25 Days of Christmas: Day 2, How the Grinch Stole Christmas

To celebrate Christmas I decided to highlight 25 days of awesome Christmas music!

Day 2:How the Grinch Stole Christmas: Original Motion Picture Sound Track

I have always loved Dr. Seuss's the Grinch. We had a whole pile of Christmas books and it was always one of my favorites. Plus there was always the old animated movie to watch on TV as well. So I was quite excited for the Jim Carey live action version when it was released. I quite enjoyed it and now have it on my must watch during the holiday season list. But something not everyone knows about is the absolutely stunning soundtrack!

Almost all of the tracks are favorites of mine so I'll try to limit myself today.

First Jim Horner's amazing symphonic compositions are absolutely stunning. Maybe it is because I love the story so much but I could listen to them all day. This album will certainly be making some encore performances, although I do also suggest acquiring the music for yourself as well (Spotify is a great way to listen to free and legal music).

First I have here "The Shape of Things to Come" featuring beautiful backgrounds, hinting and some later melodies, and introducing us to the fun world of the Who's this track is a great winner and really does give quite the overview of the whole movie in my opinion!

Along with the awesome symphonic tracks the album also features fun holiday themed pop songs. A lot of them are actually rather melancholy, to go along with the Grinch's feelings of the holiday, but I am really a fan of this alternate vibe for the holidays so I love it.

Green Christmas by Barenaked Ladies is completely catchy and fun to sing along with but when you actually listen to what you're saying it can be a bit sad.

"Green, cause of everything I miss
All this mistletoe, no kiss
And with every Christmas wish
There would be no greater gift
Than to have this envy lift."

 Still a super great song and something different to add to your holiday mix.

This is a bad recording, although acoustic does add some merits, but its the best I could slurp here on the website. An upload with the original from the soundtrack with rather unrelated anime images can be found here, or there's always Spotify, iTunes, or any other of the zillions of online music options available.

---

Carlin's 25 Days of Christmas Music

Day 1: A Christmas Festival Leroy Anderson	Day 10: ???????	Day 19: ???????
Day 2: How the Grinch Stole Christmas Soundtrack	Day 11: ???????	Day 20: ???????
Day 3: ???????	Day 12: ???????	Day 21: ???????
Day 4: ???????	Day 13: ???????	Day 22: ???????
Day 5: ???????	Day 14: ???????	Day 23: ???????
Day 6: ???????	Day 15: ???????	Day 24: ???????
Day 7: ???????	Day 16: ???????	Day 25: ???????
Day 8: ???????	Day 17: ???????
Day 9: ???????	Day 18: ???????

Keep coming back each day as I celebrate the season with new songs each day!

Christmas in February

Promised things which were never (I think) posted:

The wreath on my door was about a million times better than last years.

I put many blocks together for Grandma's blanket.

She liked it.

I used some old papercuts I had laying around to make awesome cards for a Ravelry exchange.

I got to see all of my penguin friends and pass out the awesome new penguin gear that I designed and painted.

After 7 months of working I finished Bran's Granny Square (252 of them) Super Mario Blanket.

   

 Lastly is my most awesome gift of the season. At least in my opinion. It is a hand knit lace scarf made from 100% alpaca fleece that I carded and spun myself.

I love making stuffs.

Clean Slate

Holy moly it's 2011. That pretty much snuck up on me from nowhere. But in some ways I am rather thankful for it. Somehow Christmas 2010 ended up being very very gifty for me. And as much as I really did love making and giving away so many things. It did also result in me being even more stressed out than I am normally (which is a lot).

Now the holidays and all of their madness (and awesomeness) have come and gone. Ideally I'd be moving on and thinking on all of the awesomeness that I can accomplish in 2011. But instead I've decided that I want to take some time to re-cap some of the awesomeness that went unmentioned here in 2010.

First up is my tree:

 

Notable things in this picture: The amazingly cute penguin (a spontaneous Target purchase by Bran). Lots o' presents (and that wasn't even all of them). And new light up Moravian star tree topper (purchased to replace the mostly but not quite all completed overly large paper Moravian star I glued together last year).

Next presents ready for transport:

As I was packing all of this I thought that for what I think would be the first time ever I might actually go home (to my parents) with more than I returned to the apartment with. Pretty sure that didn't actually come true in the end.

Stay tuned next time for the story of the epic blanket:

A long time.

So most every week day I think about how I need to blog again. And then it doesn't happen. Oops.

I am now in the work furiously at Christmas crafts, and prey I get everything done, time of year. And this is dispite actually making, and for at least a time staying mostly on schedule, my Christmas Craft plan back in July/August. Ah well....there's always next year.

Plus I think everything that I make is going to be pretty awesome this year:
Mother's scarf/shaw - done and awesome
Grandma's blanket - done and awesome
Bran's blanket - getting close to being done....finally
Courtney's scarf - only have about a foot on the needles, this project needs the most work
Penguin aparal - I have all the supplies gathered and preliminary work done just need to get'er done
Christmas calanders - need to check for changes with the family and then print
Christmas pillow - the cross stitch is done I think I'll pick up some holiday fabric from joann's on Saturday and sew a log cabin square around it. Should be awesome.

