Friday, March 28, 2008
Conures, sludge, and bumps
For Christmas, I got a Clover needlefelting tool. It was on my wishlist, sans the accompanying brush, because I have a ton of foam blocks that I do my needlefelting on, and anyway the Clover tool is mostly for appliqueing, which in my case happens on an already-stuffed critter. Plus, I'm frugal... okay, cheap... and I figured I'd buy a non-Clover-brand brush for a fraction of the price.Now, let's back up a little. I mentioned, back when I posted the first draft of the revision of the sun conure pattern, that I had several different ideas for how I wanted to make one. I bought some undyed, short mohair, which I've never gotten around to dyeing, much less in a sun conure-shaped pattern. That's one method. The others involve felt of some form.
At the same time, I bought some undyed all-wool felt, which I also contemplated dyeing. That's another method. But I also have a huge rainbow of pre-dyed wool rovings in my stash, so I thought I might try making my own felt, also in a sun-conure-shaped pattern. That's still another method. Or it's possible to wet felt onto pre-made felt, though you really want to do that with "pre-felt" (new wine, old wineskins, etc.) and the lovely lovely Intercal felt I have just seems too finished for that.
But, and here's the method I picked chiefly because it's least messy, and also because I'm not sure of the colorfastness-when-wet of my needlefelting wools: you can needlefelt onto existing felt. Which is what I do with my felted faces and pawpads, except this time I want to do it on flat felt. Hence, the Clover tool.
Step the first: I sorted my wool into the desired rainbow. Not happy with the blue - that's not just a dark picture, I need to find my nice cobalt blue. But that's okay, I don't need blue for the body. I traced my pattern onto the felt with a pencil. Not that it matters since it's symmetrical, but this is on the right side of the felt.
Then I took a single needle, and tacked down some of my colors, felting only on the lines, just to give me some reference points. Not too much detail, though above you can see the two leg pieces pointint at each other, just enough that I could take my pattern and trace the same lines on the wrong side this time, because I'm going to obliterate the lines on the front side.
Here's where I discovered why the brush is better than the foam. I seldom use multiple needles, even though I somewhere have a handle that holds three at a time, but even then the foam doesn't dimple much. With the safety shield on the Clover tool, though, plus the effort to get through the dense Intercal felt, I was spending more of my poke-poking energy smushing the foam than I was felting. Putting tension on the felt helped, but I can definitely see where a brush is necessary for using this.
At any rate, once I'm done needling the color onto the felt, I'll cut it out (with seam allowances) and see how machine-sewing works on the revised pattern (which is, you may be able to tell, a second draft - back to the integrated feather-pants).
I still plan to try wet-felting the wing and tail feathers, just because I want to emulate conure colors more closely, which means color changes between top and bottom. That's hard to do in needlefelting.
So it's Friday: where do I stand on the WIP List?
- Snowshoe hare
- I actually planned to work on him yesterday, but somehow ended up rearranging furniture instead.
- Gryphon pattern test
- Fiddling with the head pattern, but haven't done more sewing.
- Sun conure pattern revision
- The list was supposed to be in descending order of priority, but it didn't work that way.
This is why I'm not one of the cool kids in craftblogdom: Stacy's pregnant, Cat's pregnant, but me? I have "gallbladder sludge."
This, however, is not sludge. I am simply appropriating a blogbaby in the same way I did the blogkitty (hmm, I need current pictures, Chloe turned out to be Joey, and he's a handsome cat). Behold, Blogbaby A!
Okay, actually nothing is in the part of the picture I cropped... I'll leave it to the parents to do the first real pictures-to-the-web post when they start babyblogging, and they haven't gone public with the news yet. Expect to see some baby stuff showing up in the WIP list in a few months, though.
Labels: conure, friday, needlefelting
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Apple, the Teddy Pig
With Apple, Cat's now officially made more Teddy Pigs than I have - I actually have a work-in-progress Teddy Javelina I'll have to put together soon, just to keep up.
Apple's currently on Bid4Bears: I'll just link to all the RaggyRat on Bid4Bears items since auctions are time-sensitive... and hey, that way you can see her other fun stuff there too.
Friday, March 21, 2008
The return of Work In Progress Friday
It's not much, but it's a start.
