Exquisite Turmoil

I suck so bad at blogging, seriously.  Honestly, life has been fairly boring recently.  Most of my time has been taken up with reading ratforums and sewing rathammocks and other things involved with rat obsession.  I actually registered a new domain name yesterday for ratblogging!  Don’t worry, I still intend to blog here, the rat page will just be for rat related items.

So, Dan and I have played a bit of WAR.  We’ve both got level 21 characters, mine is a Warrior Priest and his is an Ironbreaker.  The game is fun, but I’m having a little trouble getting into it.  Don’t get me wrong, it would be all too easy to get into it (we played basically nonstop for three days when we finished downloading), but as I’ve said about a million times before — I am an all or nothing person.  If I’m going to do something I am going to do it.  I don’t really want to get sucked into MMOs again, it just eats up so much time and I’ll admit that when I’m playing I kind of lose track of the world, and I don’t particularly feel like sinking back into that mire.  For that reason, I’m having trouble getting into the game.  I make myself not play as often as would be my natural inclination to do so and because of that I feel a sort of disconnect with the game.

Dan really enjoys it and would, I think, like to play in the longterm but I guess I’ll have to see where things go.  If I can find a comfortable equilibrium between playing all the time and not playing at all then I think that we’ll continue to play, but with the way I’m currently feeling about the game.. well.. I’m just not sure.  Only time will tell, I suppose.

My darling, adorable, wonderful husband took me to Joann’s yesterday to buy like $100 worth of fabric to make hammocks for my sweet rats! People on goosemoose make and sell hammocks (and for very reasonable prices) but I figured it would be fun and cheaper to make my own. Not to mention, then I can really pick any fabric at all that I want, and don’t need to be limited by what someone else has in stock. I decided to go for an elegant theme with my cage, rather than something cutesy / animal print / etc. Dan picked the red / yellowish one (second from the left) and I picked the rest. We also bought coordinating fleeces to line all of the hammocks (and to make floor liners so we can get right to work on litterbox training the rats) and metal eyelets so they won’t be tempted to chew the attachment points.

Here’s what I’ve completed so far. This is my least favourite of the fabrics (actually the one that Dan picked is, but he picked it so..) so I decided to make my first set of hammocks out of this one, so that I wouldn’t care so much about any mistakes (as, afterall, the ones done in my favourite fabric will hopefully look perfect). I don’t really like the basket thing very much — the handles didn’t work out the way I had been envisioning and the fabric pulled a bit while I was sewing it.. I must not have pinned it well enough. In any case, I’m happy with the standard hammock and the “double decker” hammock. Think I’ll try my hand at a triangular one now!

Obsession strikes again. With the rats not coming home until October 10th (we’ve set the date now) and no cage until Thursday, I really haven’t got anything to do that involves rats aside from reading the forums, and there is only so much forum reading that one can do when the community is so small.  Once I pick up the cage I’ll spend countless hours sewing fleece liners / hammocks / cubes / etc but for now.. I can embroider!  This is actually the first completely freehand piece that I’ve done, and I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.  I think it looks quite cute, at least.  I do see several things that I would do differently were I to embroider this same thing again (I’d use a different outline stitch, for one) but all in all, I’m happy ^-^  Now if only I’d embroidered it on something other than a huge pair of “I never wear these granny panties”.  If I had known how adorable it would end up being…

Well, I’ve finally finished one but I’m not really very happy with it. The flesh isn’t pallid enough for how I imagine my ghouls living, and there isn’t enough contrast on the model. There’s no place on him that is really dark, but I can’t seem to work anything dark in..  I tried getting a nice deep black or brown on the ribs, but I couldn’t get it to look right and just ended up going reddish instead and I am not happy with it.

The bones also look like crap.  They look too brown and not enough like bone, but further attempts to highlight them are producing a very unsightly streaky appearance.  I think I just need to set the model aside until after dinner and see what I can do with it further.. x.x  Right now, I think it will be much more pleasant to just sit around and dream about a cute little ratty.

Now if only that damned pot roast would either finish cooking or stop smelling so tempting and out of reach ;-;

So we’ve decided that if Anya is a good girl at school and doesn’t get any notes sent home, then on the 12th of September she’ll be allowed to get a little pet.  The preschool class next door to her kindergarten room has a guinea pig and she is quite jealous.  We don’t really want a guinea pig, they’re a little too large, but we managed to talk her into a hamster instead.

It appears, however, that we’ve actually decided on a rat. We’ve contacted some little ratty breeders and fallen in love with the blue one in this picture. You can’t really just have a single rat, however, so we’ll be getting a second ratty as well although we haven’t decided on one. The breeder is going to move this little girl in with a group of other young rats and see who becomes her best friend.

The problem with this is.. now if Anya isn’t good at school I’m going to die. I think I want the rat more than she does QQ I probably shouldn’t have started looking until closer to the “good until” date, but with pets that are uncommon (rats, degus, certain birds, etc) it can take a while to locate a reputable breeder with good little pets. I managed to find one quite quickly, however..

Oh man, she had better be good!

On a Warhammer note, I’ve started work on painting my ghouls. I’ve actually tested out a few paint schemes and hated them all like.. utterly. The one I’m working on right now will actually be using the same pinkish flesh as the wings on my Varghulf and I will (hopefully) tone it down to be a bit more greenish on the larger bits of skin. Anyway, we’ll see how it comes out.

