Nifty Spools

Does anyone else do this to their spools of thread? I find it particularly useful with the spool of "invisible" thread that I have since I can't exactly see where the end of the thread is all of the time. I also like when I get the chance to use my many sharpies even if it is only one tiny thing.

Crooked Teeth

Meet my dryer. This is a crude approximation of it. I made this happen in my artistic ability.
Isn't it charming?

The latest victim: a beloved Silverstein zip-up hoodie. Fortunately, it wasn't too badly mangled by my monstrosity of large home appliances. The problem was that the zipper slider somehow managed to fly off the end, even with zipper stopper firmly in place! I decided to put to work my 8th grade home ec skillz and fix this.


Here's the zipper stop that needed to come off in order to thread the slide back onto its track.


After some wrestling with an extremely rusty pair of needle nose pliers, I settled on cutting out the offending zipper stop. (See my notes in the background? That's because I should be studying for my final in Human Nutrition. Tangent: I've been eating Nutella out of the jar with a spoon. Something tells me that studying for that exam might be a worthy pursuit. Perhaps I should learn what I should be eating by doing the exact opposite? A tasty proposition.)

The lonely zipper slide. This would be the orientation for putting it back on the track since I have to slide it down from the top.

And, after some minutes of trickery and cajoling, tada! I used a spare jump ring and sewed it in place of the cut out zipper stop.


And here it is all zipped up. I'm inordinately proud of myself right now.

Diamonds in the Rough

Here are a couple gems while I was grading papers today. Apparently, when you give them questions that we haven't learned the material for yet, they come up with some rather creative answers. I'd like to see them draw me pictures next.





Teaching is such a rewarding experience.

What's black and white and round all over?

This guy:
Who looks startlingly like this frog balloon from the original Shrek movie:

Shrek and all associated characters belong to Dreamworks Animation

This is a lesson in "not everything that can be made round, should." Case in point, this penguin started out adorably and with good intentions. However, somewhere along the way he went from chubby to Rubenesque. And from there, it just got worse.

Also, the picture itself vaguely reminds me of those "Dog" photographs/art pieces that were quite popular a few years back. The ones where the dog has its nose shoved curiously into the lens, lending an overall fish eye quality to the image.

In any case, I think this little fella is headed for the charity pile. Or perhaps to be relegated to the closet with the creepy five-legged octopus.