Done, Done, Disturbing, and Cute

Well, we indulged in yet another new camera. We have our old one, which for having a scant 2 megapixels takes really good pictures (most of the pictures in this blog were taken with it). We got a new 8 megapixel camera, waterproof, for taking out on the kayak. The pictures, to my eye, aren't as clear as our old camera--but I wouldn't want to take that out on a boat.

But Bob has taken to carefully looking at items like old cars and dumpsters to see exactly how paint fades and chips and where the rust forms and streaks--so we wanted a camera small enough to go in a pocket. Nice thing is that it has a close-up feature. I didn't have a rusty dumpster handy so the Pookha had to demonstrate.

A couple more projects have crossed the finishing line. I liked my skeleton mitts so much that I made a pair for a friend. I also finished my "nine pieces of eight"socks (I usually have a pair of socks on the needles for a mindless project). I wanted to paint some yarn in bright colors, and rather than planning I just used whatever dye I had on hand. The name is in reference to Pirates of the Caribbean, in the scene where Mr. Gibbs explains that "nine pieces of eight" sounded more piratey than "nine pieces of whatever we happened to have in our pockets at the time."

Meanwhile, Bob is starting to prepare for Halloween. We're going to base one scene on Mexico's "Island of the Dolls" The story is that a young girl drowned near the island, and to appease her restless spirit dolls have been left there. Hundreds of olds and falling-apart dolls are disturbingly creepy, so of course we want to do it for the haunted trail. There are many ways of making something look weather beaten--the best is to let nature do it. So he's been getting dolls from Goodwill, putting some paint on them (to streak nicely) and hanging them up on the garden(vegetable garden, not the new butterfly) to age. It's a bit disturbing. There was supposed to be a cute aspect to this post (the baby opossums) but the blog program is being very obnoxious this morning and what was supposed to take about 15 minutes has already taken more than an hour. Cute critters later.