Savannah Camisole Part I (also favorite pattern and my cat is cute)

Before we get to the camisole, Julie and I went to Fabric Depot to purchase material for said camisole.  We always enjoy looking at the sample garments and this one was a winner. The peplum shirt version was on display and, aside from the ruffles around the neckline which both of us wouldn’t bother to add in the first place, we loved this!  I forgot my camera, so this is a blurry cell phone photo. 

Also, before Julie and I went to Fabric Depot (this is a poorly arranged post) I cleaned the house.  After vacuuming my doormat, I needed to mop the floor, so I set the doormat on my bed.  Sentinel decided it was a good place to sit.

The Savannah camisole is one of two patterns available to subscribers of Seamwork magazine’s January issue.  The other one was a pair of leggings with a cute tulip detail.  I just made leggings, so I’m skipping that pattern now.  I do need tops/shirts/etc so I’m making the camisole.  This will be my first project sewing on the bias.

Here, I’ve taped and cut the pattern.

See that diagonal grain-line?  Usually it would be parallel to the center fold.  That’s how you know this is a bias cut.  I also learned that one should cut fronts and backs of bias cut garments so the bias runs in opposite direction.  This keeps the garment from twisting around the body.

Sentinel came to help with the cutting.  The other thing I learned with this project was that one should cut out pieces on a single layer.

This project was advertised as taking two hours and I’m nearly at that mark.  I’m also nearly done.  I just need to attach the stretch lace and the straps.  I did not finish this project because I’d never used stretch lace before, so I did some online research before we went to the fabric store.  This was both good and bad.  Good because I knew how much stretch lace cost online.  Bad because the stretch lace at Fabric Depot was four times the price of the lace online.  I needed two yards, which would have cost $12.00 or more at the store.  So I came home and ordered five yards from a seller on Etsy (who lives in Boise, Idaho) for $6.00 including shipping.

I’m really liking this fabric and pattern so far.  I look forward to finishing this project.

Patton Oswalt at the Newmark.

Kelly got us tickets for Patton Oswalt for my brithday.  Today we go.  Thank Kelly!  (Also, I’m just now noticing that service charge!  Preposterous!)

I greatly enjoy the architecture of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts (PCPA) and the Newmark Theater is my favorite among the complex’s theaters. Its small and intimate and has simulated boxes as well as stars on the ceiling.

We were closer than the first row! We were actually sitting in rows of removable chairs where the orchestra pit usually is.  We were very close!  This is a non-zoomed picture.

And here’s a zoomed one.  Patton Oswalt is telling us he’s relieved to be in Portland.

I was quite transfixed by his belt buckle. 

This was a great show.  He chatted about all manner of topics, my favorite of which was his opining on the day where he had to visit the Post Office and the D.M.V. on the same day.  He told us it wasn’t the employees who were the problem, they were on it.  It was the customers who were all crazy.  Patton Oswalt feels my customer service pain!

Essay: Blogging on Squarespace. A report from the first month.

I’d heard the ads (they have been a regular sponsor of Filmspotting and other podcasts I listen to) and was feeling constrained by the design features of blogspot so at the end of 2014 I took the plunge and switched from blogspot to Squarespace.  Here’s how it’s been.

Blogger is an excellent blogging platform.  It’s free, it’s intuitive, it gets the blogging job done.  The main thing I didn’t like was the inability to manipulate the layout.  Photos remain the same size, text can only go above and below etc.  Also, I wanted my own domain name.  (Which actually, I think you can do with blogger, it just costs money and takes a little work.)

Here’s what I like about Squarespace. 

Their customer service is fabulous.  If you can’t find what you want in their help site, you can open a ticket and someone will respond.  I’ve opened many a ticket and the responses come within a few hours and are nearly always excellent, even if they are telling me something I don’t want to know.  If every company had the level of customer service Squarespace does, the world would be a much happier place.

The design features are impressive.  They have multiple templates and each template can be customized.  In my initial research, I was concerned that my blog would end up looking way too iBlog.  I’m not a fan of the minimalist Mac aesthetic.  But it was very easy to manipulate the design templates and recast the stark white background in a soothing orange.

I can push content to separate pages.  I’ve been feeling lately that my blog is too varied in content and that perhaps if I just had a blog featuring, say, Three Sentence Movie Reviews, I would attract more regular readers.  I didn’t really want to break everything up and transfer some posts but not others.  Squarespace had the solution.  I can tag posts as “categories” and it will publish those category posts as part of the regular blog, but also publish them on a page I’ve created and dedicated just to that content. No longer will the book people have to wade through all the pictures of buildings to find the book posts.  Same for the movies reviews.  Same for the Channing Tatum Film Festival.

It’s really inexpensive. For less than $90.00 I got a custom domain and a year of web hosting.  For the amount of time I spend blogging that is a sweet deal.

So here’s the downside.  Blogging in Squarespace is very much a beta experience. 

Transferring from blogger.  I imported 2200 posts, which, one of the customer service representatives to me was far more than she or anyone working had ever heard transferred.  There was some trouble transferring that took about a week to resolve.  In the end what worked was switching browsers (it didn’t work in Chrome and did work in Explorer).  But when the posts did come, the tags did not fully arrive.  I can see them, but they do not show up in a tag cloud.  I’ve been told this is a known issue and I wish I would have known about this issue before I transferred.  It would have given me pause.  Supposedly it will be fixed.

