Fun with chalk and fabric scraps

It wasn’t brutally humid today, so we spent some time outside the afternoon, dipping our feet in the pool, playing with chalk, sharing a snack mix. Neil used the chalk to write you all a warning, which I rather hope you do not heed. (Aside: did you know that you can hover your mouse over the “a warning” link over there, and the image will be displayed in a little preview box for you? You don’t have to click through unless you need to see it larger. All of the links to flickr images work that way. You can tell by the dotted red line under the links.)

While Neil was writing his message, Eamonn was inspired to write his own message: “Beware the gnats” is what it said. I was a bit distracted, however, by Aidan’s artwork. Thank you, Aidan, for labelling your brother’s rear end. I might not have otherwise known what it was.

Boys. Never a dull moment, eh? 😀

As for me, one of the things I want to fix with this new blog design is that I want the comments to work the same as they did in the old one – threaded. The problem is, I don’t like the way the plugin formats the comments, and I couldn’t get it to look nice in time to launch the site, so I just skipped it. It’s bugging me, though. I really liked the threading before. I printed out some HTML/PHP/CSS and took it outside with me this afternoon so I could try and figure it out and still enjoy the fresh air.

My feet got nicely cooled-off, but I didn’t really get anywhere with the comments. Oh, well. Not a huge deal. I have a less-than-elegant work-around in place until I get it all figured out, and now that I have a test blog, I can take as long as I want playing around. It beats doing my experiments live like I used to!

In other news, my cousin in Montana is expecting a December baby. While she’s back home in the rest of the family’s corner of the world this week, my aunt is having a little shower-like get-together. I’m bringing bibs. They’re a wee bit wonky, but I’m going to call that “handmade charm” and not worry about it 🙂

I had signed up for Craft Leftovers this month, to see what it was like, and one of the things in the package was a fat quarter of this fruit fabric. It instantly reminded me of a table cloth the grandmother my cousin and I share had, and I decided it would be perfect in the bibs. Lucky for me I am enough of a procrastinator that I still hadn’t made the bibs, even though it was the day before I’d need them.

I tried a little patchwork on one of them, using some scraps I still had from two different sets of cloth napkins, and the other I just made solid on both sides. I think I prefer the solid. I filled these with batting, too, so they had a little umph. I don’t usually do that, but I like the effect. And I am happy to report that I only destroyed one snap in the assembly of these bibs. I don’t usually have such a good record, but I think I finally figured out why I sometimes have so much trouble: I haven’t been careful to make sure the stitching doesn’t get in the way. Once I started paying attention to that, I had no problems at all.

Now I have to wrap things up so that I may go off and ponder the age-old question: what am I going to wear tomorrow?