Updating: knitting, Advent decorations, and hands

Still knitting...

I think it will be about 3 metres long before I run out of wool. Then I shall have to start thinking about buttons - those little bumps you can see at regular intervals on the right side of the cuff are buttonholes. Fifty four of them and counting. I have a lot of buttons - I inherited 3 women's button boxes - but probably not enough of the right size and colour (whatever that is) even if I don't worry about them being all the same. I suspect EBay will be my friend.

 I've also got round to making another Advent decoration. I was sure she was going to end up a complete disaster, and I did make two bodices, two skirts and two pairs of wings, but in the end I quite like her. (Her wings aren't really wonky, though, and it reall life they curl back elegantly, as the sequin waste was on a roll.)

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And I've been playing around with a pleasing discovery in a Staples sale bin. Half a dozen disembodied hands.

Photograph them and app them with Flip-o-matic and you get lovely patterns. (Flip-o-matic always sounds to me like some thing Gromit invented.)

The most entertaining part of the week, for my audience but not me, was me trying to scan my hands. (It might have been even more entertaining if I'd tried to scan other parts of my anatomy, but hands were a big enough challenge for one day.)  I wanted to scan to Big Mac (copying would have been too easy!) which is about two feet to the left of the scanner: getting them closer isn't feasible.

Scanning my right hand was relatively easy. Except that the overview scan kept cutting off my finger tips, so I had to adjust it, using the mouse with my left hand. Fine tuned click and drag it wasn't.

Scanning my left hand involved crossing my arms. It dawns on me now that as it's a wireless mouse I could have moved it - but I would still have had to turn to the left to see the screen, even after I'd remembered that I could rotate to see it better. 

I couldn't solve the other problems:

1. My hand getting flattened on the platen, so it looks quite squelchy on the scans. (Good job I didn't try other parts of my anatomy...)
2. Not being able to get the back of my hand flat to the glass, so my thumbs are just shadows on the scans.

However, a bit of playing around with my favourite app, iColorama, and I got some passable results. My hands aren't really this wrinkly, honest.