If you’re in San Francisco may I suggest taking part in Lots a Leias for Halloween? Heather kindly points us to this tutorial at Obi-Wan’s Jedi Academy on how to make a Leia costume including a sewing pattern you can alter and pattern for how to make the belt. Obi-Wan’s Jedi Academy has lots of other how-tos, including building your own Lightsaber.

Lookit! The Hallowig Knit-Along, I’m so excited. I submitted a few tips.

A few questions about the pattern prompted me to make some small changes. I put up the pattern revisions, along with a few tips I submitted to the Knit-Along, here. The super nice Amy (thank you Amy) at Knitty has updated the pattern with the changes (which are in pink). Hopefully that will help clear up any confusing bits.

The Hallowig pattern itself can of course be found in the fabulous Fall 2004 Knitty.

The Carrotbox, purveryor of all things plastic ring, is holding a drawing for a $30 gift certificate. All you have to do is send in a picture of you wearing a Carrotbox ring. I need to find my camera.

Fred Flare has up Halloween stuff. Plum Party has up Halloween decorations. I love Halloween.

I haven’t been doing much clothing shopping lately, and when I was in Macy’s (sorry, Bon-Macy’s) the other weekend I was kind of stunned to see how many ponchos they had, they were everywhere, in every department (kids, teens, misses, ladies, accessories). But, I did spy a few of what is predicted to be the next thing — capelets.

I’m still sick, it’s making me reallllly slooooow.

We’ve been in consumer mode for a while. We went to buy a new toaster and just couldn’t bring ourselves to buy the very basic model because it had three settings – Low, Pop Tarts, and High. The Pop Tarts setting was a tiny little Pop Tarts logo (that couldn’t be scratched off). Pay to put advertising in my own kitchen? I think not.

Next we’re getting a new vacuum. Reviews on Amazon and Epinions are getting less and less helpful. We’re going to skip past Miele and Dyson and go for a mid priced model. (I’m honestly afraid of talking about which because of the inevitable “that vacuum is awful” emails.) Ask Metafilter has a thread about choosing expensive and sexy vacuums here.

I’m not sure why but I find these plastic flowers at Kitsch Kitchen very alluring. Do they remind me of something? I can’t be certain but now I want some very fake flowers.

Pretty cupcakes. (Of course they are where I used to live.)

Something that was discussed at Purlygirls recently – How to hem jeans and retain the original hemmed bit with the stitching (you know what I’m talking about). via Quidnunc.

Bad day – I have a cold, I think I melted the top of our stove (at least I didn’t set off the smoke alarm this time), and there is a casette tape stuck in the tape deck of our car. A casette tape from the library.

If anyone has tips on how to get a casette tape out of of one those feed in slot players, please let me know – notmartha at gmail dot com. We have a VW Golf with the standard radio.

Update – the stuff scrapes up off of the stove and the tape miraculously popped out of the radio (yay!), but I still have a cold. Cough cough.

The Fall Knitty is up! And (yay!) I have a pattern in it which I hope meets the needs of the quick-easy-cheap project search. I made a wig for Halloween – see the Hallowig. It’s meant to be knit using whichever worsted weight acrylic yarn you want. I have a long hair version of the wig I’ll be putting up on this site soon. Special thanks to Amy’s mannequin head for being a patient and cheerful technical model.

Also, yay! to Jenna for her excellent Blaze, it’s a gorgeous sweater and I love a good use of orange. And I am totally charmed by the super long neck/hood thing going on with Giraffe.

There is a new MagKnits out — I really like the Donna sweater, the Frida poncho and the Seat Belt Snuggles. Ooh la.

I’m really glad we had a few extra days to move out of the old house because just as we were doing our final clean tragedy struck. Ok, not tragedy, but it was pretty damn annoying. I discovered that the clear contact paper I had used to put over several windows was leaving behind a layer of adhesive. Yikes. I thought back to the same thing in our apartment in San Francisco, that was left up for nearly two years and it pulled off just fine. I figure that the adhesive had changed, worse yet, apparantly the adhesive had changed twice, because a half of one of the windows had a distinctly different quality of left behind adhesive mess than the other.

I spent an entire day going between the house and the blissfully nearby hardware store buying things I thought would help get the stuff off. After three kinds of tape, sticker remover, goo gone, and four different types of scrapers I found the right combination. One part of the adhesive, the stuff that had dried overnight, was easily pulled off by laying down strips of masking tape, smoothing flat with a plastic tool (the end of which had been melted down into a lopsided nub by the time I was done), and pulling off, bringing a few measly slivers cleanly off with each pull. The other kinds required a kind of four-step process of scraping with a little razor blade scraper, soaking with Goo Gone, waiting, scraping up as much as I could, again with the Goo Gone, again with the waiting, and hoping the rest would come up in an oily, grapefruit scented mess. Fun! If it hadn’t been for lunch and a chocolate milkshake from Dick’s I don’t think I would have made it.

Obviously, the frost your windows with contact paper project won’t be coming back. But just in case the same thing happens to you, there is how I cleaned it. You have to include the chocolate milkshake part, it’s essential.

Rhonda sent along a link to this itty doggie pattern (it’s for Toto) on the web site of Chiharu Kikuchi . There are lots of other instructions there as well. Thanks Rhonda!

This weekend we took to sipping morning coffee on the little deck out back and watching the birds behave quite oddly. It was really nice.

Stuff on Boing Boing today — a bottle opener fridge magnet and a bag with compartments that you fill with water to make ice cubes, then tear them off individually, this is from Paris, ooh la etc.

The ice cube bags remind me of the ridiculously specific but somehow fitting Scotch Rocks, filled and sealed ice cube trays with water from the Glenlivet Spring in the Scottish Highlands, the perfect accompaniment to your glass of Scotch. Doing a search for Scotch Rocks also turned up this — Scotch Rocks, made from the granite the water that made the Scotch percolated through. The theory being that the stone will cool your drink without diluting it. Wow, they even have different types for bourbon as well. This is all silly, of course, but I admire the lengths we go to to turn drinking into a ritual. (Or, you know, absurd bragging rights.)

Which reminds me, the Seattle Weekly recently had a story on absinthe drinking which talks about the ritual being a big part of the appeal.

My last few coffee filter-less mornings have been rescued by the jar of Nescafe Classico instant coffee I so thoughtfully purchased some time ago for this eventuality. Thank you me. (I am aware that I am too lazy to travel even a few blocks for coffee filters.) With my cord heavy two computers, printer and fancy switching cables I am hoping that this cord rack I recently got at Ikea will get everything up off the floor. Also Ikea related – there is a fan site for the Jerker desk.

I am very afraid of spiders, and I found one of these in the basement of the old place a few weeks ago. Eeek. The link is from Sundry, who relates a story much like my own — even the designated spider killer in the house had trouble with this bugger. Hers was in her bathroom. I hope one doesn’t show up in my bathroom, because I’ll never be able to go inside it ever again. I wonder if the nice neighbor would understand why I need to shower at her place all year?

What else? Lookit this adorable itty doggie that Loobylu made, she’s been making incredible thing lately. I am terribly in love with the fabric that Laura used to make this bag. Check out her brown tote as well, so great. Craftster has a blog now.

Things I’ve learned in the new house — smaller kitchen, but there is more storage space somehow, must learn this trick; don’t paint the ceiling of a room a saturated yellow; shower curtains make me grumpy; it might be better if you don’t attempt to explore the attic area, there is a reason no one has gone up there in half a century.