Puzzles & Stuff

When I was younger, I did jigsaw puzzles.  I always had a puzzle going.  In my home growing up, we had a basement and us kids had a big area to play in.  My grandpa gave us a section of pegboard (it was blue, I still remember) and we laid it out and started doing puzzles on the floor in the basement.  Sometimes, we would do them in the living room and it would take up the whole middle of the floor until we were done.  We had dogs and they would step all over it, whatever. 

I once did a puzzle that was 2000 pieces and it was a Victorian Garden.  It had all of this green grasses, 100 different types of flowers, etc.  This puzzle I did as a tween and it took a long time.  Not quite sure how long, but the peg board was huge.  This one I had to do in my bedroom and I had to pick up off the floor and place on my bed each and everyday.  I had to walk the perimeter in order to get out of my room.  I glued this one and wanted it framed, but framing (as anyone who has gone to Michael's or Joann's knows) ain't cheap.  A 12/13-year old girl does not have $200 to frame a puzzle.

So, I stood it up and slid it behind a dresser that was about the width of the puzzle and went about my life.  I never framed it.  My parent's do still have it in the basement, propped up behind a few dressers.  That was my last hoorah for puzzles for quite some time.

Recently, I did a few puzzles.  I wanted to remember how fun they were and how involved you can get in a puzzle.  Hours and hours at the table sifting through the box, looking for edge pieces, making the border, focusing on a section at a time...Better than mindlessly watching hours of TV.

My first puzzle was a dragon puzzle that technically did not have an edge.  It did have an edge, but it was a shaped puzzle with curves and points.

Vince and I did the dragon one at his parent's house, on the dining room table.  That pic was not the actual put-together puzzle.  Unfortunately, I can't find the pic of the actual puzzle we did.  It is somewhere on my computer, I just have not fully transferred all my pics from my old computer.  That puzzle was 1000 pieces.  I bought it at a yard sale for $1.  Great deal; it is about $15 online.  One does run the risk of having missing pieces when you buy it open, but I was willing to give it a whirl.

My next puzzle was a 1000-piece Mystery Puzzle, where there is a mini-story in the puzzle box, you read it as you put together the puzzle.  The puzzle is the murder scene.  With the help of the picture and the story, you can figure out the mystery.

I thought that the puzzle would give an extra clue, like the puzzle would be slightly different than the picture on the box so you only know this clue by putting together the puzzle.  No, that was not the case, but it was neat anyway.  You supposedly can go online to find out the answer to the mystery, but I guess the puzzle was old enough that it was not available anymore.  I got this puzzle at a yard sale, too.  Two-for-two on all pieces being there!

The tough part on that one was the gray stone walkway and the gray marbled walls.  They all were very similar.  My last piece was the left wall where the lion sits. 

My most recent one was a 550-piece Teapot puzzle.  This was a new puzzle that I got for Christmas one year from my mom.  I did this one and the Mystery puzzle on my dining room table.  We don't typically use the table for everyday meals, only when we have people over.  I did get a huge square of cardboard from Costco (free, it was a toilet paper layer separator) to do the puzzles on, so that I may move it, if people come over.

Isn't this quaint?  I started with the roses and then worked on the chair and down that way.  I was left with this one piece and was thinking, "I have an extra piece??!"  I scanned the puzzle and truly could not find where I was missing one.  I called Vince over and showed him, he laughed and saw the hole right away.  It was in the berries that are in the roses.  So, my last piece was were I started.  I had come full circle (or square, whatever!).

I think I have one or two more puzzles in the garage.  I will dig them up and do them, in-between my summer knitting. 

Books - Quarter 2

Is this already the end of the second quarter of 2013?  The year is half over already???  I feel like I better start doing some fun stuff to make the year last longer.  Anyway, I don't know what I have been doing, but reading has not been one of them!  I only got through one book in 3 months.

