5 Things No One Tells You About Having Braces

Here we are m'dears. Hope we're in time for tea!

-Mr. Sappleton from The Open Window

That is a quote from the play I'm currently in. Tomorrow is the performance. I'm pretty excited. You're all invited, of course. It's a very short play, really – probably less than 30 minutes. But it's a lot of fun. It's Victorian, you know, so that's always enjoyable, to get to dress in old-fashioned clothing. It makes me feel strange afterwards, though, when I've been wearing three layers of skirts for over an hour and had my hair done so nicely, to just put on modern jeans and etc. 

Anyhow. Today we bring to you:

5 Things No One Tells You About Having Braces

1. The useful skills you learn such as taking your rubber bands out with your tongue or putting a wire back in place in less than 10 seconds will sadly not have any application elsewhere in life. No use putting it on your resumé.

2. When rubber bands give you a sore, there's nothing you can do about it.

3. Eating pizza in polite company becomes difficult, because although it's pretty easy to tear off pieces and not painful (try eating carrots, ha ha!), you'll need to pick crust out of your teeth afterwards and will have to hope desperately that your companions suddenly become interested in something on the opposite side of the room.

4. Those useful little brushes that they give you actually have a name. Christmas Tree Brushes.

5. You can't make a fish face with rubber bands in. You know, the one where you suck in your cheeks? Not happening.

Tutorial: Beautiful Bubble Book Garland!

Well, hello! Nice to see you. We gather together today to witness the union of – er, the making of a beeeauuutiful garland made of book pages! (The tissue paper flower poufs are not included.)

Psst… you can see Weenie if you look close.

Tutorial: Bubble Book Garland

by Lady Awdur

You will need:

• Scissors
• A pencil
• Oodles of books that you don't mind cutting up (they'll be ruined)
• Something round to trace around (I used a cookie cutter with a 3-inch diameter)
• A ribbon, as long as you want the garland (I made BLANK garlands BLANK feet long, so I used around BLANK feet of ribbon. Mine was white and ¼ inch wide)
• A sewing machine (glue might work, too, but I didn't try this so I don't know)

How you do it:

First, trace twice as many circles as you'll need (you get three circles per foot, so if you wanted to make a three foot garland you would trace (3x3) x2 = 18 circles. Got it?). I traced 300. In most I did all words, in some (to vary it up) I got some of the picture:

I mean, it's Weenie. Who wouldn't want him in the garland?

Then, cut out the circles (that's pretty self-explanatory). After you have all of your circles cut out, you will need to prepare them for sewing. Unless you cut your papers from books that have no pictures or anything and all of them look the same, you might have a preference which side is up. The circles are double layered, so that they have some strength and aren't just floppy little pieces of paper, so one side of each circle will not be shown. If you care which side is in and which side is out, you'll want to lay them out. For instance, Weenie's other side looks like this:

It's just not Weenie.

And I much prefer Weenie, so I grabbed another circle and put them together with the sides I wanted facing out. Once you've prepared all of your circles and stacked them (not on top of each other but just barely overlapping so that you can grab one circle pair without grabbing more than one), you'll need to get out your sewing machine.

The overlapping stacks.

Prepare the ribbon by cutting one edge in a forked design to guard against fraying and make it look pretty. Lay it across the sewing machine and put down the presser foot.

Make sure you have some tail to tie the garland with. Grab a circle pair, place it under the ribbon, and sew all the way across. Keep sewing for ½ inch to 2 inches (whatever you think looks best) past the circle (you'll just be sewing on ribbon at this point), then add another circle pair (herewith referred to simply as a "circle"), sew across, sew for an inch or so on the ribbon, add another circle, and so on.

My garlands were made to hang vertically, so I did very short garlands, no more than 11 circles on each, so if you were doing horizontal garlands you'd have to figure out how many circle pairs you'd need to do.
When you've done as many as you want, cut the ribbon and the threads of the sewing machine. You're done!

Here's what they look like at the end:

Sorry the picture is so bad. Hey, I'm not a photographer.

Close-up of the forked tail.

Hopefully you don't mind how the ribbon twists a little in between. You could probably eliminate this by sewing each circle on individually instead of sewing from on end of the ribbon to the other. That seemed like too much work to me, though.

