Wednesday, June 4, 2008
In case the garden wasn't time-consuming enough.
On my desk (okay, a temporary folding table in the middle of the living room):
Chocolate peeps!
Actually, Khaki Campbell ducklings. Eight of them, of which we'll be keeping four or five. (The remainder will either become someone else's flock, or duck dinners. Our son is lobbying hard for the former, and since KCs are better layers than meat birds, it would make more sense.)
But really, that's not what's been keeping me busy. Garage sales (having, not going to), still more medical stuff (Mom had a hernia repaired Monday, and just came home today), and so forth. I've actually done some sewing: hemming maternity pants, and sitting around at the garage sales and hospital waiting rooms working on bears and such.
And then catastrophe struck. I carry my portable sewing stuff in a tote, and for times when I want to be really portable, inside the tote is a tin with all the essentials. And you guessed it: I lost the tin. It had Flower Bunny's body, the elephant prototype, Really Tiny Fuzzy Bear (one that hasn't made it to the to-do list, because I started it at the garage sale)... and all my good scissors.
Last night I found it: it was cleverly disguised by being upside down. (Never mind it's my only heart-shaped tin. I guess my brain just doesn't work that way.) Whew. Back on track.
Well, except for ducks. And the housework that's piled up while I was at the hospital all week...
Labels: wednesday
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Why I haven't been blogging
I've been putting in a garden:
It's addictive. You start planting stuff in anything that holds still:
Most of the hard work is done (the beds are all constructed, now it's just a matter of watering and weeding and harvesting and replanting), but that doesn't mean I have a lot of free time yet:
But I've taken time out to make things:
Obviously, there's still a lot of cleanup to be done. But it's supposed to rain this week, so maybe I'll do some sewing.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Maintaining your blogroll
I have always been really awful about maintaining my blogroll, in part because I've had mixed feelings about them. I'd go to a site I liked, and there'd be this daunting list of of names, most of which give only minimal clues about what the site is like. But I never wanted to go to the trouble of trying to keep a blogroll that's (1) current, (2) gives some idea of what the destination site is like, and (3) doesn't take up more space than the actual content of my page does.Google to the rescue.
If you visit my blog's main page, you will (as of this writing, anyway) see a sidebar, which has the most recent few entries from people on my blogroll. This is nifty, because it is tied to Google Reader, which is my active feedreader.
Here's a little tutorial on how to do it. First, I'm assuming you've got a Google Reader account already; if you don't, you'll have to decide if it's worth switching to GReader to get this feature. Second, I'm assuming you don't want to dump your entire blogroll; if so, skip down a bit.
You'll want to set up a folder (a/k/a tag) of the blogs you want to have appear here. When you subscribe to a blog, make sure you set its subscription information to appear in the folder you've picked for your blogroll ("Change folders").
Or, if you're setting up a new folder from existing subscriptions, you can do do a bulk folder-setting. Either way, go to "Manage subscriptions."
The "Subscriptions" tab will let you check all the subscriptions you want to put in the new folder, if you're changing existing subscriptions. Once you've got a folder to publish (one way or the other), you want to switch to the "Tags" tab. Yes, Tags and Folders are kinda sorta the same thing. Also, if you're switching from Bloglines or some other service/program that supports OPML, that Import/Export tab is going to help you out.
Find the tag (folder) you want to publish. If you haven't already made it public, this line will not have all the extra links on the right.
Check the tag, and make it public.
After that, the magic links should appear. You want "add a clip to your site," and this will pop up a window to customize how it all appears. Adding a more traditional blogroll is pretty much the same, so I won't cover that explicitly.
In this case, I removed the title (because it's going to be under a standard sidebar heading on my site), increased the item count, and most importantly checked "Show item sources" so people can see blog names. I'm leaving it green in this case, but there are a number of schemes available, plus "none" which will let you set the appearance using your own site's CSS.
If you use Blogger predefined layouts, you can just use the nifty button to add it. I use templates, even on my Blogspot-hosted blog, so I copy and paste the HTML snippet (which has been magically updated as I've changed my preferences) into my template. Do whatever your blogging software requires to put that snippet on your page.
The advantages to the "clips" type: if and when blogfade happens, I don't have to agonize over when to finally remove the dead link from my sidebar (and the answer is always "a week before the blogger reappears), it gives visitors to my blog a little more information about what your blog is like, and once it's set up, it just automatically happens, based on my reading habits.
The disadvantages: it doesn't work for visitors who don't use JavaScript, and if a blog or its feed gets hijacked (it's rare, but spammers really want to do it, the more so if a feed is syndicated automatically) the spam gets piped automatically to my page too (though since it's also my regular feed reader, I'll see the spam and can remove that blog from the published folder right away).
It's got so many uses, though: for instance, I have a second "blogroll" of my own blogs, waaaay down at the bottom of the page, so if I haven't posted to this one recently, you can check that and see "Ah ha, she's blabbing away in the houseblog" or whatever I happen to be obsessed with at the time, even if you don't subscribe to my other blogs. And yes, my wide variety of disparate blogs is why I don't dump my entire blogroll in the other box: it's Perl blogs and sewing blogs and house blogs and roleplaying blogs and AJAX blogs and Flickr pools and comic feeds and Wichita blogs and friends' blogs and... somehow, I don't expect any of my readers to share every one of my interests. My full blogroll is a unique snowflake, I expect: a particularly large, baroque one.