One gryphon foreleg.
One snowshoe hare hind leg. (The range of the Snowshoe Hare does not typically overlap with that of the Jayhawk. Artistic license.)
Current works and their progress, in descending order of priority:
- Snowshoe hare
- Set aside so long he doesn't even have an entry in the new blog, just in Flickr: snowshoe hare progress
- Gryphon pattern test
- What you see is what I got.
- Sun conure pattern revision
- I've printed the pattern out, and that's it.
Labels: conure, friday, gryphon, hare
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Easter eggs
There's a little trick to remember when turning spheres into eggs, that's useful whenever you have a seam (or an intersection of seams) that needs to be part of a smooth curve.You may remember the fabric spheres patterns, in a variety of segment counts. Suppose, as is seasonally appropriate this week, you want to sew an egg instead of a sphere. Specifically, a chicken egg. Some eggs are pretty much spherical, others are more elliptical, but in this case an egg that's more or less spherical at one end, and elongated at the other.
It's pretty simple to stretch one end of the pattern. But if you're not careful how you stretch it, you'll end up with a pointy pointed end instead of a rounded pointy end.
The trick is that where the seams come together, the angles need to add up to 360 degrees. Not for very long, or you'll have a flattened pointy end - which can be useful when you want a sphere-based object to have a less rounded base. That's not what we want here, so just enough to keep the curve smooth over the top of the point.
Three-part egg pattern, for example.
That's pretty easy when you're using Inkscape or a similar vector-drawing program... just make your little vector handles point at the right direction, along the little "tent" at the top of the example pattern. The longer the handles, the flatter the end will be. For a four-piece pattern, the pieces need to meet at a 90-degree angle, for a five-piece, at a 72-degree angle.
The same principle is true in other cases - if you look at the tip of the hind paw in the gryphon pattern draft, you'll see that it starts at a 90-degree angle. When the two leg pieces are sewn together, and then the bottom opened up to have the pawpad sewn in, the toe seam will be a smooth line rather than an angle. The same is true at the heel .
If you look at the Flower Bear you'll see a bit of an exception: the back seam of the leg is straight, as is the bottom of the foot, but the angle isn't 90 degrees. Properly done, the back seam should have a little curve to it, to meet the foot seam at the right angle, but I left the back seam straight so the leg could be cut on the fold.
At the small size, that tiny angle will be easily rounded out when sewing in the pawpad, but it's something to watch out for - if that sort of thing appeared in the side of the foot instead, or in a garment seam, it wouldn't be nearly as forgiveable.
Labels: drafting
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Sketch vs. pattern
I've been doing some desultory work on pattern tutorials, which eventually I'll put together into something coherent. But it's just not happening right now, because things are too, well, desultory. Still, I think this marks the first usage of the "drafting" tag, which hopefully will be more informative in the future.
But because this is topical, you get a peek. Here's a screencap (to no particular scale) of the work in progress on the gryphon legs in Inkscape, to give you an idea of the metamorphosis from side view to pattern.
The front foot is a little muddy, on account of the original sketch plus all the more final toes. The floating claw is the pattern for the larger claws, so you can kind of see how much fatter it is (and that's not even including a seam allowance, which only gets added onto my patterns at the very last minute, and never in my working patterns). The backward-pointing toe is a little misleading, since I decided the original sketch was too fat - so the pattern doesn't reflect enough additional material to make a toe that big.
Halfway up the leg, you get a better idea of what the difference between pattern and finished view is - legs tend to get pretty close to round in cross-section, so they're a nice easy example there. At the top, the joint will flatten out the limb top, keeping the cross-section from getting as naturally rounded as the stuffing will try to make it, so again there's not so much fabric added because it shouldn't be taken up in a curve as much.
And if you're wondering about the ominous grasping claw in the middle of it, that's a to-scale (for the pattern) image of a resin hawk foot available from Tandy Leather/The Leather Factory - if you don't mind your gryphon having his feet curled instead of flat, the final pattern will have an option for skipping over the whole fiddly sewing of feet and claws by using those, because they're conveniently the right size.
The double-toe image in the middle there is a sort of fourchette - the between-the-toes pieces for the front foot.
