6th day of christmas!

The 6th day of Christmas - hmm I am behind, aren't I?

Maybe I won't get to 12 homemade things - although I am giving myself a break here, I've made over 12 homemade things: 5 cloths, 1 scarf, 5 tissue holders, a tea cozy, 2 prs red felt booties, 9 snowmen ornaments yet to be posted, and I still have 4 things I'm trying to finish, which brings me tooooooooo 27 things. Ha, I'm in the clear ;)

So the sixth day of Christmas, a gift I made for EE:

1 fabu tea cozy

I found it at knitty.com, and it's a design by Kristen Nicholas, whose blog I adore - she's a crafter who lives on a farm in Western Mass. I love Western Mass and have since my first year at Smith, though Northampton is probably not as far west as her farm, but still, for me it's "west." I love it that you're only a 2 hour drive from Boston but it almost feels like another world. You just don't tend to see that much green space in the suburbs, but if you know where to go in Western Mass, you can find the sprawling fields and orchards of farm country. It's how I imagine Massachusetts in the early days, when farmers were tilling up those huge rocks from the soil and building stone walls to mark their property lines. But I digress.

Anyways, so I made this tea cozy - it was my first adventure in felting too. I loved it! See I tend to mess things up in the washer and dryer, usually stuff that's not my own, ironically enough (which I note, is why I stopped being nice and doing other people's laundry for them. I can only listen to my mother screaming at me because I shrank a pair of her underwear so many times.) When it came to felting I was wary - I figured I'd shrink whatever I was making and then need to "undo" it and not be able to undo it, but luckily, everything worked out. Pictured with it is a vintage teapot I found last minute on eBay. I had one all picked out when some WHORE outbid me at the last minute, but this one is nearly as good and the same color, so there. I also got my friend some special singer's tea. Ok, it's not actually FOR singer's, but I googled "tea for opera singers" and clicked on all the links until I found a recommendation - it was this tea I had heard of but had no idea where to buy it, besides online, and it was too late for that, so I gave it up as a wash. Then lo and behold, I'm in Whole Foods on unrelated business and HARK! Yogi Tea, Sore Throat Remedy with "slippery elm bark" and "mullein." To me, that sounds like some crapass tasting tea, but hey, if EE is trying to sing and her throats jacked up and this stuff helps, that's the important thing! I like how the cozy has an "aura" in this picture (a bad lighting aura, LOL). As if it's magical - a magical tea cozy - what powers would it have? Ah yes, it would make the tea magically when you covered the teapot. Brilliant.

My other friend got a dvd I converted from VHS. I can post about it because both Rach and Melu got this gift but I didn't want to say anything until they had both opened it. I was very excited about this one too. When we went to Kenya last January I took my parent's VHS-C video camera with me. I was going to lug a bulky second-hand one there, but then they offered theirs instead, which was awesome. I taped a lot of footage, mostly of us acting stupid, and wound up with about 2 1/2 hours of tape. We watched the tapes at Melu's house one weekend and it was so fun, and I thought "they should have copies of this to show their families if they want." I researched a place that would convert tapes to dvd over the internet and found nettapes.com I know you can take tapes to your local photostore, but what the place near me charges for conversion is highway robbery, so I decided to try and seek a more economical way to do this, because the movie was longer than 2 hours and would require 2 dvd's, plus I wanted 3 copies. Nettapes was great. I converted my VHS-C to VHS (for my own reasons, they accept VHS-C tapes) and then overnighted the VHS tape to them - I had my stuff in about a week! My wonderful sister then made cover inserts and disc labels using my pictures. All in all, I was very very excited about the gift, plus now it'll be so much easier to show the tapes to my family, no dragging out the converter and having to change tapes every 20 minutes.

Anyways, it's high time I get cracking on some work. Lots of maintenance things to do before the holiday. More later!