Plush of the Month: Dragons!

Yes, I know

I’m two months behind, but in my defence, I don’t actually need any. This is supposed to be fun, and I didn’t have the spoons. But now I have a few days off and finally finished one of the three dragons I embroidered and cut out. Next project will be a bit more freestyle, but I’m not going to spill the beans yet. Anyway, here’s Fuego, the latest addition to the Giliell household. I think we need a third bed…

An orange plush dragon with big tan horns, a tan belly and floppy ears. He#s looking straight at the viewer

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An orange plush dragon with big tan horns, a tan belly and floppy ears. You can see the tail fluff in red. Side view.

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Well, Fuego got quickly adopted as Knöpfchen’s best friend

A huge hippo hugs the plush dragon

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Goodbye 2021.

A huge plush hippo with a drawn on Santa hat and fairy lights around its neck sitting in a kitchen chair

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First of all, I hope you had a lovely christmas, if and how and wherever you chose to celebrate. We had a nice Christmas Eve. Many years ago we decided to destress the whole thing. No grandparents. No visits or visitors. Just us. that was nice. Yesterday, we had the family over, all fully vaccinated and freshly tested. Let’s just hope we were safe or at least lucky. Although the men in the family tend to have a lot more opinions than information, the subjects  stayed in the “ignorable” range. Who cares if those stories never happened, so this was also quite relaxed. Does anybody want some tiramisu? I seem to have made more than got eaten.

It’s no secret that 2021 can go fuck itself. Globally and personally. 2022 doesn’t look like it’s going to be much better. Omicron will sweep the globe and it will be a catastrophe for those unvaccinated, regardless of whether they didn’t have access to the vaccine or were just assholes. I hope you stocked up on pasta.

Anyway, I’m wishing you all some quiet time with your loved ones, recharging the batteries, for we’ll need the energy.

 

Love

Giliell

Have Some Gingerbread

I’m not an artist with these things like Charly’s mum, but I love making them. It’s the first time I made a gingerbread house that wasn’t just assembled from a box. I probably should have trimmed the still warm edges again with the cookie cutters, but the result was nice nevertheless.

I looked at the kids with my evil mum stare and forbid them to touch them for about 5 days, which is a perfect time for the gingerbread to get soft again, but not so long that it would go stale. There’s a few ruins left that I expect to disappear within the next days or so.

 

Tree made of stacked gingerbread stars, decorated with icing and sprinkles

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Gingerbread house on a glass plate with a marshmallow roof, front view

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Gingerbread house on a glass plate with a marshmallow roof. Side view.

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Gingerbread house on a glass plate with a marshmallow roof, view of front and side

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Have a Rainbow

I hope you’re all having a great weekend. This was supposed to go up yesterday, but apparently my computer fucked up.We went to our friends yesterday for a traditional “St.Martin’s goose”, which was nice, especially as social events will go down again with Covid going through the roof in Germany. I’m anxiously waiting for my booster, because if we do one thing well, it is fucking shit up with bureaucracy. Doctors say “5 months after your second shot”, public vaccine clinics are allowed to give it to you after 5.5 months, doctors only after 6…

Thankfully my friends and family are all very sensible, so we’re meeting on an “as vaxxed as possible and tested” basis. That’s all I really want: meet a couple of people, but I guess that’s being jeopardized again by people who neeeeed to celebrate carnival with thousands of strangers in close proximity. Here I’m ranting again…

Finally, have a rainbow:

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I got a new toy
 

There’s some things I’ve been eyeballing for ages, but could never justify the expenses, and one of those things is a die cutting machine. Basically those things are two drums that are moved with a crank and the cutting happened via pressure. You can make very fiddly and intricate designs . Having paid off my teeth (and just before I got a new toothache and our washing machine broke), I decided to treat myself to a basic die cutting set and make some paper crafts.


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These are beautiful. And a lot of work. They are about 10 cm in total and consist of three parts: the bottom and two side pieces. Not to mention the deer and squirrel, which are added separately.


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Making the little boxes from colourful paper was a good time filler for the little one’s birthday. I guess I#ll be making my own christmas cards this year.


Have some cake
 

I’m sorry, here I am again apologising for being a bad host, but what can I say, meatspace is demanding right now. But we got to celebrate the little one’s birthday this year, with cake and her first Covid shot.


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The filling is one of my favourite fillings right now: a cream cheese and cream filling stabilized and favoured with jello, in this case lemon jello. It makes for a light filling and you can add fruit to taste.


