We got up hella early to meet Mom at Walmart for 8:30am. From there we followed her into Cranston to dig some holes at a preschool that was getting some new landscaping done, and it looks really good even without anything in bloom right now. Come springtime there will be a lot of flowers and it will look very nice. After we finished the flowers hit FedEx/Kinkos to mailed out the geisha monkey. Then we went to Petco and looked at their ferrets and their cat condos. Pickle won’t be getting a buddy or a climbing spot yet, since it’s almost rent time. I’m still keeping my eyes open on craigslist though. We picked up a poster frame at Micheals because they were 50% off and we got it for $17 rather than $34, and I snagged a few $1 spools of ribbon for assorted projects. After we grabbed lunch at Walt’s (mmm… roast beef and cheese) we went down to Mom’s house, where I spent the day taking pictures of Jazz and working on the afghan. I managed to finish almost 2 sections, which I’m pleased with, and it’s starting to actually look like the picture on the pattern. Danielle came over for a visit and dropped off some pictures, including my 10th grade school picture that I got into a heap of shit over with my dad because I wore a hat in it. there was also a video of me and my best friend Andrea doing the electric slide on her front lawn prior to our 9th grade semi formal, but we left that over at Mom’s.

The next few days I’ll be home, enjoying my days off before we go back to class. I plan on working on the afghan and trying to clean my desk off. I also want to make a hat out of a smaller batch of really fuzzy blue yarn.

But for now, we’re heading to the bedroom to watch the rest of the news and SNL, providing I can stay awake.

We were supposed to go out with Mom to plant some flowers today, but it’s raining today and so the planting was cancelled due to mud. So what’s a girl to do? Why, finish the Geisha, of course!

Yes, she’s finally finished. I snapped a few more pictures of her this morning. And because I’m a stickler for details, here’s a bunch of them:

• made from one pair of big-assed wool socks, trimmed down to a mostly manageable size for her arms and legs.
• embroidered lips in bright red
• kimono, juban, and obi, all done up according to Japanese patterns and customs. Did you know that kimono and juban lapels should be wrapped left over right, except when dressing a body for burial and it’s done right over left? Neither did I, but you’d better believe this one is dressed properly.



• Long black hair, because I couldn’t get the traditional geisha style to work, nor could I find a tiny geisha wig. However, she does have a pair of pretty coiled buns on the top, complete with flowers and ribbon decorations.
• Tiny “tail obi” - I felt the tail needed a little something extra, so I made a little obi for the tail out of a bit of kimono fabric.

Eddie’s going to be getting me a box from work, so she should be heading off to her new home sometime next week! Tomorrow, she goes to my Mom’s house to show her off one last time.

After a week or two of experimenting, I managed to get the geisha’s face to be whiter than it was. It’s not glaringly pale, since I don’t want to make the sock overly stiff, but it is paler than it had been. I don’t think it’s going to get any whiter, so I’m going to work on the lips and mouth tonight. Last week I bought some red embroidery floss for the geisha’s lips, and do you think I can find that shit today? No, of course not. I can’t find the extra black floss I bought either. I’m going to check my purse when I leave, and if I can’t find it I’ll pick up some more when I pick up Eddie. Then I can finish the geisha up tonight, and hopefully we’ll get some sunshine this weekend so I can take some pictures of her for the monkey photo album and ship her off.

My jaw is so much better today than it was earlier this week. I can talk and it doesn’t hurt.

I found out that next Friday is my final for the two classes I’m in right now, which conveniently is also the day that Eddie has off, so I get out early and come right home to be with him.

I really miss my funky haircolor. I don’t mind brown, but after about 10 years of dying it bright colors, you can see why brown just isn’t me anymore.

Tonight is Survivor night, followed up with CSI and ER. I’m not sure if we’re cooking or ordering food. I’m wicked sleepy, probably because of the benedry I took today to avoid sniffling like crazy at school.

We had a rather uneventful Sunday, which was completely normal and in fact most welcome. Because Rhode Island seems to be in the middle of its own little monsoon season we didn’t go to the flea market, but we did go to Bickford’s for breakfast after I’d dyed and dried my hair. I skipped breakfast and moved right on to lunch and had a chicken sandwich while Eddie ate some sort of cholesterol-laden plateful of eggs and fried meat. We went to Mom’s for the weekly wings and football. We watched a couple of decent games, and made fun of a few sucky teams, generally annoying Brian.

I’d brought my bag of monkey stuff with me - a skein of black yarn, a few needles, some black embroidery floss, and a card with 3 silver, floral buttons. Shortly after I sat down and put in the first few stitches in the geisha’s hair, in walked my sister, who decided to come over for wings, football, and dinner. Somehow I managed to lose the buttons under the couch and ended up crawling on the floor to retrieve them. Danielle attempted to get me to go get my hair cut with her tomorrow, but I think if anyone goes near it this week it will just fall out while screaming “we give up! we can’t take anymore!” I managed to get the geisha’s hair on, although it’s technically not your normal geisha updo (the yard was too unwieldy), but more like these, just longer in the back. Her eyes were the topic of much conversation, such as my mother asking if they were going to be slanted, and Danielle asking if they’d be “chinky”. What my family lacks in tact, we make up for in being amusement for others. There’s only a few more details to be touched up on (sewing the mouth and tail on, small hair stuff, clipping stray threads and sewing up the obi so it doesn’t randomly untie itself and fall off), and then she should be ready to send out this week. Tomorrow I’ll get more pictures of her, since if I do it now she’ll look really yellow because of the lighting in here.

And now I’m going to take a shower, since being in a roomful of smokers all day has made my head stuffed up solid. Not fun. And then i’m going to try to finish my book.

I spent a lot of time working on the Geisha tonight. I trimmed the juban (the orange clothing you see under the blue kimono) by about 6″, since the kimono was shorter and the juban was hanging out a bit, and it just didn’t look proper. I’ve also put a couple of tiny hook and eye closures in it to keep it closed up.

I also sewed on the kimono’s sleeves, which wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be on the machine and required only a minimum of touch-up by hand. Thankfully, there was no need for me to break out the steak-knife seam ripper, since I made certain that the sleeves were pinned correctly. There’s nothing worse than realizing that you’ve sewn a sleeve on not only inside out, but facing into the inside of the item. There’s going to be at least one hook and eye in there to keep the upper part closed up properly, but hopefully the obi will keep things tidy. I’m debating about putting one a few inched below the obi so that I can keep the lower part of the kimono somewhat closed as well, but we’ll see; I don’t want to put too much strain on the fabric, and I sort of like the look of the juban showing through the slit a little. In the full body shot the kimono is more open than it should be because the fabric is very slippery and she was sliding down the pillow I posed her on.

The obi is made of two parts. The wider orange obi is made of the same orange fabric as the juban and has a very faint slightly zig-zagged stitched edge. It’s about 2′ long, and at this point isn’t tied all fancy-like because I’m just going to have to undo it to put the hook in the kimono, iron it, and to do the hair. The multi-colored woven obi was something that caught my eye this afternoon in the clearance bin in Walmart’s craft department, and matches the rest of the outfit perfectly. It ties it all together, as they’d say.

At this point, I haven’t done the face. I’m testing out some white fabric paint to see if I can get a good geigha-like makeup look to it without making it look horribly obvious that it’s paint; I want something “softer”. Unfortunately I can’t find my airbrush kit to do it, but i’ve got a couple of ideas that i’ll be testing out on some scrap this week. I did buy the buttons for her eyes and some red embroidery floss for her “lips”, but naturally can’t do those or the hair until I work out the makeup.