Meh, I seem to have gotten out of the habit of blogging every day while we lacked internet.  It used to be that I’d have to stop myself from blogging too often and clogging up my pages, but now I’m having to force myself to sit down and write something.  Hopefully in a few days (or weeks, who knows) I will be back in the swing of things.

Anyways — I haven’t really done any painting since I finished up the wolves.  I’ve greenstuffed all of the ghouls up and primed them, but I haven’t started painting (although I have been dreaming of paint schemes).  I spent some time yesterday magnetizing my dire wolves (although I made Dan cut the steel sheets for me) and am quite pleased with them.  They’re strong enough that I can flip them upside down and give them a shake without dislodging them, but I can still easily remove them from the movement tray.  I also put magnets onto the bases for the ghouls that I am painting up, although I obviously haven’t made a movement tray for them yet.  Honestly I’m feeling a bit meh about it since I’m not sure how big to make it.

I usually start my ghoul units somewhere between 15-20 models, but I often end up with much more than that since my Lord takes “Summon Ghouls” as a power and I do so love to pump out ghouls like crazy.  I don’t really want to make a movement tray for like 30 models, though, because it’ll look retarded sitting on my display shelf with all of that empty space going on.  I don’t currently own enough ghouls to fill in for all of the ones that I raise (go go empty bases ftw), so it’s not even like it can sit on the display shelf full and move around the board not full.  Perhaps I should make a movement tray for 20 to keep on the shelf and a spare movement tray for games?  I suppose I have plenty of steel for it..

On a non-Warhammer related note, I’ve been working on an embroidered present for Jamie’s baby and I’ve been slacking on it recently.  I really need to sit down and get it finished, I’ll feel like a tard if it isn’t done by the baby shower.  What I’m making is a little pair of baby booties and on the bottom is an embroidered letter being hugged by a bear. The little left bootie will have an L (for Liliana) and the little right bootie will have a P for her last name.  Then, on the top of the booties is a cute little pink embroidered ribbon.  I’ve finished the letter and bear on one bootie and most of the ribbon.  I’ve actually done a test of both letters and a complete ribbon on scrap material and I’m pretty happy with how they’ve turned out, I just need to do them on the real cloth now.  Gosh, I’ve been such a slacker lately…

I have finally managed to paint an entire unit!  A unit of five models, albeit, but it is still a unit!  I’m quite pleased with how they turned out (and with how quickly I painted them).  These models are actually the main reason why I decided that I wanted to play Vampire Counts.  I absolutely fell in love with them when flipping through the Vampire Counts codex.  After that, of course, I fell in love with the lore for Vlad and Isabella, but the Dire Wolves are definitely what first attracted me to VC in the first place.

Now.. what to paint tomorrow?  I think I’ll try my hand at a ghoul.  I’ve got ten assembled (although their legs still need a bit of greenstuff, methinks) so it shouldn’t be too much work before I’m ready to get started on those.  I think I’m going to go for a skin tone that could belong on a human, since they’re really just humans who have turned into cannibals and shun the light.  Anyway, we’ll see!

Yes, indeed, the wolves are going well. I’ve finished two and I’ll be starting in on the third as soon as I finish this blog.  Wolf #2 still needs some touchup, but I didn’t really want to mix up batches of paint just to touch him up, so he’ll be getting fixed as I am painting wolf #3.  Save my beautiful, expensive VMCs!  Now if only I could find the headache medicine…

Well, he’s moving along. I decided against the brownish red on the ears as I just couldn’t find a nice way to blend them into the skull (I suppose I could have greenstuffed on tattered skin but I feel like painting today, not greenstuffing), so I ended up going with a pinkish/white as per the more solid muscle wall (that being the muscle still clinging to plates of bone). As of right now, the fur needs to be touched up (it’s chipping like crazy, which is very strange on a plastic model) and perhaps some fun work done on the teeth. A bit of blood, perhaps? Also, taking suggestions on the bones. They’re looking rather yellowed in the picture, even if they don’t look quite that yellow in person. Do you think that I should highlight them up to be more white, or leave them as they are?

I’ve decided to give the Varghulf a small rest, even though he’s so close to completion. He’s just not “clicking” with me at the moment, and I think that if I take a few days to paint something else I’ll be able to see him with a fresh perspective when I pick him back up. I’ve decided to continue progress on the Dire Wolves in the hopes that they will give me some ideas (as they are using similar colors to his wings and the cuts on his back). With the Varghulf, it is mainly the fur that is eluding me, so I’m praying that completing a Dire Wolf will spark some form of idea.

Anyway, here you can see the further progress I’ve made with this Dire Wolf. His fur is completed for the moment, as are his muscles. I’ll be painting the bones next, and then we’ll go from there. I’m pondering painting the ears and any hanging skin that I can find in the same reddish brown tones as the Varghulf to see if I like the reddish brown together with the black fur (and, if so, I’ll try out black fur on the Varghulf). If not, then I’ll do the ears a whitish color to blend in with the exposed bones, but in a slightly warmer tone. Only time will tell! Dun, dun, dun…