Time Enough for AWESOME

2009-08-30T11:57:00.000-07:00

Still unsure how to finish the edges of the mistcloak strips. Cutting on the bias doesn't actually help much; when it does fray, it looks really ugly. I wonder if edge-stitching + cutting on the bias would be helpful?

Anyway, I've been experimenting with different combinations of strip width and weights of fabric. For your perusal:

Front layers still 2", back layer 1"

Only front layers; those 1"

Definitely on the right track here. It's getting much more airflow through, so it's fluttering nicely.

Back layer only (1")

All layers; 1"

Front at .5" (more or less), back 1"

Not a fan of this one. The thinner strips just look tattered, it's impossible to cut strips that narrow straight, and they're so narrow that any edge finish would practically take up the entire strip.

So, I think I'm going with all layers, 1" all around. After seeing a cloak on the TWG forums made entirely of organza, I think I'll be set if I put a partial layer of organza on top to give it some liveliness (? I lack the fancy artsy fashion designer terminology. Something something "dynamic", maybe). Updates will be forthcoming.

It should also have a hood; I'm contemplating making it out of a solid piece of the heavy charmeuse. I don't think I want to sew strips into a hood. Ugh.

So anyway, I'm making another partial mockup with the rest of my fabric, all 1" strips. Unfortunately, quilting it down - even just hand-basting - is approximately impossible unless you've stabilized it into submission first. Lacking stabilizers, I've been just hand-tacking each layer together. (I really need to get some stabilizer.)

2009-08-25T18:00:00.000-07:00

I forgot how much I hate working with satins. Even with a rotary cutter, this stuff was !$!@$ impossible to cut straight.

I ended up deciding to tear it, at least for the purposes of this experiment.

Unfortunately, tearing is a little rough on the lightest-weight silk.

Anyway, here's one of the piles of streamers. I think this is the lightest-weight fabric.

And here's the heavy charmeuse.

The edges got a little stretched when I tore the fabric, so I'm ironing all the pieces flat again.

My (probably futile) attempt to keep them from getting all wrinkled in my backpack.

The base layer - 2" strips of the heavy charmeuse sewn together at the top.

Pinning on another layer.

Two layers.

I lightly stitched the back layer together for about 6", because it was impossible to handle this piece otherwise.

And then I tacked the front two layers together down to about six inches as well.

Here's the whole thing laid out.

Not a great picture, but you get the idea.

If this were the finished product, it'd be at least six inches longer. I don't think that would affect the drape all that much, though.

My wonderful housemate Kevin waving it around so I could capture how it moved. My dog is looking on in the background with his trademarked "I do not understand why you humans do what you do" expression.

Sigh. In the end, the light outer layers were just not as tendril-like as I wanted. Now that I've got this documented, I'll slit all the strips up the middle and see what 1" strips look like. (The fabric will also be darker overall, and about six inches longer.) This was somewhat disappointing, but better now than later.

FINISH HIM!!!

2009-08-23T20:03:00.000-07:00

*cough* Sorry, I always wanted to say that in an appropriately fruity voice. Although possibly it should be "Finish hem!"

I am not terribly pleased with the results of my experimental edge finishes. Even using #100 silk thread (i.e., super fine), all the sturdy ones ended up far too stiff.

Various satin stitches.

Rolled hem.

I'm contemplating just doing a double row of very small straight stitches down the edge. I'm not sure if this actually wins me anything, though.

The edge would look like this, probably.

Maybe that, in combination with fray-check or fabric medium, would do something useful. I don't know. Well, tomorrow hopefully I'll start cutting up the fabric, and I can see how badly the edges fray if I leave them alone (*twitch* *twitch* nothing goes out of my workshop with unfinished raw edges... unless I don't have a choice. Grumble.)

No I do NOT mean lancet.

2009-08-23T18:51:00.000-07:00

Here begins round 1 of mistcloak fabric experimentation!

I used Lanaset (and man, did google's auto-correction irritate me here) acid dye on silk: a 19mm charmeuse, a 12mm satin, and an 8mm flat crepe. I normally use Procion reactive dyes, which can actually be used on protein fibers as well (prepare your fiber in an acid soak rather than a basic soak, and heat-set it), but the problem is that the Procion color card is calibrated for dyeing on cotton; it's reasonably accurate for most plant fibers, but the colors can be wildly off on protein fiber. So I ended up with Lanaset, which is an acid dye (this is much less scary than it sounds. It just means that you pre-soak with vinegar).
First off, preparing different strengths of dye solution:

Here's my bottle of 2% stock solution.

