Night of the Lepus

This has been a busy weekend on the stitching front. Work on Dicken's Mitten:

I spent quite a bit of time gathering the materials for "And a Garden Grew." I love the way the designer has put together the project: It is comprised of 18 sections, each of which is on a separate page of the booklet. Each page has a complete list of the threads required to complete that page. There are 51 colors on page 1, and I had all but 7 of them. And I didn't like the fabric I was going to use originally, so off I went to Everything Cross Stitch, where I selected a beautiful cut of rosy Lakeside Linen fabric in 32 count. The photo here doesn't do it justice. It's a little ruddier and blotchier than the photo of the model (which calls for Picture This), but it did well with the floss toss, and I really like it. The biggest challenge on this project is organization: how not to spend your entire allotted stitching break looking for the right number on the thread in order to put in about five stitches before you move on to the next elusive skein. I tried different systems until I found one I liked. I tried wrapping the thread on individual bobbins, labeling them, and hanging them on a ring. Too fussy and time-consuming for me. I tried putting them in the little floss baggies with the number showing through the bag and hanging them on a ring in order. Not as fussy, but not ideal either, and I didn't have enough floss bags. So I settled on putting a range of numbers in a series of ziploc freezer bags that I labeled on the convenient place on the front of the bags. So 100-299 in bag 1, 300-488 in bage 2, etc. That works better, saves time and doesn't involve fussiness or frustration.

Don't you love the little bees? What I especially like about this project--and it's probably the same thing with working on a quaker--is that you can sit down and work on a motif, large or small, and if you need to go off and do something else, like scrub a toilet, you've still accomplished something. I also like that this project is full of unexpected little bugs and animals: loads of bunnies, a badger, a fox, snails. Mary and I are both working on this in sort of a loose, no-expectations, no-pressure SAL. Anyone care to join us? It will probably take me 5 years--but then again, at one motif at a time, maybe not.

The other night, BF brought home a horror film that a friend had recommended, call "Night of the Lepus." There's nary a lepus anywhere, since a lepus is a hare, but this 1972 movie was a hilarious, campy look at the carnage wrought by bunnies who'd been given hormones to slow down their breeding cycle and destructiveness. Naturally, being a horror movie, they turned into 150-pound carnivores who rampaged down freeways, jumped through windows to attack people and rip them apart, etc. The movie featured a haggard-looking Janet Leigh and other actors you'd recognize.

Here's a horrifying, blood-thirsty bunny now. I was too sleepy to stick the entire thing out, so BF fast-forwarded through the various scenes. What was most hilarious was the "special effects," which consisted of regular-size bunnies running through models of little houses and cars and barns.

The movie was particularly appropriate for the weekend, since we had our own bunny horror story. We came home from work to a bill from our insurance company which hiked our premium by $900 a year, thanks to the damage done by Pink, who caused the Great Flood of '08 when he chewed through the water supply tube to the master bath toilet (needless to say, that door is kept firmly shut at all times now) and flooded the upstairs, causing the brand-new ceramic floors to be jack-hammered up so that the sub-floor could dry. Although we've been homeowners for over 20 years without a single claim, this incident reached deep into our pockets, as we suspected it might. After a little rearranging and switching to the company that insures my car and purchasing an extra umbrella policy (worth looking into in these litigious times), we wound up paying just a couple hundred $ more than we have been, so it's better than it could have been.

Pink: "I'm really sorry, Mom. Maybe I could get a paper route...."