I’m happy to report there has been no vomiting! Yay! But today I woke up to this.

Isabelle had a bloody nose last night. She takes after her daddy. Alan used to have bloody noses too when he was little. He still does occasionally, right out of the blue, something to do with the change in weather or I don’t know what. The thing is, Isabelle gets them when she’s asleep. I can hear her start sniffling and when I look down, sure enough I see it’s a nosebleed.

When she’s had them before we’ve freaked out, ran for tissue to wipe up all the blood, and tried to apply pressure to her nose. That of course wakes her up and she is NOT happy. She’ll be crying and she won’t let us touch her nose. The nosebleeds just stop on their own. So last night, when I saw her nose was bleeding, I didn’t want to wake her. She was on her side and luckily there wasn’t a lot of blood. It just stopped on it’s own again.

But here’s a question. What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to wake her up and fight with her to try to apply pressure? You know this wouldn’t even be a question if Isabelle slept in her own bed. If that were the case I wouldn’t know until the morning that she’d had a nosebleed. So maybe the answer is to do nothing except make sure the room is humid enough. Yeah ok, answered my own question.

So anyhoo I noticed that I haven’t shown anything crafty lately. Well that’s because there hasn’t been any sewing going on. A lot of thinking about sewing but no actual sewing so nothing much to show. There has been, however, a lot of drawing and knitting . But knitting takes me a damn long time. I’ve been working on Miss Muffet again. Seed stitch, seed stitch aaaahhhh so much seed stitch! And it’s still not done.

I needed a break so, in my oh so illogical fashion, I cast on something new instead of picking up something old.

This is the start of a Mary Jane’s pithy hat. I should be ashamed to use this yarn. Last time I touched it, I was knitting Uncle Angus. Am I ashamed? NO. I am thrilled to be starting something new. Absolutely happy to be making a hat when I don’t even wear hats. Yeah, like I said, ILLOGICAL.

I’ve always wanted to make carrot cake. So with this in mind, I made sure to get carrots during my last trip to the grocery store. I do this quite frequently. I buy baking stuff for when I feel like baking. But sometimes I never feel like it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve bought ingredients to make key lime bars only to have them spoil because I am just not in the mood to bake. But last night the mood to bake hit AND I had the right ingredients. So I decided to finally try making carrot cake, carrot cupcakes to be precise.

I was so excited! Mmmm homemade carrot cupcakes, little tiny cakes of yum. I read the recipe, added the ingredients according to directions, eagerly mixed everything up, and scooped them into cupcake liners. I set the timer and then impatiently waited 18 minutes while the house filled up with smells of cinnamon and cloves and deliciousness.

The timer beeped and I raced into the kitchen. I opened the oven door expecting to see little poofy brown delicious cakes. BUT I was greeted with tiny, wet, caved in disappointments. What happened to my yummies?

I reread the directions. Oh no! I FORGOT to add the flour! I knew something felt wrong when I was making it. I actually thought, this is all that’s in carrot cake? I should have slowed down. But the prospect of carrot cake in 18 minutes was just too much. What a disaster. And I couldn’t even make more because I didn’t have anymore carrots and the grocery store was closed. I was sooooo disappointed. I sat there picking at the cooked carrots, they actually tasted pretty good, but it wasn’t cake.

Did anyone notice something different about my little illustration yesterday? Well the other day I was reading Secret Agent Josephine. She had a post about how much she loved Adobe illustrator so I decided to give it a try. And yesterday’s illustration was the result. Illustrator is really awesome. It makes vector art. And I can control the thickness of my line, or not have any lines at all (like yesterday), or even change the colors all with a simple click. See.

So I’ve been playing around with it.

That’s where this illustration came from. I was playing with Illustrator and trying to read some of the blogs I’m subscribed to. But Bloglines was not working. For those of you who don’t use Bloglines, when it’s down a little plumber pops up. I was a little perturbed. Ok a LOT. I actually made that noise. Arrrgg!

Well happily I was distracted with Illustrator, how fun! I think I’ll be using it a lot more.

I feel bad for getting mad at the plumber. Because, really, I adore Bloglines. I can’t imagine ever going back to reading blogs without Bloglines. So I shouldn’t be so mean when they have downtime.

And I’m going a little crazy with Illustrator here. Just drawing everything!

I made the carrot cupcakes and success! Well almost. They didn’t come out wet sodden messes but they didn’t poof up as much as I was expecting. They are, however, delicious. I don’t even need the frosting. Yay! Less work for me. I only frosted two of them.

And also, YAY, I got three new Japanese craft books. THREE. As if I needed more. Alan actually asked me why I don’t take Japanese classes since I have so many books. Yeah why don’t I?

So where is the picture of the new books? Here. One picture for you. Of one book, ISBN 4579111494.

Am I being mean and teasing you? No. So why only one book? I had this brilliant idea of taking pictures of each project to share with everyone. That way you’ll know if you like it before you buy it. But damn that took a long time. There are 28 projects in this one. TWENTY EIGHT!

The light was bad and Isabelle was all underfoot. As a result the pictures just turned out a mess. But I had decided it was a brilliant idea so refused to give up. I then tried taking the pictures with a tripod. Still didn’t work. I would not quit. I ended up scanning them all in, all 28 projects. Then I laid them all out six to a page because I didn’t want to upload 28 pictures. (I believe I have my account set up so you can click through to the larger size.) Updated * I deleted the 6 projects to a page. I readded them as 2 projects to a page. Yes it means more pages to click through but they’re larger pictures this way. * And when I was done, I WAS DONE. Too tired to scan the other books. Too tired to finish this post properly. Another day. sleep. now.