Twenty years, now and then, KnitOwl Toys

 

  

 

Someone whose mom bought a KnitOwl handsewn toy twenty years ago contacted me today with a picture of the much-loved kangaroo and it's tiny joey, intact after many washings and adventures.  It was heartwarming - and I remember many times when our own daughter E lost her own kangaroo's baby joey and we had to go looking for it among all the toys before she could sleep at night.   The fabric had originally come from a men's cotton shirt - and I had chosen it at a thrift store to make some quilts with.  The entire toy except for one seam was made with tiny stitches with a hand sewing needle and hand quilting thread, from my original hand drafted pattern.  The joey stood only 2.5 inches tall.

 

I think sometimes about making some more toys - and putting them up, but as I told her, life gets in the way and I am always off to do something else.  Even last week, I was wondering about making another one of the dinosaur world type toys I had sent to another friend's daughter - or the forest rabbit log toy that E had (and we spent some time with that bunny getting lost, as well, as it was supposed to live in the log *ha* and it had some leaves for food etc.)

 

 

Most of all, it was nice to hear that it had been loved, and brought joy to a child - which was the entire point of making them in the first place.  I tried to - through some sort of Velveteen Rabbit magic - put some sort of personality and happy feeling into every one hoping it would carry through in some way.

 

Thank you for sharing your memories with me, and letting me see that the craftsmanship really did hold up very well over the years.

 

Marie at KnitOwl Toys (formerly MarieMeyer.etsy.com) 

  

Minetest Mineclonia house with kelp garden

 

 In the Mineclonia version of Minetest, kelp can be grown on sand or gravel in water - not dirt - and the deeper you make the pool the taller it can grow.  When harvested, you must pull the entire strand and collect the extra, then replant.  Here are some kelp gardens built beside houses by the sea - each of them able to produce kelp, which can be dried in a furnace and used as a food source.  Once you find the other type of soybeans in the game (the brown ones, not the green ones) you can make baked tofu, and use the kelp with that to make other food.  This is part of the vegetarian plant based foods mod.

 

You can also find, as part of the Italian foods mod, these little Italian village gardens in some places in the world - it took me a long time to find one - but they have basil and the 'other' type of tomatoes that can be made into tomato sauce and is used to make pizza and lasagna foods.

 This shows what the basil and the other type of tomatoes looks like in your inventory.

Also, really weird thing - the blueberries, not in those gardens but just growing out in the world, can be made into lapis lazuli.  No explanation why.  Put a blueberry on your crafting board and it turns into a shard of lapis lazuli.  Put nine shards together and they become a block.  I haven't found it anywhere in the mining, and only found this by complete accident.  The lapis lazuli shards can also be used for making blue dye.