Toys!

About half a year ago, after I left Canada I started crocheting again.  The reason was so that I could thank those people, that were supporting us financially with our wedding.  Since they all were from dw-mud, we thought, turtles would be a good idea.  So I made a few turtles (if you are reading this, supported us and haven’t yet got one, you might have one soon or I just haven’t gotten your address yet.).

Yes, in the background is a glass of honey.  So these turtles are rather small.  Especially the ones in the front.  They are usually made from patterns with slight modifications to account for the size or sometimes just children safety.  Here you can find the pattern for the big one in the middle, here the one for the striped ones and here the one for the tiny ones.

However, then I got interested and tried out more things.  Also other people saw about my enthusiasm and Carsten Meyer for example uses little frog buttons now for his campaign.

That one even made my name being mentioned in the gossip section of the local newspaper, which is rather neat for free advertising.

At some point I also realised that I’m getting older, you know, one of these days, and that more and more of the people I know have kids or are pregnant.  While I usually did baby socks for them, I thought, I could try my luck with toys.  Since I already made so many turtles, why not start with a turtle toy?

Isn’t she a curious cutie?  So off I went to make more different toys. I offered some friend on discworld, to make his son something, and we agreed upon a fish.

I adore the little frillies and had troubles packaging it, because I just wanted to keep it.

While offering the toy to this friend, I mistold ‘I could make a toy for you’ to another player.  They said, they wanted a toy too and when I asked about their favourite animal, they responded with ‘a tiger!’.  So I made a tiger – much to their surprise, they were expecting something coded.

Next time, I’ll do something different with the ears, but I’m quite satisfied on how it worked out.

I still have an elephant somewhere lying around and might take a photograph of my latest knittings too, so I can show you more of stuff I make.  If you want stuffed toys for your kids too, contact me about the specifics.  Making toys is fun, doesn’t take too much time, even in large sizes and I find it very rewarding, even if heartbreaking when I have to give them away.

How I work

So.  Since I decided I should get up a proper online representation of stuff I do for people who want to keep in touch, here I am.  I will post about my research and my crafts and other things I will think about.  However, I will do so semi-randomly.

What I mean with this is: There will be no ordered schedule per se, but it will be an item on my todo list.  My todo list consists of many things and several entries.  If they are important (like writing on a paper or on my thesis at the moment), it appears there more often to increase the likelyhood that an item gets chosen and hence, done.  So how is an item chosen?  With a dice! And then the item gets written in the end of the list again (at least if it is some regular task or one that consists of several steps, also making it possible to chunk larger amounts of work down into feasable sizes).

I am not a very structured person, but I do need structure to sort my life out and get stuff done.  However, why I’m not a structured person is, that I am easily bored of those structures that are put upon me and I would get nothing done if I always had to put cognitive load into deciding what to do next.  So I chose a semi-random approach, which actually works quite well.  Upon deadlines I sometimes change it a bit (so that for example studying for the exam will be every i-th item, so that I can ensure that I get things done), but all in all the beauty of it is something else.

This list is now sorting also my free time.  And it works remarkably well.  While I have less troubles to get enthusiastic about my work or remembering that it is my duty again to clean the bathroom (or water the plants), the list also contains stuff like ‘watch a movie’, ‘play a game’ or ‘crochet a bit’ (for that matter: ‘do your nails’ is a big one, since it ensures that they are never looking _too_ soddy.).  And the fascinating thing is: I sometimes have entire days off and in general the ratio is such that it works out quite nicely.

There are still sometimes rows of doing work tasks, be it political, uni or what have you.  However, in general I can always bring up the motivation, interest and enthusiasm for what I do at that point.

Choice is very hard for me, routine bores me, but this is something that finally worked!  Just if there is some geek out there having similar problems:  Try it, maybe it’s something for you too!

So the next time ‘do something with your blog’ is on my todo list, I’ll show some stuff I do.