I sewed these on a Singer Fashion Mate 252 – how crazy it is that a machine from 1971 runs so much smoother than my 2005 Singer Simple machine?? I guess they really don't make them like they used to.

Au Revoir,

P.S. Does anyone know how to get other google fonts beside Arial, Courier, Georgia, Helvetica, Times, Trebuchet and Verdana on Blogger? I thought I had it figured out… but no.
EDIT: Thank you very much to The Author for helping me with the fonts!

Blogging Event at To Write Or Not To Write!

I've participated in a blogging event–link-up-thing! The Author at To Write or Not To Write has posted a collection of tragic death scenes , and I have contributed. It is in fact, the next part in the story The Girls Who Are Not Princesses Who Dance Every Night Starting From A Certain Night and Who Sell Flowers. So pop on over and read 'em!
So, my sister is a senior this year. Which means I'll soon be the only bird left in the nest, since my other sister is already graduated (with baby on way!). Whoa. That's a scary thought. Remind me not to think it again.

On a different note, this is, in fact, the 100th post on this blog. Who would've thunk? This blog has had numerous reformattings, a variety of posts, and at least once I considered quitting and deleting it. Since May 2012 I have shared my thoughts, snippets, and [very occasionally] a recipe, review or tutorial of sorts. Thanks for letting me ramble!

A [somewhat long] snippet

The one thing about our house that had any worth was our garden. When my mother was alive she was famous for her garden. People would say, ‘Her husband not worth a shilling, but the most beautiful garden in the the country’. Mama loved her garden. It was filled with hundreds of types of flowers. Daffodils, tulips, begonias, peonies, pinks and poppies, lilacs and violets, marigolds, periwinkles, mums, lilies and daisies, all culminating in two huge magnolia trees that leaned over a stone bench like tender mothers with a favorite child. It was a favorite hidden spot of many a couple. Mama always favored lovers. All the flowers of the different seasons were interspersed among each other so no matter what month it was, that part of the garden would be in bloom. There was a large amount of holly, mistletoe, and burning bush, so even in the cold winter months there would be spots of color in the garden.

But the most beautiful of all were the roses. There were yellow roses, white roses, sunset-pink roses, tomato-red roses, golden-orange roses, and pink-garnet-colored roses, every one curvaceous, tender, delicate, with waxy petals soft and perfect as a lambskin. People from around the countryside would come to buy Mama’s roses: bride upon bride wanted white ones for their bouquets, widower upon widower wanted red ones for funerals, and mother upon mother wanted pink ones for christenings. Mama was generous with her roses. If two young people from the village who would soon be joined in matrimony had no money, Mama would give them her roses as a gift. But she always said she had to be generous to her garden, too. “I can’t strip the garden dry no matter how much I would be paid,” she told my father again and again. It was my mother’s flowers that kept us alive after she was dead.

My father always collected the money we’d made during the week on Fridays. Throughout the week we would take some out of our meager earnings for our meals, but we learned not to take out too much, because if we hadn’t earned enough Father would announce that something had to be sold.

“Let’s take a look,” he’d say.

“No, Father! Please not Marigold!” I cried.

“Well, it’s an expensive doll and if you can’t bring enough income we have to supplement it some other way.”

“Father, no!” I probably stamped my foot and started crying, but he took the doll anyway. It was not the first time my father sold our things to quench his thirst, nor the last. And so my sisters and I would stay in the streets until dusk, selling our flowers to any who’d buy. If we didn’t make enough we knew we’d have to eat a meager lunch – a few sweet rolls split between us, small portions for twelve girls. Times like that, as we spent the rest of the day standing hungry in our different streets, I’d wish I could feel my mother’s strong embrace again, and I’d tell myself I’d be satisfied with just a moment spent with her, but I knew it wasn’t true. I would not be happy with her being home for a minute. I wanted her back always. It was days like that I wished that we could sell on the same streets, because I desperately wanted to cry on my sister Magnolia’s shoulder.

-Excerpt from The Girls Who Are Not Princesses Who Dance Every Night Starting From A Certain Night And Who Sell Flowers

P.S. That's not the real title.