Blog Entries – Page 156

A Quiet Saturday

I spent the day mostly at my desk, working on the next gallery page for my site. The house was quiet, the men are away skiing in Vermont, and my daughter spent the day working in a kennel. She loves the dogs, and caring for them, and always comes home quite in need of a shower! I drove her tonight to her friend’s house in a neighboring county, where she will spend the night.

So I’m alone tonight, and after I finished fine tuning the collar/facing piece, and getting it and the hem all basted in, I spent some time couching the lime green floss around the collar/facing edges. This is a bit tricky, I loosened the tension on the upper thread, and loosened the tension on the presser foot, which helped keep the couching from compressing and skewing the collar as I sewed around it. I had to first pre-thread the floss using a tapestry needle, up the front, through the underside of the collar at the start of the fold line, since couching is one sided, around the collar, and back through to the underside of the collar, continuing down the other front. That way when I put the special cording foot on the machine, I could break the zig zag stitching when I had to switch sides, but not the floss.

I took my hand sewing kit, and curled up in front of a pre-recorded episode of PBS’s Great Performances, King Lear starring Ian McKellen and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Obviously it was an unbelievable performance, and I was able to get all the hand sewing finished, the hem, the facings, and the backs of the buttonholes. The sleeves are next.

It Worked!

I’m so excited, and pretty embarrassed that I finally figured this out after only three months of blogging. Thanks Tien! I love you! Actually, Tien’s suggestion on how to get the pictures clickable and still remain rectangular wasn’t exactly the whole problem. I had actually found that setting last week, and thinking it would fix the problem, was disappointed it didn’t. But after talking with Tien, I realized that there had to be a way, she did it in WordPress, why can’t I, and lo’ and behold, I merely had to click on the image URL to give it the link suddenly, I’m cooking with gas!

So being the naturally obsessive compulsive person I am, I stayed up until 11:30 pm, going back through the blogs, and I’ve clicked on the image URL’s all the way back to the beginning of the month, and now all the little images should become big screenfilling images when you click on them! So I only have to fix February, January, and December, plus work on the website, plus finish the jacket plus go to sleep sometime…….

Oh, and if you get HBO, don’t forget that Alexander McCall Smith’s #1 Ladies Detective Agency series starts Sunday night at 8pm, starring Jill Scott. It got rave reviews in our paper.

Focused Friday

So far the feedback has been really positive on the site. I did, in one of my middle of the night awakenings, think that I really should have the galleries run from most recent to oldest work, so I reversed the 2000-2005 gallery. I think it is better to click on the gallery link and see the newest work added, rather than scroll way way down and find it at the bottom. Then I spent most of the day reprocessing images for the artwork gallery. Some of the older pieces there were originally shot in slides. Many of my slides were not great to begin with, and I think my scanner isn’t doing the best job anymore. But I did my best with what I had to work with, and vowed that next time I set up a photoshoot, I’ll reshoot some of the older important work in digital with proper lighting and a better backdrop. It was interesting to see how far I’ve come as a photographer.

The men made it safely up to Vermont for the last ski trip of the season, I got a text message at 2:15am letting me know they arrived safely. (That’s probably why I woke up last night and re-thought the gallery!) In spite of the rain yesterday, they had a good day of skiing today, and are looking forward to the weekend.

I worked on the jacket after dinner tonight, and got the upper collar/front facing in, and the backs of the bound buttonholes finished. So I can actually button the jacket. I love the narrow trim collar, and the lines on this are really really slimming. I took an interior shot of the jacket before I started on collar/facing, because I always loved what goes on behind the scenes in a garment like this.

There are a couple of blogs that I really enjoy, one of them is Tien’s Blog, the traveling tigress. Tien is a weaver who makes garments out on the west coast, and blogs about her adventures, like me, but she is a wonderful writer. I love her musings, and look forward to her latest adventures. We spent a lot of time emailing this afternoon, I gave her some advice on interfacings, and she gave me some advice on using WordPress and how to get my images to be clickable, but remain rectangular. Before when I used this feature, the thumbnails in the blog would be square, cutting off important information, like in a long gown, you’d only see the crotch. Not attractive. So she advised me on where to click in the settings to change this feature to eliminate the square thumbnails, and we’ll see if this works. Hopefully my interfacing information works for her.

The other blog I follow is from Susan Hinckley, called Small Works in Wool. Another fabulous writer, she is absolutely hysterical, and peppers her posts with old magazine images to get the point across. It is the best laugh of the day when she puts up a new post. And her work is great, she takes old sweaters and beads, and buttons, and turns them into little works of personally and politically charged art.

New Website!

