Beginning my first doll

<--This was our dinner a few nights ago. It's Stir-fry, and looked so pretty cooking on the stove, I had to take a picture of it. You can even see the steam coming up from it. Too bad I forgot to take pics of the finished food sitting on a plate, or something. We were too hungry. Here's a hint on making stir-fry: cutting up all the vegetables takes the longest amount of time in the whole preparation, so start your rice cooking while you get the veggies sliced. If you wait to cook the rice while you get the vegetables cooking, you'll end up with really soggy veggies-- they only take a few minutes to cook.


This is the reason we ended up eating our stir-fry at 9:00 at night. I was getting the fabric ready for this doll, and completely lost track of time. She's not nearly done, yet-- I've only just started beading her. I won't completely cover her with beads and hangy-down things, because I want a lot of the fabric to show. I made up the pattern. I need to cut a bigger head, I think, and I included boobs, but they ended up looking like Venus de Milo's missing arms.



Her face is one of the faces I showed on a previous post.












Her body is made from some of the fabric I dyed and posted earlier, too. It was one of the more boring pieces, so I fused some threads and matching tulle to the fabric, then drew a pattern on it, sewed it up, turned it right-side out, and stuffed it. Whoa. Fused fabric is really, really stiff and hard to turn!




<--This is our new pergola. Brad and John built it, and it's over our driveway. This is NOT a carport! We have a garage, but my landlady saw this in a picture, and wanted one next to the kitchen. We are now the envy of the block.



<-- Our new privacy fence. See the windows to the house next door? You can't? Good! The preevert who lives there can't see ours, either, which was the whole point of the fence. The guy would stand in his kitchen without the lights on, thinking we couldn't see him, and watch into our kitchen. The thing is, he's reallyreally white. And he often wears a white T-shirt, or doesn't wear a shirt at all, in which case he positively glows in the dark. This was Not Fun for us. We couldn't keep the curtains open (they aren't sheers, that's for sure!) because he'd be there, looking. What a creep. Standing all still and quiet. So now we don't have to worry about it. Daughter #2 is just over 6' tall, and if she can't see over the fence into his kitchen, we know he can't see over the fence into ours. My landlady was over, before the fence was torn down and rebuilt, and there he was, standing off to the side, and she saw him, and said, loudly, "Oh, yeah, I see him, too! Well, we'll be taking care of him, now, won't we?" And she turned and looked right at him. She is so cool. I won't tell you the nasty, crude things he called her, right to Brad and John's faces, when they told him about the new fence going up. He had a horrible temper tantrum, too, and started throwing stuff all over his backyard, swearing so much he could have lifted the roof off a house. This is the man who tells everyone how to be a Christian. Mmm-hmmmm.

Next up, starting tomorrow, will be the bathroom. We'll be bathroom-less for a while. Contractors say "a couple of days," but I say at least a week. All the plumbing in this place is from the 1940's, and is leaking like a sieve, down into the basement, and there's water damage in the floor. I think they'll have to put in a whole new subfloor, too, but you know contractors-- ever the optimists. Brad and John are wonderful young men, and do phenomenal work, but they're still contractors.