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Video made with one of my christmas presents from my mom: a flip video camera. :)
Video made with one of my christmas presents from my mom: a flip video camera. :)
Oh yeah, I made a thing a while back
Oct. 27th, 2010 12:14 pm
I have a really nice purple striped laptop case from Speck that I got when I bought my new MacBook. However, I'm the kind of person who likes options. So I wanted a sleeve for my laptop that I could throw it in when I wanted to plop my laptop into a bigger bag and carry a bunch of things with it (like my lunch and my book and my water bottle and my DS and ... you get the idea). Sometimes I'm gone from the house from 8am to 10pm and need food and entertainment during the long transit rides between work sites. So, I have a goodwill pile of clothes that never really get to goodwill because I keep repurposing them. In this pile was a blue sweater that was threadbare on the shoulder. It laced up the front with this thin piece of cord, made from the same material as the sweater. So here's what I did.
1. Lay the sweater out flat on an even cutting surface. Place the thing which you will be covering (in this case my laptop) on top of the sweater. I lined up the laptop with the short side along one of the side seams and the long side lined up with the bottom edge of the sweater. 2. Mark with chalk or pins the remaining two edges of the item. I used pins to keep the two sweater layers together for easy cutting. I may have even stretched the sweater a bit to make sure the piece I was cutting would be a bit smaller than my laptop. This was a really stretchy sweater, so you'll have to adjust based on the give of your knit.
3. Open up the rectangular piece of sweater you've cut and place right sides together. Using a zigzag stitch or a serger, sew up the two cut sides of the sleeve, leaving the bottom finished edge open.
4. Next make a casing for the cord. While the sleeve is still inside out, fold over the open edge, between a quarter and a half inch. Using a straight stitch, sew a vertical line from the top of the fold down across the edge of the fold, and back over it a couple times. I place this little line in the center of the width of the sleeve. 5. Now, using a straight stitch, sew the fold down close to the finished edge of the sweater. Leave an opening on either side of your vertical line. Feed your cord through the casing by attaching one end of the cord to a safety pin and inching it through.
6. Turn right side out, insert laptop and pull cord to tie closed.
While my DS is charging
Sep. 14th, 2010 11:19 amMy sweetie got me the new Professor Layton game for my birthday. I've played it until the little lights have turned red, so I have to keep myself occupied until it's charged enough to play for several more hours, because that what I'm like with these games. Puzzles are so addicting!!!
But that's not all the birthday fun there was to be had last week. The tale started on Thursday (even though it was supposed to start on Wednesday, but weather got in the way, however we won't dwell on the negative bits here) with my very first ever trip in a sailboat. It was a sailing lesson with Scovare Yachts, and it turned out to be a private lesson because all the other students canceled for the day (and the captain didn't want to leave me stranded on the docks two days in a row). We didn't go far from the Willamette Park docks, but we got up to a pretty good speed at one point (and a pretty good lean which scared me a bit) and I was at the helm for most of the hour. Very exciting.
I followed that with two hours of sauna time at Löyly, in the Clinton area. They had a wet box and a dry box with a cold shower between, and lots of little extra goodies that I didn't buy (like cleansing tea and sea salts and snacks and facial packages and shampoo). I went during women only hours, so no suit thank goodness. Only problem was one woman mistakenly grabbed my robe and wore it around the resting area for a good ten minutes before I realized it. So I just went around in my towel after that. Ick.
Saturday morning I got up and finished my new dress, then went to a sewing circle meetup at PDX Seamsters. It was the first time I'd been back in the new space and it was wonderful back there! So much room, so many cutting tables, lots of space to plug in machines and even a kitchen and a changing area to try stuff on. I may just go back there sometime even if there's not a meetup there.
Then I came home, got gussied, and sweetie and I went out to eat at Bo Asian Bistro, which was very disappointing, but I was nervous anyway and didn't want to eat much so it was ok. Then we went to Voicebox, where I'd rented a private karaoke room for my friends and I for two hours. And we sang and sang and sang and sang and one friend brought me homemade peanut butter brownie bites and it was so completely awesome. We ended the night with Cheap Trick's "I Want You To Want Me." It's my new favorite karaoke song.
Just when you thought it couldn't get any better, Sunday morning came. My sweetie wrote me a poem and read it out loud to me (and I had a little teary-eyed moment of joy) and then he made me french toast with strawberries and bacon (and tried to make me a pot of tea) and announced that even though the new Professor Layton game wasn't supposed to come out for another week or so, they had upped the release date to THAT DAY and we could go pick it up as soon as I wanted to (squee!!!!). I got phone calls from all my family members. And then my neighborhood threw me a birthday party (well, it was the Belmont Street Fair that day, but still).
