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.
Congratulations, Stacy
You know you're a dedicated blogger when you post the morning after giving birth. I can't seem to post more than once a week (though I'm doing better over in the houseblog - it's the garden that's been eating all my time).At any rate, Stacy of Stacy Sews is a new mommy, pictures here. And congratulations here!
Labels: blogdom
Friday, April 18, 2008
Work in "progress" Friday
There's a little progress, but nothing to show off yet.My planned sewing "vacation" didn't turn out to be much of one: up until Sunday afternoon I ran a low fever, not serious enough to be concerning to the doctor, just noticeable enough to make me feel a bit blah and restless. So I did do a fair amount of sewing stuff, just flitted from project to project. I got part of a blog post on Inkscape pattern drafting, part of a new pattern done, part of my works in progress sewn... oh well.
After that, I felt like working again, but of course then all those non-sewing things that I'd put off called to me. The good news is, I have peas and onions and garlic and cabbage sprouting in my garden, and tomatoes and peppers and such waiting to be planted this week, all those things that just can't be put off too long.
So where does my list stand?
- Snowshoe hare
- I haven't put the poor critter's other arm and leg on the machine, but I had carried him around so much I ended up sewing his pawpads in to them anyway... so now and then I've hand-sewn on them. That long, thick fur isn't easy to machine-sew anyway, so I may end up doing it all by hand. Ed from the bearmaking guild is placing an order for oversized glass eyes, so I'm waiting on those - I didn't care for the quality of the 16mm eyes I was going to use, so I ordered some nicer ones from Intercal. They're really nice, and I'll have to take pictures of them to show you all, but they only came in 14mm and below, and I really wanted them a tad larger.
- Gryphon pattern test
- The gryphon's some of what I worked "feverishly" on, so there's progress.
- Sun conure pattern revision
- I need to do a little more blending of the colors, and then just sit down and sew this up. Right now, my sewing desk is a bit buried.
- Flower Bunny
- The last time the desk was unburied, I did all the machine sewing on this, so I just need to sew in the footpads and assemble it - other than I decided the ears are too long for the flowers I'm using (they really need to match the petal length) so I'll re-do those. Flower Bunny's lucky, though: I've set his eyes, and once they look at me, critters get done more quickly.
I visited Cottie of Country Cubs today, and she's getting ready for another garage sale, so somehow I came away with a couple more coats for recycling, so I really need to get Teddy Lynx(es) on the WIP list... so I'd better get cracking and knock some of these guys off.
Labels: friday
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Hedgehog in the wild
Melody of Treasures Under The Willow Tree made a blue hedgehog out of my open-source plush hedgehog pattern. You need to go read it, just to see how she made the blue plush fabric. That's dedication.I've had it on my to-do list to add it to the gallery, but haven't gotten around to it yet. But today she marked her twentieth post to her fairly new blog, so it's a good excuse to post now - stop by and say hello in her comments.
Labels: inthewild
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Medical Update - good news
I may make an actual sewing-content post later today, but for now I'll just toss out a quick medical update.I no longer have a gallbladder - took about twice as long as they expected because apparently my organs are not properly, uh, organized. And the gallbladder was inflamed to just short of where they'd switch from laparoscopic to "open" surgery. Otherwise, it went pretty well, and I should only have a excuse to slack off the housework for a couple of days, so I'll see how much sewing I can pack in.
In more exciting news, I get to talk publicly about the blogbabies now: I am, if all goes well, going to be aunt twice over. My sister's having twins. So like I've said, be prepared to see baby-oriented sewing going on here. I'm holding off on the diaper bag(s) until we know boys or girls, though I could probably get by with doing it entirely in a KU Jayhawk theme - for his side of the family, at least, that's a unisex thing.
So: yay!
Monday, April 7, 2008
Keeping an ear to the ground
Sewing is still theoretically on hold (though actually I got some waiting-room sewing done today on both the snowshoe hare and the flower bunny, but nothing worth showing) until post-op, so I'll continue my topical posting with some business advice. Maybe I'll make this a regular Monday feature.Even if you're not a blogger yourself, if you're running a craft business (or let's face it: any sort of business), you probably ought to keep track of what people are saying about you. There are some nifty tools to do this, aside from subscribing to Every RSS Feed Known To Man.
You can subscribe to a Google Alert for your company name, product line(s), or anything else that might turn up in a blog, news article, video, Usenet group, or on the web. You can have links mailed to you as frequently as you prefer. This is about as easy as it gets, at least if you already have a Google account (and you probably should; a GMail account is, as of this writing, one of the least evil of the "freebie" email accounts, and it's useful to maintain one as a backup contact point).
Google is not the only one, of course, and it's wise to get your information from multiple sources for a more complete picture. Technorati offers a similar service, but only for things with syndication feeds. Set up a Technorati search, being sure to set it for blogs with "any authority" if you want to see mentions in blogs no matter how new or obscure (or in my case, blogs who've changed drastically recently and thereby erased their "authority" - evidently Technorati doesn't connect the redirect the way Google and Bloglines have). You'll see a "Subscribe" link with the syndication symbol next to it - if you don't use a feed reader you can convert that feed to email with Feedburner.
You can do the same search-to-feed(-to-email) thing at Bloglines (even without being a Bloglines subscriber - I subscribe to Bloglines searches in Google Reader). Bloglines also caches posts, often within seconds of their posting, and will keep them even after the blogger has deleted them, and sometimes after the blog itself has been deleted. (This is, incidentally, something to consider before posting anything libelous in your blog.) Bloglines, like Technorati, will also give you an idea of how popular the blog is.
