it a great big hug :) I don't get people that don't like gulls, I love them!

Back in town

For a little while, anyway.. Just enough time to let you know I'm still alive, upload a bunch of photos and write a few posts :)

The past week or so I've been staying with my grandmother. The plan was to help out with a lot of gardening and stuff, and to paint all the garden furniture white (we're tired of a very boring green), but the weather's been bad most days, so very little of this has actually been done :/ On Tuesday we did manage to dig up some stone tiles across the lawn that just didn't look good anymore. I carried the tiles away and used them to make a path and a small step up to my gran's new tool shed. Bollan and Glyptodon tried to reach the door, but even together they are a bit too short. Fortunately my grandmother is a little taller :)

Carrying all those tiles were hard work, and the next day I was so stiff and sore all over I could barely move! But the work was worth it. We dug up a new flowerbed and used the turf to fill in the gaps from the stone tiles, and voila - the lawn is all pretty again AND my gran has a new place to put even more flowers :)

Then it was rainy again for several days, until Sunday and yesterday, when I could finally start painting a couple of garden benches. There are lots more to paint, so I'll have work to do all weekend when I'm not preparing for the fair. Have I told you about that? Hm.. Well, it's a fair. Don't know what else to call it. There will be food and drink to buy, an art exhibit by local people (paintings, sculpture and photography), crafty people selling their stuff, and there will be some entertainment. Among other things there'll be a play, which I have two different parts in. Very scary. Thankfully we're not supposed to speak, because everything's been recorded beforehand :) Most of this will happen outside at the harbor on Sunday (want to keep some privacy, so I won't tell you excactly where it is - it's where I come from and it's a pretty small place). Since I haven't been outside much I've had plenty of time to finish the stuff I'm going to sell at the fair :) Here it is:

I don't count on selling all these things, but it's good to be prepared :) I have have so many different things that even if I only sell one of each, I'll still be half-way to a new laptop! Yay :D Tomorrow afternoon I'm going back to my grandmother's again and I probably won't return to civilization until the fair is done on Sunday evening...

So far, so good :)

I've started my owl for Itsy Bitsy Spider's CAL! Finished the head yesterday :)

I made a few changes to the eyes: worked two rounds of black (instead of black and another color) and an extra round of green to make the eyes a little bigger, plus I added white dots to give it some life. I think it worked :)

Give-away!

At Itsy Bitsy Spider! You can win an adorable little plush owl like this!

It's one of a set of collectible Owlets by Harley & Boss. You buy the box, but you don't know which plushie is inside until you open it! Both plushie cutness and excitement all in one box :)

Before I go...

...to visit my grandmother for the weekend (where the internet is horrible and I probably won't use it much), I thought I'd give you a little preview of some upcoming patterns :) After I got my new job yesterday I was in such a good mood that I made almost two new Dudes and started a third! Here's a mallard duck and a beaver:

I still haven't decided if they will be in the same set, so I'm not sure if a pattern will be ready over the weekend, but I'll do my best :) I'll also try to finish the next Great Big Bug for Tuesday, which will be a fly! A housefly, not a blowfly :) I think flies are fascinating, though I don't want them near my food, I love to watch them groom themselves. I have some other stuff to finish as well, plus I really want to begin my owl for The Great Owl CAL :D

Ooh, and I've also stitched up one of my many tiny cross stitch kits! It took me just a few hours to finish - instant satisfaction :D Naturally I started with one of the hedgehogs:

His nose/face is one stitch shorter than it should be, but I think that only made him cuter, so I didn't correct it :)

Well, it's past four in the afternoon, and I think my uncle will be her to pick me up soon, so I'd better finish packing. I can't believe how much stuff I have to bring just for a short weekend! A small suitcase full of yarn and WIPs, my backpack with more yarn, stuffing, a bottle of wine and my laptop, a handbag with even more yarn, a shopping bag with food, and a little laundry that I haven't had time to do... *whew* But Bollan is already packed and ready to go, and that's the most important thing :)

New design & new job

Notice any changes? Yep. I've changed my blog design again! I just discovered that Blogger has a new way of customizing your blog that makes everything a lot easier. I can even have three columns, and I don't have to battle with the html codes :D Woohoo! You can still edit the layout in html if you want to, but I don't :p

Wednesday was my first day at my new job. It was also my last. It just didn't work out. Now, I don't want this to be a post about me writing bad stuff about my boss, because I don't like to talk about people like that, but seriously... When I asked for the job I expected to work the register, some cleaning and sorting around the store, being friendly with the customers etc. The customer is always right and all that... What I didn't expect was being told that I'm not chatty enough! Apparently I looked too much at the buttons on the register and the change I was counting when I should have been chatting with the customers! About what? Goddammit, I had been there for a few hours and I needed to see what I was doing so I didn't make mistakes :( I have never worked in a store before, she knew I needed training, but it didn't seem to be enough. She made a huge point (several times) out of telling me how important the customer was, and that it was not their fault when I made a mistake. Obviously! I never even implied such a thing, I smiled, said hello and was polite. That's the best I can do. She also told me several times that it was an unusually slow day, and that the line of customers usually were around the corner. She said it looked like I was struggling (which I weren't), she almost felt sorry for me (!), so I figured she was trying to tell me that I didn't fit in. She was probably trying to encourage me or something, but it didn't help much... Being told that I'm not good enough doesn't make me work harder, it just makes me give up :( It didn't help that I was the only one she'd found to work there either, I didn't want to be there just because she didn't have anyone else. Or because she felt sorry for me, or because she knows my mother! I'd still feel that she didn't think I was good enough. I'd rather be broke than depressed.