Ok that list is kinda scary there. But I'm aiming to get a good bit of stuff done this weekend.

Wish me luck.

Knitting lace.

Way back in July when I started planning Christmas gifts I decided that I wanted to spin enough lace weight alpaca to make my Mother a big scarf/shawl. It seemed like a pretty crazy goal, but at the time I was quite gung-ho on the spinning thing and for some reason seemed to think that the knitting part was practically a throw away.

The month past, and while I did accomplish a good bit of spinning, I didn't meet my goal. So when October came near everything was a bit iffy, but I decided to proceed with Mother's scarf/shawl reducing the repeats in efforts to still have enough remaining yarn to make a scarf for Bran's sister.

Then I proceeded to struggle with the 3rd row of the pattern. It took much longer than it should but after a while i figured it out, and i was off.

I've not done much lace knitting at all so it was something different. The project certainly didn't look like much while on the needles. But I found that when I stretched it out things were shaping up rather awesomely.

Unfortunately awesome or not things seemed to be crawling along at a snails pace. But then after about two weeks of plodding along suddenly I found my groove with the pattern and I started going more quickly. I also started to realize just how much size was added when the knitting was stretched. It was awesome.

And so late last Friday I found myself at a point where I could cast off! The next day (after a traumatic laundromat visit) I made my own blocking board. and on Sunday I stretched the whole thing out 20" by 60" and let the sucker dry. 

Inevitably there are a good many inconsistencies in the project. There are a few spots where you can see that I used a batch of coarser, not quite the same color, fleece. Really I need to get over it and just throw that stuff out next time (I hate waste!). At the end of my first skein I seemed to have gotten particularly fine with my spinning, then the next skein started off a bit more bulky. And lastly I'm not sure if I was just knitting more loosly or if the yarn changed, both are quite possible, but the start of the scarf is much tighter than it was when I casted off. Blocking helped this last issue some, but really the end didn't take nearly as much stretching, so who knows....

Plus I am quite worried that as Mother uses it the crazy hand-made item could easily loose shape. I was reading knitting horror stories about such things with alpaca yarn....that would be sad.

But for now at least I can enjoy marveling at this simple beauty.

3-D Paper Snowflake

The first project on my list (alphabetically) is a 3-D Paper Snowflake. I think I found and bookmarked this tutorial 2 Christmas seasons ago. 

It seems quite simple, yet very pretty. I'm not quite sure why I've never gotten around to it beyond that the holiday's tend to attract super-duper craft overload.

So this year maybe I'll try to use it as a break from all of my other projects. After all snowflakes are easily one of my favorite seasonal decorations. Ever since bizzardizing my college dorm rooms (all 3 years I'm proud to say) I have continued the tradition of cutting and hanging snowflakes en-masse.

252 Squares

On Thursday October 14th at approximately 9:15 (while watching Grey's Anatomy - yay) I finished crocheting the last of the 252 little Granny Squares for Bran's Christmas Present (Mario Blanket). I began constructing squares while on the beach in Ocean City MD back in June 117 days ago. And so I am proud to say that dispite having sometimes stuck with it and sometimes ignored it, I did in fact keep up to my average goal of 2 squares per day. In fact I exceeded it nominally yea!

Unfortunately beyond the ability to take awesomely ridiculous pictures of piles and piles of squares I'm not feeling much accomplishment. Instead I'm just dreading the joining process. Ugh.

According to my Christmas Present creation schedule I don't need to join any of these squares until November. But now that they're finished I am itching to start it (or at least figure out what on earth I'm up against). My current thinking is to join all of the horizontal rows together and then join the long vertical rows. But we shall see.

A more pressing question is what to do with all of the ends? I probably should have been hiding them as I went but I am lazy....

This thing had better be the most awesome thing ever.

It is also possible that I'll not be posting anymore on this project. See Bran is pretty much the only person that I know reads this blog. And I'm planning on hiding the project out of his sight now to make the finished product more spectacular. So we'll see.....Maybe I'll just do verbal descriptions with no pictures.

And one last quick thing! I'm also totally at a loss as for what to use as a good take along project. These squares were so easy to grab and work on absolutely anywhere. Now I'm going to be back with projects that actually require my attention while I work on them. Tricky.

You better watch out....

I am already thinking very much about Christmas.

It started way back in July I believe when I typed up a plan for what I needed to accomplish each month in order to have a bunch of crafty presents. 

But inevitably, as most things go, I think that once again I’m being overambitious and I’m feeling behind. 

Sometimes I feel like I still have tons of time before the holiday’s and I shouldn’t be freaking out yet. But then I count the months and realize I’m at 2.5. Yikes! 

In other news I can’t help but plan how I would want to decorate “my” new house for Christmas. But that is boatloads of speculation so….maybe.