Librocubicularist- November 2016

It's November, which for me means big sales and increased hours at work, in addition to all of the chores and stress that accompany Thanksgiving and preparations for Christmas. As a result. my reading always drops around this time. I was looking back over it and I seem to read about half as many books in November versus other months.

This year has gone pretty smoothly. Last year, our store extended our Black Friday sales event so it spanned four days (Wed, Fri, Sat, and Sun) instead of just Friday and Saturday. That seems to have helped to take some of the pressure off. You still end up working just as many long hours but the stress is lower because everyone isn't shopping all at once.

We kept Thanksgiving small because we both had only one day off and decided we didn't want to spend that entire time cooking. We ended up eating finger foods (cheese and crackers, dip, a veggie tray) and playing Apples to Apples. The rest of the weekend was mostly working and sleep. My wonderful husband purchased some bath bombs from da Bomb bath fizzers to help me recover from the Black Friday sale days so I got some fun little trinkets.

I had a Super Hero and a Ninja Bomb

Then yesterday, even though it was cold and rainy, we went out to choose our Christmas tree.

We looked for a slightly skinnier tree this year so we'd have a bit of buffer space to protect it from Gil's tail wagging. We've never had any trouble with the cats trying to get in the tree but I'm a little worried they might try to hide from dog there, so we're going to move really slow with our decorating. It still needs a bit of straightening but it smells wonderful and helped but me in more of a holiday spirit.

Here're a few of the books that I did manage to squeeze in this month.

Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia

My Rating: Unfinished- 2 Stars

I ended up having to return this book to the library before I finished it, and I'm mostly okay with that. It sounds like it should be a really awesome book, like Hellboy if they were a for-profit company not part of the government. For whatever reason, I just didn't ever have a real connection to the story or any of the characters. Part of the reason is the amount of gun talk. I don't know much about guns and the characters in this book all have fancy, customized guns which they talk about and describe in detail. Since I can't really follow these conversations all they do is interrupt the flow of the story.


The Dangerous Book for Dogs: A Parody by Rex & Sparky

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Last month I read the Devious Book for Cats, so this month I decided my dog, Gilgamesh, should read the Dangerous Book for Dogs. It's a silly book, a parody of the Dangerous Book for Boys type books. It offers your dog all the information he needs to re-connect with his wild roots. The articles run from practical, such as How to Escape Humiliating Costumes or The Formal Rules of Fetch, to completely ridiculous, such as Epic Walks, a series of stories about great walks in history including a walk across the ancient land bridge to a new continent. Overall I enjoyed reading it and as someone who's new to dog ownership and wondered why I can't seem to get Gil to play fetch right, it's good to know that according to the official rules, I'm the one who's actually playing wrong. Sometimes it's comforting to know that you aren't the only one who's had this kind of problem with a pet and maybe laugh a bit about things along the way.

Bead It, Iron It, Love It! by Kaisa Holsting

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book has a good range of designs from seasonal and holiday design to food, animals, and even simple abstract patterns. All the patterns are shown full size if you are using mini (2.5 mm) beads, therefore half size when you use the regular size beads. There are some basic instructions for adding designs to brooches, magnets, and hair pins. There are even instructions and designs for using the peyote stitch to weave bracelets using the Perler beads. The final section of the book contains more detailed projects to use your creations such as necklaces, earrings, and drink coasters. Also included are a few pages of grid paper to try creating your own designs.

Since this book is pretty new I wish that it had included some kind of 3D things. In recent times I've seen some cool 3D stuff online and it would be nice to have some tips or patterns to try out.

Tiny LEGO Wonders by Mattia Zamboni

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I LOVE microscale LEGO creations and I don't really know why. This book is full of tiny things that you can build yourself. All of the models are vehicles of some sort, like trains and cars, which aren't normally something get excited about. They are all pretty cool but my favorites are the Spitfire and wooden boats. I could see using a bunch of the boats to set up a battle between fleets in an RPG. The only thing I would add would be specific ID numbers or something for the pieces used. It has the regular LEGO instruction style pictures of the pieces. IDs would make it easier to find what you needed if you had to order parts.

String Art-Part Four- Curves and Wings

After months of work, I have finished my gigantic string art project. 

The last stage of the Hylian Crest design was the wings and triforce.

The triforce is created by making parabola curves using the sides of the triangle. Follow the pattern below for each corner, on each of the three triangles.

For the wings, all you have to do is start at the top inside corner and make rays. Inside corner to top outer corner, down one nail, back to the inside corner. Then to the next outside nail, down one, and back. Just keep following that pattern until you get to the inside bottom of the wings.

The final piece is to finish the curved part of the wings. You can use a similar technique to make any curve or even a full circle. You start the string at one end of the curve, then move to the middle nail, over one, then to the second nail of the curve. It's easier to understand if see it then read it, so here is a diagram of the pattern. Basically, you start at one side of the curve and eventually end back at the center of the curve.

For this design, I actually continued a bit after the center to finish the straight side of the wing shape. If you wanted to make a complete circle you follow the same basic pattern. Pick a point to start, move the nail directly opposite and the continue from there.

So without further ado, here is shot of the full, completed design.

This ended up being a much larger project than I expected. Not in size, obviously because I chose that when I started, but in time and materials. I ended up using twice as many nails as I expected and making runs to the store for more thread, both the blue and gold. All together I used 5 skeins of the blue embroidery floss, between a third to a half spool of the silver, and around two and a half spools of the gold thread.

For the most part, everything went according to plan. I had a few issues with loose nails. I know I mentioned in a previous post that I had a much easier time with some nails than others. I don't know if using a different type of board for the backing would have been easier or if I just need more practice with hammering. When I was working on the wings, a couple of the corner nails came loose and caused me to have to redo that section.

To fix it, I put a small amount of glue on the nail, then hammered them back into place. After the glue dried they seemed much more stable.

For now, it is propped up on a bookshelf in our dining room but the plan has always been to hang it behind the couch in the living room. The question now it, what's the best way to hang it, to ensure it doesn't fall and hit our friends in the head. We are considering simply screwing it straight to the wall. I can't think of any type of hooks that seem strong enough to hold the weight of the board.