I shouldn’t be offended by this show, because it’s something for parents to keep their horse-crazy little girls occupied with, but this show OFFENDS me on a bitch-eating-crackers level. Probably because I can see so easily how it could be so much better.
Quilting logic: Open Windows throw pattern
This is from a pattern book that I impulse-bought while on heavy markdown. I liked a lot of ideas in it, and I felt free to adapt and change as I pleased, which is half the fun of crafting.
It’s supposed to be a knitting pattern, but I changed it to Tunisian crochet, which meant the stitch counts were pretty useless. I had to do some reverse engineering to figure out the measurements to use.
Quilting logic in yarn afghans
My maternal unit actually prefers quilting to crochet, so while I don’t do it myself, I do know the ways and means. So it’s natural for me to think of motif afghans in terms of quilting logic, and I’m experimenting with expanding that logic to log cabin-style afghans.
Book review: ‘Connect the Shapes’
I’m trying to be more cautious about the books I actually buy copies of, and that goes double for yarn-project books, because I don’t want to spend twenty bucks on a book with only a couple patterns I actually like in it.
Happy nice time review: Natsume Yuujin-cho
Disclaimer: I own all 20 currently translated manga volumes of Natsume’s Book of Friends. I have Nyanko-sensei merch. I’m just a teensy bit biased.
This is actually pretty unusual for a shoujo manga/anime, mostly because while there’s a lot of romance, it happens around rather than to our main character, Natsume, who is a dude (which is in itself rather unusual for shoujo).
Almost good: Engaged to the Unidentified
Or Mikakunin de Shinkoukei if we’re purists (and I tend to be). It’s a romantic comedy anime which is heavier on the comedy than the love part, which saves it from the crapper, I think.
It revolves around an arranged engagement, so we have believable mixed emotions and turmoil, but we don’t get bogged down in it because of ridiculous obsessions.
This is a show about weird contrasts, which are inherently funny to our brains, so I think it has a solid humor base. The yokai-girl is obsessed with UFOs and Unidentified Mysterious Animals from the Japanese version of the Syfy Channel. The super-popular student council president has a (non-sexual) “little sister fetish.”
Fun with existentialism: ‘Erased’
The premise of this anime is that a 29-yr-old man has moments of literal deja vu, where he experiences resets of time, and it’s usually because something is wrong and he feels compelled to fix it. He does stuff like saving a kid from a wreck with a truck where the driver died of a heart attack.
And then (mild spoilers) his mother is murdered and he’s rewound in time to when he was 11 years old. And when he was 11 years old, a two of his fifth-grade classmates when missing and were found dead, along with a girl from another elementary. He was the last to see the first victim alive. He’s forgotten about most of it in the last 18 years, but it may be why his mother was killed. Continue reading
