Happy New Year!

For Chinese New Year, I hung up a very sweet kite that a friend very graciously gave me for x-mas. It is very similar to one that I saw on a business trip to Taipei. This one apparently came from a dusty back room of a tiny kite shop in San Francisco's China Town.
This kite has a ~30' tail of tiny masks with feathers on sticks to presumably balance or damp the mask wings. I have to admit I have my doubts if it will fly or not... but after a quick check of youtube, sure enough there are several videos of people flying these things. Maybe when I get tired of it flying around the house I will take it to the park and give it a go!

Sewing Time: Dog Collars

The wife decide it was time for the dogs to have a change of neck attire. So out came Pinky (the pfaff sewing machine) and after some swearing out popped a spacey collar for the Goose.


The Goose thanking me for the new duds.
And some thing more demure for the dainty Vespa:


But still a bit spacey to match the Goose.
These were made out of 80mm of 1.5" wide fancy pants ribbon and 2" wide webbing. Also a slip buckle, snap buckle and a D ring all for 2" wide webbing.

The Dez, Castle Dome

On our recent trip to AZ, the wife decided we should climb the biggest mountain we could see from Wellton. It happened to be Castle Dome in the Kofa wildlife reserve which she found here. So on 01/01/09, yea 911 backwards we headed up this:

And sitting on top at 3788' it looks like this, but be careful of jumping cholla :

The wife climbing out of a cave about 400' below the top.

Sewing Time

In these apocalyptic economic times, it is time to figure out how to survive on our own. So for X-mas my cave wife got me a sewing machine. She of course got a Pfaff to match our German kraut making crock and highly designed German vacuum. Of course it came with many links to how to hem woman's pants. So of course my first real projects were for my Jeep. Here are some pictures of a bag I made that fits between the wind shield and the roll bar.

Yes, the machine is pink! Not exactly my favorite color but I can deal. Maybe other men would start sewing if they made them army green.

The wife picked out the red zippies. Which I have to say look quite good.It runs up the middle between the seats.



I found the limit of the Pfaff is 8 layers of nylon webbing. I am pretty impressed given that it is not an industrial machine. But it does have a walking foot thing that seems to help with many layers.

I also made some nylon door stops for the jeep out of nylon webbing. Those were 3 layers of nylon webbing and the Pfaff punched those out easy.