Every Inchie Monday: question

Hello folks - thanks for dropping by,

I'm not even going to bother finding the exact passage where the word question comes up because the question in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is so famous:  What is Life, the Universe and Everything?

Now you must give me a little bit of slack here for doing the obvious.  I thought I was being so clever because I made these inchies before I realized all the words were from The Hitchhiker's Guide:

And here is my quilled question:

 I think I will start working on the animals soon but I don't think I'm going to quill them this time.  I've gotten away from quilling and am into crocheting amigurumi right now.  And I can't imagine trying to quill one inch animals.

Have a good week.

Every Inchie Monday: "Lighting"

Hello Folks,

Well once again I can't find my Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (time to do some cleaning).  However, I probably would not have found the correct word because I misread the prompt for this week as "lightning" not "lighting" - lol.  So rather than re-do my inchies, I decided that lightning lights up the sky so would do for "lighting".  Here goes:

My first lighting is lightning hitting the CN tower in Toronto.  According to Google. "The 553.33-metre [1815 feet] freestanding structure gets hit on average 75 times a year."  So much for "Lightning never strikes twice in the same place".

And here is my quilled "Lighting":

So that's enough uses of the word light, and quotation marks.  Have an illuminated week.

Every Inchie Monday: wormhole

Hello Folks

I wonder if wormholes exist?  Sometimes the lines between science fiction and science get a little blurry.  If they do, they probably aren't interstellar travel hubs like most SF seems to think!

Chapter 19 of HHGG opens with the statement that "careless talk costs lives....at the very moment that Arthur said 'I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,' a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy" where a war is about to start.  Arthur's words pop up across a negotiating table but it seems in their language it is 

"the most dreadful insult imaginable" and a centuries long interstellar battle begins.  The ships travel for years "and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across -- which happened to be the earth -- where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."

That was not easy to condense!  but it's one of my favourite images in the book.

Thinking literally, here is a worm in a hole.  It probably should be a red hole so as to be in an apple, but somehow it ended up blue.

My quilled inchie reflects how I think of SF wormholes with a big opening tapering to a small end part:

Guess the moral of Adams story is to be careful what you say, even if it seems completely innocent.

Have a good week.

Every Inchie Monday: Cloud

Well folks, I think this week I have to admit defeat.  I can't find cloud in the part of the part of the book we are at.  Maybe I missed it or maybe it's earlier in the book, but there comes a point where the search is no longer fun, so I stopped looking.

[edit - see Jenny J's comment below - she found it]

Here are my inchies.  The first is simply happy little clouds floating across a blue sky:

I included some rain with the quilled inchie because clouds are not always simple benign happy things:

I'm a bit disappointed that I couldn't find cloud, but nevermind.  Have a happy week.

Every Inchie Monday:Coastline

Hello Folks -- Happy Halloween!

Had to go back a bit in the book to find coastline (tricky Trillian), but the only coastline I could find is good old Slartibartfast and his fascination with fjords -- "doing the coastlines was always my favourite,"  he says. [chapter 22]

Did you know that Canada has the world's longest coastline? -- 265,523 km, or 164,988.3 miles [conversion by Google].  The figure varies a little according to which source you use, but it is still more than twice (not far from three times) that of Indonesia which comes second.  It's all those little islands in the Arctic, I suppose, and being the second largest country in the world.  When we talk about the vastness of this land we say from coast to coast to coast (because we have three oceans).

Now what to quill for coastline  Best I could come up with is a lighthouse to guard all those many miles and the ships that pass by.  I even included a little gem for the light.

Come visit Canada some day - it is truly a glorious land.   And according to Lonely Planet it's the best travel destination in the world for 2017.  And 2017 is our 150th birthday.

Every Inchie Monday: Pirates

Arggh Mateys, 

Pirates you say, in TheHitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy?  You bet, but space pirates, of course!

Ford and Zaphod are talking about their childhood on Betelgeuse, and Arcturan megafreighters.  Apparently "The Betelguese trading scouts used to find the markets and the Arcturans  would supply them.  There was a lot of trouble with space pirates before they were wiped out in the Dordellis wars..."  [chapter 29].  Nice to know space is safe from pirates now.

I drew two inchies - one of a pirate with his peg leg and parrot:

And what self respecting pirate would be without his map for buried treasure?

My quilled pirate inchie goes outside the inch a little bit.  Hope you can forgive this transgression, but  it was hard to fit my pirate's parrot into the required space,  His beak and glorious tail hang over a bit, but he is pretty

Finally, here is my latest and favourite amigurumi - Dorothy from my all time favourite movie.  

She was difficult to make because I altered a pattern for a witch (by Sayjai Thawornsupacharoen).  I had to make the body twice and the arms/sleeves three times before I was happy.  I love the sparkly ruby slippers with their teeny tiny bows and the white 'buttons' on the straps of her dress as well as the blue around her neck.  It's as close to the original dress as I could make it.  I want to find some blue gingham ribbon for her hair bows and I'm contemplating doing something like white cross stitch to give the illusion of a gingham dress.  The hair is a bit long but so far I haven't been able to make myself cut it.  I had so much fun making her.

Have a good week my lovelies.

Every Inchie Monday: Horizon

Hello Folks - thanks for stopping by.

Well finding horizon (this week's word at Every Inchie Monday) was easy because it's in the same passage as direction, so I'll just copy last week's entry:

"...Zaphod was standing and scanning the horizon, because that was how far the gold ground stretched in every direction. perfectly smooth and solid.  It gleamed like ... it's impossible to say what it gleamed like because nothing in the Universe gleams in quite the same way a planet made of solid gold does."

On to the inchies.  My first offering uses one point perspective which I used to love to teach to students.  Three little rules and instant success.  It was always so satisfying to see their faces when they realized they could actually do something that at first thought seems difficult.  We also used to let the students out of the classroom to draw the hallways which the students always loved - no way to supervise them all at the same time -- freedom!

My quilled inchie is quite simplistic with a generic sun and a straight horizon - but not too bad considering it is quilled.

Have a great week expanding your horizons.