21st Century Girl

Simple Paper Craft

21st Century Girl — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 20:24:11 +0000

This looks lovely. Please see the full tutorial at Tip Junkie Paper Crafts!

Granny Squares: How to change colours and weave in ends as you go!

21st Century Girl — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 22:49:54 +0000

Thanks to a nice reader who asked a very good question, I’ve added this post that shows very clearly how to change colours and weave in your ends while you are crocheting your Granny Square. I hope you enjoy!

A raw petfood guideline

21st Century Girl — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:52:58 +0000

I am now caring for a large dog as well as my two feline friends. I’ve been feeding either homemade raw food or store bought raw food for my cats for over 15 years. Along the way thoughts on grains and cooked vs raw meat have evolved. A good guide I have found is Pat McKay’s on feeding raw food diets for cats and dogs. Below is a summary of what she has to say.

When feeding cats and dogs a homemade diet:
The breakdown is 35% muscle meat, 20% organ meat, 20% fat, and 25% vegetable (carbohydrates). Pat McKay specifies that these percentages are a guideline and that it is not essential that each meal be to exact proportions. For cats she says that ratios can go as high as 90% meat and 10% vegetable and that often it is easiest for felines to digest lightly steamed vegetables. I can attest to the fact that my cats love vegetables, particularly steamed broccoli! Note: the meat ingredients should all be from the same source (muscle and organs for example). PatMcKay is against bones in the cat and dog diet. You can read more about that here.

The only thing missing to this simple approach to cat and dog diets is the calcium they need. Pat recommends you order a specific supplement from her site, but this is just impractical for most as it ties you to a product that is not easily available. Most people will feed bones when feeding a raw diet to their cats or dogs. This is a good book for that investigation (if you have a dog): Give Your Dog A Bone. Sometimes raw food recipes come with a recommendation for bone meal as a supplement, or calcium tablets crushed into the mix. There is a ratio and it corresponds to the amount of meat you are using in your recipe.

Goggle Blog Search generated trackback comment spams: Incoming link strangeness

21st Century Girl — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:24:06 +0000

This is a short post to bring peoples attention to a very insidious form of spam. If you see a load of links in your Word Press blogs incoming links area that don’t make sense to you -this is spam and it is bad. Report such spam links via Google’s Report Spam form here.

Please read more here.

Tags: link, spam

Quick Christmas Gift Project: Sweater Mittens

21st Century Girl — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:50:02 +0000

Felted mittens made from thrift store sweaters. I love this idea. This is a quick post to get you started as I too will be making some of these. I’ve already found 2 thrift store sweaters, washed and felted them and now I’m ready to get started. Stay tuned for how mine turned out and for now please drool appropriately over what others have done!

The project in a nutshell:

Find 100% wool sweaters or just one sweater at your local thrift store.
Wash and dry them to felt.
Lay the sweater flat and plop one hand along the right-seam edge of the body of the sweater and trace
Do the same with the other hand along the left-seam edge of the body of the sweater and trace
Cut out your shapes leaving the seam functioning as a seam where it lies in your shapes
Cut liners in the same shapes in fleace if you like
Cut 4 inches off the arms at the cuffs if you want to sew on these as cufs for your mitts
Sew your mitts
Sew your liners and attach with your cuffs
Voila! You have cute recycled eco friendly, beautiful handmade mittens to gift or keep!

Links to the experts who can actually write a proper sewing patterns based on the same general idea:

Two Dancing Crows: Recycled Mittens from Wool Sweaters

Studio 5 Recycled Mittens