I’ve been playing around with my site lately. I went all mad scientist on it.

You may have noticed, I turned off comments a week ago. I decided to give it a try after running across a couple of blogs that didn’t have any comments. I thought: What an interesting idea. You don’t have to worry about spam then! But do you guys miss it? Is it totally anti-social? Have any comments on that?

Then I kept up mad scientisting my site: I changed my banner today and my twitter background picture. And now I have an idea about my “I Heart” section.

Have you noticed my “I Heart” section in my sidebar? I copied the idea from Secret Agent Josephine’s “Eye spy with my little eye”. Well anyhoo, my idea is that I’m going to start drawing the “I Heart” section to get my draw on. So, instead of grabbing a picture of what I’m loving I’ll draw it. I’m having drawing withdrawal I guess.

It’s been almost 6 months since I had this I MUST draw urge. Blame Secret Agent Josephine again. She’s started to draw daily and it got my yearning for it up and going again.

What else can I go mad scientist on?! Well, I think I’m done with my site for now so moving onto the real world and a GRAND EXPERIMENT.

And the title of this post is Mad Scientists because the GRAND EXPERIMENT involves Isabelle.

Ok that sounds so mysterious and exciting. But it’s not really. Do you remember what it was? It was us trying to grow things. Ooooohhhh!

It failed miserably last time and I’ve been wanting to try again so we bought a whole bunch of new seeds.

And this time we’re serious. We even bought planting gear!

That’s right. Gardening world, watch out, we’re well equipped here! We planted a seed, a single seed of corn, a week ago. (We learned this time and didn’t go all crazy planting a gazillion seeds.)

And lo and behold, it groweth. A plant thing sprouteth yesterday.

Ok so I’m not down with the gardening terminology. A plant grew. Is that what you say? A plant sprouted. A seed has…oh whatever.

We are mad scientists and mad scientists don’t need to talk properly. They can use crazy words. They’re mad! Bwa ha ha!!

And to prove our awesome powers, LOOK:

We have the power to mutate helium. This balloon has been up since Isabelle’s birthday back in September. It’s mutant helium. All cower at our mad sciencing. Bwa ha ha!

Ok, I obviously need to go to bed now. But seriously, Isabelle’s balloon…Craaaazzzzy!

I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I updated to the newest WordPress and saw that I could choose monster avatars! MONSTERS!! So I played around some more with my site. Now my hands hurt.

But anyways, back to the monsters. Each person has their own avatar generated for them. It’s always the same I guess. If you have a Gravatar, like I do, then that shows up instead.

Since I don’t know what my monster would look like, I drew one. You know, as if my hands weren’t hurting.

And if you want to look at what your monster looks like, comment and it’ll show up.

Oh I should add: I don’t know how long they’ll be up. Usually I find stuff like this fun for a while then I remove them. But for now there are monsters.

I’ve been scarce around the internet, reading and writing.

On Thursday night my friend, Olinda, noticed my website was down. It happens sometimes. It’s the second time, that I know of, this year. It happened a handful of times last year. And a handful of times before that. It’s sort of frustrating. So I changed web hosts. Everything moved over without a glitch (I think).

Then on the weekends we’re usually out and about so posting is rare.

But the big monkey wrench in posting came when I was reading Mary at Confessions of a Craft Addict. She was saying her site had issues on Internet Explorer. So I opened up IE to take a look. And then being curious, I checked my site. CRAP. I knew my site wasn’t “up to code”. I just never fixed it before . But for some reason, now, I was determined to get it right. So that’s what I’ve been doing for days. DAYS! I’ve been looking at code so much, my head hurts. But I was determined to have it fixed. I couldn’t stop. Not even for a silly old thing like my head exploding.

But now it’s all fixed and it even validates! Well everything except the galleries. But I’ll fix that some other time.

So what’s that have to do with the picture of the shirt? That shirt is a prime example of how stubborn I can get when I’m determined to do something.

It was supposed to be a gift for my nephew. I bought organic fabric specifically for him. And I bought fabric paint. I had grand ideas for trying out freezer paper stenciling. But right away I knew I was on the wrong track and I should have stopped. But I didn’t, even with the obstacles in my way, I just barreled on through.

First of all the fabric is too stiff. I should have used a knit because the pattern is basically a t-shirt, except for where the snaps at the shoulder should be. But knowing this, I didn’t stop. I just kept going along.

And then I noticed I cut two fronts out instead of a front and a back. But…I kept going.

Then I thought the size seemed awfully small. But march, march, march. Must not stop now. I just figured, it was all screwed up, so why not just see how it comes out.

But I stopped at the snaps. I didn’t want to waste snaps on a hopeless shirt.

I then washed it a couple of times hoping that would soften it up and I don’t know…magically make the front piece into a back piece? I don’t know what I was thinking.

Project Notes
Pattern: shirt 5 from Japanese craft book ISBN 4418051244
Fabric: stiff as a board organic cotton
Size: 100cm

Oh and let me end with a random video of Isabelle because I know Olinda is missing Isabelle.

The video is from a couple of weekends ago. My friend, Lorraine, came down from Oregon and we went out to dinner. A whole bunch of us girls and Alan. There was live music and Isabelle was dancing and clapping. I couldn’t get any of the clapping on video but I did get a little dancing.

Which reminds me. I want to get a small teeny camera that does video as well (for when I always forget my big heavy camera). I’ve been looking at some super inexpensive ones that are 6 and 7 MP. Does anyone have any experience on how good the quality of the video looks like on those things?