The Dino-Aspie Ex-Café (for Those 40+... or feeling creaky)

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yeah, i know. keeping the spikester alive was quite a battle (that feeding him every half hour round the clock was just brutal, and by the end of 10 days i was a jibbering basket case), and it's possible that there was something wrong with the little dove from the start. still, i'd bought the infant bird formula and had a syringe ready to use to feed it. i just didn't act quickly enough, i think. i just wish the little thing had had a fighting chance. i'm guessing it was the the first-hatched got all the food.

perhaps he'll try to come back again, in the next egg?

Hi everyone.


I',m still in the throws of a needle felting obsession.....(and no, I will not call it "special interest" or "perseverance" ,I know what an obsession feels like and that is what I get) .

Someone sent me an interesting article about Empathy and Aspergers that I thought some of you might want to read .

http://www.thestar.com/article/633688

I also wrote about it in my blog if anyone cares to comment there....

http://eyesoftime.blogspot.com/

My opinion....is that empathy is just like the other senses...sight,sound,ect and that just as some aspies have heightened sense in some areas and lower sense in others...this could also be true of empathy . Maybe the sensory organ is some where we haven't discovered a use for yet...like the appendix or the tonsils ? Perhaps it is the root of my constant sore throat...(the world sure is filled with a lot of pain .)


I went to my first craft festival and sold $360 worth of my felting things and have been invited to sell at a "art crawl" in October if I get up the nerve . I still haven't listed any of it in my Etsy store because I can't seem to figure out how to take good pictures or find the right size boxes or figure out postage . I really suck at business but I sure love buying and playing with all the pretty wool .


I was going to add some pictures but I forgot how .

Congrats on the book Lemon and the weight lose Blessedmom and your up-coming trip Nan and I hope the rest of you are surviving the nasty economy....poor Obama .

Love the Allsorts Sleepydragon . Are you selling your work any where now ?

Sorry to hear about the wee birdy Nan.....nature is brutal .

I went to a big craft show a few weeks ago, and there was a little bit of needle-felting work displayed there, but nothing as nice as what you have up on your blog, krex. The little hamster is cute, and I like the whimsical critters with the big eyes. Lovely combinations of colours, too.

Haven't sold any of my polyclay creations, so I have takeaway-Chinese food boxes full of everything I've made, but not yet given to anyone. (Including the lemon beads and the pomegranate beads. ) I've joined up on a clayers' site as well, and most of the people on there have etsy accounts. Most of them do things at a much more technically-advanced level than I do. I'm soaking up ideas like a sponge. Now I'm thinking I need one of those rock tumblers for sanding and buffing. My neighbours won't be too thrilled if I get one of those cheap kiddie tumblers, I hear they make a heck of a racket.

That empathy article was an interesting read, and so was your blog entry about it. I too have often wondered if shutting oneself off to the emotional radiation being emitted from those nearby is a defence mechanism, so that you don't feel like you're being sandpapered all over.

Thanks for looking at my felting Sleepy . I watch what others are selling on Etsy and don't see to much that is like what I do...some are better and some worse but most people do miniature creatures around 2-4 inchs and mine are comparatively large . I just don't have the dexterity to do miniatures and end up poking my fingers with the little barbed needle . I had the same problem when trying to use Femo and even make jewelry....I just have fumble fingers and end up dropping anything small .

Nan, I tried to learn knitting this weekend and it was a disaster....it looks so easy when I see someone do it on TV but I have already forgotten how to hold my hands and where the yarn goes . I also collect yarn because I can use it for the needle felting but now have so much I thought I better learn to knit . There are so many glorious yarns out there ....Does she have a favorite ? Has she ever considered spinning her own ?

very nice krex, it must be wonderful to visit you, i'm sure i would sit next to you and start immediately to be involved in this creations
also, what a large production! so much since i visited your website last time

and i must read the empathy article, will do that soon

it is a real nice effect this felting, but i do not know what it is. i do not see stitches or so?

Hi Lemon , So exciting to hear about your book !

The needle felting I do is with bits of dyed combed wool that you sort of roll into a shape and poke with something that looks like a long sewing needle . It has little barbs on it that make the wool fibers open up and get tangeled together . If you keep poking it and sort of shaping it, eventually it forms a solid shape . It's a little like sculpting with clay except that one of those animals can take me 8-16 hours of poking to get solid . I think for hand flappers it is very soothing motion to keep poking up and down . There isn't any sewing or stuffing involved...these are solid wool .

You can find some videos on utube about it . It's the most fun I've ever had with a craft . I love the feel of the merino wool and the amazing colors people dye it . I think you would really enjoy it if you gave it a try . I could mail you some basic supplies if your interested . All it takes is a bit of wool, a needle . Lately I've been working with a blend of merino and tencel <---this stuff is actually made of Eucalyptus tree fibers and is as soft and shiny as silk .

Interesting stuff.

