2011--My Year of Full-Bust Alterations and Lounge Wear

My 2011 garment sewing adventures were not great blog fodder. They involved revisiting my pattern collection and trying the full-bust alteration on previously unsuccessful blouse, shirt, and jacket patterns. Much brown wrapping paper was used for pattern copies, there was much cutting and taping, and many muslins were made and discarded.

While it was an instructive process (and one that is not yet complete--I still have a couple of patterns to try once more), I have little to share here for my trouble beyond an excellent Web resource: Debbie Cook's Stitches and Seams Tutorials. She demonstrates the alteration on princess seams, empire waist garments, dolman sleeves, and other alteration-resistant styles. As if that weren't enough, many of her blog posts show her full bust alteration process, so we can watch the way she solves a variety of problems.

I did do some utilitarian sewing--mainly lounge-wear and undergarments. I made four of these sport bras from an out-of-print "Stretch and Sew" pattern I've used for at least 10 years. This is the first time I've made these since I got the serger, and I was quite pleased with the way the serger inserted the miles of elastic that go into each of these items. It's a quicker and better-looking edge finish than I've gotten in the past.

I made a summer version of the Kwik-Sew robe pattern I altered and tried in January. It's the fuchsia garment on the clothesline below. It uses some silk noil I'd crumple-dyed several years ago, and it's trimmed with some grab-bag lace remnants. The nubby silk noil is surprisingly comfortable in hot weather.

The light blue nylon knit below was made from a pattern in Kwik-Sew's "Beautiful Lingerie". It's a nice pattern, easy to sew and fun to embellish, but I've discovered that a yoke that ends above the bust is...well...not a great look for me.

The purple stretch lace gown on the right is simply a knee-length tee shirt, and this works very well for nightgowns out of stretchy fabrics like thermal knits and cotton interlock. This navy blue nylon tricot seemed to be as stretchy as the knits I've used before, but in this style it seems a little too snug, or perhaps too body-hugging. I have several nylon tricot remnants I'd like to use, but I'll continue looking for a different gown pattern.

Tree Year 2011 Recap: Sumac Season

My blogging habit crashed and burned last year, but I continued to take sumac pictures for Tree Year 2011, at least until summer's dry weather killed the small trees I was photographing.

I waited until the end of April to see the buds relax and swell.

These leaves were unfolding on May 21.

By June, most of the trees were leafy, although some new shoots were still growing.

The inflorescences are not as pretty as the red winter fruiting bodies. This is full bloom on June 21.

I had never looked close at sumac inflorescences before.

And then, they all dried up and died--the small, reachable sumacs, that is. Around here, sumacs are adventitious woody shrubs that pop up in old fields and die back after a short time. I had hoped for a series of fall foliage colors, like we had in 2004. I was going to finish off the year with this:

When we read Indian Summer in school, the whole concept of "crimson forest" was a mythical thing in my mind, like dragons and fairy godmothers. Yes, sometimes a leaf might turn yellow or red, but mostly, they turned brown and blew away.

Along the line of smoky hills
The crimson forest stands,
And all the day the blue-jay calls
Throughout the autumn lands.

Now by the brook the maple leans
With all his glory spread,
And all the sumachs on the hills
Have turned their green to red.

Sometimes, I knew, trees could blow away. The Kansas part of "The Wizard of Oz" was all too real--I was in high school before I could bear to watch it on TV. But "sumachs on the hills...turned their green to red" was some sort of literary conceit. Boy did I get a surprise when I moved "back East." I believe sumac sometimes glows in the dark come autumn.

Wind Turbine Mufflers

Mineral County wind farm owner seeks to reduce noise  - News - The Charleston Gazette - West Virginia News and Sports -: "KEYSER, W.Va. -- The owner of a wind farm in Mineral County is working to reduce turbine noise after neighbors complained that they can't sleep. Edison Mission Energy has asked the turbine manufacturer to develop a turbine muffler system."

Reset KDE4 Dolphin

Here's how you reset kde4 dolphin settings:"Just remove settings file and restart dolphin--"


$rm .kde/share/config/dolphinrc


Every time I turn around, it seems I've inadvertently changed some of the KDE desktop goodies, and the GUI's are not really forthcoming with "reset to defaults" options. It seems the place to look to find offending rc files is ~/.kde/share/config There are just so many kde/ & .kde/ & /kde4 directories scattered around the file system that I didn't know where to start. It's the hidden file in your home directory.

Silk Purses from Fabric Scraps (No Sows Were Harmed....)

I have trouble throwing out tiny fabric scraps. I found this sort of small drawstring bag lets me use some of my less practical velvets and velours. The drawstrings here are of ribbon left over from a long-ago Christmas project.

Remembering "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"

My wild New Year's Eve activity was watching Netflix's streaming video of Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I was expecting something soothing and low-key, and, indeed, there were beautiful landscapes, expert interviews, and hushed voices. However, the effect was astounding, and I've been thinking about the amazing prehistoric artwork ever since. This April, 2011 interview with Hezog is from Scientific American's Youtube channel.

Random Boot Failures, Linux Kernel Updates, and Hardware Troubles

Earlier this week, Debian unstable offered me a kernel upgrade, and, after some cautious data backup, I installed it. Soon after, I attempted to reboot, and, sadly, it was back to kernel panic, can't find grub, can't find kernel, etc., etc. This time, using the Debian testing installation disk in rescue mode was no help. I re-installed grub, updated the configuration file (update-grub) and got the same errors. I shut down the computer and went to my laptop to search for help, and decided to try some alternative rescue disks: Super Grub2 and Rescatux, and, if that didn't suit, perhaps a Linux Mint live CD.

