Knotty Mouse

1. Avada Kedavra Sock, 2. “dining room”- before 3. “dining room”- after

I know.. I know.. “holy shit.. KNITTING? On Mouse’s knitting blog? No way!” yes, way. I’ve been chugging along at night on the Killing Curse socks and have turned the heel on sock #1 while watching obscene amounts of CSI:Miami. I also found a “new way” (new to me anyway..) of doing a hole free short row heel which can be found here and is WAY easier than my previous method which was rather hit or miss. The pain in my hand from knitting is mild as long as I don’t knit for hours at a time.. so I’m trying to monitor my time and fly under the radar on that one. While I do miss knitting constantly I do NOT want to injure my hand/wrist anymore and risk further and more serious damage.. so I’m taking it one project at a time.

The photos on the right side are a before and after of my (useless for its intended purposes - which makes me wonder what sort of idiot designed these houses) dining room. Our house is a split level and its the room you come into when you come up the steps from the front door - so the mess and the clutter made me sad every time I came home. This is also the room that connects every other room upstairs so I was constantly looking at the mess and wishing it would go away even though I had no idea where to start in fixing it - some messes are overwhelming like that. A few days ago I ended up pulling everything out, throwing most of the contents of the top of the large table in a cardboard box to be sorted later, moving all the things hiding UNDER the table into the garage, and bringing up a small card table in its place. The small table with two padded chairs (also hiding in other rooms taking up space) became a really nice place to do homework with Munchkin at night.

Fair amount of bitching and an overdose of the real life of Mousie and a fair amount of swearing under the cut.. (so if you read this on bloglines you can feel free to skip the rest of this post if you don’t want to hear it) Read the rest of this entry »

E is for Earrings..  long dangly earrings that make a lot of noise when worn.  I’m not entirely sure how many pairs of earrings I have but its definitely a lot..  I’ve taken to using them as a wall-hanging just to have access to most of them. ( I couldn’t capture ALL of the earrings in one shot so this is just a portion of them)  I love natural stone, silver or brass, and exotic looking designs. Most of my favorites were bought in an imports shop when I was in high school..  I take serious measures to make sure I don’t loose my earrings because they are really sentimental.  I buy those little plastic  ‘grippers’ by the bag full every time I’m at the craft store and I always wear them on the ear wires so that I don’t loose my earrings when I’m out.  I’m pretty sure that those plastic thingies are actually to keep the earrings on the cards for sale.. but I found that they work great in my ears.

I have 12 holes in my ears.. 4 in the lobes & 2 in the cartilage of each ear.. and I wear small silver Bali-style hoops in them.  For a few years I had the holes in my earlobes stretched so that I could wear metal eyelets (I think they’re a 4 gauge) but I hated that I couldn’t wear my beautiful long earrings (without having to alter all of the hooks on the earrings) and I took them out again. I do love the look of large tribal style piercing jewelry but I’m afraid that I’d get bored entirely too quick with only having one pair of earrings.

(sorry about the crap quality of the photo..  the weather is disagreeing with my need to take photos)

D is for dreads… about 3-4 months old at this point. I decided not to start out with my entire head dreaded because I know that they have a tendency to shrink as they get older and I wasn’t sure that I was willing to lose a lot of length - I also wanted to be able to “hide” the dreaded bits by pulling them up in a bun and having loose hair underneath. Admittedly I would probably have dreaded all of my hair if I had someone willing to backcomb my entire head of waist length hair… but since I had to do it myself I decided to start out with a few and let the rest form by themselves. At first I started out with only a handful of dreads & braids.. and now its about 50% dreaded & braided - I’m planning on letting the rest of it dread until there is no loose hair left or until I get sick of this.. whichever comes first. The photos are sort of in a time line - on the left is ‘day 1′ so I had a record of what I started with and the one on the far right was taken today after I cleaned everything up a bit and added a bunch of new beads to the back.

(I think its funny that I’ve gotten stumped by the same letter twice already… last ABC-Along I couldn’t think of anything for D either. It took me so long to come up with a “d” word that I actually am behind - the rest of the along are on “E” now. )