Fashion Plates 2.0

Does anyone remember fashion plates?  They were these plastic plates that set in a holder with grooves over the outlines of the person and outfit.  Then you put a piece of paper over the holder and rub over it with a crayon.  The plates represented the three parts of the model: head, torso, and legs so you could interchange all the outfits and accessories. I had a set when I was in elementary school, but they were New Kids on the Block. There wasn't much changing them up for me because putting Joey's head on Danny's body was just too weird.  Sidenote: the outlines never looked as neat as they did on the box because you were 6 years old rubbing a crayon furiously over the paper to get the outline to show up.  

The other day I discovered the upgrade to the fashion plates: Polyvore.  This site allows you to search user-submitted outfits by keywords as well as being able to find where the items are sold.  When you select an outfit to view, you mouse over the piece of clothing/accessory you want to know more about, and it brings up a thing that shows you who made the outfit and a link to the website.  It's amazing!  You could search by person, phrase, color, season, etc.  For example, I chose winter to look up cute ideas for wearing a skirt in the wintertime and checked this one out:

Vintage:

Cows:

Marilyn Monroe:

Endless amounts of fun!

Today is also a special day because it's my Giraffe's birthday!  I'm cooking him dinner and sticking to what I know I can fix: steak and potatoes.  No creativity this time.  Just a sure thing man pleasin' type of meal.  And I get to cook it on this thing:

I won this in a drawing at Home Depot before Christmas!  It was a lucky few months because I won the drawing at the book fair at work in October and scored a free cookbook and then got a call about this beauty in early December.  I keep thinking I should go buy a lottery ticket to see if my luck continues because these things come in threes.

Tomorrow night is going to be the big party for Giraffe so pictures to follow!

Christmas Revisited

Everyone around me seems to talk about the whirlwind of getting things ready for Christmas and don't mention the aftermath of Christmas: the reorganizing.  I know my place was a total wreck when I got back from spending Christmas at home because I had left almost everything where I had left it prior to going home.  There were rolls of wrapping paper on the floor, craft items on various workspaces, my sewing machine open with the last thread I was using still wound, several bags and receipts about, etc.  Not to mention, I had a birthday dinner party to get ready for the day after I got back to town.  So yay for my Giraffe for getting things ready while I was away and he was in town again.  (*huggles*)

Now that everyone has received their handmade gifts, I can finally post the results of my hard, albeit very fun, work.  I still need to retrieve some pictures from Victoria, so those will be posted later.

We'll start with the ones that were given out at the Thanksmas celebration at Foodie's house. His present is one of those pictures to be posted later, but his fiance got some custom recipe cards.

The guys in Giraffe's family got homemade beef jerky.  Some of the guys ate their whole tin of jerky before all the presents were even unwrapped.  Success!

Undy, who loves the color red, got an apron with little aprons on it.

Astro got a hobo bag that she decided to use for her laptop and accessories.  I also have to post her expression because one day she's going to win the Nobel prize and I like having these kind of pictures handy. 

For Victoria, I had to redo her present because I had originally used fleece instead of the final crocheting, and didn't allow enough room for your hand to go into the mitten.  So she got her Christmas present for her birthday, which is New Year's Eve.  However, she really got her present a week or two later at a Chick-Fil-A.  

These are no ordinary mittens.  They're smittens!  You and your person each wear a mitten on the outer hand and then there is a big one for both your hands between you.  So you can hold hands while walking around in the cold. 

It looks like Victoria is about to deck Bo.  Well, she might have.  It was too cold that night for me to remember much in the parking lot.

All in all, Handmade Christmas 2008 was a success, and I plan on doing it again this year.  I started on the presents early, but I took too long a break between starting and leaving for Christmas and some presents I didn't even come up with the idea until the last minute.  Let's just say I was pretty sick of the single crochet come Christmas.