I burned the CD's inserted my first choice, SuperGrub2, and waited for it to spin. It never did (it turned out to be a bad disk). As I sat there, scratching my head, the computer loaded the Grub menu page, selected the first kernel, and proceeded to boot successfully.

So, perhaps, the problem is not a configuration problem, but a hardware problem. I get a variety of intermittent error messages concerning ata1 (and I was getting a bunch them yesterday, so once again I checked the hard drive with smartctl command line utilities. As before, both the long and short versions reported no problems. fsck also reported no problems.

The search terms "boot failure linux hardware" returned a few tales of woe similar to mine, such as Boot failure randomly. Can someone help?: Here's someone who has intermittent boot failures, and suspects a hardware problem. One reader comments:

one of the causes for this can be faulty memory. That can also explain why you sometimes have a problem: if that bad memory is not touched everything works like a charm. If it does get touch unexpected results can be expected. In general: irregular behaviour during boot always start thinking memory 1st. So run memtest from the live cd or from grub if you can boot into it and see if 1 of your memory modules is in bad shape and if so replace it.

The original poster eventually reports:

found a fix but not an explanation therefore help still needed here ;-)

The Fix--Disconnect the cable and take off the battery for a few seconds.

Conjectures--This fix lead me to conclude that maybe something is kept into memory of some hardware.

And here's someone who has the opposite problem from mine: [amd64] Reproducible cold boot failure (reboot succeeds) His computer fails to boot if it's been turned off for several hours, but will reboot, or boot successfully if it's been off for a short time. Eventually, he reports that he's found a memory issue:

In fact, one of the 4GB DIMMs in the system returns bogus data
(0x10000000 or 0x04000000 instead of 0) for some 40 to 50 seconds
after power-on. Once warmed up, memtest86+ runs for days without a
single extra data error (I wanted to have an estimate for the defect
having led to damaged data in disk files).

Running memtester showed no errors, although I started getting reams of complaints about ata:1.00 again. I haven't yet run the more comprehensive memtest, which has to run at start-up; I'll get to that in the next few days. Last night, aptitude update informed me that there was a kernel update. I went ahead and installed it, then shut down the computer. This morning, I powered up, and got a missing grub message, restarted, and the computer booted successfully. So far, today, I'm not getting any complaints about ata1.

Here are some resources I've found either helpful or informative this week:

Hardware Checking Resources for My Particular Problem

• Test Memory Using memtester in Linux:

  memtester is a user-space utility for testing the memory subsystem in a computer to determine if it is faulty. It does a good job of finding intermittent faults and non-deterministic faults. It has many tests to help catch borderline memory. memtester should compile and run on any 32- or 64-bit Unix or Unix-like system.

• How should I run fsck on a Linux file system? fsck (not a mis-typed profanity, it's short for "file system check") checks and repairs *nix file systems. You can't (or shouldn't) run it on a mounted file system. As root,
  

  Single User Mode and umount the file system: Issue command to change run level and umount the /home file system that is mounted on /dev/sda2:
  

  
  # init 1
  # umount /home
  

  Run fsck:
  

  
  # fsck /dev/sda2
  

Helpful Resources for Boot Failure

• GRUB 2 bootloader - Full tutorial:

  My goal is to provide people running any flavor of UNIX-like operating systems or multi-booting their computers and using GRUB as their bootloader with a simple, no-nonsense, step-by-step, proven and working tutorial that should allow them to quickly, easily and painlessly control the boot sequence of their systems.

• MondoRescue HOWTO Utilization and Configuration of Mondo and Mindi under Linux

  This document describes the use of mondo and mindi tools to realize disaster recovery backup of your systems. It provides information on installation, backup and restore modes, hardware and software requirements, and answers to some frequently asked questions. The goals are to offer a general view of the functions and their best usages. Mondo Rescue is a Disaster Recovery Solution which allows you to effortlessly backup and interactively restore Linux, Windows and other supported file system partitions to/from CD/DVD-+R/RW media, tape, NFS, ... and Mindi Linux provides the bootable emergency restore media which Mondo uses at boot-time.

• Troubleshooting Boot Failures section of "Configuring a Linux Kernel" offers some advice on how to manage failures in a home-rolled kernel. It offers this advice:

  A boot failure can either be due to: kernel configuration issue, a system configuration issue, or a hardware malfunction. It's pretty easy to guess which one is the hardest to detect but easiest to resolve (hint: it's the hardware malfunction one). The other ones, well, they require a bit preparation in order to easily troubleshoot and, eventually, solve.

• How to solve boot problems with Ubuntu after kernel upgrade: Here's a clear explanation of what happens as linux boots, and a description of some of the things that can go wrong. It didn't help me fix my problems, but I do understand the messages I get as the process fails.

• From the same Web site, a description of Grub2. It's a little old, but this is where I found a link to Super Grub2 and Rescatux, boot problem fixes meant to be easier and quicker than using the rescue mode on the system installer.

  Update: SuperGrub2 returns this message: "not a known file system" and fails to find an OS. Not really helpful for my problem, which, to be fair, probably has little to do with Grub.

