Holy bloody eyeballs, Batman!

Daily double car-line waits mean small, easy projects get done. Also I now read more books in audio than print. (Weird: I still experience disorientation when switching from audio to print and back.)

I listened to Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book while making this bloody eyeball bag, which is from the pattern "Catch His Eye" by Leathra for the The Anticraft. (Note: The book is charming, not gruesome. I highly recommend it.)

Green and brown yarns for the iris are my approximation of hazel: inner ring of brown, middle ring of green, and thin spike-stitched outer ring of brown.

Alterations: I can’t count so the bag is bigger than planned (about 80 stitches around the outside of the iris). Extra ring in iris (see above). I was free and easy with increases throughout (see “I can’t count” above). Added an extra row of red around the top. I-cord handles, threaded a bit differently (I had the wrong number of loops).

Photo notes: I cheated and stuffed the bag with fiberfill for the photo. Without it, the sides are straighter and the iris puckers around the edge. I think I’m going to make a small padded bottom for the bag to correct the iris puckering. Laser eye surgery, if you will.

I wish my family had eyes in every color so I could make each of them a different eyeball. Ah well, the rest of my tribe have plain brown eyes. (I’m stretching it a bit to call mine hazel.)

I bet my son will want a red-irised eye anyway. And my daughter? Icy-blue like a wolf. Or so I hope, for variety’s sake.

My husband wouldn’t be caught dead with a bag of any type, so maybe I’ll make his violet. Ha.

Cut

photo by Esther17 on flickr under a Creative Commons license

What a thrill ----

My thumb instead of an onion.

The top quite gone

Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,

A flap like a hat,

Dead white.

Then that red plush.

Sylvia Plath

Well, it wasn't quite that bad; in fact, it was a coin toss whether to go to the doctor or nail it down myself with band-aids. When it kept bleeding after several hours, the doctor came up heads.

A vial of Special Glue Intended Only For Skin was applied*, a band-aid duly wrapped around it, and I was on my way. Well, after having a completely embarrassing adrenalin rush ("I feel faint") in which I was instructed to lie on the floor.

Y'know, I always thought that people who got faint at the sight of blood were just chickens. That the reaction was completely under their control. Well, it isn't.

Which isn't to say I'm not a chicken. But it most definitely was not under my control.

What I did have under my control was the decision to open a stubborn bit of plastic packaging with a dull pair of scissors held like a knife, blade-side up, my hand pressing the plastic bit down onto it. If I had seen one of my kids doing this, I would have screeched at them not to be so stupid, you're going to cut yourself like that.

Well, it was (stupid) and I did (cut myself like that). D'oh!

* Isn't it ironic that the doctor's Special Glue is, in fact, superglue? It really is great at sticking to skin, as anyone who has worked with it knows (sometimes painfully so).