My wife has recently started raising llamas and alpacas. The fiber is really gorgeous stuff. She and her friends are having some problems in transforming the raw fiber into yarn. There are professionals who do. But for some reason, they are all running months behind in processing orders.

oh poop. last weekend it was nice and overcast, maybe in the mid 70F range. perfect for the kid's birthday party. but a good friend of hers was not going to be able to make it, so she moved the party to today.

it's 90F out now, and not a cloud in the sky. that sun is just brutally strong. fortunately, the park has some very nice, dense shade trees and they watered the lawn this morning, so the grass is offering up a lot of water and, thus, cooling the air under the trees. i just left her over there (it's about 5 minutes from the house) with her friends, since nothing kills a party faster than a parent sitting in on it.

they're all not playing badminton or croquet (we found some cheap sets at target last week and thought they'd be fun). they're all sitting with her on some blankets under the shade trees and talking. (which is nice, because she can't come out from under that tree except for a few minutes, carrying an umbrella.) have to watch the temp pretty carefully - another 5 degrees and she needs to be in under an a/c regardless of it being her birthday party today or not. thank goodness for cell phones.

cooked 'em a mess of chicken, italian sausages, and hamburgers, and they were making a good dent in the pile when i left. amazing how much food young people can put away without appearing to do so!

now, the other problem in life. squab. this is chicken and chickenette's offspring. (until we know the gender so we can give it a proper name it is "squab"). chicken has never paid any attention to taking turns helping care for squab. chickenette has just decided yesterday that she's paying him no more attention. today he's out of the nest, but unable to get them to feed him. he should be fed by his parentbirds at least another 10 days... this is not good. i got some food for him, but it's not as easy as with finches. finches open their mouths and you just shovel the food in. doves, apparently, are used to shoving their beaks up their parent(s)' throat to be fed. i've tried making some formula and putting it in a tiny bowl, and shoving squab's beak into it, but he's only taken a few mouths full, as far as i can tell.

sigh. how to feed a bird that doesn't know what formula is when you can't do the "pry the beak open and squirt the food in.".... anybody ever raised a baby dove?

ok, nevermind on the dove problem. i got him/her out and got him/her to lap some formula out of a spoon. to the distress of his/her mommybird. i put squab back in the cage, strong enough now to peep vigorously, and mom came and did what mommy doves should do.

damn, that is a particularly disgusting evolutionary tactic! squab flew up to a branch in the cage a bit ago. they sure do mature a LOT faster than do little zebra finches.

Ok, the soap opera continues. Squabie is eating fine. Got home yesterday from work to find that HeaveCliff, Spikey's little brother/sister (cousin? I can't remember anymore) had fledged and fallen to the bottom of the cage. Where, apparently, the doves went after him as a threat to Squabie. Poor little thing got beat up pretty badly -they pulled all the feathers off his head and he's got blood blisters now where they continued to peck him. He was almost unconscious when we found him, crumpled up in the corner.

We got him out, kept him warm, got a little thin formula down him last night. He seemed to want to sit with the kid, as if we put him in the box he kept fluttering up to be near her face, so he got to sit in her hand for a few hours as they watched tv. We put him in the hospital cage later, under the heat lamp. Every 30-45 minutes I got him to take a little bit of the formula mix. By 10pm last night he was pecking the syringe and turning around to give me his back (take the hint there, lady), so I put him in a little canary nest in a spare cage and was able to catch his mother and put her in there with him. She was pretty traumatized last night, but this morning she's feeding HeaveCliff, which is good, as he's got at least a week to go before he can feed himself. Nothing wrong with his vocal cords, he's damned noisy! Poor thing looks like a vulture, though. Beautiful toffie colored feathers all over his/her body, capped by a blood-red head with bruises all over it.

The other part of the soap is that the kid spent about 6 hours in the park on Sunday sitting under some really dense shade trees. And ended up sunburned anyway. She HAD sunscreen on. She was red in the face last night, with that bleary-eyed too-much-sunlook, and running a fever and feeling really bad. Said she started feeling bad on Sunday night, could hardly sleep. Wish I'd have known, so we could have taken a photo for the doctors. That shade under those trees was pretty thorough - I thought that it was pretty much like being under a tent, hardly any sun got through. She was in the direct sun only for as long as it took to walk to the car - about 2.5 minutes.

Of course, me, I woke up yesterday itching like mad. All over. Can't find the source, no new food or medications, no new laundry soap, no discernable pattern, just itching like mad. I should invest in a hydrocortisone cream factory.... just rinsed off once again, no change. I thought maybe it was because I laid on a blanket in the grass for about a half hour on Sunday, but I wasn't on the grass. Doesn't make sense.

Sigh. And then, there's the Governator and his IOUs....

This will all be very funny, someday, I'm sure.

Oh, OW!

Welcome to the Café, 2Left. Llamas and alpacas: Do they get on well together, or do they have to be kept in separate grazing areas? Beautiful wool, indeed. It's amazing the variety of fibres sitting around waiting to be gathered up and played with. I've heard of people making art from clothes-dryer lint (not much of a palette there to work with ) and collecting fur shed by the family cat to spin into yarn. I'm a collector of yarns myself, textured cotton yarns in bright rainbow colours mainly, nothing too "out there."

HeaveCliff, awesome name! And sorry to hear about the all-over itching, Nan; I would have guessed bug-bite — except that that's usually more localised (unless they got you everywhere, yikes!).