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Next step: frosting with vanilla buttercream. Thankfully it doesn’t have to be too even. This is after the cake spent some time in the freezer, because on top you get mirror glaze.


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©Giliell, all rights reserved


When working with mirror glaze, you always have leftovers. I decided to refrigerate them and use them for Halloween. Here’s two things I learned:


    

  1. Purple mirror glaze resists all efforts to be died black. It will just become deep purple (haha)
    2. 

  2. My cellar wasn’t cool enough to let the frozen and glazed cakes thaw slowly. They decided to spontaneously disintegrate.
    3. 



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Well, on Halloween things are supposed to look horrible, aren’t they?


Reproductive Injustice: Adding insult to injury
 

CN: Descriptions of periods, medical procedures, etc. But hey, if half the world can deal with this, the other half should at least know about it.


I have heavy periods. And I really mean heavy. Like the bottom is falling out. An average period is 60 ml of liquid. My mens cup holds 48 ml and I can fill that three times in an hour when it’s a bad one. Add the cramps, the migraine and the iron deficiency that goes with it and I was fed up. This is clearly an issue that affects my life and my health, so I decided that something needs to be done and that the something is an IUD. IUDs have a great success rate at reducing periods, up to not having any at all (my ob gyn mentioned this as a side effect: “But then you may not hay any periods” as if I knew any cis woman who was happy having hers). Sounds like a medical solution to a medical problem, right?


Nope, nope, nope. As a side effect, the IUD also works as contraception and we can’t have the sluts having sex without at least paying heavy money for it. That would be absurd. Because people afab need to suffer for the very fact that they have a certain biology and they are not allowed to offset the suffering by having fun sexy times. As a society we’d rather have them suffer even without fun sexy times or when they’re using a different method of birth control before we help women and others with uteri to not suffer*.


So I had to pay private for my IUD. With insertion it was 350€ and from what I know this is even cheap compared to the USA. I’m not poor, I could pay, but a poor woman can’t. This would be 75% of what a person on welfare gets a month, and the fact that with any luck this will last me five years doesn’t change that. I’m still angry about it.


So to recap, I have a medical problem, there’s a highly effective therapy, but because I get birth control as a side effect, it’s not covered by health insurance. Fuck the patriarchy.


*And if you get m,ore offended by my wording than the fact that this is happening, kindly fuck off.


Plush of the Month: Meet Archie O’Pteryx (and some personal updates)
 

Here we go again. The next pattern has already arrived and I finally finished my feathered dino baby. So no, I’m not dead, I’m just very bogged down. One part is work, where we’re now “catching up” on many things that didn’t happen during the school closings. And many things are happening. so many kids who need help, so few resources. I rarely leave school at the time that I should, and of course the work that would then normally be done at home like grading and preparing classes doesn’t do itself.


On top of that I’m still dealing with the fall out from Uli’s death. Not just the emotional part, but also dealing with many of her belongings. I have hauled off stationary, I’m in contact with charities, of course her sister (legally I have nothing to do with all of this), an asshole landlord, sorting through tons of clothing and trying to find people who will take it (and you still don’t see a difference, but I cannot personally carry all of it to the appropriate places). Yeah, you can rightly ask why I’m doing this, but to me it’s important that her life not be discarded, wasted, and it’s also a way to say goodbye and find closure.


Aaaaand, if that’s not enough, I’ve been having a ton of health troubles as well as regular check ups and cancer screenings. at least my teeth are done for the moment.


But I still got my baby done. It’s such wonderful self-care, it offers instant validation and provides me with a snuggly friend every month. As usually, the pattern was amazing, but like the deer on the complicated side. I’m afraid poor Archie will remain a single kid (though he’s already been claimed by Casey the Deer as her little brother).


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As you can see, Archie is tall, and such a tall plush brings its own challenges, mostly when it comes to stability. You cannot stuff such a narrow neck to the extent that it will hold the large head, so Archie’s got a heavy (1 mm thick) wire running from his head to his tail as a “spine”. The same problem happens with the wings: they’re large, they’re heavy. I tried the same wire as for the spine, but it was too heavy and the wings would just flop down. I used some thinner wire, and while the effect was better, it still didn’t work. In order to get them to stay up I needed to attach them to the head, but I didn’t want to stitch them to the frills. This would be fine If Archie was an collector’s item, but I make friends and therefore I didn’t want to risk tearing anything apart accidentally.


