New haircut, after painting the kitchen wall and basically ruining what the stylist did to it. Ah well. (Pictures of the kitchen wall are on the House St. Clair blog.) Look at that gray!

Mabel was just sound asleep, and I was sitting here reading when suddenly she jumps up and starts barking like crazy. She ran into the hallway and stood at the top of the stairs, still barking.

I have a fan on in here, so I thought maybe the cats might have knocked something over in the kitchen or something, so I went to investigate. All was well.

I think she was dreaming or something, because there really isn’t anything going on in the neighborhood this morning. Sheesh! Dogs.

I did get my haircut. I didn’t get a good picture yet.

Today I…

–Painted the last wall of the kitchen. Second coat will go on tomorrow.

–Tilled a portion of the garden and planted the lima beans. Tomorrow, if all goes well, I will till the rest and plant the butternut squash and the zucchini.

–Posted Emily the Unicorn on my Etsy shop, and hashed out the particulars for my sister’s unicorn.

–Bought wallpaper paste stuff that is intended to go overtop of vinyl wallpaper, which is what I have. So we’ll see if it works. I will do that tomorrow as well, and post pics.

–Turned on the air conditioner, because it was 85 in the kitchen and very, very humid. I kept the Green Room at 78 degrees, which was fine, however the good part was that I was able to eliminate a lot of the humidity, so even though the kitchen stayed in the mid-80s, it didn’t feel like it at all.

–Drank almost a gallon of tea. (Hey–tilling in 88 degree weather is hard work!)

–Saw my outdoor thermometer get up to 96 degrees. Yikes.

–mulched the sweet potatoes, the rest of the tomatoes, the peas, and some of the perrenials in the other garden. Determined that the carrots were washed away by the rain. Decided to put peppers there instead, which will work–there’s plenty of room for four peppers.

–Also determined that a 20′ x 20′ garden is plenty for me. I’m going to have a huge space for the cucumber and squash vines to spread out, although there will be trellises too.

–Managed to wrestle a whole bale of straw into the back of my car without the strings breaking! Yay!

Tomorrow I am getting my hair cut. I am also going to work on the custom doll and Thursday’s doll. And make another unicorn, I think. Just because. I’m on vacation, after all.

I am also going to Mom and Dad’s to get more bamboo for the trellises, more straw, and I think that’s it. We’ll see.

Now I have to go clean out the litterboxes and write a bit before I head to bed.

It is my sister Emily’s fault that I was up until after 1am last night.

See, she sent me a conversation on Etsy last week, wondering if I could create a sweater unicorn. I wasn’t sure, so I said I would try and see what happened.

Well, last night around 11pm I wasn’t tired at all, so I sat down on my bed and started fiddling with the pattern I had initially come up with after her email. Well, after cutting out pieces that looked like they would work okay, of course I couldn’t just leave them there and go to bed. I had to make a prototype to see if my pattern would work.

I wasn’t certain, because there was no head grommet in the pattern I designed. It’s a really simple pattern, actually. It is actually just as simple as it looks! There are no surprises whatsoever.

So last night after midnight I was in my comfy chair in my office, stuffing pattern pieces and then putting it all together. 1am came and passed, and I had assembled everything, but needed the mane, tail, and eyes. So I decided to wait until this morning to finish my very first unicorn.

She is made out of vintage fabric from my scrap box, actually. She stands 10″ tall if you count her crocheted horn (I couldn’t think of any other way to do it that would drive me nuts), 9″ tall if you don’t. She has vintage buttons on all four legs, which are jointed. Her hair is handspun purple shaded wool.

The only real issue I had with the pattern was that I stuffed the body very firmly, and stuffed the legs just as firmly. That meant she had a very big hind end before I disguised it with the fluffiness of her tail.

See?

Okay, you can’t really tell in the picture. But trust me. It was quite large.

Alternately, I think I would not stuff the back end so firmly, just so I can make it a bit less noticeable. Because I am already planning to make another one, of course!

Thanks so much, Emily. Maybe I should name this first unicorn after you!