The big rounded piece is the bottom of the hind foot, not a gryphon egg, and is another deviation from the original sketch. The lion references I used (because I was too lazy to get out my actual art books) had feet obscured by grass, so I underestimated their paw size, plus I wanted to add a litttle to balance the large front feet.
The back leg shows some of the same things as the front one does, with an important note: having the smaller joint up high in the leg like this is generally not a good idea. It's a more natural pivot point, it's true, but the joint disc will not serve the purpose I mentioned before: keeping the leg from puffing up too much. As is, this gryphon will have major thunder thighs when seen from any angle but the side, and too-shallow (front to back) thighs when seen from the side. Normally, you put the joint at the widest part of the limb top, and use as large a joint disc as will fit. I'll discuss this some when I post the snowshoe hare pattern - in his case, I basically cut off the top of the leg so he didn't have a sticky-out-bit above the joint, so that the joint placement gave him a good pivot point. It's all about compromise.
Speaking of compromising, the body is definitely going to require compromising, either in my desire to keep the thing a two-piece (plus neck circle) pattern or in the body shape, but I haven't settled on that yet.
I bring all this up because Denise has leaped headlong into making one, and has some in-progress pics on Flickr, including one of the sketches. (They're neat, go look. I'll wait.) She asks in email if that's okay, so I'll answer in public. Hope I don't embarrass her, but it's a good excuse to talk about the new organization of stuff here anyway.
The things that are licensed for reproduction are clearly marked with Creative Commons licensing. Everything else defaults to the copyrighted "all rights reserved" status. You'll notice that, to avoid confusion, many of the photographs (ones that aren't instructional) have been taken off the pattern pages, and you have to go to the gallery to see them. This isn't a huge deal to me - there's a couple of sites that have reproduced the old Flower Bear and Teddy Wolf instructions complete with the pictures (in one case amusingly including the text where I point out that the non-pattern photographs are *explicitly* not licensed). Mostly, I was concerned about keeping my amateurish "here I took a quick picture for the blog entry going to bed now buh-bye" snapshots out of wide circulation.
So: anything that starts out http://www.silverseams.com/opensource or (for pictures), http://images.silverseams.com/opensource is generally licensed under one flavor or another of CC. (I'm going to set up an index for the images Real Soon Now, so you don't have to find where they appear in a web page to see what licensing is linked to them). Anything else, like the gallery, isn't (though I'm liberal in what I consider fair use of my stuff, and likely to give permission for most other stuff if asked).
In the case of the gryphon sketches, they're in the gallery, and thus not licensed. I don't mind the copying (as Denise correctly guessed, I put the URL on it on the assumption it'd get copied regardless), other than it's kind of scary to see unfinished things released into the wild like that. In this case, here's me making it official: Denise, you have license to reproduce that image in your Flickr stream provided you change the description from "pattern" to "sketch" - I'd hate to mislead people into making too-skinny gryphons. Beyond that, I have no complaints, and I'm immensely flattered by her enthusiasm.
And that brings me back around to more discussion of pattern drafting. I mentioned "as is," the gryphon hind leg will have a problem. Needlesculpting - sewing through the object to counteract the pressure of stuffing in a particular direction - is one way of fixing it, and I should probably have drawn a likely sculpting line for purposes of this quasi-lesson. NeedleFELTing is similar, in that depending on what you're stuffing with and how deep you go with the needle, you can not only be attaching surface design but actually shaping (in fact, felting) the interior stuffing... so Denise can control the fluffiness or flatness of her gryphon's thighs that way.
Needlefelting is also a nifty way to camouflage conventional needlesculpting - if you look at this view of Teddy Fox, you can see a couple of sculpting stitches ahead of his eye, where a canine muzzle naturally narrows before filling back out in the whisker area. Those are hidden by the felting (technique note: severing a sculpting thread with the barbs of a felting needle is a risk - take redundant sculpting stitches, and anchor each one individually so one break doesn't undo an entire line of stitching!). The same thing happens inside the mouth, an area that's prone to bloat.
