This is a free and easy pattern for everyone to enjoy. Please check out the Mochimochi Land Shop for more patterns that you’ll love!
This is Bob. Bob’s shape was inspired by the plastic thing that floats in your toilet tank. He’s not an elephant, or an anteater. He’s just Bob!
As a summertime knit, Bob is made of cool nylon yarn, but you can make him out of almost any yarn you like. The pattern is knitted in the round on double-pointed needles. Continue reading “Free Pattern: Bob”
Tezzcan just added the sweetest photo to the Flickr group.
I am blown away by her gorgeous tri-color Rainycloud and the touching image of her son Jack modeling it. Tezzcan says that after the photo was taken, her Rainycloud was sent off to her husband, who “is somewhere hot for four months with the British Forces.” It’s now hanging by her husband’s desk.
I hope it’s reminding him of both the cool rain and his beautiful family.
Owasso, Oklahoma, is my hometown, which I’m visiting right now. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the city – open skies and strip malls and a church on every corner – which I can appreciate so much more now that I’m no longer living there.
When I’m home, I always make some time to peruse the Owasso Reporter. In addition to the pageant queens and local parades and the occasional sex offender story, in recent years the paper has also included all the police calls and arrests from the week. They are generally a riot and make Owasso seem like the the oddball suburban town that it never really was.
Browsing the past week’s calls, many of them struck me as more poetic than droll, so I thought it might be interesting to rearrange some selected calls from the week into an imagined day in the life of my hometown. You could almost build a very atmospheric movie or novel out of these slices of humanity. (Street addresses have been omitted.)
10:54 a.m. – Check person. Elderly man all dressed in white staggering. Out with subject. Arrest.
1:43 p.m. – Accident no injury. Parking lot by the baseball field, vehicle was backed into by a semi, Mountain Dew truck. Report.
2:06 p.m. – Found property all. Someone left a crate box of chemical bottles on the corner near the church. Handled.
3:26 p.m. – Found property all. Small piece of luggage placed on her driveway, she has had problems with neigbors and is afraid to open it, would like officers to check on it. Unknown if this found property or supplemental. Recovered a large amount of jewelry. Report.
3:33 p.m. – Follow up all. Caller thinks the man that stole her radar detector a few months back just walked into the store, saw her and then left. Report.
3:56 p.m. – Check person. Kids are swimming in Three Lakes pond behind the gas station, caller asked the father to not allow them to swim, he said no. Handled.
4:56 p.m. – Check person. Subject passing out fliers for restaurant, took a large hand full and just threw them into the air and let the wind blow them around. Spoke with manager of restaurant to have the subject come back and clean up his mess.
5:20 p.m. – Follow up all, reported at PD. Caller advised that his house was broken into on May 31. He has filed a report with Rogers County and has been in contact with Rogers County deputy, who advised him that officers from Owasso has located a bag of jewelry on the same day and that they would need grandma to identify it. Handled.
7:32 p.m. Vandal in progress all. Subjects are rocking the Timmy and Cindy statue. Handled, subjects are no longer playing around the statue.
8:30 p.m. – Juvenile nuisance/truant/other. Parking lot, gray shirt, brown hair, is waiting on a boy to get out of the movie to fight with and is out arguing with his ex-girlfriend, blonde, teal shirt and jean skirt. Handled.
1:08 a.m. – Check person. Four Hispanic males chugging on some beer. Handled.
1:39 a.m. – Check vehicle. Silver Dodge truck, keeps driving by a stop sign that has been run over. Handled.
2:21 a.m. – Disturbance loud noise/music. Loud music. Handled, officer advised they pinky swore to keep it down.
To my great joy, I just discovered that the crime blotter is now published online for me to enjoy from anywhere in the world. What a wonderful gift from the town that made me what I am today.
Today I discovered an incorrect link in the Gallery section of Mochimochi Land! I thought I had been directing people to the Mochimochi Friends Flickr group, where everyone (including you!) can share photos of toys they’ve knitted from Mochimochi Land patterns, but it turns out that it was the wrong link all this time.
