/etsy/hostname

Ok, I settled on YayPrettyColors. (yayprettycolors.etsy.com). Nothing up there yet, but I expect next time I get bored I'll produce some stuff to sell. Or next weekend, which I think I am declaring a Weekend Of Crafting.

/etsy/hostname

I think I might open an etsy store to fund my spinning hobby. Because, really, I love the process of spinning, but I have no real desire to keep or do anything with the yarn I end up with. Clearly, etsy is the solution.

But I have no idea whatsoever what I should name my store. Help!

"Ooooh! What kind of quilt is it?" "Overambitious."

My good friend and honorary big sis Gwen was getting married, and I wanted to do something really special for a wedding present. Thus:


Isn't it pretty?? And absolutely perfect for them.

I should mention at this point that the skill level listed for this pattern was "Advanced, or a VERY DETERMINED beginner." I decided I could be VERY DETERMINED. However, what I neglected to realize was that this quilt consists of three hundred very complex blocks (paper-piecing For The Win!) that turned out to take me at least an hour each. I didn't get the pattern until three months before the wedding... and I'd have to work six hours a day on it to finish it in time.

Oops.

So now I'm shooting for the first anniversary. :P Not that I regret picking that particular pattern; by the time it's done it will be gorgeous, and Gwen and Hongyi are worth it. However, I draw the line at hand-quilting. I don't love them that much.

On to the construction details:
This is a queen-sized quilt, and therefore uses a crapton of fabric. Look at all the pretty colors!!

(Bother. Where did my pictures of the yellow set go?)

Each block is paper-pieced. Paper piecing rocks. It means I can do absurd blocks like this:


without having to be stupidly obsessive about cutting everything just so (and then crying when, despite my best efforts, I didn't get it quite right and the blocks won't go together.) Not that I don't try:

Bag of pieces waiting to be trimmed to size

I would like to put in a good word at this point for equiltpatterns.com. A huge selection of awesome art quilts and blocks, and very clear, well-written patterns. That pattern cost me, what, $6? Downloadable as a PDF, too, which is essential since I have to print out a pattern piece for each block I make. 'Cause I'm doing this:






And then I end up with these:









I'm totally making progress! Really I am!

Halp!

This is the other fabric Jacky brought me from Taiwan.


What should I do with it??

Craigslist is dangerous.

I, uh, may have made an impulse buy on Craigslist.

I acquired a little 22" four-harness floor loom from a nice lady out in the suburbs. Because I've always wanted to try weaving, and, well, who needs floor space anyway?

Luckily, the interwebs are full of informations, and told me how to set things up. Here's a sampler I made while figuring out what I was doing:

Plain twill, then herringbone twill


More herringbone

So, now that I sorta know what I'm doing, I'm setting up for a shawl made of these nice blue and blue-green wools.




Hrm. I seem to have failed to get any pictures of the nice blue-green wool I'm using for the weft. I'll fix that when I get home tonight.

After I bought the wool, I realized I wanted it to be about twice as wide, so I need to go get some more before I do much with this. I'll post details on how to thread it and stuff when it gets here and I get back to work on it.

Ok, well, I was bored.

One of three things can happen when I get bored. Either I start twitching and babbling and fidgeting until everyone around me is begging me to sit down and shut up, or I stare off into space thinking furiously about nothing at all (or, occasionally, homework. There was this one really surreal day where I sat down and thought about sorting algorithms for eight solid hours) until my brain is tied in knots, or I pick up some random mindless project and work on it until I can't stand it any more.

This time around, I got my spinning wheel up and running again. The results:

Some wool roving in beautiful colors. Unfortunately, the beautiful colors come off on my hands, which are now green. I'll have to wash the yarn I make out of it before using it for anything.

Spinning wheel closeup, with some yarn made from the wool above on the bobbin




The results of the first pass on the pretty blue-green-purple wool. The picture before this one has the results of these two bobbins plied together.



Three-ply white bamboo fiber



Beautiful purple bamboo fiber; two-ply



More bamboo fiber - undyed, this time. A fairly fine yarn.




I have no floor space.

I love bamboo fiber - lovely and soft and spins smoothly, and it's a lot less finicky than silk. Unfortunately, my favorite fiber supplier Mind's Eye Yarns doesn't carry it any more, so if I want more I'll have to get it from the interwebs. I might try getting some and dyeing it - I've never tried dyeing, but it can't be that hard... right? (Bamboo apparently takes a ton of dye, but you end up with these amazing vibrant saturated colors). We'll see.

Everything's better with springsteel

Is this not awesome?

(courtesy of trulyvictorian.com)

And I immediately thought of this fabric my friend Jacky brought me back from Taiwan:

Pretty, innit?

You see where this is going. Clearly, I need to make a corset-tailcoat out of this totally kickass fabric. Unfortunately, I only have four yards of it, and it's thirty inches wide - this is going to involve some magic. I think I'll fill the pleats in the back with a black satin, and make elbow-length sleeves with three-inch-wide black satin cuffs attached to the bottom of those (sleeves take up far more fabric than you'd expect).

