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Monthly Archives: August 2012

Interesting medical conditions

Just to be clear, I’m not actually a hypochondriac.  Sometimes I like to pretend that I am one so that I can have all these really cool diseases.  Um…I’m obviously not much like other people.  I like diseases.  And the agents that cause disease.  They’re really interesting to me.  But I generally don’t really believe that I have said diseases no matter how convincingly I might portray a sufferer of the disease in question.  So anyway, to the story!

Recently, I was looking into various medical conditions because I thought I might have broken my throat and later on, a few toes.

The throat story: One day last week, my right tonsil started hurting.  No reason as to why.  It just decided to hurt intermittently.  Then it decided to hurt all the time.  I was kind of annoyed with it.  Tonsils that hurt kind of interfere with swallowing and sometimes with turning my head.  So, I decided to look into causes on tonsil hurt.  I found a few.  The most interesting one to me was tonsilloliths.  Did you know such things existed?  It’s like a kidney stone…but in your tonsil.  They can get quite large too and look something like a tooth.  Can you imagine a tooth growing out of your tonsil?  I wonder if it would be any good for chewing.  Probably not.  You can use your teeth for chewing because they’re firmly seated in bone.  Tonsils aren’t really known for their sturdiness.  Anyway, tonsilloliths generally cause bad breath and sometimes will cause sore throats, difficulty swallowing, coughing fits, etc.  You can often remove them yourself.  Apparently, a lot of people post videos of that on youtube.  Otherwise, here is an image search for tonsilloliths.  And the wiki article for it.  It’s all so interesting!

The broken toe(s) story: A few days after breaking my throat, I was trying to get ice some ice for my coffee so I wouldn’t have to wait so long for it to cool off.  That involved removing the ice tray.  That involved a large frozen block of something falling off the top shelf of the freezer.  That involved my right foot being smashed by this frozen block of something because I didn’t realize that a large frozen block of something had fallen from the top shelf of the freezer.  My toes are quite black.  Even now.  At first, I thought I might have broken some of them.  Since then, I’ve decided that while I might have cracked the bone, it’s probably just some pretty bad bruising.  But still, this was excuse to look up different conditions that involve painful toes.  Did you know there is something called turf toe?  I thought it might be some interesting and exotic condition involving your toe.  Maybe there’s so much fungus growing out of your toe that it resembles an athletic field.  I don’t know.  But…it’s not that.  It’s just a really bad sprain of your big toe.  It was so anticlimactic.  Disappointing even.  I guess it makes people feel better to have some interesting sounding condition instead of “badly sprained big toe”?  Anyway, apparently people also post videos of turf toe on youtube.  And here are a bunch of images again.  Here’s the wiki for it, which is actually filed under a much cooler sounding name.

So…yeah.  Interesting medical conditions.  I might sample some of them.

I make! Lemur laundry bag edition

I bring your attention to this.

I trust that you remember it?  The giant circle eventually because a part of this.

Lemur!  I stuffed a comforter, a smaller blanket, and like five pillows in there and there was still some room at the top.

Yes, when I said it was that time of year again, I meant it was that time of year in which I make a lot of oversized laundry bags (two links…it also occurs to me that I’m missing a year’s worth of laundry bags) for the graduating high school seniors.  Remember, gifts should be useful…and embarrassing.

This year, I only had to make one and I decided to make a lemur.  Obviously.  It took a long time to figure out which animal to base this laundry bag on this time and then even longer to figure out how it should be posed.  I really wanted to do a sleeping lemur, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to make a 3D version of what I wanted and also, it kind of negated the reason as to why I chose the lemur (the big eyes).  So, I settled on a sitting lemur with its hands resting at its side.

Here are some detail shots.

I tried something new this time and appliquéd the face.  Except for the pupils.  That’s fabric dye.  Appliqué means that it was easier to make all the details of the face, but it is really stiff right there.  The rest of the pieces were done as I had before, which is how Tally made her patch here, only on a much larger scale.  All previous bags had all the details made that way and sometimes it’s kind of hard to control how exactly it turns out when you turn it inside out.

I really like how the hands and feet turned out.  It was actually the same pattern for both.  Lemurs have hands and feet that look quite similar.  I sewed the general outline of the hands/feet and made the individual digits by using black thread with a gray bobbin.  Really like how it turned out.  In case you didn’t catch it the first time.

I based the laundry bag on a ring tailed lemur, so of course it needed a nice, fuzzy, ringed tail.  I made the tail out of fleece so that it was fuzzy.

I believe I have perfected my bias tape technique.  Even the round on the bottom of the bag was wrinkle free.  Except I didn’t get a picture of it.  You’ll just have to trust me.

And finally the grommets.  I had originally planned on using silver grommets, except then I realized I only had two left.  I did have a new box of gold colored grommets, so I started using those.  Only to have each and every one I tried putting fail at the last instant.  They would all warp in weird ways right at the end and not actually grip the cloth.  I thought it was the anvil and setting tool I was using, as I had two sets, but both sets were producing the same results.  I ended up having to buy another set with another setting tool and anvil.  These ones worked just fine.  I have no idea what was going on with the other grommets I had.

Anyway, tada!  Lemur laundry bag!