That Homemade Look

So now that the baby (who I'm sure doesn't use the internet much) has received his gifts, I can show you the pencil pillow I made:
It's from the Readers' Digest Complete Guide to Sewing, and I mostly followed the instructions. I hadn't seen any pictures of it online, so here we go. Sorry there's none with a scale factor, it was just past my waist if I stood it on end on the ground. There's a few mistakes, one of which was me not examining the pattern for what wasn't said carefully enough (there's a trick to turning the point that I forgot about), one was me not thinking when I changed the pattern (no, you cannot do machine top-stitching after you stuff it. Trust me.) One of the problems, however, brings up an interesting philosophical point. The appliqué lettering has issues. Now, had I made the pencil without the letters, it would have been fine. It would fall on the "handmade" side of the "homemade" vs "handmade" dilemma from the knitters' point of view. At least, it could have. But, without the letters, the pencil wouldn't have been quite as good. And the portion without the letters is just as good as it would have been either way. I know that I personally would feel better if I make something simple well, than if I make something fancy poorly, even if I show the same level of skill each time. But when I add something complex to something simple, where does that fall?

And I need to share that having a mechanical engineer around the house is great for sewing, not just for fitting stuff (and knitting). Look at what Allan suggested so that I could more easily do the topstitching:
See that tape? Genius I tell you. (I didn't have a marking on the plate, because I was using the edge of the feed dog, because the topstitching needed to be right at the edge).

Ok, I probably should have known on my own

But if you search the CRA website for how to change your name and address, it doesn't say that you need to have your return from last year in front of you! The only info from my return that I've ever needed with them is line 150, so I wrote that out... shame that's not what they asked.

Rabbit Food!

Well... not literally rabbit food. Just the green crunchy stuff that gets referred to as such. My mom once was picking up food for the rabbit, and a friend commented that "normally when people say they have to buy rabbit food I don't believe them".

Back on topic...

So this evening I was in charge of putting together a salad. Allan had already chopped up some of the interesting stuff. I looked at how much he had done, and then chopped an appropriate amount of mushrooms. And then went for the lettuce...

One dinner for two people, and two packed lunch-size (i.e. huge) salads later, I have come to the realisation that there is no way to make a small salad. In fairness, this was partly because I was using two kinds of lettuce, and not just because I needed to match the lettuce to everything else, but salad is always significantly larger than you expect.