2. This book was one that was on my To-Read list for awhile.  It was a good book, but not what I had in mind.  It reads part fiction and part non-fiction.  Let me explain: It takes place in the era of when the World's Fair comes to Chicago back in 1893.  It is a work of non-fiction with dramatization, not unlike "based on true story" books and TV shows.  This is true crime that occurred during the World's Fair.  The boring parts for me, but interesting because it is how history was made, were the sections regarding how the Fair came about and who was in charge of what and the difficulties that the organizers and architects faced in order to meet the Fair's Opening Day in time.  Interesting because the Fair was when the Ferris Wheel was born and other inventions such as mass electricity, fireworks and Shredded Wheat debuted.  You learned that Frank Llyod Wright was an architect that was fired from a firm that did not win the bid for Fair and other interesting tidbits of historical information.  The interesting parts were the demonic ways of a silent serial killer on the loose during this time.  He used the lure and excitement of the Fair to gain property, loans, false identities and especially women.  He would lure women with his charm, and dupe them into signing over any property they had with dreams of marriage and extravagant trips.  Once he got what he wanted he would murder them in gas chambers that he built and in other horrific ways.  He went undetected as a serial killer and only was caught when he tried to cash in a life insurance policy on someone that he killed or so it would seem they died "accidentally"; he was caught for insurance fraud .  That was when they explored his personal belongings and uncovered another world in which he lived in.  The Fair and the serial killer story lines occurred in parallel, so reading this book tended to go slow during the historical parts.  It was a good book, well written based on hundreds of letters, other types of correspondence, photographs, trips to the Chicago archives and countless other sources of information.  One must be a great writer, to piece all of these events gathers from various sources to make a book that coherently tells this story of a great World's Fair.

I am getting burnt out on my knitting and crocheting projects, so I think I am taking a break from them for awhile.  I will do some sewing projects and some reading this summer.  I do love yarn and want to buy pattern books of beautiful pieces to create and soft yarn to touch, but I must resist!  I have a ton of yarn and a ton of books; I do not need to buy anymore.  I can finish my Scrappy Quilt that I have pushed the pause button on.  That should tide me over for a bit.

Is anyone else in a crafting slump?  Knitters block?  Eye twitching from too much reading?  Let me know...

Hawaiian Halter Top

This was a quick and fun one to do.  My friend was having a murder mystery birthday party where we were the participants.  It was a lot of fun, even though none of us really knew what to do or say to each other.  It was sort of scripted, where you got clues and questions to ask each other.  It was to take place at a hotel luau in Maui, Hawaii.

My character was name Poni and I was the star of the luau.  My character was to dress in a grass skirt and a tropical top.

I was not going to wear a coconut bra, that was for certain.  Yea, I've been working out, but I do draw the line somewhere!  Instead I decided to make a chic top from a kitchy hawaiian shirt that I bought at Goodwill.

I bought it oversized, because I did not really know what I was going to do with it.  I did some internet surfing and found a blog that made a halter top out of a button-up blouse.  The blog was called In-Perfection and she gives a step-by-step on how to do it.

I will be brief on it, because it did not really go according to plan and I had to make all sorts of corrections.  But the basics are here.

My shirt had a pocket, so I took that off.

What you want to end up with is keeping the collar and cutting away the sleeves and the top of the back.  So I marked with white chalk, where I was going to cut away the arms.

I cut around the neck/collar and shaped the front.  I cut straight across the back.

That was where I should have taken more care in cutting across the back.  I cut way to low.

I then sewed the raw edges just one fold all the way around.  It was big around the body, so I tucked it in the back and sewed a new seam.  I should have taken in the sides, not the back.

I sewed the lapels down, they were all over!  As you can see, I did not cut even on both sides.  Granted this was for a costume party, so I was not that sad about doing a sloppy job.

Here is me and my $4.99 grass skirt.  The grass skirt did not hide much, so I wore the halter tucked in, which barely covered the booty and wore my black running spandex.

The conclusion: no one noticed my sloppy alterations and we all had a great time.  Even though my character was the annoying miss-goody-goody that told on everyone, I was not the murderer!  Ha ha!