For hand-application of dye to fiber and fabric, usually you lay it all out on a sheet of plastic and wrap it up when you're done, in preparation for steaming or batching (if your dye doesn't need heat, you just give it time to react). Yes, this is my dining room. And yes, my housemates are wonderful.

I thought I'd try spraying on some dye to see what it looked like.

And also put some in cups for brush-painting.

Hrm. The sprayed-on look is... not really what I was going for.

Anyway, this is the 8mm crepe after I've done various things to it - spraying in the far corner, a few different shades of hand applied dye on the rest.

My first shot at hand-applying the dye.

This is the 12mm silk, painted with dye and ready to be rolled up.

At this point I ran out of time and had to go to work, so I rolled them all up and stuffed them in the dye pot until the next day.

Acid dyes generally require two things to fix them to the fiber: acid (unsurprisingly), and heat. Lanaset dye can just be steamed (although if you're immersion-dyeing, you can just heat the whole dyebath). Unfortunately, although I found this lovely pot at Goodwill, the metal colander thing I got to go inside it for the fabric to sit on wouldn't quite fit. Improvisation time!

All wrapped up and starting to get steamy.

You're supposed to wait for it to all cool down to room temperature before rinsing it out. Ahahahaha yeah right.

The really cool thing about Lanaset is that the dyebath exhausts. This means that all of the dye reacts with the fabric, so when you rinse it out, all that should be coming off is some slightly vinegar-y water. Unlike my Procion-dyed bamboo yarn, this did not need EIGHT RINSES. (grr...)

Here's the 19mm charmeuse rinsed off.

Trying to fit all of them onto this drying rack in a way that would allow all of them to dry took some ingenuity. And clothespins.

And now for the moment of truth! (Note: none of this fabric is as blindingly shiny as it seems; the flash on the camera just brings it out. Due to that, it's also a couple shades darker than it looks in photographs.)

8mm crepe:

You can see a little bit of experimentation with the squirt bottles in the middle. I had mostly given up on that technique by then, though.

This stuff is super super light and fine. I hope it does the "curling like the mists" thing; I'm planning on having it as the top layer.

A nice all-over mottled pattern. Not bad.

12mm satin:
This one I did only with foam brushes, and I actually managed to divide up the fabric and remember what I did where instead of just sort of slapping things on to see what happened.

You can see the dividing line right down the middle there...

Closeup of the darkest section.

This is the lightest section...

...and this is the medium-colored section.

19mm charmeuse:
Features of note:

Remember how I said I let it sit wrapped up in plastic overnight? I think some of the patterning here is from being crumpled in the plastic. I'm starting to see the point of the Maiwa Handprint instructions for dyeing with Lanaset - namely, to apply your dye and then let the fabric dry completely before steaming it. At least that way you know your dye isn't going to seep around before you set it. On the other hand, you don't come up with cool things like this by accident.

A heavier application of spray. The lighter areas are from being crumpled in plastic as well.

The entire spray corner, with patches in two different intensities.

The backside of the softer sprayed area - it's hard to see the pattern when the camera flash is making the fabric super shiny. The back side of this fabric is matte, though, so it's easier to see.

The front side of the softer sprayed area. I can't remember exactly, but I think this area involved painting over the spray with a layer of the most dilute dye, and shaving cream. (Yeah, apparently if you spray some shaving cream on top of the dye, you can smoosh it around and soften the edges a bit.) I rather like this effect.

But... where do the tassels go?

2009-08-23T18:05:00.000-07:00

All right. If you've read Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series (You haven't? Go fix that. Right now.), you will understand why I need to make a mistcloak. See, in the Mistborn universe there's, well, a lot of mist. Particularly awesome allomancers get to wear mistcloaks (useful, since they tend to run around at night in the mist a lot). Here's the description:

He pulled open the pack, then whipped out a dark gray cloak. Large and enveloping, the cloak wasn't constructed from a single piece of cloth--rather, it was made up of hundreds of long, ribbonlike strips. They were sewn together at across the chest, but mostly they hung separate from one another, like overlapping streamers.
Kelsier threw on the garment, its strips of cloth twisting and curling, almost like the mists themselves.
Dockson exhaled softly. "I've never been so close to someone wearing one of those." "What is it?" Vin asked, her quiet voice almost haunting in the night mists.
"A Mistborn cloak," Dockson said. "They all wear the things--it's kind of like a...sign of membership in their club."
"It's colored and constructed to hide you in the mist," Kelsier said. "And it warns city guards and other Mistborn not to bother you." He spun, letting the cloak flare dramatically. "I think it suits me."