Scraps Into Yardage Into Hand-bags

2011 was my year of sewing with fabric scraps. It wasn't really a resolution, but I had eight big plastic tubs of fabric scraps, and only four tubs of fabric yardage. I ended the year with five tubs of scraps, partly because it's trimmed up and better organized, and partly because I decided to turn scraps into yardage using my serger. The serger's great feature for this purpose is the way trims and finishes the raw edges, so I don't need to cut the scraps to fit one another. I just place two pieces right-sides together, eyeball a straight stitching line, and sew. After I turned some of my denim bits into crazy patchwork hunks of fabric--incorporating a few other heavy-weight scraps for contrast--I cut the "new" fabric into hand-bag pattern pieces.

I've been carrying this bag around with me for a few months. I didn't line it, because it seemed stiff enough as is, and the serged seams inside have not frayed or become untidy. That bit of red on the outside pocket is a remnant of a Guatemalan hand-woven shirt I bought in Costa Rica.

I sewed these bags in the spring, but they seem a little plain and lack-luster. I'm waiting for embellishment inspiration.

If I Were a Poor Iowa Kid--Oh Wait, I Was

Art of the Rural has a complete and interesting recap of the Stephen Bloom kerfuffle in "The Atlantic." I wasn't really curious about it until I read Matthew Fluharty's blog post. He includes a link to this interview with Bloom, in which Bloom characterizes his article as "satire" and "parody."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I read the article, and couldn't identify what, specifically, Bloom was parodying or satirizing. What I read was, mostly, an unsympathetic description of rural poverty. Why he (and The Atlantic) thought that another disdainful description of white people at economic and cultural disadvantage would be useful and informative is puzzling. There's been so much of it, ranging from the nineteenth century Hatfield--McCoy feud's national newspaper coverage to Bill O'Reilly ranting that drunken Appalachians should move to Miami and "get a job".

The Iowa article was so mean-spirited and so much in the mood of "white-trash" bashing that it reminded me of the appalling Gene Marks article, If I Were a Poor Black Kid, on the Forbes website. (Originally published as "If I WAS a Poor Black Kid"--I guess Mr. Marks is not quite as well-educated as he thought.)

"If I Were a Poor Black Kid" unleashed a flood of angry and funny responses, including Poorblackkid.com. Similarly, Bloom's Web article is now accompanied by a variety of responses, and helped inspire this much-viewed video:

Because of the vehement response to the Forbes article, several people have suggested that it is actually an Internet troll tactic, and that the outrage has raised Gene Marks' profile and readership. Perhaps that explains why The Atlantic published Bloom's grouchy and tired critique of his adopted home. Willie Geist's NBC interview above notes that Bloom is "in hiding" because he has received harassing phone calls. I certainly hope no harm comes to his family because of his flame-bait. That kind of behavior only reinforces Bloom's clue-less disdain.

The Long and Short of Writing Practice

Via Mirabilis.ca: A long sentence is worth the read --by Pico Iyer.

Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker. Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can't be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won't be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we're taken further and further from trite conclusions--or that at least is the hope--and away from reductionism....

Years of writing technical and scientific papers matched with my current practice of Web writing have coached me to appreciate the short and succinct, but my own prose runs to the baroque and confusing. I look forward to Sherry's and Dave's 140-character word snapshots, and I spent some time considering joining the River of Stones project, but my trite attempts seem more like "sound bites" and "bumper stickers" than Fiona's mindful writing practice:

A small stone is a very short piece of writing that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment. There are no strict rules for what makes a piece of writing a small stone, as there are for forms such as haiku. The process of finding small stones is as important as the finished product--searching for them will encourage you to keep your eyes (and ears, nose, mouth, fingers, feelings and mind) open.

I truly appreciate well-written instruction manuals, field guides, taxonomic descriptions, and crochet patterns. I reread Elizabeth Zimmermann's knitting books just for fun as often as I refer to them for techniques. They are special because they offer a little more than bare-bones instructions, but not so much blather that you lose track of the procedure. (I'm afraid my own instructions are blather-heavy.) I'm skilled with observation of detail, but haiku writing appears to be contrary to my nature. Pico Iyer gives me hope for when he says "...[T]he promise of the long sentence is that it will take you beyond the known, far from shore, into depths and mysteries you can't get your mind, or most of your words, around."

Textbook Troubles and Dr. Feynman

Sometimes I teach undergraduate college classes. As an adjunct faculty member, I don't pick the textbooks or write my own syllabus, so I'm painfully aware of how much textbooks cost, and how frequent production of new editions keeps the students buying new rather than used books. There's talk about how e-books will save students money, but in my experience, the e-books cost just as much as physical books. I was heartened to read this: Steinberg Proposal Slashes Textbook Costs for California College Students:

At a time when the affordability of higher education is at the forefront of national debate, this legislation would create Open Educational Resources (OER) in California, where undergraduate students would be able to have free access to the 50 core textbooks required for lower-division coursework via computer or mobile device through a digital open source library, with the option of buying a printed version for around $20. The legislation would also require publishers selling textbooks adopted by faculty for the most widely-taken lower division courses to provide at least three free copies of those books to be placed on reserve in California public college and university campus libraries.

If college textbook highway robbery were not aggravating enough, there's always the topic of K-12 textbooks in public schools. I enjoyed re-reading Judging Books by Their Covers:

In 1964 the eminent physicist Richard Feynman served on the State of California's Curriculum Commission and saw how the Commission chose math textbooks for use in California's public schools. In his acerbic memoir of that experience...Feynman analyzed the Commission's idiotic method of evaluating books, and he described some of the tactics employed by schoolbook salesmen who wanted the Commission to adopt their shoddy products. "Judging Books by Their Covers" appeared as a chapter in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman...(1985).

