Silver Seams

Lobigna

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:12:00 +0000

Jennifer, a/k/a Raef Wolfe, was kind enough to send me pictures of the wolf she made using the Basic Standing Wolf pattern:

She had some trouble finding eyes and noses, and ended up covering an eye with pleather to make the nose. She used the same pleather around the eye (click to see the pictures larger), which gave them much more expression. (Compare them to the "staring" unadorned eye on my work-in-progress White Wolf in the wolf plushie gallery.)

Oh, and if you were wondering about the meaning of the post title: "Lobigna," she tells me, is Portuguese for "little wolf," her boyfriend's nickname for her. This little wolf is a gift for him.

Congratulations on a great job, Jennifer, and thanks for the pictures!

In case the garden wasn't time-consuming enough.

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 01:42:00 +0000

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...

Why I haven't been blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Sun, 25 May 2008 17:11:00 +0000

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.

Maintaining your blogroll

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:24:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:33:00 +0000

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!

Look what was in my garden

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:06:00 +0000

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...

Snowshoe hare pattern

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:13:00 +0000

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.

On my desk

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:09:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:46:00 +0000

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!

Work in "progress" Friday

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 02:20:00 +0000

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.

Hedgehog in the wild

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 02:00:00 +0000

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.

Medical Update - good news

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:18:00 +0000

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!

Keeping an ear to the ground

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:06:00 +0000

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.

The difference between knockoffs and infringement

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:57:00 +0000

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.

Open source vs. not

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:01:00 +0000

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.

It's official

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:25:00 +0000

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.

Conures, sludge, and bumps

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:22:00 +0000

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.

And in the interests of honesty, I have to admit that I started another project: the bunny version of Flower Bear. I have three pattern variants I don't have a picture for: the two-piece simplified bear, the bunny head, and the simplified bunny head. So I thought to myself, "Self, you should make your mother a Flower Bunny for Easter." My mother in law has the original Flower Bear, my first mohair bear Jake, and the Charles bear. My mother insists she doesn't need more clutter, but she does have silk flowers here and there, so he'd fit right in. And I sewed his head, but that was as far as I got, since I spent a good chunk of last week virtually sleepless until I figured out that hey, I need my gallbladder taken out.

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.

Apple, the Teddy Pig

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:22:00 +0000

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.

The return of Work In Progress Friday

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 03:02:00 +0000

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.

Easter eggs

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:55:00 +0000

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.

Sketch vs. pattern

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:54:00 +0000

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.

Cheer up, emo bird!

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:12:00 +0000

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.

Skip the Rabbit

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:29:00 +0000

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.

Simplifying the sun conure

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 21:53:00 +0000

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.

RSS in Plain English

noreply@blogger.com (Karen in Wichita) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:25:00 +0000

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.)