From elsewhere:
Vin followed, her cloak tassels spraying rainwater.
So you see why as soon as I read this I had to make one. I'm always up for some sewing challenges. Read the rest of my blog and you'll see. (Also, I'm a hopeless fangirl. Some people write fanfic. Some people draw fan art. I... cosplay. Sigh. One of these days I'll get moving on that Lulu (FFX) costume - involving, as it will, far too much springsteel.)

I think my general plan of attack will be to dye silk in various shades of gray and/or mottled gray (I <3 Dharma Trading), cut it up, and quilt it down in a diamond pattern. I'm going with a diamond pattern because the pattern will naturally get looser the farther down it goes, so that the fabric doesn't all break free at a single cutoff point. I'm not sure yet if I'm going to go with different widths of strips in the cloak, but I'm definitely going to layer them a bit.

And, just because it's too cool an idea to pass up, I'm going to (attempt to...) carve a couple of the allomantic symbols (see this for a relatively un-spoileriffic example) in wax and cast them as cloak clasps. This, of course, is probably out-of-genre (at least, since the two symbols I'm using are atium and [redacted for plot reasons]), but it's just too cool not to do. (I'm finally taking a Real Metals Class at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts this fall, which ought to help. I've done a bit of lost-wax casting before (really need to write the post for that...), but it's not the same.)

The challenges I'm expecting are:

I have no clue how to finish the edges of the strips. This fabric will all fray, which I don't think is going to leave me with the look I want. I'm afraid that a rolled hem or satin-stitched hem is going to be too bulky and interfere with how the fabric flows. Using fray-check (or maybe fabric medium?) might work, but it tends to wick through the fabric, and fray-check, at least, dries stiff. I could maybe counteract the wicking by thickening with alginate (would that even work? no clue!), but I'm dubious.
I'm buying a yard of each weight of fabric for the sole purpose of trying out a million different dyeing techiques and cutting it up and sewing it down and tinkering until I've figured out how to get it to flow right. A lot is going to be riding on the construction details.
Where the hell do the tassels go??? They'd weigh the bottom down too much for it to flow right (unless maybe they were on the very bottom layer), but aside from that I have no guesses.

I will chronicle my first ever attempt to use acid dye shortly.

Step 6: Don't be annoying. Kikyo is not annoying at all.

2009-08-12T18:16:00.000-07:00

While doing research for this costume, I came across a kind of hilarious guide on how to act like Kikyo from Inuyasha. It boiled down to "Dress like Kikyo. Learn archery. Don't be a twit."

Anyway. I wanted to dress as a miko (Japanese Shinto shrine maiden) for a party. This party was on a Saturday. The fabric got to my house on the evening of the Wednesday before that. So, uh, guess what I did all of Thursday, when I was off work. That's right...

Part 1: Hakama
Hakama are the giant poofy pleated pants. For miko, they're always always Bright Red. I based these (very) loosely off the Lastwear pattern, which makes slightly odd but really cool-looking hakama ... it wasn't intended to be as loosely based as that, but then I ran out of time, and had to compensate for mistakes, and, well.

So. First off, I didn't get nearly enough fabric. At least, not to follow the pattern as written. I thought that 2.5 yards would be more than enough for any reasonable pair of pants. Unfortunately, hakama are not reasonable pants. So I spent the better part of an hour juggling numbers to figure out just now I could salvage this.
Eventually I managed to trim off just enough out of the pleats to be able to fit the front and back of one leg across the width of the fabric (yes, each leg is 58" around...). Whew.

Then the part I was dreading... trying to get all the pleats in accordance with the pattern. It took several tries to get the numbers to match with reality, but eventually I got it...

