Friday, August 9, 2013

Needle Felting Project : Peppermint Butler

Catching up on comics today!  Well.  Trying to, anyway. 

Loving the first issue of the new Adventure Time miniseries Candy Capers -- a noirish who-done-it starring Peppermint Butler and Cinnamon Bun.  Adventure Time?  Mystery?  Noirish?  I am so there.

Of these three on the cover, I'm not sure who weirds me out the most.  But hey, everyone likes tea time?
 

Reading this reminded me that I had never taken a good picture of my felted Peppermint Butler!  He's not my favorite character from the show (just... so... unsettling...) but he was definitely fun to make in my own style. Bows are always really fun to felt for some reason.  Trying to make them actually look at all ribbony is always a challenge!  


























Sunday, August 4, 2013

Agatha Christie Challenge

Believe it or not, I've never read an Agatha Christie novel.

Gasp!  For shame! What kind of reader are you?

The "Queen of Mystery" and I have, of course, encountered each other. She's almost impossible to miss! At least one of her novels sat, unread, on my shelf for years when I was a kid mostly uninterested in mysteries that weren't aimed directly at my age group. My friend picked the Agatha Christie episode of Doctor Who as the episode that would serve as my introduction to the show, and it left me hooked on the Doctor. My Netflix queue is littered with Marples and Poirots -- I've devoured the movies and the shows over and over with great relish and know their plots and characters by heart -- Agatha Christie's Marple with Geraldine McEwan is my favorite right now. Her books are in almost constant motion at the library -- right now we have a beautiful collection of the newish edition trade paperbacks from William Morrow. Patrons often check them out and excitedly recommend them. They're "classics," right? 

So, I'm starting here:



Since Marple is my favorite to watch, I've decided to start with the slightly less familiar Poirot and Tommy & Tuppence, with The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Secret Adversary respectively.

Why now? I'm in a YA slump right now and nothing is appealing to me, no matter how much it had excited me in previews. I'm a few books away from finishing the Phryne Fisher mysteries and just can't bring myself to come up to date -- then I'll have to wait longingly for the next one!  And, one day, while catching up on my book blogs, reading Stuck in a Book's report on her power as a slump-buster left me feeling like maybe Agatha might do the same for me, despite our different levels of familiarity with her work.

So we'll see!  I hope to report back with good results.