Well I’m not completely finished, but I got what I’ve done uploaded and ready for testing. I’m completely brain fried, I think I’m getting too old for these kinds of intense hours!

Anyway, if anyone wants to try out what I’ve done on the new site, feel free to go to www.daryllancaster.com

Please note that only half the pages are completed, if you click on a link and the page isn’t done, it will just say, “Under Construction”. FYI, the About Me section should be done, those pages were easy since I just had to basically cut and paste from my resume. The schedule and worshops aren’t done. And the gallery is only halfway there. It took me the whole day to rebuild the Garment Gallery 2000-2005. I haven’t decided if I will ultimately put my earlier work, I go all the way back to about 1975, but I think it is too much information and not relevant to my current body of work. 2006-2010 isn’t up yet. But I did do the HGA Challenge page, because I finally figured out what button to click to get the text to wrap around the picture instead of on top or below. A big DUH! (To further the duh moment, the technique for doing this very simple thing (the align left key), is the same one I use to use back in the Microsoft FrontPage days. It never occured to me that this maniacal program would use something so simple…

Feel free to comment about any part of the site, I’m still building it, so I’ll take any feedback under consideration. The pages with a large amount of text or images have a built in scroll bar, see if it is intuitive to figure it out. Should the gallery images go from oldest to newest on the bottom, or the other way around? Same with things like my published work. I know you can’t click on the home page images, I hadn’t intended that. It is just a JPG in photoshop. Does it make you nuts that you can’t click on them? I was hoping visitors would just go right into the site.

The biggest question is, does the Spry menu bar work in Safari browser, I heard there were some compatibility issues. If it doesn’t, what happens? My husband has Safari browser on one of his computers, so after his ski trip (yes, another one, they left tonight for Vermont), I’ll get him to check. If anything wacky comes up on your screen, let me know what browser you are using.

Anyway, I’m tired. No progress on the jacket, I wanted to get this site up and working before I go any further on it. There is one other issue I’d love some feedback on, and that is the contact page. There are two schools of thought here. Publishing my personal information, my address and such is thought by many to be a no-no, after all, I will eventually have my schedule posted and that’s an invite to unwanted visitors while I’m away. On the other hand, there is the school of thought that often a guild or other important person needs to send me something by snail mail, or they need to plan airfares by the closest airport, so by not putting it, which I haven’t ever on the old site, I know very annoyed program chair people will spend an hour cruising through my site and finally email me in disgust, because they can’t find my address. Any opinions here?

Pansies and Piping

Well it isn’t much. But I managed to brighten the dreary days of March, eager with anticipation of spring, measuring the bulbs as they poke their heads out of the damp earth. In anticipation of tomorrow’s rain, I did manage to get the deck boxes and a couple pots planted with pansies, a wonderful gift from my friend and neighbor, in celebration of my husband’s birthday over the weekend. Thank you Deb! Everything is so bare and cold, but pansies add a little bright color in mid March, the first color of the spring.

Of course you realize that a week ago, the deck looked like this:

I’m seriously crossing my fingers we are done with the spring snowstorms.

I worked hard on the website today, managing to figure out one of the things that was eluding me. I knew it was just a stupid click, somewhere, yet I sweated how to do this simple thing for days, and then all of a sudden, Wham! The proverbial 2 x 4 hit me over the head and you could hear the “DUH!” all the way to Trenton! Now that I figured out that little detail, I can start on the gallery pages, and get them moving along. I want to reprocess all the images I used on the original site, make them more uniform, and a little bigger in their thumbnail size. So lots of photo processing, finding the originals in the archives, oh goody, a treasure hunt of sorts…

I worked for a bit tonight on the jacket, getting the left side of the jacket sewn in. It fits like a glove. I’m so glad I added the additional two inches in length. I’m really loving the lime green piping, and when I looked at it on me in the mirror, I loved the way the belt brings in the jacket in the back. But I decided, after mulling over some of the comments from the original posting, that a hint of the color someplace else would be a great idea. I have some DMC floss in the exact color as the felt piping, so I took off the back belt, and couched the floss on, get this, I realized I didn’t have the right color thread, couching only works if you have the same color thread, so I rooted around in a drawer, and voilá, there in the back was a very old wooden spool of poly thread, in the exact color. Go figure…

So I couched (which means a very narrow zig-zag stitch over a cord or yarn, in this case I used floss, aided by a little foot that has a groove to feed the cord or yarn). I plan to use this couched floss to topstitch the collar and the top of the sleeve cuffs.

I love the wavy movement of the felt piping, it looks like the aurora borealis in the northern sky, and that’s the effect I was looking for, the jacket is called after all, Arctic Sky.