There I was, with about 7 members of my extended family gathered around the computer. I clicked on the link to show them the great photos people had taken, and I clicked, then clicked again, and well, it was just a little embarrassing.
But now the link is fixed! So hopefully even more people will check out the great photos and add more of their own. For example, who knows how many people have missed seeing this funny photo by Mikkers:
Her Grass wishes he were cabbage. Or maybe he’s trying to disguise himself. Either way, it’s super-cute.
So if you have a Mochimochi Land toy you’d like to share, please join the group!
I didn’t mean to write a “worst of” series of Whole Foods purchases, but I feel obligated to warn against this mistake before others make it:
I’m not a picky eater, especially not when it comes to salads. I can be pretty forgiving, because really, what is it? Usually fresh greens and other, more colorful vegetables, with something tangy drizzled on top. Even the worst salad – iceberg lettuce, say, and too much ranch dressing – is completely fine with me. So when a dressing makes a salad inedible, it’s a real shame.
The above pictured dressing is so bad, we had to throw out the better part of an otherwise yummy tofu salad. The flavor had nothing to do with shitake (which I love) or sesame (which I also love), but instead was like something made from a powder for diabetics or astronauts. It tasted like the dressing McDonald’s would come up with if it were folly enough to try to make a sodium-free, sucrose-free, fat-free, “organic” dressing substitute. But McDonald’s is much smarter than that. (And this dressing wasn’t fat free, amazingly enough.)
So that’s one less bottle of dressing you’ll have to choose among next time you’re at Whole Foods. But shouldn’t we be making our own dressings ourselves? It seems like one of those things that’s easy to do, but I never get around to remembering how for long enough to actually make it….
Do you remember Bob? Bob remembers you!
Bob, who was christened by you wonderful readers, will be the next free Mochimochi Land pattern. He or she is coming very soon, but in the meantime, I thought I’d share a sneak peek at the new and improved Bob:
The changes are subtle- I just plumped her up a bit and made the tail part of the main knitting, instead of a separate piece. And the snout is a bit shorter now.
Check back soon to learn how to knit a Bob of your own!
O frabjous day!
The pattern for Sleepy Snake & Mischievous Mouse is now in the Mochimochi Shop!
This is the first interactive toy in Mochimochi Land – Mischievous Mouse can crawl into Sleepy Snake’s belly, and back out again. (Don’t try this at home, all you naughty mice!)
A-L-S-O, today is the debut of our new shopping cart system in the shop! We hope it will make buying Mochimochi Land patterns more fun and easy for all of us.
This weekend I pulled out some of my old ikebana magazines to show to a friend, and I fell in love with it all over again.
If you’re not familiar, ikebana is the traditional art of Japanese flower arrangement.
Like many of the traditional arts in Japan (calligraphy, tea ceremony, kimono putting-on), ikebana is compelling in its beauty and profound simplicity and its design that is surprisingly modern-looking to Western-trained eyes.
An arrangement is meant to capture the essence of a particular flower, and, ultimately, of nature itself. At the same time, as a work of art, an arrangement is acknowledged as an artifice. In order to capture the essence of a flower in ikebana, sometimes you have to bend or break stalks, insert wires, or even add obviously “unnatural” elements like plastic.
There are many different schools of ikebana, and different styles within those schools. The last time I was in Japan, I studied the Ikenobo school of ikebana. My sensei was very nice, but very disciplined – for some arrangements, she would show me a diagram of exactly how each leaf should be placed, and at what angle. (These were the “shoka” arrangements, for which there are crazy-strict rules for each different type of flower.)
Then there was “freestyle” arrangement. For this, my sensei would give me a bunch of flowers and tell me to do whatever I liked with them. Then, when I finished arranging them, she would pull them all out and show me how I should have arranged them. It was my own weekly Karate Kid experience, which I loved.
Here is one arrangement I did that I particularly liked (I believe it was shoka) – the flowers bloomed over the course of a week or so after I took it home:
Looking again at all this gorgeousness, I feel that it’s time to finally pursue some lessons in New York. I’ll have new photos to share if so. In the meantime, you can see more ikebana here.