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The solution was extra strong crafting magnets in the wings and the frills at the side of the head. This way they come apart easily when being pulled without any damage to sweet Archie. If you look at the feet, I hate everything about them. Not the result, but everything about making them. The claws had to be sown individually and then sown into the seams of the feet and there was a lot of cussing involved. Nevermore!


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One thing I love about NazFX’s patterns (and the fact that I have an embroidery machine) is that the faces are so expressive. This little fellow basically spells “good natured mischief” with that look, as well as “please cuddle baby”.


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Walking in the Woods
 

Two weeks ago Mr and I went to our local woods for the first time this year. Living next to swamp and marshland has its advantages, but it also meant that for most of this year the paths were unwalkable, unless you wanted to recreate that child-traumatising scene from the Neverending Story where Ayax drowns in the moor. It was nice, apart from the fact that the mosquitos must have been starved before they got us.


Two round mushrooms
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We found lots of common earthballs (though I really like the name “pigskin poison puffball”, which would make an amazing name for a band), which are nice to look at, but not good for eating if you value your survival.


Puffbal mushroom with a hole in the top
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puffball growing on a tree
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And I met a frog. I don’t think that they are poisonous.


small brown frog sitting in green leaves
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Garden update: Harvest is upon us
 

Autumn is sneaking in, which means that it will soon be time to say goodbye to the lush colours of the garden. But before we leave for winter, things are still growing.


Butternut squash on a planting stone
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There are finally some butternut squash. they’re pretty late, but this is the second one we ate and there’s a couple more. My corn (not pictured) was a mixed success. While the regular sweetcorn was ok (but I only had four stalks), the black popcorn maize put out cobs way too late and didn’t grow tall either. I doubt that it will still ripen and I’m a bit at loss as to why that happened. Can’t be the soil or anything I did, since both varieties were planted next to each other…


I will have way more chilis than anybody can wish for…


Orange chili on a plant
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Somebody must have told this one a dirty joke, it’s turning red.


And last but not least: asters. They’re about the last food the bees get in autumn and aren’t they just amazing?


pink/purple aster with lots of buds
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Teacher’s Corner: A Trip with Donkeys
 

The federal government decided to throw some money at schools “to make up for lost learning because of Covid”. While the higher classes who need to write their finals can have some free remedial lessons, we decided that the younger kids didn’t need more maths, but more social skills and hired a guy to do “Erlebnispädagogik”, outdoor education with us. Last week it was time for year 5, which is usually not my year, but because our school worker was sick, I got to cover for her and provide an additional adult, which was good, because in the end I was the one to bring the kids back to school.


The program for the day was a trip with donkeys and a dog.


Picture of a black and white border collie puppy, 4 months old.
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Meet Luna, the hyperactive border collie pup. Of course all the kids wanted to be the one to walk Luna, and they all learned that walking a pup is more work than they thought.


Head of a grey donkey with a white snout
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Meet Bruno, the more stubborn of the two donkeys. His friend Fridolin is more docile, but also the boss. these two have the patience of a stone. The gladly took all the kisses and snuggles they could get.


The class was split up in 4 groups with rotating tasks: one for each donkey, leading them and making sure they’re not eating anything their boss didn’t declare safe, because people are assholes who throw away anything and some years back a donkey almost died after he ate something he shouldn’t have, one group walking the puppy, and one group walking in front with a map. Meet “my” happy group of rascals with Fridolin:


Six kids holding the leads of a grey donkey. Their faces are covered with stickers that say "We don't post pics of kids here"
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Of course I obscured the faces, it goes without saying that you should never post a kid’s face without permission. Us adults told them that we’d only intervene if they did something harmful for the animals. Apart from that, they were responsible. When it was my group’s turn to lead the way, they mixed up paths and used one that wasn’t actually a path but the destruction left after heavy machinery collected wood. Incidences like that are actually a good thing. The kids have to take responsibility, come up with their own solution, work together. When the ground became difficult to walk because of all the branches left by the machines, they decided quickly to work together and clear it for the donkeys.


We made it back in time and it was such a great experience. Actually we’d need this way more often. At least once a month. Even better would be a school dog or something like that. Or maybe a school donkey? The kids handle the animals with all the care and respect they never show for each other. One boy in particular, who already has a reputation for being difficult, was so totally taken in by the donkeys that he was the most peaceful and sweet kid all day.


a kid hugging the donkey and resting its face (obscured) on the back of the donkey
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Next week I get three days of donkey fun. Sometimes I love my job more than usually.