If you zoom in, you may notice ~~my toes~~ that I was marking the fabric with something, er, more indelible than regular fabric marker or chalk. Thankfully, I came to my senses when doing the other leg and did it in pencil. This was a lifesaver, because I then proceeded to cut out two left legs. Doh. It's a good thing for me that the wrong side of this twill looks almost like the right side, or I would have been Very Very Sad.

Finally, I got all of the right marks onto the correct sides of the correct pieces of fabric (although I think I did mix up a front leg with a back leg somewhere - they're almost identical, though, so it didn't really matter). Then the other part I was dreading rolled around, which is to say, actually getting the pleats physically in place. I don't know what it is with me and pleats. I can do pleats on the fly, but when I try to do pleats matching up to a pattern, I just fail horribly. See:

One of those things... is not the same width as the other. Sigh.

Eventually, I realized that following the pattern after making such substantial modifications to it was just going to be a pain. I also realized that the original pattern appears to have been made to fit someone with a Much Larger waist than mine, and since I took the extra width out of the inside of the pleats, my hakama perforce would fall right off. This is where I hit the part of the project where I just start totally making sh*t up. There's one of those in every project, but most of them don't come quite so early.

So, after recalculating to make sure the final width would be, you know, reasonable, I just put the pleats in where they wanted to go. It turned out that my pleats were just as deep as the original pattern called for... so it may have been a win that I didn't get enough fabric. If I had followed the original pattern, it would have been terrible.

There, doesn't that look better?

Next up was the whole waistband unit. I more or less did this by the pattern, although I left off a lot of the quilting, due to time constraints. (I have discovered a secret fondness for topstitching and quilting things down. If you do it neatly, it just looks so gorgeous!) Here's part of it:

This is about where I stopped taking pictures, because the time pressure was getting to me. A couple more highlights from the remainder of the evening:

I ended up having enough fabric. Barely. Part of the back waistband was patched together from the crotch cutouts.
And I had to make the back pleats deeper because I only had enough fabric to make the back waistband so wide. Eep.
If you're curious, I ended up stiffening the koshita with a couple layers of upholstery velvet.

Anyway, eleven hours after I started, I achieved VICTORY!!

The first picture was better, but I had to include this one just for the expression on my face. Can't you just see me doing the FF Victory Dance here?

That's about it for the hakama. They got pleated and pressed, of course.

Part 2: Kimono Top
This was actually fairly uneventful. (Gasp!) Basic kimono patterns are really fairly simple. Although, once again, I ended up not getting enough fabric to have a comfortable surplus... sigh. Well, mostly because I forgot how deep the slits in the side of the hakama were going to be, and I sadly didn't have enough fabric for the kimono to go down long enough all the way around to cover it. (I ended up piecing something together to make the kimono longer just where the hakama vents were).

Part 3: Hair Tie
This was something of a last-minute inspiration. One possible mode of miko hair style is to have a ponytail wrapped in prayer paper and tied with something that looked like twine in the pictures I saw, but probably isn't. I had a scrap of white fabric left, and some red ribbon, so I just finished the edges of the fabric, sewed the ribbon on, and voila!
The tie isn't quite right, of course, but it's all red and white, which makes it plausible enough.

Here are pictures of the whole thing (this is from after I got back from the party, so I was tired and grumpy. This costume looks much better in real life, especially when freshly pressed. Also, you can't see the perfect perfect shoes and tabi socks I found in Chinatown and borrowed from a friend, respectively.)

Just flowers then. And the shine off the back of a dragonfly. I wanted a piece of the moon, but blue-dragonfly-shine was as close as I could get.

2009-08-12T17:53:00.000-07:00

Or, Adventures With Silk Paper.

So, the theory behind silk (well, I used bamboo fiber that I dyed, but the principle is the same) paper is that you sandwich some fiber between netting, wet it, squish fabric medium through it, and let it dry. (There are various other things you can use to stick it together, depending on the specific properties you want out of it, but fabric medium works as well as anything else.) Anyway, here's the process:

Take your fiber and start laying it out on the netting (you should also put plastic underneath so that you don't get fabric medium everywhere). For extra strength, do multiple layers with the grain at right angles to adjacent layers.

The fiber I dyed wasn't particularly smooth, so it was hard to just pull out nice even tufts. I ended up taking smaller segments and spreading them apart. It ended up getting me rather uneven paper, but it has an interesting texture.

All done with that step.

Now fold over the netting, or lay another piece on top, or whatever you need to do to get both sides covered.