The danger, see, is that this will end up looking like a pimp coat - the pattern on the fabric is strong enough that this could happen, and that's really not the look I'm going for - this is the other reason I'm going to do these black accents. So I'm going to make the low-neckline version, so as to avoid having Vast Tracts of Fabric, with a line of cute little round black buttons down the front.

However, this causes some issues with the collar. This pattern has both a mandarin collar option (meant to go with the high-neckline version) and a half-collar (basically, the mandarin collar, but only half of it - it goes around the back and stops roughly below your ears). The half-collar is nominally what you're supposed to use with the low-neckline version... but it looks really absurd. I love the way the collar looks in the back, though. So my friend Kim had this brilliant idea: I should do the full mandarin collar, on the low-neckline version. Basically, a built-in choker. I think it'll look really nice.

Victorian outfits, of course, have one more complication: you've gotta have the right underwear. In this case, a corset and a bustle and possibly petticoats. And I'd like to have a skirt to go with it. So I'm going to try out a few other Truly Victorian patterns while I'm at it:


http://trulyvictorian.com/catalog/101.html



http://trulyvictorian.com/catalog/170.html

The Silverado corset from this one
http://trulyvictorian.com/catalog/lm100.html



And this skirt.
http://trulyvictorian.com/catalog/290.html

Patterns and bustle wire should be getting here any day now. I'll keep you posted. (Is anyone actually reading this, anyway?)

Some Assembly Required

You may have noticed that some of those components from last time can't actually be dropped into a breadboard as is. I should note at this point that I've never soldered anything in my life (yes, I'm a terrible person, I know.) But it had to be done, and I had these cute little header pin things that you can solder into the breakout boards and all...

It actually didn't go too badly. I only burned myself once! It's actually surprisingly easy, as long as you pay attention to what you're doing.





After that, I was all set to start plugging things into the breadboard. However...

Fail #1
So remember how last time I mentioned that taking the LCD out of the frame was a bad idea?

I had a good reason, I swear. Look at the connectors on that:

(the above image courtesy of sparkfun.com)

They're some sort of weird spring-loaded... something. So I took the LCD out of the frame to see if it connected to anything that was a bit easier to work with - but no.




You can just barely see the groups of iridescent traces coming up off of the black insulated rectangle. How is that even conductive?? Anyone know?

Since there obviously wasn't anything we could do with it out of the case, Mike and I tried to put it back in, so it wouldn't get accidentally broken.

Ahahahaha...





Why is it always easier to get things out of cases than back into them?

Fail #2

Oops. It doesn't fit. Either I need to find a smaller cheap low-power LCD (I can't imagine I'm going to have much luck), or another pocketwatch. The thing is, the LCD would totally fit in there - if I could just get it past the ring where the front and back screw on.


Anyway, after that I started throwing things on the breadboard - I'm going to build and test the entire system on the breadboard before I start getting serious about final assembly.


From left to right, the things you see are: the whatever-it-is that's providing 3.3V, the SD card reader (you can see the square metal socket), the Arduino (it takes up, what, half the board?) with the audio output jack on the very end. You can see the extra power rail I tacked on, too; I wanted to have an easily accessible 3.3V rail. (3.3V power is color-coded orange on my board - orange is like red, but, well, less so. (Red is the traditional color for power.) I also have 5V on there, so I wanted to make sure it was clear which was which.)




See that big blue clump of wires on the bottom? Apparently the arduino vaguely prefers to use particular pins to talk to the SD card. Just for reference, it's:
CS (chip select/slave select): pin 10
DI (data in): pin 11
DO (data out): pin 12
SCK (clock): pin 13



And since DI and SCK are coming from the Arduino, we have to run it through a voltage divider to get it to a value that's safe for the SD card. We may also have to do that for CS; I'm not sure. Here I just used a pair of 10K resistors (the peanut-shaped things between the SD card socket and the edge of the Arduino) for each to cut the voltage in half - 2.5 volts is within the acceptable range according to the SD card spec, so it's all good.


Me being all industrious and such.


Mike, my partner in crime, looking up datasheets for me.

And then, uh, I got home and realized that even as fanatically neat as my breadboards always are, I was going to be super cramped on that board. So I went home and pulled all the stuff out of another board I had from an EE class (which I failed, incidentally. I was terrible at the math. However, I had the prettiest breadboards in the lab!), hooked them together, and transferred everything over.



Complete with my pinout cheatsheet!

Unfortunately, I didn't hook up the SD card reader again, because I ran out of colors of wire that were not red or orange. I may need to go swipe a couple feet of various colors of wire from one of the labs. *cough* er... did I say that out loud?

One last note - see how there's a power rail running under the SD and audio out boards? I've actually got them hooked up to power and ground underneath, like so:





(Like I said, I ran out of everything that's not power-colored, so I used green. Green is the new black. Right?)

For next time, I'll hook it up to the computer and write some code to try to get the processor to talk to the SD card reader and the audio jack. (Although if you really want to see it, I'll share my experience of getting the equivalent of Hello World running on the Arduino.) I'm limited with what I can do with the audio until I get the decoder chip, but presumably I can send it a sine wave or something. Also, I haven't looked too hard at it yet, but this looks promising.