I know I said, back when everything felt like it was going bad, earlier this summer, that I was no longer going to add blogs to my sidebar as I feared I somehow had the effect of making the writer decide to stop blogging shortly after I linked.

Well, of course that is irrational thinking.

I have added a couple of new blogs - or rather, not "new," ones that have been going on a while and that I've been popping into off and on for a while.

"Stitchy Britches" is devoted to vintage embroidery. Very often the authors post scans of old, out-of-copyright transfers that you can download, print, and trace (or I suppose, iron on directly if you are very clever and have a printer that does that) and then embroider. (They would also, many of them, make good simple "coloring pages" for small children. Or inspiration for applique.)

Doe-c-doe does embroidery (usually she has something every Thursday) but she has so much more - fabric and vintage children's books and thrift-store items. All kinds of cute neat stuff, the kind of stuff I like looking at and kind of dream about finding on my trips out to antique shops.

And finally, I added the Mochimochiland blog. This is a site with wonderful patterns (some free, some for sale) for knitted toys - the style is kind of San-X ish, sort of "Hello Kitty with a twist and without the saccharine quality." (She recently had a photo contest. I was dying to enter it and I had a really good idea, but the summer got too hectic and too sad and I only finished the first part of what would have been my grouping of toys, so I didn't enter. And heck, maybe my idea wasn't that clever and funny and it wouldn't have won, but still. Maybe she'll do another contest someday and I'll have time to finish my plan).

I know there are a great many fans of the "original" "Star Trek" out there. And I know the series has its detractors. (I'm mostly agnostic on it...no, I don't mean that I find it impossible to determine whether it exists or not, I mean that I don't have strong feelings one way or another).

But, just in case, here's an odd little site: Punch Captain Kirk. I suppose it's good if you have some aggression you need to get out.

(Just hope he doesn't show up in the persona of T.J. Hooker and arrest you, or the persona of Denny Crane and sue you, or the persona of "The Negotiator" and karate-chop you).

Really, the internet has so many just plain odd things on it.

Interesting set of paper ephemera and other items on Flickr.

Conceivably, one could print some of the "paper toys" (and the paper dolls like M. Epinard) out and actually assemble them.

(She also has a blog - en français - with lots of ephemera here. There are some of the paper-toys - like a neat set of c. 1920 racecars - there as well.)

Periodically, Lynn will do a feature on "repurposed stuff that city dwellers think is cool because they thought it up, but which they would think was "redneck" if someone in "flyover country" thought it up."

Here's another one:

lamp from old washing-machine drum.

I don't know - while it would probably work somewhere like an entryway where you don't need lots of light, I'd find the little pinprick dots annoying for task-lighting. (And as one of the commenters on the site pointed out: you have to paint the thing black or some other contrasty color; if you used it just as it came out of the machine, it would scream "old washing machine part!" and you don't want that.)

Two quick links:

From the sublime: A park pavilion that is perforated so that a poem is projected by sunlight coming through the holes (The really amazing thing is that the designer worked it so that at different times of the year - when the sunlight is coming in from different angles - you get DIFFERENT LINES OF POETRY. That blows me away.)

To the ridiculous: Bee boop boop-deedle-bee, be boop boop-deedle-bee, bee boop boop deedle-bee, deedly-deedly-deedly-deet (That's my best approximation of the opening music from Pac-Man. The link is to someone who sells little crocheted sets of Pac Man and the ghosts, but if you'd rather make your own (slightly differently looking) ones, there is a pattern here

(And a third link, spotted on the site where that last pattern was posted: Geek Crafts. While I'm probably not sufficiently geeky to be in the true fanbase of that site [in that I'm really NOT a huge NES fan, nor would I redo my house in a Star Trek/Star Wars/Monty Python theme, there's a lot of stuff on there that makes me kind of gasp with delight that someone actually tinkered it up...like the computer case modified to look like R2-D2])

Nobody told me Loobylu is back!

I missed her blog. I'm happy to see she's blogging again.

And linking wonderful things...like this Welsh low-impact woodland home. Which, though it probably would mean my changing my current "1940s cottage" style to suit it, is a lovely little house, sort of what you'd get if you had a construction and architectural team that had both Hobbits and Moomins on it.

Also, one of her "further back" (but still new to me) posts features a lot of interesting vintage crocheted blankets.

Also, from a link to an illustration blog she had on her site, this cover from the Moomin comics (wow, I'd love to find a set of those in English...)



Hahahaha. I like the cover, with the distressed-looking fillyjonk in the middle, on the phone, and all the other creatures being vaguely threatening around her - Little My either pulling a snake out or putting a snake in to the stovepipe, and Moomintroll looking angry with a pair of pliers, and some of the random Jansson-creatures dancing by firelight in the back. Perhaps the fillyjonk is calling the police on them ("Please? It's 2 am? And they're still making noise?") or perhaps she is calling someone to come and remove her from such a madhouse....