Incidentally, it is 85 already. And it didn’t rain last night at all, either. However, there’s a chance of rain the next four days.

Oh boy, it was hot today. If this is a precursor of summer, then I think I need to move to Antartica. Yikes!

I hope the front does come through tonight. I really, really hope it comes through tonight.

Since what I really wanted to do today was paint the kitchen (and there was no way, not when it was 83 in the kitchen by 4pm) I decided that I might as well get my errand-running done and I went down the road to Goodwill and Target. I didn’t find anything at Goodwill (I didn’t have a 50% off coupon anyway, so it would have had to be something really good) but I got almost everything I needed at Target, including a box fan for my office. The other day I took the window box fax out of the window and used it in the office and it was nice. I have a smaller fan blowing on me at the moment, but I think (at least in here) I need a larger one.

Then I made a detour to pick up a water pump from freecycle, and came home. To HEAT. However, I did manage to do some things today, including mix up another load of dirt, pot up more plants, and sit outside on the porch swing after lunch and write for a bit. With the breeze blowing, it wasn’t all that bad, really.

I had three fans going in the kitchen today, which really helped move the air, too. I managed to fix Mabel’s fan yesterday, so that one is blowing across the floor. Quite nice, even if it does make the cat hair dustbunnies blow everywhere.

Tonight I’m planning to write some more. Tomorrow I’m planning to start the next doll, and possibly the custom doll that has already been paid for! (Thanks so much again if you read this!) I will also, if the weather cooperates, get the kitchen ready for painting. I hope. But we shall see.

(I would also like to till the rest of the garden and plant my zucchini and at least the butternut squash, which are both ready to be planted. And maybe the peppers too. And finish mulching the rest of the planted garden as well, but that means I need to get more straw. And such.)

Sometime this morning I had a dream that I was paralyzed from the waist down. And that my upper body strength wasn’t anything to shake a stick at, so I had to tool around in an electric wheelchair. (I think part of this was because I was sleeping on my stomach and Misty was sleeping on my lower back, so I really couldn’t move for a while.)

And boy was it irritating!

I must have been in an accident or something, because I had the impression I had just gone back to work after an extended period of not working. I was still working my same job, but one of the other people in the office was in a meeting and I was alone answering the phones and greeting people at the front window.

Well, I fell asleep at my desk, and then I heard the little bell people ring when there’s no one at the front desk. I woke up–oops!–and the weird thing was that I was in bed, and that I had forgotten momentarily that I was paralyzed. So I started to stand up and it just didn’t work. Damn!

I grabbed my wheelchair, which had somehow been pushed away from my bed, and got into it (it was hard, too) and then I was in the office again.

There were eight people in the waiting room! And all of them were walk-in referrals or with referrals. And I was alone in the office in a wheelchair!

It was very hard to manuever the wheelchair and open the doors connected to the waiting room. (No handicapped access on two doors.) It was even more difficult trying to balance–I felt like I was going to fall out of the wheelchair at any time. It was practically impossible to make copies, because the copier was too high for me to use (I’m not really sure this would be the case in real life, but it seemed like it was too high. Maybe when I get back to work I’ll try it out and see.)

It didn’t help that two of the people were prior consumers–well, the guy was and his wife was just grumbling under her breath because it was taking so long. But I was trying to serve people in the order they arrived, and they were last.

And that damned phone kept ringing, too.

The two priors ended up in some sort of kitchen area after walking through the door, and I had to go after them and ask them to return to the waiting room since our policies had changed. They didn’t like the fact that we now did a group intake, and they didn’t like the fact that they had to be served by a cripple. (Seriously. I couldn’t believe they said this! The place I work for serves people with disabilities!)

At any time I could have knocked on the meeting room door and asked for the other lady’s help, but I was determined to do it myself. After all, I reasoned, if I couldn’t do it now, then I wouldn’t ever be able to do it. And I tried. And tried. And it was horrible, because the office was not set up for people in wheelchairs.