In case reading this makes you nostalgic for Dr. Feynman (as it did me), here are links to some fine Feynman videos: The Richard Feynman Trilogy: The Physicist Captured in Three Films | Open Culture.

New kwinrc Fixes KDE 4.6 Desktop Effects

To my great surprise, I've got KDE 4.6 Desktop Effects working again. My recent desktop environment problems had led me to reinstall Debian testing and upgrade to unstable (sid). The newly-installed KDE Desktop Effects were working properly until I copied all my /home/rebecca files onto the new installation and restarted. I tried to adjust them using the GUI panel:

System Settings > Desktop Effects > Advanced

No luck. I couldn't revert to a clean install. I was just going to live with it because I didn't care about the missing desktop effects at all, but I really hate it when I don't know why something does or doesn't work, so I have looked sporadically for answers, and this morning, I found this: [SOLVED] KWin effects not working (ATI, catalyst, KDE):

I have had something like this happen a few times, too. Removing ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc always seems to fix it.

I renamed the kwinrc file, moved it to an out-of-the-way directory, and rebooted. A new and much shorter kwinrc file was generated, and I haven't found any other KDE attributes changed. Here's the difference in file size between the new kwinrc file and the old, renamed file:

rebecca@hecate:~/.kde/share/config$ wc -l kwinrc
23 kwinrc
rebecca@hecate:~/.kde/share/config$ wc -l /home/rebecca/xxx
166 /home/rebecca/xxx

I haven't yet figured out what those 143 lines in the old file did, but the problem must be in there somewhere. Something to occupy my idle hours, I suppose.

Closet Sachets--Upcycled and Emblematic

Sometimes I don't know what my New Year's resolutions are until the year is over. 2011 was a year of going through my old stuff, sorting, deciding what to discard and what to work with going forward. That was most obvious in my fiber activities, but I think my sorting, sewing, spinning and knitting projects symbolized some internal housekeeping processes best left unblogged. Perhaps Pincushion of My Ancestors, Slipcovered and Starched was a foreshadowing of my 2011 theme.

Whether or not they are emblematic of my soul, here are some sachet bags I made out of stained or unusable kitchen towels my grandmother and her friend embroidered back in the early 1950's. To pretty for rags, too damaged to display, I inherited a substantial collection of such linens.

I finished and photographed these in the early spring. Then I stuffed them with dried lavender flowers and stuffed them into my dresser drawers, where I see them whenever I change my socks.

The black-eyed-Susan-embroidered bags represent my first attempt at crocheting lace borders onto a sewing project. I'm not ready for delicate hankie crochet, but I'm moving toward that goal. The pale green and yellow crochet threads are leftovers given me from a friend's attic stash, so these represent totally upcycled projects.

Debian Wheezy to Sid--Are You Sure It Won't Blow Up?

Yesterday's post reporting a successful switch to KDE was a bit premature, at least on my desktop machine. The laptop is still OK (I hope).

After a few days, all the "Desktop Effects" quit abruptly, perhaps after an update. (I was running Debian testing, which has daily updates.) I tweaked and adjusted, and eventually some of them started working again, perhaps because I switched compositing type from OpenGL to XRender. This change is located:

System Settings > Desktop Effects > Advanced

KDE has changed so much since I last used it that I have much frustration in locating these sorts of things.

More updates, including a kernel update, ensued, and I had a flashback to my Mysterious Errors and kernel panics of a year ago. Restarting the computer produced either a grub rescue > prompt, a "can't find the file" message after selecting the kernel on the grub menu, or a kernel panic. In every case, I was able to boot from a Debian net install disk using "rescue mode," re-install grub thus:

# grub-install followed by #update-grub

I could then remove the CD and reboot successfully once. Every time I restarted the computer, I had to go through this song and dance. As I said last January,

After I...powered up, the little darlin' booted right up....I really hate it when I don't know what was wrong, or why it's running now. Did something reset while it was powered down? Did jiggling the cables do the trick? Was it dust? And what's with all the update-grub/reboot iterations? Why do I always have to do that over and over again? And why does none of this ever happen with my Linux laptop?

Last year, the problem mysteriously resolved after a few tries, but this time, I started getting more and different error messages that I couldn't figure out. Googling showed me that I wasn't alone in my troubles, but I couldn't find a solution that worked for me. I made two fresh back-ups of my home directories, and resolved to choose "Install" rather than "Rescue Mode" at the next reboot.

The re-install ran without any problems, and, while I'll have to reconfigure my localhost installations of Wordpress and Drupal (they needed work anyway), this fresh install is now scoured clean of all the Gnome, XFCE, icewm, sawfish, awesome, metacity, etc. libraries and programs, which I'm not using but which require updates anyway.

Last time I installed testing, I tried without success to upgrade to sid, that is, Debian unstable. This time, it worked for me, and I am now typing on cutting edge Debian. The Debian GNU/Linux FAQ--Choosing a Debian distribution recommends sid over testing:

There is no perfect answer but only a "wise guess" could be made while deciding between unstable and testing. My personal order of preference is Stable, Unstable and Testing. The issue is like this:

• Stable is rock solid. It does not break.
• Testing breaks less often than Unstable. But when it breaks, it takes a long time for things to get rectified. Sometimes this could be days and it could be months at times.
• Unstable changes a lot, and it can break at any point. However, fixes get
  rectified in many occasions in a couple of days and it always has the latest
  releases of software packaged for Debian.

