Shirt

Here's a pic of one of my new creations.  I made this shirt without a pattern.  For the shiny bit at the top, I took a dressy blouse and cut off the bottom of it.  For the rest of it, I used black stretchy material leftover from a skirt I made, and white material from some hacked-up t-shirts to construct the rest of the shirt.  The slightly sticky-out bit on the left of the photo is from an awkward joining of strips of material right there, and is usually not very noticeable. 

The gorgeous bracelet and earrings were made by my mom, as is the painting in the background.  (Her website is marytelfer.com)

(Still no camera cord, but my mother kindly took a picture of me with her camera and emailed it to me.)

More Ridiculous Nancy

OK, The Secret in the Old Attic remains ridiculous, but it's sort of charming, once you learn to go with it.  Take the following passage:

"Near the ventilator was a door which apparently lead to the room.  To Nancy's annoyance it had no knob or visible lock, nor could it be pushed or pulled.

'It must open by means of a secret spring,' she reasoned."

Or this one:

"The music had ceased, but from nearby came the sound of stealthy footsteps.  These were followed by muffled rapping sounds.

'There isn't a harp or a piano in here,' Nancy told herself, trying to regain her composure. 'Maybe this is just a trick to keep people out of the attic.'"

I love the logic! People set up strange noises and display skeletons to keep intruders away from their things, any suspicious-looking room must have a secret passage or hidden compartment, and if you just duck down behind an oil barrel, no one will ever see you.

It makes me want to rent the movie "Mystery Team." It's a comedy about a group of teenage boys who have a detective agency (like Encyclopedia Brown or the Hardy Boys), but are hired to actually solve a dangerous murder and are way over their heads.  It's supposed to be quite funny.

Nancy Drew

So I just brought a bunch of my old books back from my mom's house, and a good deal of them are vintage Nancy Drews (mostly from the sixties, though one is from the forties).  I LOVED Nancy Drew when I was a kid, but I haven't read one since... well, at least 17 years ago, I'm thinking.

I've decided to read The Secret in the Attic.  I'm in chapter three so far, and I'm not terribly impressed.  The writing... is not that great.  There are some children's lit books that I still adore (the Bunnicula series by James Howe, anything by Madeleine L'Engle), so I know it's not just that it's not meant for adults.  And the logic is astounding me.

Nancy's dad is a lawyer, and he's been asked by a nice old man to look for clues in old love letters for the location of the man's dead son's unpublished sheet music.  The old man needs the music so he can publish it and afford to take care of his son's daughter, Susan.  Nancy and her dad agree to help him right away.  Were times different then? Why would Nancy and her father assume this music would actually get published and make money? Why would they not worry that the man is crazy?

Then, as the old man is leaving the Drew residence, he gets hit in the head with a rock by a mysterious assailant - so he stays at the Drews' house for the next day or so, and Nancy takes care of him!  I don't trust him.  But I think I'm meant to...

OK, and while he's there, Nancy leaves the radio on for him.  He hears a song, and he recognizes it as a piece of his son's, and knows it's been stolen.  And Nancy believes him!  "Her task was now twofold: to locate the thief and to trace the rest of the unpublished music."

I'm pretty sure Carolyn Keene, the ostensible author, didn't actually write every book in the series.  I think she'd sketch the plots, then farm the actual writing out to a group of writers working for her, like Ann M. Martin did for The Babysitters Club.  So maybe other books are a little better, and don't make the reader think Nancy and her dad are crazily naive, about to be taken in by con men.  We'll see...

Finished with werewolves

I finished Curse of the Wolf Girl two days ago.  It was great.  It was the perfect follow-up to Lonely Werewolf Girl - there were a few new characters introduced, some old side characters were more fleshed-out, the protagonists seem to grow and change a bit (besides changing into wolves, of course).  Best of all, it is very clearly set up for a sequel.  Come on, Martin Millar, you better be writing right now!

