Sunday, February 24, 2013

I'm attempting to sew a patch...run for your lives

     Now that I'm an adult, I find myself with a growing desire to mend things.  Oh, it's not out of any desire to help others or to save money. I just like solving problems and when I see something broken, I want to try to fix it. Of course, if I saw a broken refrigerator, I'm not going to attempt to fix that...I have no idea on how I would even start. I'm referring to simple things...like gluing the broken ceramic pieces of a vase back together. For today's challenge, I'm attempting to fix a hole in my boyfriend's flannel shirt.


     As you can see by the size of my hand, that's one pretty big hole (there's a joke in that somewhere). I had to trim off all of the frayed edges of the hole so I can mend the hole with clean edges.  Luckily, I had an old shirt that was destined for the scrap heap so I used it to create the patch.  Given the size of the hole, there wasn't anyway I could figure out how to create a patch the exact shape of the hole...so I made my patch square shaped and covered the entire darn thing.

 
     My stitching ability is not the strongest of all my talents (hard to believe isn't it?), but I did manage to connect the edges of the flannel hole to the patch.  The main difficulty that I encountered was that the flannel material was so thin in one area that I couldn't knot the end of the thread so that the stitches would stay put. And that's when inspiration hit...I'd use an ole friend of mine: liquid cement. Sorry, I won't mention the brand name here...that would be crazy ;)


     In the end, I decided to glue all of the stitches so they wouldn't EVER slip out of the material.  Then I trimmed the edges of the patch to make it look pretty. Luckily, the finished product is not something that will be seen in public. It's a comfort shirt and is only worn once the day is done so it only needs to be functional, not glamorous. And thus the journey ends...the hole has been sealed. Hey, I just killed 3 hours with a needle!



     What did we learn today old friends? You should always have a sewing kit, glue and scraps of fabric lying around. You never know when you need to fix a shirt...that really just needs to be thrown away, but someone that you love loves it so much that they would wear it until it becomes a bunch of rags...and THAT drives you to a level of OCD insanity so strong that you MUST find a sewing kit you haven't used in years just so you can do a crappy patch job and fix the shirt.

***On the plus side, I just had some delicious coconut gelato. All is well.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Hello Kitty Chia pets are temperamental...

For my true blog peeps out there, I'm very sorry I haven't kept you updated on the fate of my Hello Kitty Chia Pet. It turns out that growing a Chia Pet is very entertaining, but writing about it wasn't. But you know what the funny part about this whole experiment was? It seems that I had a bunch of new readers from the Internet just because my blog was about Hello Kitty. How crazy was that? Perhaps next time I'll write about Batman.

Let's look at some photos shall we?

Day 4 finally yielded some chia growth...but the stupid seeds had a tendency not to stay in place. You can see the groves where the seeds lie in, but the seeds on the bottom would not stay in place. I had days and days of issues with the seeds just sliding off. Chia Hello Kitty wound up having bald spots.
Meanwhile, the excessive amount of chia seeds in threw into my Chia cat grass planter grew a lot faster than I expected. After seeing how well they were doing with simple dirt (and considering how many seeds I put in that container), I knew I was going to have a crazy amount of chia action about to happen....crazy chia action!!!!
 
Day 6...now things really started to grow. But they never grew like the picture on the box. I think next time I'm going to need a squirt bottle, which will keep the seeds moist but not give them so much water that they slide off.

The extra chia seeds were growing like crazy...with crazy chia action. In fact, they grew so fast (and because I put too many seeds inside), that the seeds killed each other. Or maybe I over watered it...I guess we'll never know the truth.
 
Now I wish I would have taken additional pictures after these first few days. The funny thing is that I thought I did. But I can't find those pictures....maybe I dreamt them up. But here's what I learned: chia seeds grows faster in dirt than on top of a ceramic Hello Kitty.  It grows so fast that I could swear I could see it growing.
 
And as fascinating as watching Hello Kitty grow chia on her head (that really doesn't sound right), it is not the most exciting thing to write about. I'll try again with Hello Kitty 2.0; maybe I'll use more humorous commentary.
 
In my future blogs, I'm going to stop trying to writing meaningful words. I'm so concerned about making my blog full of meaningful thoughts that it take me forever just to write an entry. From this point on, they maybe short and sweet, just a picture I took, a poem, a short video...whatever strikes my fancy. Regardless of what I write, it will be entertaining so I hope you'll all keep reading...
 
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