Needles & Nilbogs

 Spoilers abound! Thoughts are unfiltered and spoilers everywhere.  I LOVED THIS ONE SINGLE-HANDEDLY GOT ME BACK INTO THE FANDOM BRAIN

 TWO WEEKS TILL RELEASE DAY AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!! Things we know now: IT’S A KAT BOOK THIS IS NOT A DRILL WE ARE GETTING KATHMANDU GIBBS-MONTGOMERY PERSPECTIVE AND I AM HERE FOR IT. (Also does this mean book 5 will be Rio POV????!!!!) Also, looking at a summary and a pre-reader’s review: ARE WE GETTING A NEW SPY?????? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!! I can’t wait!!  ( All of my fics that are post-canon or nebulously so are going to need tags to say when they were released, won’t they. Not excited about that part.)

I’ve been reading a lot about antique/vintage crochet lately, so I’m going to review one of the books I’ve been using as reference. The book is Civil War Ladies: Fashions and Needle-Arts of the Early 1860’s , and it’s a collection of articles from Peterson’s Magazine, coming mostly from 1861 and 1864. I got it from a friend of my grandfather’s, who was also very fond of older patterns and craft history.  Overall, my general impression is definitely good; it’s very clear that the patterns are not reproductions, they’re original. This does mean the patterns are hard to understand sometimes, and they occasionally look odd to my modern eyes, but I can follow most of them.  The subject matter is mixed. Peterson’s published patterns for all sorts of fancy work, alongside poetry, songs, and fiction (mostly cut out from this book). There’s embroidery, patterns for sewing, knitting, crochet, netting, the occasional tatting project, and some that are unclear or useable for multiple craf...

 Chag Sameach Purim! Happy Purim! I’ve had a very busy and exciting week, and I have plenty of hamantaschen as well. And some cool photos from a trip to Monterey. Purim is a Jewish holiday that celebrates that the evil Persian vizier Haman, adviser to Xerxes I (aka Ahasuerus), didn’t kill all the Jews because of the brave actions of the clever Jewish Queen Esther. We celebrate by dressing up and bringing food to others, among other things. So my family made A Whole Lot of Hamantaschen, the traditional cookie. It’s a butter cookie shaped like a triangle and filled with jam, chocolate, poppy seeds, etc.  Plenty of hamantaschen Ours are regular butter dough, filled with strawberry or apricot jam; chocolate dough, filled with chocolate chips; cheesecake filling in regular dough, drizzled with chocolate; and regular dough, filled with Nutella or chocolate chips and drizzled with chocolate. We made … probably too many, so I’m bringing them around today to all my friends. (Sorry, Rus...

Tuesday I got my preordered copy of a book I’ve been waiting for since forever!!!!! It’s the third book in the City Spies series by James Ponti, and it is just as good as the first two (maybe better. We’ll see). The really frustrating thing, though, is that there is literally no City Spies fanfiction. None. Go check, I’ll wait.  See, no fanfic (seriously, I google it regularly and can’t find anything). I’ve written some, but so far it’s only been for my sister, who also loves the City Spies. But since there isn’t any out there, and I’m now really excited to write city spies fanfic again, I’m going to put it here so that there’s something. Depending on what people think of these (and what I want to do) I may share more or I may not. These are links to google docs so that scrolling through won’t take forever, and my author’s notes are here too. I welcome comments on these and I hope that even if you haven’t read the books that you give them a try. Middle grade books can be amazing fo...

Yeah. I got sick. I’m too behind and also too grouchy to put anything together. I can offer either nothing (in that case stop here) or really really old (January 2021) murderbot diaries fanfic I wrote that’s not horribly embarrassing hopefully, only cause that’s what I’ve got hanging around my local storage. It’s based off of opera (le nozze de figaro), written because I could, and from back when I had something like free time. Written in markdown, but it doesn’t seem to transfer from drafts very well. Stuff in underscores is supposed to be in italics.

Happy Chanukah! Happy Advent! I had a Chanukah gaming thing that I was going to do, but I didn’t finish it in time, so I’ll either post it next week or next year. Instead, I’m going to share my writing project. I seem to get these ideas every year, so I write them down.  Meet… the Yarn-, Math-, RPG-, and Book-Related Christmas carols (not all of these may be present, this is just a few things)! Some of these people have probably seen before; heard before, more likely, actually because I was singing in the shower when I came up with several of these. And not all of these are complete or good parodies. I write them when I think of them.  O Crochet Tree (O Tannebaum) Oh crochet tree, oh crochet tree, how lovely are your stitches. You stand so soft and cuddly, you are so warm and snuggly. Oh crochet tree, oh crochet tree, how lovely are your stitches.  We wish you a merry knit-mas (we wish you a merry Christmas) We wish you a merry knit-mas, we wish you a merry knit-mas, we w...

 I have a minor obsession with the Murderbot Diaries books, in case that’s not clear to anyone. And I needed a ship for a d&d game last week. So I drew a preliminary sketch of ART/Perihelion (the ship MB is somewhat friends with, depending on your feelings about what exactly friendship is) as a kind of guide for what the players would find. Then, of course, the players went elsewhere, and I didn’t use the map after all.  However, I did add to it, and then redraw it nicer so it looks like an actual schematic that ART would have. Because I could, and I was bored, and I was forced to sit through a very boring presentation yesterday. Also, I’m sharing it because it’s nearly Christmas season, so a lot of my crochet work is presents, which I’ll share after Christmas when it’s not a spoiler.  The whole thing Logo on the top left. Transcript: Deep Space AI Division, Est. CR 2371. Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.  Close up of the front part of the ship. Th...

 I’m kinda tired. We got back from our road trip on Saturday, then we unpacked, then it was my birthday just a couple days ago, and I’m exhausted from everything.  So I’m just going to dump a bunch of random photos here from our trip, roughly in chronological order, and see if there’s anything I want to say about them. Featured within: the Regal Cardigan I started and finished (link to the Ravelry project page) during the trip (and the Olympic Games, so it qualified for the Ravellenic games too!); random scenery things; and a handful of random drawings I did, including a bunch of characters from the Murderbot Diaries books.  Blogger does weird things on pictures from a computer for some reason, so these may be rotated in random directions. No idea how to fix that, though, so my apologies if it’s hard to read. Also, this is image heavy, obviously. 

This is going to be a kinda weird and random post, since I’ve been pretty busy this week, and we leave for a road trip tomorrow. Speaking of that, I picked a project! Last week I was really unsure what I wanted to bring on the trip. 

Over last weekend, I went camping with my family. It was nice to be out in the fresh air and with people I love, and I got to play with fire a bit, so it was very fun. But it got me thinking about books, because lately, I’ve been reading a bunch of young adult (YA) and middle grade literature, and I brought a few amazing books on the trip to (re)read. And because the library’s Summer Reading Challenge starts this week and I realized just how many books I’ve actually read lately.

 I have no explanation for this other than this is what Read Across America Day (March 2nd, aka Dr. Seuss’s birthday) does to me. Back to rpgs and crafts next week, probably. This is only mostly serious; I had fun writing it but ... well, read to the end.