Surface design - be it felted-on wool, or fur pile - also affects pattern drafting. In this case, I'm drafting for mostly a low-pile end product. Lions have fairly sleek fur, and bird feet are scaly, so there's not much added "fluff." For a snow leopard leg, for example, I'd look at the photograph and have to account for a lot of fur before I got down to the actual shape of the leg. Morbid as it may seem, looking at plastic taxidermy forms can be a better reference than looking at live animals, because that is what the animal really looks like without the shape-concealing fur (and a layer of skin, but at least that's fairly consistent in depth).
I promise, future tutorials will be less brain-dumpy and more diagram-heavy.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Cheer up, emo bird!
Monday really isn't a good No Housework Day for me. When the husband goes back to work and the kiddo goes back to school, I get caught up on cleaning up after them. In a way, it's the start of my weekend.
Usually.
This is spring break, so there's no school. And instead of giving me a respite when he came home Sunday night, my husband gave me another patient when he came home Sunday afternoon, with a herniated disc. Whee!
So I did some housework as I had the energy, and in between fiddled with the gryphon pattern. This was a remarkably mild case of strep, all things considered, and I think most of my lack of energy came from the fact that I have a noisy houseful of kid and critters, one of which is awake and active through most of the night.
As promised, I replaced the prairie falcon with a golden eagle, and in so doing noticed that the prairie falcon looks kind of morose. The golden eagle looks kind of peeved, which I guess is an improvement. I'm sewing up a felt test right now, which given the interleaving with work on the sun conure, has made me really tempted to make an exceptionally colorful gryphon at some point.
Special bonus trivia point: the joint circles on the gryphon in the Inkscape cap above are both the same color. Really.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Skip the Rabbit
Is it me, or does that sound like a rallying cry to de-secularize Easter, or perhaps to rail against the practice of giving live animals as Easter presents, or something?
Actually, it's the name of a pattern from the long-lost Kunin Felt archives, which I've revived with the help of the Wayback Machine and Google. I've got the similar Blossom Bear in cleanup, and will see how many others I can reconstruct. Unfortunately, the non-featured patterns were accessed via a search form, so finding them all is a challenge.
Skip the Rabbit is a simple little felt bunny, made in much the same technique as the even-simpler Felt Pig pattern I put up for the Year of the Golden Pig.
I don't anticipate making announcements in the patterns category every time I add a Kunin pattern, but I've noticed some searches for felt bunny patterns lately, and the Skinny Bunny, while doable in felt (the picture of Fran's Bunny is in Kunin plush felt), is probably more than what people are looking for. I was hoping to get a simple (and fully open-source) bunny pattern of my own out there, but it probably won't happen in time for Easter, so this will have to do.
Labels: patterns
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Simplifying the sun conure
This would have been Work In Progress Friday, except there was no work and no progress on account of yes, the strep test was positive, to no one's surprise.I'm not getting my germs on anything textile-related, but bacteria aren't transmitted via graphics files, so here you go:
The simplified sun conure pattern draft.
No neck joint, and most of the seams are now symmetrical - that is, you're sewing two curves together with both pieces of fabric lying flat (or at least doing so in the area you're sewing). Aside from the little "forehead" tuck, the head gusset is the same curve as the head side, the two body sides are mirrored, and so forth.
The bill opening hasn't changed significantly, so this bill fits in the original pattern and the open bill fits in this one - there's not much more to simplify there without significantly losing the distinctive parrot shape.
I'm still iffy about the legs - simplification here means strictly yarn-wrapped, without the felt coverings, but moving the parrot-pants from the body/underbody means you have to stitch the tops down to the body, the antithesis of symmetrical seams. Almost definitely going to change that.
As you may remember, the craft-felt parrot was supposed to be a prototype. I have at least three different ideas for the final critter, in mohair and various permutations of wool, and I will probably exercise one of them in testing this.
But in the meantime, I'm a single mom for a weekend, of a kiddo whose reaction to new medication was to be wide awake until 2 am (at least), and who has the class hamster home over spring break, and who can NOT leave the poor critter alone, and by extension me: "Can I pet him?" "Can I get him out?" "Can I feed him this?" "Don't you think he'd like to play with this?" "When can I get him out again?"