Raphael Hertzog also reassures me that "Unstable is a quickly moving target and it's not for everybody. But you can use it and your computer won't explode" in his blog post 5 reasons why Debian Unstable does not deserve its name

Now, it's back to fiddling with my brave new Debian. I wonder how long before I break it?

Return of the KDE User

The last few weeks I've been shopping for a new Linux Desktop environment. I never do this voluntarily, but my distro, Debian testing (Wheezy) has upgraded to Gnome 3, and the transition has not been smooth. On my desktop machine, Gnome 3 hangs at shutdown (and sometimes at start-up), and the Gnome display manager, gdm3, doesn't work well on my laptop.

I've been using Gnome because at the end of 2009, updates to KDE 4.4 messed up, along with Xorg, probably due to a poor fit between my video chip and the open source driver. I used Kubuntu for a while, but eventually had so many problems that I reformatted my hard drive and installed Debian testing, complete with the default Gnome desktop. I had preferred KDE, particularly for Digikam, the photo management program par excellence, but it was just too much work to keep the KDE eye-candy functioning, and it was easy enough to install "Digikam + dependencies." This produced an unattractive redundancy of libraries, but there's plenty of room on the old hard drive, so what the heck.

Anyway, word on the Web has been that Linus himself has switched to Xfce because Gnome 3 and KDE 4 feature too much "crazy crap," so, even before Gnome 3 hit Debian testing, I installed Xfce on the desktop machine and the laptop, and tried it out. Xfce seemed fine, but I also auditioned some of the window managers, and revisited icewm, which I previously have run happily on pokey old hardware.

When the Gnome3 update finally happened, I discovered that the new Gnome display manager caused all sorts of problems, especially on my laptop, which is also used by a (reluctant) Linux novice. (The Mac mini he used to use bit the dirt a few months back.) I needed an easy-to-understand log-in screen, and the KDE display manager fit the bill best.

What with all the KDE stuff I was using, I gave the KDE 4.6 environment a whirl, and all the compositing features that used to mess up my desktop machine now work perfectly. They also work fine on the laptop. Most of the fancy "plasmoids" and "Activities" seem useless to me so far, but I can ignore them easily enough.

If I were a real, nuts and bolts Linux gal, I'd select a window manager like icewm or sawfish, edit my .conf files to get exactly the user experience I want, and never be bothered by all these fancy-schmancy desktop environments. My ideal user experience would resemble the 1998-era Sun Workstation I used so happily at The Institute. A few terminal windows, Xclock, an Emacs window, and a browser--I'm in business. Too bad I have this yen for shiny visual effects and big chunks of software that install themselves and never make me figure out where the .conf files are. Shallow and lazy--that's me.

This Should Discourage Mice

A mouse built a summer nest in my box of Christmas ornaments and stuffed the stable full of chew-able ornament pieces. Once I picked the bits of paper from behind the Holy Family and glued the middle King back in place, things were nearly good as new--provided you overlook how I broke two little lambs off and glued them back before Mom got home when I was eight.

Cold, wind, and snow make this another good day for indoor activities (such as packing up Christmas decorations), and Princess seems to agree. Certainly there will be no mice in the manger in this setting.

J.R.R. Tolkien--A Video On His Birthday

Today at Open Culture: The best free cultural & educational media on the web, a link to a wonderful video: J.R.R. Tolkien in His Own Words

In celebration of Tolkien’s 120th birthday, we present a fascinating film on the author from the BBC series In Their Own Words: British Novelists. The 27-minute film was first broadcast in March of 1968, when Tolkien was 76 years old, and includes interviews and footage of the old man at his haunts in Oxford.

Snowy Day Sewing Room

Yesterday's cold rain has given way to icy wind and dry snowflakes. Princess wisely has chosen to join me in the sewing room.

Links for the Teapot

Tee-Ernte und Produktion in Doi Mae Salong, Nordthailand - YouTube:

I don't know why I favor tea. I feel vaguely un-American when breakfasting away from home, but coffee just doesn't start the day for me. Tea has the added charm of coming from a beautiful woody plant. Here's a video of Thai tea production and a collection of tea links: Tea | Letha's Asian Health Secrets:

'via Blog this'

Droop Mountain, New Year's Day, 2012

New Year's early morning featured sun and blue skies over the valley fog, but by the time I left the house for the First Day Hike at the Droop Mountain Battlefield Park, these high clouds had moved in. Nevertheless, it was a fine day for a walk in my favorite park.

The hike as advertised in The Pocahontas Times:

"It will be a nice winter hike to see the park at a time when people don't normally see it," added Droop Superintendent Mike Smith.

While few people visit the historic state park in the off-season, Smith said the winter months offer their own special perspective on its trails. Smith said this is Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park's first scheduled winter hike in recent memory.

The First Day hike will cover two, mostly level, miles of trails, said Smith. Hikers will set out at 10 a.m. from the park office on a loop that encompasses the Overlook Trail as well as Horse Heaven or Old Soldier trail, progressing toward the lookout tower and back across to the park office on the Musket Trail.