Yeah. Best birthday ever.
But that's not all the birthday fun there was to be had last week. The tale started on Thursday (even though it was supposed to start on Wednesday, but weather got in the way, however we won't dwell on the negative bits here) with my very first ever trip in a sailboat. It was a sailing lesson with Scovare Yachts, and it turned out to be a private lesson because all the other students canceled for the day (and the captain didn't want to leave me stranded on the docks two days in a row). We didn't go far from the Willamette Park docks, but we got up to a pretty good speed at one point (and a pretty good lean which scared me a bit) and I was at the helm for most of the hour. Very exciting. I followed that with two hours of sauna time at Löyly, in the Clinton area. They had a wet box and a dry box with a cold shower between, and lots of little extra goodies that I didn't buy (like cleansing tea and sea salts and snacks and facial packages and shampoo). I went during women only hours, so no suit thank goodness. Only problem was one woman mistakenly grabbed my robe and wore it around the resting area for a good ten minutes before I realized it. So I just went around in my towel after that. Ick.
Saturday morning I got up and finished my new dress, then went to a sewing circle meetup at PDX Seamsters. It was the first time I'd been back in the new space and it was wonderful back there! So much room, so many cutting tables, lots of space to plug in machines and even a kitchen and a changing area to try stuff on. I may just go back there sometime even if there's not a meetup there.
Then I came home, got gussied, and sweetie and I went out to eat at Bo Asian Bistro, which was very disappointing, but I was nervous anyway and didn't want to eat much so it was ok. Then we went to Voicebox, where I'd rented a private karaoke room for my friends and I for two hours. And we sang and sang and sang and sang and one friend brought me homemade peanut butter brownie bites and it was so completely awesome. We ended the night with Cheap Trick's "I Want You To Want Me." It's my new favorite karaoke song. Just when you thought it couldn't get any better, Sunday morning came. My sweetie wrote me a poem and read it out loud to me (and I had a little teary-eyed moment of joy) and then he made me french toast with strawberries and bacon (and tried to make me a pot of tea) and announced that even though the new Professor Layton game wasn't supposed to come out for another week or so, they had upped the release date to THAT DAY and we could go pick it up as soon as I wanted to (squee!!!!). I got phone calls from all my family members. And then my neighborhood threw me a birthday party (well, it was the Belmont Street Fair that day, but still).
Yeah. Best birthday ever.
I made a book
Sep. 4th, 2010 08:54 amI had the beginnings of a wonderful post about my bookmaking class, but DW killed it when I clicked away. :( Anyway, it's probably for the best, because I was going to give way too much away about bookmaking, rending the wonderful class I took at Collage worthless. If you are in Portland, you really should take the class. It was wonderful. I'll post some pictures here though of my class project, which I promptly shipped to Tennessee for my momma's birthday present. She loved it, and has not yet decided what to use it for.
I would like to include this quote from Inkheart by Cornelia Funke, though, because her stories engendered this burning desire to craft real hard-bound books with my own two little hands, and now I've done it.
"Mo turned his back to her again. He began laying out his implements on the table, even thought it was too small: his folding tool on the left, then the round-headed hammer he used to tap the spines of books into shape, the sharp paper knife... he usually whistled under his breath as we worked, but now he was perfectly quiet."
I would like to include this quote from Inkheart by Cornelia Funke, though, because her stories engendered this burning desire to craft real hard-bound books with my own two little hands, and now I've done it.
"Mo turned his back to her again. He began laying out his implements on the table, even thought it was too small: his folding tool on the left, then the round-headed hammer he used to tap the spines of books into shape, the sharp paper knife... he usually whistled under his breath as we worked, but now he was perfectly quiet."
Been waiting on snaps
Aug. 2nd, 2010 09:36 am
I did make my shoes, just in case there were any out there wondering what ever happened with that. However, I need snaps to finish them off, and had to wait to get paid and then had a busy social weekend that included spending an entire half day as a drunken rampaging pirate (yes that's me in the middle, next to Plunderathon organizer Dave the Horrible). So, now that's all done, I'll be off to the craft store for some bookmark making materials (bookmark swap round 5 is fairy/folk tale/retelling themed) and down to the fabric store for Cowgirl snaps. Pics will be forthcoming soon, and I'll definitely make another pair so a tutorial (of sorts) will appear in the distant-yet-not-interminable future. 
