Reese got a magic kit for Christmas this year, and he's been doing a lot of practicing. He's got some good tricks, too - there's one he does with a pair of dice that's very cool. The part that's really a work in progress is his magician's patter. For example, he has this trick that consists of pulling a yellow rope out of an egg. Not much to it, so it's kind of all in the presentation. His first attempt was to hold up the egg, forcefully declare, "This has no openings in it!" then pull out the rope. Um.
We suggested he might add more drama by saying he has an ordinary egg, and oh my gosh! what's this? etc. etc. So he held up the egg and said, "I have an egg!" Then, pulling out the rope, "WITH A ROPE IN IT!"
Which is our new catchphrase. Even Jane can be heard walking around the house muttering "I have an egg with a rope in it!" to herself.
As for my own works in progress, I finished the February baby sweater:
So fun to knit. pattern: EZ's February baby sweater, from the Knitter's Almanac. yarn: Dream in Color Classy. needles: size 6 Addi Turbos. mods: None really. I screwed up on the first repeat of the lace pattern, and forgot to keep the border in garter stitch. Once I noticed, I was too chicken to drop the border stitches down because I had a buttonhole in there too, so I just kept making the same mistake. It's a design element now.
So now that that's done, I am officially Working On Sam's Cobblestone. But at this point, the rows are still really long, and I've got most of the sweater hanging off the needles as I work, and
I just can't do a lot of it without wanting to either fall asleep or bury the thing under the 5-foot snow pile in the front yard. So I've also . . . cast on a sock. Don't judge.
Besides all the knitting, another reason I've been sort of blog-absent is playing around with shop stuff. I've been spending some time (time when I should probably be sleeping, mostly) working on things like getting my pictures to look better, reading up on stuff in the Etsy forums, and, of course, making things. And I've got a little prototype to show you:
So what the hell is the picture on that? It's a ray diagram. I've been messing around with some embroidery, but I wanted to do something a little different, that would reflect a little more of me. I hit upon this idea of doing glasses cases with pictures on them of the ray diagrams that show how the lenses work. This one is a converging lens, used to correct farsightedness.
I've also done one with a diverging lens, for nearsightedness. What do you think - too geeky? I thought it would be fun to keep my glasses in a case that shows how the lenses work, but then I'm kind of a nerd.
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