Wonderful Sunday !

Current Mood : Oh, yeah !!!

Well, I guess I can tell you what Beloved Hubby got for Christmas – it was a specialty Samsung Galaxy 2 tablet, darn near made for scholars. The included reader devices made some of his scholarly books suddenly much cheaper, and included features that’d make writing papers and cross-referencing books a snap. He loves it, and soon had a koi pond screen-saver app and several driving / racing games downloaded to it, then he accessed our Netflix account and watched an episode of Lie To Me. Wow. I was impressed.

What impressed me even more was a free-but-sponsored knock-off Bejeweled game that was both addictive and sharable. Seriously, at one point, all of us were on the sofa, poking at groups of star-shapes before the awful Star Trek alarm sounded. Four – or even six ! – eyes are better than two on those things. I think we kinda made the game mad because we jammed it several times, but I wouldn’t trade those cuddly sofa times for nothin’.

Anyway. Reason I’m telling you all this is that today, I woke up to a surprise – breakfast and an exhortation to get dressed, we had a special errand to run this morning. He drove us to Best Buy, where we picked up an already-paid-for Samsung Galaxy 2 ! We’re now a two-tablet family ! I went nutz – and probably snagged $200. worth of free books, everything from regional fairy tales to cheezy Christmas romance to digitized classic literature, and darn near anything in between. Including free books on where to find more free books ! I can get almost the whole library of Mercedes Lackey or those awful Lisl Harrison Monster High books if I want – it just kinda ranks to pay more for Kindle versions than I would for used hardbacks, but the appeal of searchable text, bookmarks and highlighting, instant delivery, and portability is hard to deny.

I figured I had a month or so to read all these free words before they vanished, since there’s fresh new books for free every day. But, no, I ‘own’ those books forever ! In fact, I’m not even sure how to delete them. Gotta look into that…

Anyway. I slept, played, read, downloaded, daydreamed. What a great day ! Dearest Son found some Lego games and happily created until his eyes got tired. I was feeling a bit restless, so I finally got off my duff and sewed.

Remember back a few weeks, when we were broke ? Stay tuned, in a few more days, we will be again ! (grin)  Anyway. I found a MH dress on Etsy I really liked, and I didn’t have a pattern for it. Seller sold dresses, not patterns. I thought I’d just shell out the ten bucks and snag one, take it apart and make my own, when the funds became available.

But you know me, I’m impatient. Especially when I’m broke, for some reason. Since a good chunk of the dress’ appeal was its vintage Barbie style, I dug around in my pattern files. And I found one that’d work, but I really hadn’t tried shrinking Babs’ patterns to MH scale. Played with pattern sizing until I had something that looked about right…and stopped. We had funds ! Yet, I couldn’t just buy the dress until I tried my pattern first, although it took me quite a long time to work up the interest and patience to do it – and today was the day !

To make a long story short (too late !), there it is, on Frankie. It’s mostly OK, although I futzed with it for so long – nearly three hours – that the white-on-white fabric is mostly grey. Learned that it doesn’t take to a lot of handling, and rip-outs and resews leave their mark. I used a thinner-than-usual seam allowance, so the fit is not as snug as it could be, so I may remake it with a regular quarter-inch one. I also think the original has the shoulder straps sewn as underarm seams, which means the straps are sewn to the bodice before the side seams. So I need to remember to try that, too. On the whole, though, I’m fairly pleased. Just saved us a quick ten bucks !

That’ll buy a lot of digital koi fish and several Kindle books…