And Baxter the dachshund is going positively berserk over it, and is making me crazy. Him too... poor little dog is an absolute slave to his hunting instincts, and "rodent! in tunnels!" trips all of them, frustrating him no end. So he's making little yips and whines and hooting-monkey noises, which I was going to say translate to things like "Can I eat him?" but in thinking of it, I'm pretty sure there is no question whatsoever in that little dog's head. Asking permission? Pfft. The fluffy lap dog is out to lunch. The single-minded hunting machine is in.
Hate to break it to Baxter, but I'm pretty sure right now the kiddo would trade him in on a hamster in a heartbeat.
Labels: conure
Friday, March 14, 2008
RSS in Plain English
Here is my lazy content for today:If you don't understand syndication, watch that video. One important bit they left out: "RSS" is sometimes called "Atom", or "XML", or "RDF" - don't let the terminology confuse you, they're just niceties of the formatting, and your aggregator will deal with them all pretty much the same. "Feed" is a more generic term, and usually the one I use. (If you have to make a decision, go with Atom; it's the best-spec'd of the current formats, but generally you won't see a difference.)
That's a good excuse for me to point out that I have all the feed variants more-or-less working again:
- Main Feed - Full blog entries (the default)
- Summary Feed - Abbreviated, pictureless blog entries.
- Comment Feed - Blog comments.
- Patterns only - Full entries labeled patterns
- Bestiary only - Full entries labeled bestiary
- Shop announcements only - Full entries labeled forsale
Whew. If those aren't enough, they're all available in RSS flavor too, and if you want a different one (main PLUS comments? One of the other labels?) I can set one up.
I also have some of those feeds (main and patterns) set up in Feedburner, which is kind of like a special aggregator that takes the feed and mails you new entries as they appear. You can see those links in the sidebar, or you can go to Feedburner's site and learn more.
And now (the reason for the laziness of this post), I'm off to the doctor to get a strep test. Whee! (Oddly, despite taking care of family members with everything from influenza A/Brisbane/10/2007 to stomach bugs to URIs, I didn't get any of that. Instead, I get strep, which nobody else has gotten. But hey, given the choice between a smorgasbord of viral things and a nice, antibiotic-treatable strep infection, I'll go for the out-of-the-blue strep every time.)
Labels: blogging
Monday, March 10, 2008
Gryphons, but no mock turtles
Somebody please explain to me why when I set out to do No Housework Monday my plans get steamrollered (though admittedly I didn't do any housework then either), but when I set out to spend Friday catching up on housework, nothing interrupts it?
Oh well. This weekend I did a little catching up on my embarrassingly-late emails, and answered Denise' (of Blackberry Downs) FlickrMail. How late? Late enough she had forgotten she'd written me.
Unbeknownst to her, because I do it through Google Reader instead of Flickr, I was already following her photos. (And on that note - if you visit the site itself, you may have seen the entries-from-my-blogroll in the sidebar. That's far from all the blogs I read, which are right now an even 500 in Google Reader, and it excludes things like Flickr photo feeds, not to mention things I've forgotten to check off as "shared.") So we've had a nice chat about bunnies and gryphons and whether plushies or jointed critters are easier to make/design and, well, I've unretired the "bestiary" sub-blog (now label) here.
Denise said, in her most recent email, that she's inspired to try a jointed gryphon, with a needlefelted face (since I referred her to my work-in-progress pics of Teddy Fox for how I do most faces these days) - if I don't mind. (Oh, dear. I'm going to have to rant about my open source sewing rationale and why you shouldn't be shy about taking inspiration from my work soon, aren't I?) And her inspiration inspired me to spend an evening on my own.
Which finally gets us to the gryphon (griffin, griffon...) up top. She (because she has wings, and lacks parts that male lions don't particularly hide...) is a sketch for the Bestiary. I'm trying to decide whether to shift it toward jointed animals (which look more daunting, but are actually easier to draft and sew), so tentatively the gryphon has joints.
The disadvantage is that when you have joints, you want to move them. With teddy-ish animals, that's not so bad, but with more realistic animals, the legs look more unnatural when they move stiffly: jointed gryphon. Armatures help, but then you're getting overcomplicated, especially at the default scale for the Bestiary.