After three years in hell during High School (Junior High, I think is the closest term in English) I'm not very social or chatty person (in person, that is - online in writing I can be "normal"), dealing with new people is really scary, and I think smalltalk is pretty useless with complete strangers, especially when I'm trying to work! In my mind, and in the town where I usually live, the point of working in a store is not to talk to the customers from they enter the shop and all the time until they leave... She asked me to come back on Monday to get three more hours of training (so I'd have a full day), but I won't suddenly become a social butterfly over the weekend, so I told her to find someone else. (Well, I had my mother tell her, because I was curled up in a ball, unable to do anything useful for the rest of the day...)

Yesterday I got a new job! I'm going to be a cleaning-lady at the town hall, starting some time in July. Which suits me just fine :) I don't mind physical work, as long as the company is all right (in this case it means being ignored). So I still have a few more weeks of holiday and lots of time to crochet :D I actually applied for the cleaning job a good while before I got the store job, but somehow they managed to screw up when sorting all the applications, and I got a letter saying that I'd applied for the wrong job! Since my mother works there and knows these people (she's the one who told me about the job in the first place, since it wasn't advertized anywhere), and they apparently had no idea what had happened. They would sort out the mess and send me a letter saying my application was received. I never heard anything... I figured that the cleaning job was long gone when I got home, but then my mother told me that they just started hiring people yesterday! About a month too late... But hey, the screw-up means that I now have a job, so I'm not complaining :)

Well, now I feel silly...

Turns out I can do the PDF converting myself! Just after posting the long rant yesterday I discovered that Word2007 has this cool function that converts the document into PDF, and there's no extra software needed :) So after a month of bothering my aunt and stressing her out with all my e-mails, I could have just fixed it really easily myself... Don't know why she hasn't told me, unless she is also unaware of this fancy function. The only difference I see is that the document I made is about half the size of the ones she did for me (I have counted the number of pages and pictures, and they seem to have little to do with this). As far as I can tell my converted PDFs are just as good as hers... Oh, well :)

I won't repeat what I said about the pattern yesterday. Instead you can just skip the first 2.5 paragraphs of my previous post and read the rest :) Oh, and in case you are wondering, the body of the spider is brushed. The pattern is now added to my Ravelry store, I'll list it on Etsy later. Now I'm off to work!

No pattern Tuesday :(

Well, today was Tuesday (I'm going to bed in a few minutes - first day at work tomorrow, wish me luck!), so I should have posted a new Bug pattern. Sadly, that didn't happen, and I'm guessing it won't for a while. You see, converting my Word documents into PDF isn't as easy as it sounds. First of all, I use Word2007, which is new and fancy and I love it :) But, since it's so new and fancy very few other people have it, like the library or my mother's office. Which means I have to save my documents as Word97/2003 to be able to read it on other computers. Second, I don't have a PDF converter. I could do that in the library, but then my formatting will be screwed and the fonts I use will be changed. I know this because I've tried.  I've also tried some free online converters, but they only screw things up even worse. 

So, the solution I've used so far is to e-mail the files to my aunt (who is a journalist and has bought the complete Adobe-thingy through her work with a HUGE discount - it would otherwise cost thousands of money), and then she sends the finished PDFs back to me. Simple enough, right? Nooo... Today I e-mailed my aunt my latest pattern, and she called me back a few hours ago and told me her computer (laptop) had crashed. Completely. Won't start or shut down (sounds weird, but that's how it is), so she has to get it fixed, and that will take at least two weeks :(

So unless I find some other solution there will be no new patterns for a while :( However, this doesn't mean that I'll stop working on new patterns! I just means that I'll have several new patterns out when things are in order again :) Today's pattern was going to be a Great Big Spider! Can't believe I have actually crocheted a spider, I'd told myself I'd never do that... But I got a request to make one, so here it is :)

Unlike the other bugs, this guy is not based on any particular species of spider, since I'm totally unable to google images for inspiration! Heh, it's really that bad... So it's sort of a generic tarantula, with that shell-like thing on its back and a furry butt :) Because the anatomy of spiders is different from insects (insects have three main "parts" while spiders only have two), I have attached all the legs on the front part of the critter, and the eyes are placed in the front. To me, spiders really are little monsters, so I gave him neon green eyes to make him a little (more) scary. He's a green-eyed monster :p

This is the first time I have done a pattern that has color changes in the middle, which raises the level of difficulty to intermediate. Don't worry though, it's only a few stitches on the back end of the spider, and you can skip the patterning altogether if you feel like it. I have also tried to make it as easy as possible by not putting the color changes and the decreases on the same round :)

I must admit that I'm still not sure how I feel about this guy, he almost creeps me out a little, and while working on him I've had more spider dreams than usual :/ Bollan seems to like him, though, she has always wanted her very own spider!