Along the way, hikers will find an old bear den, small cave and rock features similar to those found at nearby Beartown State Park, as well as a stunning view toward Briery Knob. Smith will have a fire going in the park workshop and "maybe even some warm apple cider for when we return."

I've been all over the park at all seasons, but this is the first time I've had the pleasure of Mike Smith's guided tour. Civil War history, biogeography, prehistoric artifacts, or animal tracks--Mike can tell you something interesting about any aspect of the park.

The rain these clouds promised finally caught up with me on my way home. If you have to get caught in January rain, it's best to be within a quarter mile of the house.

Overlocking Lingerie Elastic--A Tip to Remember

Sometimes, when I can't think of anything to write, it's time to do something less verbally demanding, like sewing. I've been practicing my serger skills, and went out in the snow this weekend to photograph some recent projects. Overlocking small pieces of fabric together creates enough yardage to make these underbritches out of small jersey scraps and old tee-shirts with cool graphics. (That's a big green praying mantis on the far right.)

Overlocking jersey knit seams is fairly straightforward, but I've had some trouble attaching lingerie elastic using the serger. The overlock stitches stretched out the elastic and it didn't snap back, producing sadly drooping drawers. Serger books I've seen suggest flatlock stitch for elastic, and this looks alright, but it doesn't seem very durable.

This time, I used an overlock stitch and played around with the stitch length adjustment. A long stitch length means fewer stitches per inch, and less damage to the elastic. Sure enough, overlock at maximum stitch length gave a tidy finish, and allowed the elastic to retain its snap.

Overlocking alone attached the elastic adequately, but I've noticed that ready-to-wear lingerie often has the elastic turned under and stitched down with a multi-stitch zig-zag, for a more delicate look, so that's what I did here.

Proofreading Matters

This is wonderful, and Taylor Mali has much more, like:

Snowy Setback--2011 Tree Year

After several warm days that made the lilac and rose bushes pop new leaves, winter weather returned.

This is the same snowstorm that caught Sherry on her way home from West Virginia. Bourbon County had a sunny, snow-melting day today, but here on Droop, the snow persists.

St. Patrick's Day View of Lake Kilarney

Another holiday postcard from Grandma's album--this one was never addressed or mailed. It says "Erin Go Bragh--Upper Lake Kilarney." Happy St. Patrick's Day!

19th Century Doll Clothes Links

I confess I never quite outgrew my girlish fascination with doll clothes, doll houses, and miniatures. I quit making doll clothes because I needed clothes more than dollies did, and there were so many other things to do. However, browsing the Internet shows me that there are a lot of grown-up ladies (and gentlemen) who never put aside their interest in miniatures, scale models, dolls, and doll clothes.

Although I feel I could easily be sucked into the world of dressing vintage dolls or even creating fanciful cloth dolls, I'm going to confine myself to making clothes for this one doll. To that end, I've put together a collection of links that I found helpful, informative, or just interesting.

• Doll Clothes Patterns from the Butterick Publishing Company, 1901. I was surprised to find that "The Delineator" marketed tissue paper patterns for doll clothes. This page shows the pattern envelope drawings in enough detail to copy fairly easily.
• Child with china doll: 19th century photographs of children and their antique dolls.
• "Dolls' outfits are a feature in the toy shops this season."...from Harper's Bazaar, 1872. These drawings of doll costumes are small and not detailed, but it's interesting to see the variety of characters dolls were meant to represent.
• THROUGH THE EYES OF A DOLL From The Youth's Companion, 1842. This is a rather gruesome little tale, informing the magazine's young readers that their mommies and daddies would be sad if their children died, but that excessive grief is idolatrous, and they'll probably have replacement kids anyway. Presumably, the kids knew that already, but jeez, who wants hear that from a doll?
• Restoration and dressing of a china doll. Nancy Wilson Barbata, aka The Doll Fancier, photographed the steps she went through to restore and dress a nineteenth century china head doll.
• Those Old Dolls Are Much Fussier Than Humans by Joan Kiplinger. This is a detailed and helpful guide to designing and sewing period-appropriate garments for old dolls.
• The Doll Costumer's Guild The Doll Costumer's Guild publishes 4 journals a year with information, patterns and sewing techniques for authentic costuming of antique dolls made from 1840 through the turn of the century. I'm not sure if this Web site is still active, but the illustrations are quite informative.
• Freebie Friday - Drafting Doll Clothes. Links to several interesting approaches to making doll dress patterns
• Past Patterns makes historical patterns for real people, not dolls, but I find their pattern envelope illustrations very helpful in understanding how old-time clothes were constructed.

Dormancy--2011 Tree Year

It's snowing again today, and the sumac buds are tight shut still.

Like other smooth-barked tree species here, the sumacs have lots of lovely lichens.

Late Winter Sumac--2011 Tree Year

Yesterday's sky did not promise spring, and this morning we had snow and sleet. Robins have been visiting the sumac fruits, but the main customers there are our red-bellied woodpeckers.

Lately, they have been rather rough in their foraging, and pieces of the fruiting bodies are scattered on the ground under the trees.

I wonder whether they enjoy these dry, furry fruits, or if they're the last choice here at the end of winter.

Heraldic Socks

I've finished another pair of socks from my vintage yarn collection. This yarn is what they used to call "baby weight," and judging by the label and the pastel color palette, "Peter Pan" by Wendy was intended for baby clothes. The fiber content is 55% nylon, which made me think it would make long-wearing socks. If the nylon/acrylic fibers are uncomfortable in shoes (as is sometimes the case) I'll have a nifty pair of bed socks for cold nights.