Perceptive readers may notice I recycled the conure wing for my sketch. As with the conure, the actual stuffed critter's wing would end up more horizontal than the sketch shows. Here's what it looks like under that wing. Gryphon without the obscuring near wing. Perceptive readers with really good memories may notice I recycled the unicorn tail, which is why it's not actually merged with the body shape. It's a sketch, remember.
The head's a prairie falcon, if you're wondering. The old plush griffin (who now has a dubious entry in the gallery) had a bald eagle head, because it was kitbashing a couple of existing patterns in the days when I was just learning about drafting my own. I'll probably end up giving this a Golden Eagle head instead, since gryphons are historically eagle-based... but I have to admit a particular fondness for Prairie Falcons.
Friday, March 7, 2008
New, improved sun conure pattern
After my previous post, I took the last line a little too literally, and pulled the pattern into Inkscape. I was just going to, y'know, create a placeholder file, not spend a lot of time on it.Two hours later, it was after midnight and I had a New! Improved! sun conure pattern. I haven't updated the text (and so I left the old, paper pattern in place, as a reference key), but I'll do that eventually.
It's my plan (always has been) to go through all the old patterns and clean them up. Many of them I already have in digital format - even some shown on the orange grid paper. That was a workaround for Flickr's old "only photographs" rule - I printed out my digital patterns, and took pictures of them. Others, like the Sun Conure, were never digital to start with.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Sun conure in the wild
Cat of Raggyrat dropped me an email about her version of the Sun Conure pattern. I'd actually been following its progress in her blog, but since I was busy demolishing and rebuilding the site I hadn't gotten around to posting on it, since I wanted to do it justice. Now that he's done (or rather, they're done, since there are two), I think I'll just let the pictures do the talking:
(Click through to the bigger picture, there are lots more in her photostream, including a newspaper article.)
She says he's a completely made-up bird, but I think his coloration is darn close to that of a Scarlet Macaw.
I really ought to get that pattern out and clean it up properly, hadn't I?
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
GnuCash
Yesteday's plans fell through, as I spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to de-duplicate my mother's Quicken files. (Gory details: She accidentally started entering stuff in her backup file, then without realizing it entered stuff in her master file, and then discovered the problem and wanted them merged. No problem, you just export from the backup and import into the master, except I forgot her antique Quicken (1999) didn't have any duplicate-checking logic. Fortunately, I have old Perl scripts that help with this.)At any rate, in making lemons from lemonade (okay, I typed that backwards, but I'm going to leave it that way), it inspired me to finish setting up GnuCash for Silver Seams. As you may remember, I'm relaunching the business. The first time around, I just used a spreadsheet, since it more or less evolved. This time, I'm using GnuCash as a real accounting program.
GnuCash is kind of nifty. It's an open-source, free project, and you can use it as more-or-less a Quicken replacement, with pretty much the same interface (I'm weaseling since I haven't used a Quicken newer than Q2002). However, unlike Quicken (and QuickBooks, last I looked at that), it's a true double-entry accounting system on the backend - you can kick it out of basic check-register mode if you know more about accounting.
Now, I'm not an accountant, but I have a more-than-passing familiarity with the stuff. I have the better part of an compsci/engineering degree, and then ended up in business programming - go figure. I ended up going back and taking Accounting 101 during my first job, when a client reported a bug as "My reversing entries didn't reverse during month-end," and I realized what it sounded like when I said things in computerese. Plus, I have a sister who's a CPA, so I can ask her when I get stuck. All this is optional, though... if you just use it as a check register at first, and view the chart of accounts as "categories," you'll still be building records that an accountant can make good sense of when you get that far down the road.
The nicest feature right now is that everything I put in now for opening balances - not just the checking account and Paypal account, but the inventory and supplies and so forth - throw a corresponding entry over into Equity. In English, that means I can look at the balance of that and know how exactly how much of my own money I've put into the business. At least, I hope it's a nice feature. I suppose it could turn out depressing. Currently, the only depressing thing is the absence of any entries in Finished Goods Inventory. Excuse me while I go rectify that...
Labels: business
Monday, March 3, 2008
No Housework Monday
It's official. Lynn (Molly Chicken) says so.Of course, I already had it planned: I'm finishing the snowshoe hare, a/k/a the March hare.
As Lynn says: "How about you? What nice things are you going to do today?"
Labels: monday
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