I’m really not sure how our intern (who was in a wheelchair) managed. I know for a fact that he couldn’t reach the fax machine. However, he plays tennis, and his upper body strength is a lot better than mine was in my dream!

I hear the Memorial Day parade going past. They are 11 minutes late. If I peer out my office window, I’ll be able to see them walking down Main Street.

With the thought that it would be nice to have a doll gallery, and not really wanting to upload every picture to sff.net, I decided that it would work just as well to have a doll gallery blog. I posted some old dolls this evening–those are the pictures I’ve been able to find so far.

I’ll work on getting the new dolls on there this week while I’m off. It will be something to do in between working on my list.

The link is above in my list of links, but it is also here.

Minerva. 13″ tall–15″ including her hat. Cafe-au-lait cashmere ’skin’, curly wool hair in blonde/brown and blue. Angora blend hat and dress. Handmade glasses (no glass, of course.) Handpainted and needlesculpted face. Wired arms for easy poseability. Her legs are not wired. A bit of a decoration at the top of her dress–tiny iridescent beads. Wool tights that just about match the blue in her hair.

Minerva comes with her little book, and you can bend her arm so she can hold it by herself. Minerva is much cuter in person.

It is very hot outside and I’m in here playing with wool and cashmere. Go figure!

It’s supposed to be 90 today. And 91 tomorrow. It is still May, last time I checked. What’s up with that?!?!?!!!

It looks like there will be a front coming through on Monday night–possible rain, but also a bit cooler temperatures the rest of the week. Which is fine. I don’t care if it rains during my vacation. Nope, not at all. But 90 in May is way too hot, in my opinion!

Yesterday wasn’t so bad. It did get up to 80 in the kitchen, but that was only after I used the oven. The only thing I’m going to use the oven for today is to bake brownies, but I might wait until much later this evening to do that. Which is fine.

I also have to use up about a half gallon of milk, which probably means creamy potato soup or something. I will have to find a recipe.

I am working on tomorrow’s doll this morning. I have her arms and legs left to do (that always seems to happen, doesn’t it?)

But anyway, she’s cute. My second witch, Minerva.

Yes, she is wearing glasses. They were… let’s just say interesting to make. She is a studious witch. She might even be a librarian. I haven’t decided yet.

I should easily be done with her by early afternoon, and I will post pictures.

And since it’s going to be so hot these next two days, I might make another one for tomorrow; we’ll see.

Last night I stopped at one of the plant places on my way home from Mom and Dad’s. I passed up the one I wanted to stop at for some reason–I swear I didn’t even see it–so I stopped at the other one (the one that I got all the cool herbs from last year.) They really didn’t have any cool herbs this year (last year I got St. John’s Wort and Rue, for example, both of which are doing great (the rue is blooming), but they did have lots of Gebera Daisies and all sorts of other cool things.

I ended up with two Gebera Daisies for my hanging baskets (I tried to overwinter two but only one made it through the winter. It’s now in a pot) and a beautiful Delphinium. I have to get some Delphinium seeds, I think. They are lovely, lovely flowers. (And the nice thing about the one I picked out is that it has two plants in two different colors, too!) Yay!

And I’ve decided to get my hair cut on Wednesday instead of getting a perm. In the summertime, I tend to wear my hair up anyway, so it really doesn’t make sense to get another perm. So I’m going to go with short hair for the summer and see how that works out.

Now I get to go water my plants.

Okay, so last night my camera battery died, so I couldn’t take pictures of the newest doll, and then when it was all charged up, it was too dark. At least, that’s going to be my excuse.

So, two days late, here’s Violet the Mermaid.

(Please ignore the garbage can in the back of the picture. I forgot to move it. Oops!)

Violet is 8 inches tall. Her skin is cashmere, her tail is 100% wool, all recycled. She has multi-colored chenille yarn hair. She comes with a shell (I’m not sure what kind of shell it is) that is not attached. Her arms and her tail are wired for easy poseability, however I think she works better in a sitting position. She wears two belts–one of green iridescent glass beads and one of purple/blue of the same kind.

I think I will probably end up making more mermaids–she was fun!