Basic blogging features are not available.  For instance, you cannot add anything to the page with the blog.  A blog page just gets to keep on being a blog page, there’s no way to add a search bar or a list of archived posts.  I’ve added these on the About page, but I find it very annoying to have to go to a separate page just to search the blog.

In addition, the archives feature does not give you a list of posts published in the month.  It instead takes you to the last post of the month so you can scroll back through the month.  As a person with 20-30 posts each month, I need to see the names of the post in each month.  There is no fix for this right now.  Acutally, the suggested fix was to go back and tag every post with the month and the year and I said “NO WAY” to that.  The posts are already published by date.  There should be a way to feed the titles of the posts into a true archive feature.

You can only load one photo at a time.  Loading photos now involves a lot of deep breathing on my part.  Load one photo.  Breathe a few times.  Load another photo.  Breathe again.  Some posts have 20 or so pictures and this is a substantial increase in time commitment.  I would like to select all 20 photos, hit an upload button and then work on something else while they upload.

I can’t set features like single spacing, or defaulting to middle justified.  Both are driving me crazy.  Sometimes we don’t want a double space.  I can make it single space by hitting <shift>+<enter> but I just want to single space naturally.  And mostly I middle justify. I don’t want to have to set that with every text block.

Here’s how I blog.  Once per week I upload all my pictures to the blog, set up my posts, and save them as drafts.  Then I can go back at my leisure and write and edit the posts.  In Squarespace I am unable to set the published dates.  I can schedule future posts, but I cannot schedule past dates.  When I’m ready to post, I have to save and publish, then go back to settings and change the date.  This is a massive pain and I would prefer to set my dates as I set up my posts.

Squarespace gives you a choice of bold or italic.  You cannot choose bold AND italic.  And why not?  There’s just some times you need both.

Finally, when someone comments and the comments are emailed to me, the email tells me the name of the post the person is commenting about.  This is good.  However, I would prefer that the name of the post listed in the comment email also be linked to that post.  This is because I often answer questions asked by my commenters, and it’s easier to just click on a link rather than searching for the post.

So it’s been a rough transition.  I’m not totally happy yet.  I’m giving it a year to see if their blogging features improve, but if they don’t I may search around for a different home next fall and do another transfer at the end of the year.  I hope not though.  I’d like to stay here.

Letter from Aunt Carol

If the tell-tale sign of Aunt Carol’s handwriting didn’t tip me off the address label (free from some nonprofit) would.

Inside, a note from my aunt and a folded piece of paper.  I recognize the paper.

It’s computer scratch paper.  Growing up we had tons of it.  I’m not really sure why random symbols were printed out, but Dad would bring it home as scratch paper from his job as a principal.  This is actually the good computer scratch paper because you could tear off the dots.  The previous generation had dots that were not perforated and you had to use scissors to remove them.

And inside a picture and a story.

What a fun blast from the past.

Baby blanket (finally) finished!

The baby in question, MaryAnn’s Henry, is now two months old.  This is the same pattern I used for the other three baby blankets I made.  One for Ariel’s Charlie and Matt’s niece Mya.  I’ve also made it for a friend whose child is now in elementary school.  That was the pre-digital-camera era though, so I don’t have a picture of that one. 

I’m such a slow knitter I usually start these before the couple knows the sex of the child, so green is the default color. I would be fine with giving more girly colors to boys and vice versa, but not everyone feels that way and so gender-neutral green it is.

I’ve also got a PDF of the pattern I can send you if you are interested.  Just let me know. It’s very easy, 3 knits 3 pearls in a repeating pattern of 14 rows. 

Starting with this blanket, I kept track of what I was watching while knitting.  Here’s the list:

  • Wolverine
  • Persuasion (BBC)
  • Midsummer Night’s Dream (Portland Actor’s Ensemble)
  • Revenge of the Nerds
  • In a World
  • Repo Man
  • Ruby Sparks
  • Mad Men Season 7 part I
  • Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains
  • Frozen
  • Sherlock Season 1
  • House of Cards Season 1 (episodes 1-3)
  • Stuck in Love
  • Treme Season 1 (episodes 1-3)
  • Downton Abbey, Season 5 (episodes 1-3)

Someone has a little too much discretionary spending money.

From an Oregonian article about most downtown parking tickets accumulated.  The top winner is a UPS truck.  But also high on the list?  The daughter of a doctor with a little too much spending money.  Who also has a parking space in a garage.  The absurdity of this made me laugh.

Circle Skirt part I

Gertie’s New Book for Better Sewing has a schematic to make a circle skirt. I had material left over from the capes I made last summer, so here I go.

I had very little pattern paper, so I made my right angle in one corner.

And then raided the wrapping paper for the rest of the pattern.

Here are my two pattern pieces, the waistband and the skirt.

I moved the chairs out of the way to clean and then left them while I was working on the skirt.  Sentinel found a new seat to sit on.

Sadly, while I had thread and the material, I did not have a zipper, so this is as far as the circle skirt has gotten.

The preferred method.

This is a moot point because I’ve switched over to an electronic calendar, but I need to point out to nearly all of the planner makers that the above is a better setup than five days the same size and Saturday/Sunday sharing one space.   We have things to do on the weekend.  Lots of things.  It used to drive me crazy, having acres of space to write things Monday through Friday and then squeezing in the Saturday and Sunday details.  Here Monday through Thursday share one page and the remaining three days share the other.