Wikipedia has a list, far from comprehensive, of blog search engines - these are just my favorites. If you don't subscribe to a search, you should probably at least occasionally check on them now and then. I do it regularly, chiefly to turn up people who've used my open-source patterns so I can put them in the gallery. Sadly, there's no magic to turn up people who've infringed your work... yet. If one of those search engines turns up, I'll be sure to pass it along here.
Friday, April 4, 2008
The difference between knockoffs and infringement
I've been cogitating a bit more on the
Alimrose fooferaw, and I came to a little bit of a realization. I'm still not a lawyer, but I think I know something Alimrose doesn't, or didn't.See, it baffled me that Susan would say (in the deleted but not entirely gone Moopy post), "...we have not breached any copyright..." when we're all looking at the side-by-side pictures and going, "They're all but identical!" I'm guessing that what she's saying is not that the design isn't a copy (that's undeniable), but that there were no rights violated in that copying. I think that's wrong, of course, but I can make a pretty good guess at why someone might think that. Maybe that's not what happened here, but I think it's still worth exploring.
In fashion design, it is apparently perfectly legal to examine an article of clothing and copy it. Provided you're not infringing on trademarks (which moves you from "knockoff" to "counterfeit"), it's not only legal, it's a staple of the industry. So why couldn't Alimrose do that with Hillary's softies? Sewing is sewing, right?
The distinction, so far as I understand it, is that articles of clothing, shoes, even purses, fall under the Useful Article classification. Soft toys don't. I know a lot of mommies who'd disagree (anything that makes a baby happy is so very, very Useful), but as none of them write copyright legislation, toys got left out.
The "useful articles" class doesn't preclude copyrights on parts of the design separable from the object - just because you put a design on a T-shirt doesn't mean you can't copyright that image, for instance (in fact, you automatically do have a copyright under Berne). "Useful articles" is just a way of saying "don't use copyright as a poor man's patent." After all, clothing (and furniture, and so forth) would be in a sorry state of affairs if the first guy to lace hosen together had said "Eureka! I hold the copyright on pants!" We'd all still be wearing togas and whole animal hides, and woe betide you if you happened to wrap your toga the same way as someone else without their permission. For serious innovations there's patents, but that's a considerably more costly protection with a much shorter lifespan, and rightly so.
Now, don't go run out and start duplicating clothing on my say-so; you'll want to read Fashion-Incubator or Techdirt for pointers on where to learn more about what is and isn't covered in the fashion industry. That's not my field. All I know's that you can't apply those rules willy-nilly to dolls and stuffed animals and teddy bears - and that if you're doing it as a business, especially if you're accepting designs you haven't personally created, the advice of a copyright lawyer knowledgeable in your specific field is probably pricey... but definitely priceless.
Labels: business, opensource
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Open source vs. not
Or, "Scuse me while I get my RANT on!"I have, in the past, explained one of my rationales for open-sourcing my patterns, and not minding if the results were re-sold. I feel like even if no significant creativity goes into it ("creating" a plushie isn't, for purposes of copyright infringement, the same thing), you're putting enough sweat-of-the-brow effort into it - sewing, or if you're doing it on a larger scale, sourcing and marketing and whatnot. Even if you're just selling the patterns on eBay or Etsy or whatever, you're still going to the effort of the auction and the shipping (or emailing) and whatever, and if you're actually doing it under license (and indicating the CC license), your customer obviously feels you're adding value for them, otherwise they'd just download what I provide themselves.
That said, there's a reason I use Creative Commons, instead of assuming that you can just do all that without that license. Because guess what? Generally, you can't. (Clothing is a special case, but that's not really my field.) Let me publicize a for-instance. Y'all ready to get mad? Good:
You're probably familiar with Wee Wonderfuls, so perhaps you've seen Hillary's entry already. And if you have a cached copy of the discussion at Moopy, I'd love to see it, because I came late to the party and missed it - what I read secondhand seemed to indicate it was pretty outrageous, but I'll bite my tongue on commenting on hearsay. (Update: Bloglines has the entries, though not the comments, cached.)
Besides, the pictures pretty much speak for themselves. In case you missed it, the plushies in the picture are commercially produced by an Australian company called Alimrose Designs. The patterns are Hillary's. Hillary has not licensed those designs to Alimrose. I do believe that's what's known as "copyright infringement."
Yeah, that's right: I firmly believe in open source sewing, and yet I object - I most strenuously object! - that someone has done with Hillary's creation exactly what I license them to do with mine. Because the choice, under the law and under plain ole common courtesy, is the creator's.
I respect Hillary's choice. I don't respect
Alimrose, not at all.Labels: business, opensource
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
It's official
I had a sonogram this morning, and I had entirely too much fun taking this picture to bear guild tonight. But seriously: I meet with the surgeon on Thursday to schedule gallbladder removal. Whee. The good news is, I should have a really good excuse to just sit around and sew for awhile.
And needlefelt. I haven't done much of that in awhile, and after the previous post I got out a scrub brush and tried felting on it. The difference is amazing. So in my next trip to the store, I bought a new, clean scrub brush (because I'm still too cheap to buy Clover's) and felted on the conure. Much, much faster, and now I really wanna do some more felting-onto-felt stuff. Pictures soon.
Still no official pictures of the real blogbabies, but I heard from the mother-to-be, who had a sono at the same time as mine above (and which led the tech to provide me with keeping-up-with-the-Joneses material). She reports that both are doing well, though blogbaby A was doing too much dancing to get a good picture of him/her. As you can see, my liver was much better behaved. And yeah, I only have the one.
Labels: needlefelting
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