Now you need to wet out the fiber to make it easier for the fabric medium to work all the way through. Get your soapy water ready (something like 1t/cup works fairly well).

Start working it through the fiber. The fiber has to be completely saturated; it takes more water than you think.

Next, peel back your top layer of netting and sort of brush the loose fibers back toward the center to make a "selvedge"; it makes it much easier to get out of the netting later.

Ready for fabric medium.

At first I was brushing it on, but eventually I decided to just dump it on. (This was fairly heavy paper, so it took a lot.)

Squish it in with your hands if you like!

Yeah, there will be suds; you just soaked the whole thing in soapy water, it'll do that.

Then hang it up to dry (ok, it would probably be better for the fiber to not hang it in direct sunlight, but I felt like living dangerously.)

Ironing to heat-set the fabric medium. Check the label on whatever sort of glue stuff you're using to see if you need to do this.

And there it is! This was three fairly heavy layers of fiber, and it came out more like a felt than anything else.

After that, I decided to try experimenting with making the lightest possible paper I could. This is what I ended up with! It's surprisingly sturdy. I could see using it in place of organza for some projects.

You can't see the shimmer very well in this photo :(

Wings!!!

2009-07-30T20:45:00.001-07:00

One of my favorite projects. Sadly, no construction pictures again (I promise, I'll remember to take them... although this was from long ago. still, it would have been awesome.)

The wings are a 1/4" mild steel frame with fabric stretched over; the fabric is some stretchy synthetic. I painted it with a base coat of fabric medium, then acrylics, then a pearl glaze.

The corset is a fairly standard three-layer deal with 1/2" spring steel. I had to hand-sew the last couple panels (argh), because the metal attachment points made it impossible to cram through the sewing machine. I had hand-sewing callouses by the time I was done. *sigh*

The wings are actually detachable. The nuts, er, unbolt, letting you remove the pieces of metal they're attached to, and the strip running between them that the wing frame is anchored to. What's left is a sort of flat loop of metal with bolts sticking out - so theoretically, anything that can bolt to those loops can be attached to the corset. I could make all kinds of other wings if I wanted!

Can't think of a clever title

2009-07-30T20:23:00.000-07:00

As promised, more details on hand-painting.

To keep the fiber from getting all scraggly, I tried enclosing it in pantyhose for the duration. This ended up failing, because I couldn't get the dye through the way I wanted, so I ended up switching to a length of netting tube from a bath poof thing. To keep the fiber stretched out along the length of the tube, I tied scrap yarn around the fiber in several places and then tied that through the holes in the netting.

After you get your fiber into some sort of protective casing (this is quite possibly unnecessary for other fibers - bamboo is just tricky that way), put it in the salt and soda ash soak.

Get your dye area set up. Lay down some plastic wrap to work on; make sure it's big enough for the whole thing, because you'll be wrapping the fiber up in it when you're done. Mix your dye and urea into squirt bottles.

Start squirting the dye on! Keep applying it until you see it puddling on the plastic - if there's no dye coming out of the fiber, it hasn't absorbed everything it can yet.

Keep going... and once you've got this side nicely saturated, flip it over and do the other side. See the places where it didn't soak all the way through?

All done. Now roll it up in the plastic wrap like a burrito! It's worth putting another layer or two of plastic wrap on while you're at it, as well.

For added security, throw it all in a plastic baggie before leaving it someplace warm to cure. I left mine for about 24 hours.

Time to rinse! Dump it out in the sink...

take the plastic wrap off...

and rinse off whatever you can by hand.

Unfortunately, these fiber reactive dyes are incredibly irritating when it comes time to get them off the thing you're dyeing. This picture is from four rinses in, simmered on the stove with Synthropol. Argh.

Eventually I gave up rinsing and just hung it outside to dry.

Here it is! The colors weren't as deep as I wanted; it's fairly clear that I didn't get the dye all the way to the center of the bundles. Either I should make a point of saturating the fiber way beyond what I think it can possibly hold, or make the bundles thinner. Also, the purple came out way too red, but that's probably just a mixing error.

Even so, it's still pretty.

Tactical Kimono and Tactical Yukata

2009-07-30T19:37:00.000-07:00

Ok, so tac vests are awesome. I love all the pockets. I recently found myself in need of an article of Chinese/Japanese-style clothing, and as I was laying it out, I thought.. "You know, there's a lot of room in these sleeves." And thus my Tactical Kimono was born. (Ok, so it's not really a kimono - too short, wrong fabric. But still.)

