Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Long time, no blog

I've been pretty hosed with my new job (which I love!), hence the long hiatus from doing anything interesting enough to write about here. It may be depriving me of cross-stitching for now, but it did give me a cool new mug:


Unfortunately, I don't drink coffee... but it is a nice place to keep my pens!

Thursday, January 12, 2012

New Toy

We got a new rice cooker! My favorite part so far is the instruction book, which has nice anthropomorphized illustrations of the correct and incorrect ways to use your rice cooker:


Now I really want to wash the rice in the inner pan, just to see if it really makes that face.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Pen Pals

A while ago, we got this in the mail:

(You can click the picture to go to the link. Same for all the pictures below.)

After careful deliberation, we sent this postcard in response:


Check out that fine craftsmanship:


The following week we received a package in return, containing a laser-engraved wooden placard:


That's a still frame from the video illustrated in ASCII, with the url at the bottom:


So, we escalated by creating and sending this:





It has been a few months now and we've heard nothing back, so I think at this point we are victorious. It's too bad, though, because we had a few other cool ideas we were planning to send... perhaps we will continue this correspondence one-sidedly.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

A Productive Break

One of the perks of working for a school-based organization is that you get the same winter break as the schools do. So for the past week I've been able to get quite a lot done, from the kind-of-important (wedding planning, catching up on emails) to the not-at-all-important-but-still-wanted-to-do-it (reading a long book, watching all of Dr. Who*).

Most importantly, I finally got to make the new Steotch sampler! I don't know anyone getting married in the next month or so, so instead I made it as a 1.57th anniversary present for some friends:


It was really fun, although this was the first time I've worked with metallic thread (for the crown and the sword), and it was kind of a pain. I sort of want to make a stack of blank ones now, so as friends get married in the coming years I can just add the names and dates and be all set!

*Just the 6 seasons of the new version, not the 26 seasons of the original. Yet.