"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.

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?)

Meet the Components

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.

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!