For extra sturdiness, I topstitched all the seams and did a satin stitch on joins that were likely to see some tension.

One side of one sleeve (I flipped the sleeves inside out so you can see the pockets in all their glory)

I tried to make cargo pockets like you see on BDUs...

Little elastic loops and button toggles so you can fill the pockets arbitrarily full.

At the time I made the Tactical Kimono, I wasn't blogging, so I never thought of doing in-progress pics. If anyone's curious, leave a comment and I'll try to explain - but basically, it's just a simple kimono with a sleeve lining of canvas with pockets sewn on.

Anyway, after that, I decided that I wanted something a bit more authentic (...as authentic as a tactical kimono can be, anyway) and something a bit lighter. So I ordered some fabric from the amazing people at ichiroya.com - they sell all kinds of kimono/haori/obi/etc as well as fabric for all of those. I also decided to go with a double layer of fairly fine-woven cotton broadcloth (sheets, actually) for the pockets. I also got an obi from them - and it turned out that the same kind of flower is on both the obi and the fabric!

Yukata with obi

Just in case one of the things you need to keep up your sleeve is an 8.5x11 envelope.

Loop and toggle again, with pleated cargo pockets

Turns out this fabric takes flat felled seams really nicely.

I was making it up as I went along, and the neckline turned out all wrong; I'll fix that before the next time I wear it.

Isn't the fabric pretty?

There were a couple flaws in this model; I should have tacked the pocket pleats together at the top, because they kept spilling everything out. Also, the sleeve lining tended to creep forward out of the sleeve - I need to tack it down inside somewhere. Same basic construction principles as the original tactical kimono; I just spent more effort getting the pockets finished neatly. Lots and lots of topstitching turned out to be the secret.

Snips and snails and ?? tails

2009-07-30T19:12:00.000-07:00

A project from a couple summers ago. I decided that, clearly, for this costume I needed a tail. So I scrounged around in my fabric stash and came up with the remnants of the fabric I had bought for the corset that went with my wings (a project I promise to post another day), and some random black fabric, and a pile of plastic grocery bags (because I was running out of time and didn't want to pay for batting.)

It came out impossibly well for the amount of time I actually spend on it (for once, I got it right the first time!)

Basically, I just sketched a tail shape onto the fabric and sewed it up. The spines are just black cotton duck - once again, I just sort of sketched them onto the fabric, cut out two, stitched them and turned them inside out. All I had to do after that was just sandwich them in between the layers of the tail fabric so that they'd stick up from the "spine" after the tail was flipped inside out.

The plastic bags don't hold up super well in the long term - they tend to compress - and they rustle. Not the ideal stuffing material, but hey, it worked. (That seems to be the refrain in all my projects...)

The dreams of fish, and sailor's songs

2009-07-05T09:26:00.000-07:00

+5 to you if you get the reference.

So, yesterday I ran some experimental dye batches - I'm still looking for a nice deep turquoise, emerald, and sapphire (can you tell I like jewel tones?) What I got was not at all what I expected... but it was rather nice all the same, I think. For your perusal:

Isn't it a nice sea-colors set?

After that, I experimented with hand-painting (when I do a batch for real, I'll post in-progress pictures). I was trying for blue-green-purple, but my green seems to have mutated to a dark greenish blue. Still, it's interesting, and I seem to have mixed a nice blue-violet. And now I know how to do it.

I adore bamboo. It doesn't matter what horrible colors you dye it; the sheen makes it beautiful. (Well, possibly with the exception of the terrifying BRIGHT YELLOW GREEN!!! that I managed to produce last time I did some experimental batches. Eugh.)

Upcoming: hand-painting some plain fiber, because I'm contemplating an experiment with silk paper that will become a book cover or somesuch if it comes out well. First I need to dye the fiber, though. I'll post in-progress pictures on the off-chance they're useful to someone.

Welcome Elly!

2009-07-03T19:10:00.001-07:00

Sorry for falling off the face of the earth - I had a rough term. Anyway, here's a very belated post about the baby blanket a friend and I made for two friends of mine who were having a baby. (No in-progress pics, because I just forgot.) It's all colors of happy bright cotton on the front, and soft blue flannel on the back. It's a super simple pattern, too; it went together much faster than I expected.

