Costumes! Must be Halloween…

So of course it’s Halloween, and I like Halloween, and I’m going to wander about a bit tonight and see at what everyone else came up with.

Meanwhile, I came up with a couple of things for us here at my house. First me - I’m not going to bother saying what I am, because if it’s not obvious I really, really failed. Actually, I take that back. I’m specifically a North American seven-spot ladybug. See? I totally lucked out on finding a sparkly red felt remnant for the wings. I like the twisty antennae and stuff too. And I have a veil. ‘Cause ladybugs are ladies

Also, I have pets. 2 cats and a dog. Pets need costumes too, right? At least I was thinking that they did, but I had nothing. No ideas, and really, no time either, but I still felt like something was missing from Halloween if at least one of my babies didn’t have something to wear.

So when I found this costume at Curbly I thought it was awesome and decided to crochet very, very quickly. That was two days ago. Only one cat and the dog have costumes, because neither of them are possessed of much dignity. The older cat has excessive amounts of dignity and Very Large Claws, and I don’t think he’d like having a costume.

So, I present Audrey Corn (poor little thing just had teeth extracted today - hence the bleary eyes - but she’s still game) and Callie Corn! They managed to keep the costumes on for at least 2 minutes.

Happy Halloween y’all! Trick or Treat!

Crochet for Charity: Newborn Caps

Ran across the following: Caps to the Capital is a project to provide little caps to newborns. Apparently this is a large problem. Makes sense though, for a newborn to need to retain heat through his or her little head. This is a project of Save the Children. The first 280,000 caps were recently delivered to Malawi.

Ran across via “I live on a farm blog.” Incidentally, I’d like to move to upstate New York and live on a farm too, like she did. Can I do that please?

Favorite things last week:

Last week I didn’t get to post my favorite things from my web-trawling. But I still want to post them, because I’m fond of them

Meanwhile, in the interwebs-rambles this week I found…

Craft pointed this out: the Brain Monster from the Half-Asssed Knit Blog just about killed me. First to find a hat that eats your head, and then to find it from a blog with that name? I laughed for half an hour. If I could knit or even convert knit patterns to crochet (working on that), I would totally make this for my brother. And he would totally wear it. The linky there is to the pattern. Yes, you can have this for your very own.

I really liked these little signs made from spools from a cool new blog I found: Madeline Tosh. She’s a fellow Texan who appears to really love yarn, as she spins & dyes the stuff. I also found this really awesome post she made about cotton crochet and women in Texas. She’s so right! Crochet’s ability to create patterns with an open weave really makes a ton more sense here in the hot south.

Not for those easily offended: You really have to go look at the Mean Cards over on Juliana Holowka’s site. All pithy sayings accompanied by an equally pithy stick figure drawing. And while you’re at it, check out her Mace Lamp. Here’s some examples for ya:

“Crying means you’re weak.” (Inside: Cheer up.)

“Everything dies.” (Inside: Just a friendly reminder.)

“Let’s bring back the middle finger.”

The hand-tatted jewelry at Agnieszka is completely out of this world. Talk about a skill. Do you know how hard this is? I mean - you can kind of see it by the intricacy and delicacy alone!

There are a couple pair of white lacy tatted earrings on this site that, as I told my husband, made me want to get married again just so I could get the right outfit to wear with them. And weddings are a pain in the a**, so that tells you just how much I like this stuff. Meanwhile, this necklace (to the right) is amazing, isn’t it? Incredibly elegant.

Wall Graphix: I don’t know which ones I’m getting, but I’m totally buying something from One Up Wall Graphics. I particularly like the Spiral and the Early Bird and the Opulent and, well, all of them, I guess.

My husband passed on a link to the Buttonarium, an online museum of buttons. Everything from button lockets to Felix the Cat to the totally fab Star Trek ones.

Finally: Quiltsryche. You have to understand that I was a big fan of Queensryche back in the day (Silent Lucidity, yeah! er… I’m such a big dork), so I think that her name is really funny. Anyway, her tagline is Evil Quilts Rock, and she makes things that involve skulls and pentagrams. This goes into my list of things that turn traditional things like quilting on their ear - aka My Favorite Things.