I used Barbara Walker's Heraldic Pattern from A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns, pp. 150-151. It's a pattern I've wanted to try for many years, but I had great difficulty converting the back-and-forth, flat knitting direction to in-the-round directions, mostly because every stitch is, at some point, twisted with another stitch. The odd directions in rows 23, 25, 31, and 32 reflect the way I worked around this.

The end result of a seamless tube of diagonals is very pleasing. I'm going to have to use this pattern on another pair of socks if only to justify the time I spent working out the "round and round" directions.

Barbara Walker's Heraldic Pattern
Multiple of 12 stitches, knitted in the round
Row 1: *K2, P4*
Row 2: *RT, K4, LT, K4*
Row 3: *K2, P4*
Row 4: Knit
Row 5: *K2, P4*
Row 6: *RT, K4, LT, K4*
Row 7: *K2, P4*
Row 8: *K1, LT, K2, RT, K5*
Row 9: *K3, P2, K3, P4*
Row 10: *K2, LT, RT, K6*
Row 11: *K8, P4*
Row 12: *K3, RT, K7*
Row 13: *K8, P4*
Row 14: *K2, RT, LT, K6*
Row 15: *K3, P2, K3, P4*
Row 16: *K1, RT, K2, LT, K5*
Row 17: *K2, P4*
Row 18: *LT, K4, RT, K4*
Row 19: *K2, P4*
Row 20: Knit
Row 21: *K2, P4*
Row 22: *LT, K4, RT, K4*
Row 23: *K2, P4* Last repeat, K2, P3. Slip last stitch
onto next needle, making it first stitch of next row.
Row 24: *RT, K6, LT, K2* 
Row 25: *K3, P4, K3, P2* At end of last repeat, slip
first stitch from next row onto working needle, knit.
Row 26: *K8, LT, RT*
Row 27: *K2, P4, K6*
Row 28: *K9, LT, K1*
Row 29: *K2, P4, K6*
Row 30: *K8, RT, LT*
Row 31: *K2, P4, K3, P2, K1* Last repeat K2, P4, K3, P2
Slip last stitch onto next needle, making it
first stitch of next row.
Row 32: *LT, K6, RT, K2* At end of last repeat, slip
first stitch from next row onto working needle, knit.

Rethinking My Web Presence

Now that I've updated my Drupal website, I need to think of something useful to do with it. I've used it for sharing information with my students, and as a trial ground to learn to use content management systems, but I don't currently have a need for either of those purposes. I've also thought about using it as an adjunct to selling my fiber arts projects, but I've made no move in that direction.

I made that site to learn how to use Drupal, but I'm also thinking about switching to Wordpress. Ironically, I started this Blogger blog to get my website indexed, but these days, this blog covers most of my web presence needs. Maybe I should drop the spiceridge.com site all together?

Here are some tips I've collected for using Drupal for a personal site. (See, I'm using this blog to keep track of links I don't want to lose.)

• Mistakes made when using Drupal as personal blog
• Don't use Drupal's blog module unless you intent to build a blog hosting site
• Howto: Drupal for bloggers

Workaday Dolly

For now, Grandma's dolly is going to sit around in her underwear. Once that would have been indecent, but nowadays, it just means she telecommutes. The silk dress dress didn't dissolve or shrink from washing, as I had feared, but it was so badly stained that I won't be putting it back on her.

I wonder what my mom would have made of e-commerce. It only took me half an hour to learn that this is what collectors call a "flathead" china doll, most likely made in the waning days of "lady dolls" (as opposed to "baby dolls") as the little girl's gift of choice. Although this doll is in relatively good condition and has most of her original clothes, she is just one of the common dollies. Collectors pay the big bucks for rare dolls that were never played with.

Meanwhile, after washing and ironing her complicated lingerie, I'm feeling fond of her and thinking about making her some new outfits. I believe I can make an acceptable period dress--perhaps a wrapper with an apron, or a shirtwaist and skirt. I do have those seven plastic tubs of fabric scraps, and fitting doll clothes is much simpler than fitting human clothes. Dolls don't need wearing ease and don't ever complain.

Overcoming My Fear of Antique Dolls

Recently I pulled my grandmother's china doll out of the box I've kept it in since clearing out my mother's house in 1996. Mom, in her turn had kept it in a box after clearing out her own mother's house in 1963. Mom used to show me the doll occasionally, telling me it was a valuable antique which we would restore "someday." She kept some vintage fabric scraps and 1960's magazine clippings with the doll.

I've decided to end the family tradition of not knowing what to do with this doll. I could clean it up and display it, sell it, or perhaps find some way to preserve it in storage, but I no longer keep stuff just because I'm afraid to get rid of it.

As a little girl I was frightened of the doll--it made me think of graves and corpses. Opening the box, I found it was just as creepy as I remembered. It was dressed in a silk gown my mom had told me was made from "Aunt Ella's wedding dress," meaning her dad's sister. The dress had a number of brown stains, was grey with dust, and smelled musty.

I undressed the doll (imagining how horrified my mom would have been to catch me playing with it) and suddenly, it looked more pleasant and friendly. (I couldn't bring myself to take a picture of doll, dress and all. It was too disturbing.)

In the first picture, it's just wearing a chemise and some lace scraps that were sewn on, not fashioned into a blouse. I clipped the threads holding it on and removed the chemise.