My puppy Polar Bear approves of the blanket.

It's embroidered on the back! Please, er, ignore the date. I promise I'll get her the quilt by her first birthday, really I will.

I hear money can be exchanged for goods and services

2008-12-18T12:29:00.000-08:00

Edit 01:34 12/19: ...in fact, money can be exchanged for goods and services. Someone bought all my purple yarn within a half hour of posting. As the first listing in a really obscure etsy store. ????? Not that I'm complaining, mind.

Thanks to the wonderful Eric Schmiedl (ericschmiedl.com), I now have some decent pictures! I got to see these on a very precisely color-balanced screen, so any color skew issues you may be having is between you and your monitor.

Inigo Montoya, take 2

2008-12-18T08:30:00.000-08:00

I finished my finals on Monday... meaning I had time to spin up the rest of that bamboo and dye it. These will be going up on Etsy soon! Go check out yayprettycolors.etsy.com later today or tomorrow.

The first batch of purple was popular enough that I made some more:

Unfortunately this stuff is a bitch to photograph. This is a pretty good picture to show the variegation and color range, except that it's rather redder and darker. Blah.

Unfortunately this stuff is really hard to photograph. I'll add some pictures of it in skeins when it dries enough to be put in skeins. That might help...?

And then the nice forest green! Still not quite the shade I was looking for, but it's still quite pretty. If it turns out to be popular on etsy, I'll make another batch.

This is the best picture I have of the green, but it's still not right - the yarn is considerably greener. Argh.

It's not easy...

2008-12-10T13:12:00.000-08:00

One more attempt at dyeing! I was going for an emerald green, but despite putting in extra dye and letting it sit for fifteen minutes, all I got was this sort of medium grass-green that unfortunately photographs badly. It's quite pretty, just not what I wanted. Oh well... when I finish spinning this yarn, I'll give it another shot.

My name is Inigo Montoya...

2008-12-06T14:39:00.000-08:00

Prepare to dye. :p

Remember that lovely soft shiny white bamboo yarn I made a while ago? Now it is lovely and soft and shiny and has a COLOR.

The basic procedure goes something like this:
*(optional) Wash the yarn/fiber you're going to dye. We did this by simmering it for about ten minutes on the stove with a teaspoon of Synthrapol (it's a detergent that's supposedly good for pre-washing, although I've heard you can really use any detergent. What it's really good at is getting the dye out at the end - I can vouch for its awesomeness there.)

*Soak the yarn in a bath of salt (...lots of salt) and (optionally) something to soften the water. I used this stuff called Metaphos.

*After it's been in there for a while, mix up the dye and dump it in. So now you have an actual dyebath. Let it sit in that for a while (well, stir it too).

*Take the yarn out, dump in the soda ash (fixative), and stir it into the dyebath. Put the yarn back in.

*Stir stir stir. And then wait.

*Rinse.

*Dry.

That's about it! Well, for this particular kind of dye; I used the Procion MX reactive dyes. Other dyes have different procedures.

Really, pictures say it all.

The raw materials!

And the undyed yarn.

Another shot of the undyed yarn.

All the random chemicals and pots of dye

Washing the yarn

Washing the fiber

Yarn after pre-dye wash

Stirring around the fiber while it's getting washed. This was the trickiest part - I didn't want it to all come apart leaving me with a giant wad of fiber. It mostly held together, though.

Rinsing out the fiber after its pre-dying wash

Putting the salt in the pre-dying soak

Measuring out the Metaphos (I keep wanting to say Mephistopheles. Argh.)

Stirring the yarn/fiber in the pre-dye soak.

Dye powder still in the bottle. Surprisingly unimpressive.

Measuring out the dye

Powdered dye in the cup

Mixing up the dye solution

Fiber and yarn in the dyebath, soaking it up before we put in the fixative.

Soda ash (fixative) solution in the cup, ready to pour in

Lifting the yarn out of the dye bath so we can pour the fixative solution in and swish it around

Screw it, I have gloves on, if I'm supposed to "stir continously" for five minutes I might as well do it by hand.

After we added the soda ash, the color of the dye bath changed like whoa. That's almost blue. Woohoo, chemistry.

Fixative has been added; now we wait.

the Moment of Truth! and you can really see the color change in there.

