Current Mood : Very tired - but excited and happy !
Busy day today. It was so bright and beautiful outside, I had plenty of light to work on ‘Triana' first thing this morning. Triana, of course, is the new Barbie Basics I bought yesterday, and her name is sort of a tribute to the Venture Brothers character, and part of a riff on her ‘Model No. 003' packaging. Not to be confused with Tiana, the lovely titular character from The Princess and the Frog. More on that doll line a bit later.
But anyway. Yesterday, while I was in the Lab for far too brief a time, I grabbed my fine-point green Sharpie and relocated it to my living room desk. And now, Triana has green eyes. It's funny - she had the ice-blue nearly-white-at-the-bottom-curve look to her eyes that's so popular with Mattel, so all I did was color that curve in. I kinda hated giving her just one color eyes, but the various details and lines still showed under the Sharpie ! Looks pretty good with her green eye-shadow, too. Now, if I could just somehow eliminate that too shiny underliner...I'm thinking toothpicks and Goof-Off...
Maybe later. Speaking of Princess and the Frog, I was surprised to see another doll from that film on the Mal-Wart shelves yesterday - a character who wasn't in the title. Charlotte La Bouff, Tiana's pink wannabe princess friend, is now available. She's actually kinda cute, and if she wasn't so wow! blonde, I'd have probably bought her instead. I really need to see that movie, if a secondary character warrants a doll. Ya'll know how I am about secondary characters... Even back when I did cosplay in my misspent youth, I always played the main character's best friend - Shinobu in Urusei Yatsura, Molly/Naru from Sailor Moon. Hard to believe I did that fifteen years ago.
My whole day changed about 9:30am. The box with my new computer parts arrived, and Beloved Hubby called - his scheduled job had been delayed. And once he was home, there went his day ! It's weird, but since we replaced the falling apart one function at a time CD drive, the flailing hard drive hasn't had a single bad minute. It could be the power supply wasn't good either, we replaced that, too, but I'm still running off my old drive. And it hasn't had a problem at all, even with all the restarts and even losing power twice earlier tonight. Thunderstorm.
With my poor ‘puter tied up with Beloved, I clearly needed other ways to spend my day. So I decided to run our dishwasher, to clean it. You may remember our dishwasher doesn't really work - the well water pressure isn't strong enough for it - so we use it as a dish drainer. Problem is, the water sometimes pools, and it gathers dust and dirt, and after a while, will even start to smell. Since it'd indeed been a while, I decided to run it... and soon had a small lake in the kitchen.
Oh, well. Needed to mop the kitchen anyway. Figured out where the ‘drain' part of the cycle was, and at least got the water in there emptied, then discovered that I can clean the inside of the door using the sprayer hose from the sink and a scrub-brush. Once it was all over, I did a load of laundry to wash up the two already-dirty towels I used for the lake and a bathroom rug that needed a cleaning. So it all worked out.
Watched a movie with my guys (Weird Science ! ) between making lunch and dinner, then worked a bit more on the fabric box project. Cut out the stabilizer, fused it to the matching exterior pieces, and glued the fleece to the foam bits. Never found either of our old glue guns, and didn't buy a new one, so I just used good ole Elmer's White. Sooner or later, I'll buy a glue gun - I can even use a 40% off Hobby Lobby coupon this week - but I'm kinda tired of buying stuff for this project. There's now three piles - interface-fused exterior pieces, fleeced foam squares, and plain-fabric interior cuts. At least it's easy to tell them apart at a glance now.
I also attached the Velcro TM to the flap and front, and that concludes the ‘prep work' phase. From here on, it's all sewing and assembly. This has to be one of the most elaborate crafts I've ever done. Even when I sew stuff for me, it doesn't usually take this long. I've put about five hours into it, not counting shopping, and I have no idea how many more there are to go. But I'm really interested in finishing it, so there's little to no chance I'll abandon it at this stage.
It's funny how, at least with craft projects, I'll pretty much always finish them, even if I know halfway through that it's a bust. ‘UFO's (Un Finished Objects) are almost unheard of in the Lab. Unless you count not putting in closures, I'm notorious for that. Since I've only skimmed through the directions, it's time to give ‘em a pay-attention read-through. Just hope I can stay awake - it's been a crazy day !