The stockings and shoes are sewn and pinned in place, and I didn't have confidence that I could replace them. The doll body is made of muslin stuffed with sawdust, not kidskin, as Mom had thought. It has kidskin forearms and hands with individually-sewn fingers. The painted hair shows some wear on the back, suggesting that my grandma played with her, but Grandma must have been big enough to avoid dropping a 22-inch doll on its china head too often. I'm guessing she might have been six or seven, which means she got the doll about 1890.

Drupal Updates Long Deferred

I've been putting off updating my Drupal Web page for most of the winter, but I thought I'd better get it taken care of before spring or I wouldn't do it at all.

The first thing I had to do was get my desktop computer set up as LAMP, Linux Apache Mysql PHP, so I could have a test site.

• I had apache2 and php5 already installed on my Linux desktop (Debian Wheezy). All I needed to do was add php gd support to Apache thus:

  # apt-get install php5-gd
  # /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

• For the "M" in LAMP, all I had to do (as root) in Debian was:

   # aptitude install mysql-server mysql-client
   # aptitude install phpmyadmin

  and then tell apache2 to find phpmyadmin: "Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf"

In the process of relocating a Drupal site to a local machine for testing, one has to clone the database. PHPmyAdmin has a push-button function for exporting a database; however, my database has grown too large for the push-button "import" to work. There are lots of bad hacks with high Google ratings, but they're much harder than using command line MYSQL with the commands given at Import/Export Large MYSQL Databases. "Source" is a dandy sql command I'd totally forgotten--it tells mysql to read a file and do the commands given there.

After all this, adding the updates to the Drupal installation took a few minutes. I haven't finished with the Spice Ridge site yet--I'd like to do it after a good night's sleep, in case something goes wrong; however, it's been my experience that the live site is easier to manage than the localhost one.

Every time I update Drupal, things go a little differently; however this time, I found most of the things I needed to do in my own Drupal posts here on my blog. I may bore my readers, but these Linux and Open Source posts are the things I revisit most often.

Spinning Away a Winter Virus

Other than these skeins of Rambouillet yarn, I have little to show for the past few days. I thought I might get through a winter without a head cold, but a virus got a hold of me, and my mental acuity has not been too sharp. Fortunately, spinning is something that doesn't require much concentration, and I have compressed a big plastic bin chock-full of fleece bats into a dozen skeins of yarn, freeing up about four cubic feet of closet space.

You may recognize my ancestral pincushion posing next to the yarn, sporting its collection of hatpins. My grandma and her mother must have been brave women to use these fierce implements to fasten down their hats.

Sprouting Onion Seeds

I've never sprouted onion seeds before, and I didn't expect them to be so curly and cute. I hope these will give us better success than we've had with onion sets here. The garden catalog called this variety "Walla Walla," and promised they'd do great things.

A Little Late Winter Spinning

In my continuing efforts to clear some closet space, I've been spinning a plastic tub full of dyed and carded fleece. Yarn takes up so much less space than wool batts! These four colors of Rambouillet wool represent four different crockpot dye baths.

These two batches of yarn represent the last of a very dirty fleece that was given to me. Even as yarn it's got burdock bits in it, but I really like the complex way it takes the dye. Once dyed, it was just too pretty to throw out.

Devil In the Shirt Details

Back in October, I read about The Never Too Many White Shirts Project, started by Barbara at Sewing on the Edge. Quite a few stitchers have signed up to sew ten white shirts, the idea being that white shirts focus our attention on fit, line, and details, and sewing a bunch of them is useful because they are such versatile wardrobe components.

I think it's a cool idea, but I didn't sign up because I don't need ten new shirts. Since I was a teenager, most of the clothes I've made myself have been shirts, or else blouses styled like shirts, with collars on collar stands, shirt cuffs, front buttons, etc. In college, my incredulous roommate counted 24 shirts in my closet. They were all made from the same pattern.

When I was a grad student in Washington D.C., I discovered that the Georgetown Junior League's Thrift shop had gorgeously-detailed, seldom-worn men's dress shirts for under five dollars. The colors and patterns were sometimes eccentric, but I was a regular shopper there.

A few years ago I bought Shirtmaking by David Page Coffin. It's the most interesting sewing book I've ever read, and I've incorporated his design details into my shirt-making for several years now.

While Barbara works on sewing slowly and attending to professional shirtmaker's details, I've been looking for ways to sew quick and easy projects with my new serger. Of course I've tried it on shirt patterns.

I used my favorite men's shirt pattern, Kwik-Sew 2777 to make myself this nightshirt and flannel shirt. This time, I altered the pattern with a full bust adjustment, rotating the side dart to pleats at the shoulder seams. I was pleased to find that the shirts fit me much better this way.

For the nightshirt, I used a pattern size larger than I normally wear, and I made it night-gown length. I used the collar stand but no collar for a nineteenth century look, and I made the front one piece with a placket, for the same reason. I tried some cuff and cuff placket shortcuts using the serger, but they didn't turn out particularly well, so I made menswear cuff plackets using the pattern in Coffin's "Shirtmaking" on the flannel shirt.

The serger gave very nice seam finishes and shirt tail hems, but I couldn't bring myself to dispense with the menswear shirt details in these garments. I guess I'm just too shirt-obsessed--a "shirty dame."

Blame It On the Cat

Was Valentine's Day disappointing? Could Kitty be responsible? "Single White Feline."