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WOODCARVINGS BY MY GRANDFATHER

I don’t talk about my grandfather Verne very much but recently we were at my grandmother’s apartment for Easter and she had been given a couple of his old woodcarvings that hung in our old church for many years. Not sure why they were eventually taken down but apparently some asshole over there put them in the garbage and some nice person rescued them for my grandmother. Anyway… I will spare the internet a church-related rant and instead show you these wonderful carvings!

They depict symbolism from the Biblical Gospels and are really pretty great. I kind of wish I’d paid a little more attention to my grandfather’s wood carving skills back when he was still alive but to be honest, we were not very close. So it is nice to see some of his work appear out of nowhere for us to enjoy. In fact, if no one in the family claims them, I would be happy to take them.





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Some Design Work

I like graphic design. I didn’t really study it in college though I did take all the computer design classes offered at UTSA. I took as many of those as I did upper division drawing classes which was my major but they didn’t offer computer graphics or graphic design as a major. Go figure.

Anyway, so last week my sister asked me help her prettify her blog for cold hard cash (or a book, as it turns out) and I was like sure! Why not! The world is a better place for pretty blogs, right? Of course then she’s all, not the WordPress one, the Blogger one. And I was like, *sob*. Because I do not know Blogger from Adam. Actually I do know Adam, he’s my cousin. But I do not know Blogger. I know WordPress. Why, I asked her, did you go back to Blogger when WordPress is so AMAZING???? (This was of course last week, which was Before 3.0 which has changed my life! Or at least motivated me to update my own blog template for the first time in approximately forever.)

Because, she explained. You can’t put Google Analytics on a WordPress.com blog.

I run WordPress on my own server so I don’t know what the regulations are for the blogs hosted on WordPress.com. Since I don’t follow my own stats anymore I don’t know how anything works anymore. Which is partly why it took so effing long for me to get my portfolio website back up and running. My coding abilities were tapped out in about 2004.

But these days blogging is really user friendly. Back in the olden days you actually had to code your own stuff but now you don’t. Sure, I spent a good hour of my time digging into the stylesheet of this particular theme that I’m currently sporting because I hated the default font and font size but if you’re lazy and don’t care it was all automated and you have to do is drag your widgets over.

To make a long tangentially off topic story short (oh so too late) I made Abby a bunch of different headers to choose from. I don’t know what one she’ll choose but here are the ones I made that feature the world famous ROBOSAURUS.

I actually like all of them. I made her other ones too but I was particularly fond of these ones. I took these pictures at the Salinas Air Show I attended last year with my family.

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Up To (No Good)

I’ve spent a good portion of these first two months of 2010 doing nothing but knitting on sweaters and listening to zombies on book-on-CD while I work on some jewelry designs. My place is pretty trashed due to my tragic housekeeping skills, though I did clean my bathroom recently (the other bathroom is my de-facto paper-towel storage center and knit-wear cleaning station). And one of my new years resolutions was to keep more on top of things, and I certainly have in the kitchen, which is where things were most dire. Other places in the house it’s just full of craft-related clutter. The one thing in the kitchen that is throwing me is recycling, like where do I keep that stuff? I don’t even know. Argh.

I’m trying to be a better housekeeper, but…

Honestly, I have better things to do. 😛

So anyway, I have been knitting, and I totally knit this sweater in January:

Gathered Pullover
(hard to take a decent picture of yourself, let alone knitwear by yourself at 10 pm in the middle of winter, you know? oy.)

I like it.

PATTERN: Gathered Pullover, Interweave
YARN: Dream in Color Classy,  Happy Forest
MODS: Well, the whole thing is a mod except for the bustline cable. The original pattern has you knit from the bottom up with no ribbings.  But that is not how I roll, so I knit it as a top down raglan with 2×2 ribbings. I hate the curly look of stockinette edging. Also, I made 3/4 sleeves instead of long sleeve. I had enough yarn to make long sleeves but I wasn’t feeling it.

IN CONCLUSION:

Here is a picture of the zombie box I made that I found on my harddrive.

Zombie Box

Hard to believe that I actually made that like six or seven years ago now! Oh, zombie box. It only lost two of the Barbie arms in my travels.

…I hated sculpture class. I have no aptitude for three dimensional thinking (hence making illustration/drawing my main focus), though I did enjoy ceramics.  If I ever find my grotesques I’ll post pictures of those. I have no idea what happened to them – I remember packing them, and then they are just not here anywhere post-Texas. I’ll have to check the shed.