Rinsing out the fiber

Rinsing the yarn

Rinsed.

Rinsing the roving

Note my high-technology drying setup. Yes, I am drying the roving on my doorknob.

Wet yarn hung up to dry. Yup, there's my spinning wheel in the background.

Yarn straight off the drying hook. It's kinda snarly still.

Yarn after re-winding into a fresh skein. The color didn't come out quite right in this picture, sadly.

Finished yarn. This is the only picture that comes even close to capturing the color - it's this gorgeous glowing deep amethyst.

Finished roving (the color came out better on this one)

Another of the finished roving. I had to sort of tease it out to get it to be smooth enough for easy spinning.

/etsy/hostname

2008-11-28T09:16:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-27T09:30:00.000-08:00

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."

2008-11-27T08:48:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-11-25T11:01:00.000-08:00

This is the other fabric Jacky brought me from Taiwan.

What should I do with it??

Craigslist is dangerous.

2008-11-25T10:52:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-11-25T10:33:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-25T10:09:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-24T13:25:00.000-08:00

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.

Meet the Components

2008-11-21T12:38:00.000-08:00

Look, look, my box of toys got here!!

The processor:

For the moment, I'm borrowing my friend Mike's Arduino clone - I can just drop it in the breadboard and go. I think I'll eventually end up with the ATtiny2313, mostly because it's the smallest AVR processor that SparkFun has with enough pins. But the arduino is good enough to play around with for now.

The SD card reader:

Not an awful lot to say about this guy. Aside from the fact that it apparently wants 3.3 volts, and the Arduino will only provide five. This'll be interesting...

Audio output:
Audio jack and its breakout board.

Sorry for the image quality; I hadn't quite gotten the hang of closeup mode on my crappy little camera.

Notice how the ground pin doesn't appear to actually connect to anything? All we could think of is that maybe it had a ground plane (is that the right term?) inside. This is probably also the explanation for the mysterious pin in the middle of the board and the jack that doesn't seem to connect to anything.

Audio decoder:
Will be appearing as soon as SparkFun gets the breakout board for the VS1053 in stock. Good god, that thing has more instruction memory than the processor. I was seriously considering punting the processor entirely and running everything on the decoder, but it looks like eight I/O pins aren't quite enough, if I want to have buttons and things. (The other reason why this chip is nice is that it decodes EVERYTHING. No, seriously.)

And our special guest star:

Sketchy 5->3.3V converter:

I don't even remember what this is. It's an accelerometer or something. But apparently it puts out 3.3V if you feed it 5, on top of its other manifold virtues. I'm pretty sure I can run all the components on 3.3V, but unfortunately, the only way I have to get power to the board right now is to plug a power source (USB or wall wort) into the Arduino, and it'll only output 5V. Hence the whatever-it-is (really, the Right Solution is one of these, but I didn't think of it until after I placed the order.)

LCD:

It's just a Nokia 3310 LCD. The internets love them for this sort of thing; they're cheap, small, and ridiculously low-power. I decided to pop it out of the plastic and metal surrounds, but this turned out to be a bad idea. More on that next time...

It's a GREAT idea.

2008-11-09T11:48:00.000-08:00

So. I had this crazy idea. Clearly, I need to build an mp3 player into a pocketwatch (i.e., a pocketwatch case with an mp3 player inside it.)

I've been trying to figure out how to design this. I decided to base my design on the Echo, since it looked like the smallest homebrew mp3 player on the market - with a few modifications. I'm going to use an AVR processor, because I can talk to it in C (as a friend of mine said, "Being able to speak in C to a processor is like finding out your mail-order Russian bride speaks English"). Also, I'm using microSD for storage instead of regular SD - I'm going to have to do crazy miniaturization to get it all to fit. Oh, and I'm using a cooler music decoder chip.

...ok, so it probably isn't really the same design now. But you get the idea.

Components I need to get:
-Pocketwatch case, as large as possible
-MicroSD card and some socket that can talk to it
-A processor. AVR?
-Audio jack and whatever associated hardware it wants
-mp3 decoder chip
-an LCD. I'm going to go with the same one they used for the Echo, because it's small and cheap.

I'll probably have to get a custom PCB made when I'm ready to put it together for real. batchPCB looks like they've got some pretty good deals.

Anyway, ordering from SparkFun now. More news when the box of toys gets here!