Another blogroll baby
Die maus ist hier, or something. (Sorry, the last German-speaking relative of mine was my grandmother, who was Pennsylvania Dutch - but orphaned young and raised English, and anyway I never met her, so I've only acquired third- and fourth-hand scraps of the language.)So what I'm trying to say is: Congratulations to Cathy the Raggy Rat Lady, on the birth of her daughter!
Labels: blogdom
Friday, May 2, 2008
Look what was in my garden
We had a hailstorm come through last night, so I went out early this morning to see if anything remained of my garden. I was pessimistic, so I was pleasantly surprised. This is the worst of the cabbages, and I'm sure it'll pull through fine.
I put the tomatoes and peppers in a little too early, though. But the gerbera daisies are doing beautifully. Wait... this is a vegetable garden!
Oh, so you think you can come in here in camouflage, do you? That better just be hail damage on those cabbages. Show yourself, little Flower Bunny!
Oh, you can't. Heh. This is Work In Progress Friday, and your body isn't finished yet.
I've actually finished all the sewing, but when I put together my new sewing tote (from which I'm working until I get the workroom moved), I left out a small stuffing tool. And I was too lazy to go to the basement to get one out, so I worked on the snowshoe hare yesterday. He's not as photogenic yet, but here are his eyes:
The eyes come sealed onto cardstock, so at first they look like badly scuffed acrylic eyes. They're glass, though. And I tried the manual mode on the camera since it wasn't compensating for the light from my desk lamp, but I guess I should have worried about more settings than color. Trust me when I say they look pretty much like the pictures in the Van Dyke catalog. What I really wanted to show is what they don't show there: the side and back views. As you can see, the backs aren't completely flat; they have the pupil indent.
I wouldn't use these for conventional eye settings - sure, you could glue your thread on in lieu of the loop, but it'll only hold as tightly as the paint holds to the glass. No, the sockets will be pre-sculpted, so there's no tension involved on the eyes. They'll be glued in place, and then have needlefelted lids around them, so they'll be doubly secure.
Status update:
- Snowshoe Hare
- You'll have seen the snowshoe hare pattern preview yesterday, of course. He lacks one front leg, some final assembly... and where did his other ear get to, in my sewing-tote move?
- Flower Bunny
- Needs stuffed, jointed, and assembled. He's a Mother's Day gift, so I'd better... uh... hop to it. Also, I need to put the Bunny variant on the pattern page.
- Gryphon and sun conure
- On hold until the Mother's Day gifts are finished.
- Snowshoe Hare II
- Speaking of Mother's Day gifts, I guess I'll put this guy on the list, too, even though I haven't started him. Same song, second verse, except this one's to be made from real blue fox instead of faux. The notion is that the real-fur one goes to my mother-in-law, the faux one goes on eBay or Bearpile against her medical bills. But I'm months behind, so we'll see. For one thing, I gotta go clean up that poor wind- and hail-battered garden...
Labels: flowerbear, friday, hare
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Snowshoe hare pattern
Consider this a preview, since I don't yet have the actual pattern page with full instructions up, and won't until I have a finished critter to show there.
Head
Neck
Arm
Leg
Leg/Tail
Body
More Body
It's pretty self-explanatory, at least if you're familiar with teddy bear construction and double-jointed necks (if not, wait for the real pattern release and all will be made clear). Additional neck circles go on the bottom of the head and top of the body, seam allowances are 3/8", and except for the neck circles the joint sizes are given. Neck circles use the biggest joint you can fit in there.
And now, I'm going to go work on the sample bunny.
Update, for visitors who aren't familiar with my policies: The final pattern will carry the same open-source licensing the rest of my Open Source Sewing patterns do; if you want to make (and sell, or whatever) these from this version, you certainly can (if you need a formal license, holler), but don't redistribute the pattern itself just yet.
Labels: hare
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
On my desk
Two generations of Canon Pixmas (Pixmae?), the newer of which is an all-in-one. Which means I once again have a working scanner, and the biiiiig box of paper patterns downstairs is calling to it.
So is the snowshoe hare, who's had some pattern modifications done after being printed out. My previous method of digitizing consisted of taking pictures of the pieces on my infamous orange 1" grid, tracing the outlines and correcting for keystoning and such, printing the results out and comparing them, making more corrections, etc. The scanner should make that a much more accurate process.
Not to be outdone by the UPS guy, my mailman delivered presents today, too: a box of taxidermy eyeballs. Yay! Okay, not quite that weird: a box of glass carousel horse eyes from Van Dyke Taxidermy. They're pretty much like glass teddy-bear eyes, but without the wire loops, and actually better suited for needlefelting around in many ways. It's never actually happened, but I'm always afraid the barbs on the felting needles will catch on and cut through the threads anchoring the eyes. Or perhaps worse, catch on and weaken them, so they fail later. Maybe I'm just paranoid. Especially since I use about four strands of heavy thread to anchor every eye.
I'll have to take a picture (or maybe just scan) the eyes soon. Two pairs of brown, for the bunnies, one pair of yellow, for a lynx (never mind that I now have three, count 'em, three faux-lynx coats), and a number of "flints" - which is apparently taxidermist-speak for "unpainted clear glass eyes." So now I don't have any excuses to not finish up the first snowshoe hare. Other than the excuse that that printer is still upstairs because my workroom is stacked to the ceiling (yes, literally; admittedly it's only a 77" ceiling) with boxes.
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