Felt, Frogs, and Fives

The three fs of happiness follow.
Inspired by way craftier bloggers than myself added to a lingering penchant for stuffed felt objet d'art, I bought a little felt kit for making stuffed Teddy bears from the Border's books impulse buy sales rack a few weeks back during the mad scramble to get Nook eBook to read book 2 of a series only to find out that book 3 of the series was not in eBook form. Not that I'm bitter, and that's the important thing. Since then, I've been staring at the kit on my coffee table when I've sat down, which hasn't really been that often. I think, maybe, after looking at the repetitive-OCD stylings of Polka Dot Pineapple I thought that a few blanket stitches would not lead me too far down the wrong path.

After the aborted attempt earlier to make felt items that wound up being channeled into a colored foam card for mom of a monkey in a tree, I finally got around to the felt project. And made 3 things this week, finishing one each of the last three nights.


The bears are from the "Bella" and "Blossom" bear patterns that came with the book. I enlarged Blossom as she was too tiny to stuff easily otherwise, and those disks flowers on her head were improved (trust me on this) by the polka-dot blogger's instructions on making flowers for some other thing she did. The fish I just made up tonight. Don't really know why, but I like it. Like the bears, it has one color on each side, but the tail is less cute.


I've gone to the gym, to the farmer's market, or a dinner party on each of these nights but still felt compelled to finish the felt (toys? beings? objects? goodies? crafts?) items. I think that means they each took around 3 hours while watching TV. So now what? I don't need more stuff, but I just made myself more stuff. I like this stuff; it's cute, but really, what was I thinking?

For the remaining "f" fabulousness...

keep reading.

Sunday was spent with friends eating pancakes or pecan waffles then hitting the Muzeo in Anaheim for a frog exhibit. It was cute. I am continually entranced by pictures of frogs and geckos, and finally took a couple of my own. I don't know what this one is. It has cute red bubble toes; it's not a waxy monkey frog.


Jabba


And here's a friend taking a photo of a vibrantly colored poisonous frog


She took a picture of this frog, specifically, but got a closer image with a better angle to see his manly posing.


Then on the drive back, my odometer went a little 5 crazy.


It's fiendishly hard to take a good picture of my odometer while driving on the 405. I tried several times with varied results. Interestingly, to my left eye, things look more like this, if you pay attention to the doubling, but not the blurring.


The bonus happiness "f" is food (adding friends brings us to 5 fs, like my odometer count). There were mulberries at the Farmer's market today! I love mulberries, which are usually ripe around the 4th of July, but are almost never sold anywhere. They're a mess and aggravating to pick, but they are also delicious. Most mulberries I've seen, though, look like this next one only a ltitle plumper and prone to bleed out juice.


Today's mulberries are HUGE. Not wide, just long. I've never seen such things before. Look at these freaks of nature!


I had another day where I wasn't buying my usual staples, freeing me up to "waste" money on obscure items like a $6 quarter-pint of mulberries. On one hand, that's a lot of money to spend on berries. On the other, I didn't have to dirty and specialty-clean an outfit after picking them, all the berries were in good shape (no rotters on the bottom) and the flavor was just right. Considering I'd probably let you ride in my spaceship in exchange for them, $6 wasn't actually that pricey.

To cap things off, I ran into our new Admin at the market. (And a little kid who kept darting in front of my knee, but that running into was a tad more litteral.) I shared my mulberries with her and she shared her snap peas with me. I will be the first to admit that these two foods do NOT compliment each other. But I have distinct memories of picking peas from our garden when I was 4 or 5, and climbing the neighbor's mulberry tree to pig out. Here's thinking of you, Mrs. Smilie. And thanks for sharing the dripping-boiling-water trick for getting mulberry stains out of clothes, so that my mom allowed me to live after showing up purple more often than not on hot summer days.