When I Won Third Place

Since I still can't find my camera cord, I thought I'd show a picture of a previous accomplishment of mine.  In 2005 I won third place for scariest knitwear on the now-defunct You Knit What? blog.  Behold, my terrible dinosaur tank top, and the description of it that I sent them:

These are pictures of a sweater (?) I knit two years ago. I thought it would be different to have a dinosaur on a shirt instead of boring stripes or something. I also thought "I don't need a pattern!". Which is why it's wayyy too big on me. On the sleeveless side, you can see a lot of my bra, showing just how great the fit is. So it's pretty warm, like a sweater, but sleeveless, meaning that even if I threw a shirt on under it, there was never proper weather to wear it (too warm in summer, too cold in winter). Because of this, last year I decided to add sleeves. I wanted to make them pink, but because my local yarn shop was out of it, I bought blue instead - and not the same blue as the dinosaur. A much uglier, non-matching blue. I made one sleeve, and realized how ugly it was. I tried tying a piece of yarn around the sleeve, like a ribbon, and tying it in a bow. That's the weird string hanging from the shoulder. And the other sleeve? I decided it was pointless, and called it finished

Werewolves

So I just re-read Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar.  It has some flaws, and yet, I love it.  It's about the complicated social lives of various Scottish werewolves, and it's just such good fun!  Sometimes I think the writing isn't that great, that he's telling me something I already know or using too many adverbs or whatever, but it doesn't matter, because the story is so engrossing.

There's a huge cast of characters: Kalix, on the run after killing her father and taken in by two college kids, Daniel and Moonglow (a goth).  Her sister Thrix, an enchantress and a fashion designer.  Their brothers Markus and Sarapen, both vying for the position of Thane.  Sarapen is violent and brutish; Markus is a cross-dresser.  The outcast cousins, Butix and Delix, who play in a punk band and renamed themselves Beauty and Delicious.  Malveria, a Fire Elemental queen who buys clothes from Thrix.  Vex, Malveria's high-spirited niece.  And more, lots more.

The goofy names and the fact that there are werewolves and faeries and fire elementals make it sound kind of cheesy.  It would be, if it Millar took himself too seriously.  But he doesn't, and the book's a riot.

I re-read because, to my delight, a sequel was just released: Curse of the Wolf Girl.  I started it a couple days ago and can't put it down.

New Shoes

I bought these shoes off a friend who ordered them and found them a little too small on her - what luck! I'm in love with them.  I wore them to work just once so far and got lots of compliments.  They're made out of plastic-coated recycled newspaper, and are made by All Black Footwear.  Mine actually have gray straps, rather than the teal in this photo.

Shoe places need to come up with more unique names.  Do you know how hard it is to find that company online? I got lots of photos of black basketball shoes and such...

Joseph Kanon

I've read three books by Joseph Kanon now (just finished Los Alamos) and I definitely have a grip on the template.  Tough sort of guy, maybe a journalist, gets involved in both a murder investigation and some romantic entanglements - usually with a woman who seems like trouble but is ultimately worth it.  World War II and communism are involved.  The murder is solved, and along the way deeper themes are explored (the responsibility of the scientists in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, for example). 

I like them.  Is it bad when books are formulaic? Maybe it's not the sign of the most daring, original, wonderful books (Los Alamos is no Cloud Atlas, which I still can't get out of my head) but that doesn't mean they can't be fun.  Fun isn't even the right word, since reading about the destruction of Berlin in Kanon's The Good German is certainly not fun.  Maybe the word I want is worthwhile.  Plus, after a chapter or two to gain momentum, they're nicely un-put-down-able.

As soon as I find my stupid camera cord I'll post pictures of the blouse I finished.  It's the pink, floral 1930s one, and I adore it.  It's lovely.  I also created a tank top out of a shiny, dressy blouse that a friend gave me, an undershirt of my boyfriend's, and some black scrap fabric.  It has a few more flaws than the pink blouse, but I'm proud of it since I built it myself, without a pattern. 

Cloud Atlas

Oh man, I finished Cloud Atlas, and it was amazing.  I loved it.  The structure - six stories forward into the future, 123456, and then finishing those stories in reverse, 654321 - could've been annoying, but it wasn't.  I liked that it was different.  I liked the way all the stories connected.  The middle story, Sloosha's Crossin', had me intimidated before I reached it, as it takes place in the distant future and is written in a strange dialect.  But once I got through three or four pages of it, it was no trouble at all.

The way Mitchell jumps genres is amazing.  I got completely soaked up by the spy novel, or sci-fi interview, or whatever, far quicker than I thought I would.  Somehow each story seemed completely unique and genuine, not like a quirky exercise Mitchell was attempting.

Should you read it?  The only caveat I have is that not every story ends with a rosy happy ending.  But it's not a downer, either.  If you're okay with that, then yes, by all means, read this book!  This is going to be a book that I push on people to borrow.