rabbit holes

one of my mom's favorite phrases when i was a kid was

  look it up

if i asked her how to spell a word 

look it up

or what is the capital of Chile

look it up

 or how many feet are there in a mile

look it up

 whatever i needed to know 
for whatever reason 
she almost always said

look it up

back then the looking up was in Webster's or our set of encyclopedias 

that a door to door salesmen talked a poor working family into buying when it was something they could really not afford ... but i digress 

anywho, she almost never let the answers roll off her tongue

 she said

look it up

 i dunno know if she realized that looking it up meant that for the next hour (or two or three) i would be in my own little world, reading the dictionary or the encyclopedia because, invariably, i would see something that led me to something else

 and then to something else 

and on and on...

anywho...

it's the same thing now ... i will wonder how to make a deliciously gooey lava cake 

or what the color name is for DMC Floss #319 (it's Very Dark Pistachio Green) 

or where to find a paper pieced pattern for a snowflake (not for the faint of heart)

and a couple of hours later i will realize that yes, indeed, there are forty-three gazillion possible ways to make lava cakes 

but now there is no time to bake one, so i dunno if it would be a deliciously gooey lava cake cuz i fell down a rabbit hole...

oh, those rabbit holes...

and that is how i stumbled across  Stitch Your Own Adventure - Letters From Hogwarts

(not a secure site, so if you don't go to not secured sites, don't follow the link)

the Stitch A Long started back in september of 2019, but i didn't discover it till late december
 and then lost the link a few times before i figured out how to bookmark it so i could show it to Melissa...

 i told her that i wanted to start it and asked if she was interested in stitching, too, 
she said yes, she was interested, very much so

and, even though we were hopelessly behind everyone else, we came up with a plan - we would stitch our own adventures and not worry about catching up with everyone else - it would be just Melissa and me competing stitching side by side...

so we set about getting everything ready to start our stitching...

we ordered fabric...

we needed a memory stick to take to kinko's in order to print the introduction and the floss list and the charts...

 we waited till there was a 40% off your entire regular priced purchase coupon for Joann's so we could buy two sets of floss and needles 
and then i typed up the floss labels whilst Melissa punched holes into snack bags, reinforced those holes, and put the snack bags on two big rings...

we found small backpacks shaped like owls...

 and Melissa made zipper pulls...

and scissor fobs...

we needed notebooks to hold our charts...

and journals for notes...

and totes for each of us...

and a big black basket to hold the totes...

and fabric for snippets and microwave-a-bowls...

we used seven of our Audible credits to buy all of the Harry Potter books to listen to whilst we stitch away...
and now that we have everything that we think we're gonna need
 it's time to stitch our adventures...

Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.
Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince