Maggiedoll's Obsessions

Mom's Linen Tunic Mom's Linen Tunic Neckline Mom's Linen Tunic Back

I know, I am a bad, bad blogger and I don't post enough. But I have a good excuse! I have lots of them!

You see, first I was reading. And some of that was dfr's fault, because while I was waiting for my other Borgia books to come, I started reading Black Sun Rising, the first book of the Coldfire trilogy. (The second and third books are When True Night Falls and Crown of Shadows.) That's dfr's fault because she's the one who first told me to read In Conquest Born, which is by the same author. My mom actually ended up buying Black Sun Rising for her Kindle while she was here. I'm not sure exactly why she started reading a book I was still in the middle of! My dad got started reading This Alien Shore, another C.S. Friedman book. I'm not sure why he left it here, he seemed to be enjoying it and I was already finished with that one!

The Borgia books I was waiting for were Light on Lucrezia, The Borgia Betrayal, and The Borgia Bride.
I'd already read Madonna of the Seven Hills, which comes before Light on Lucrezia, and
Poison, which comes before The Borgia Betrayal, because those were cheaper.

And then of course I couldn't put up in-progress pictures of my mom's tunic, because then she would have seen them. So really, everything that's not a good excuse is dfr's fault!

I'm actually much happier with the tunic than I am with these pictures. My camera and computer don't seem happy about the color. It's this really beautiful, deep, vibrant turquoise, and the photos just don't do it justice. I tried adjusting the color, but I couldn't get it quite right. Any adjustments that made the fabric color more accurate gave strange hues to everything else.
The actual fabric is a bit darker and much deeper than it looks in the photos-- just a really stunning color, utterly perfect for my mom.

Turquoise and silver are her colors. She already had a beautifully matching necklace with her-- and she didn't know about the tunic until she got here!
(On a related note: our house got burglarized when I was a kid. When we got home and discovered this, we found that he'd emptied my mother's jewelery box all over the bed. And of course found nothing but silver and semi-precious stones. My mom said she actually felt bad for the guy!)

My mom seems to have the same fitting problems as I do, except even more exaggerated. I'm a lot taller, but we're a similar size, so I'd cut the same size as I do for myself. The sleeves turned out to be too narrow, although I did manage to get them fitting fairly well by letting them out a bit within the seam allowance. Her shoulders are also even narrower than mine; I fixed that by taking it in a bit around the top of the sleeve cap. I didn't unpick anything there; I just took in both the top of the sleeve cap and the edge of the shoulder. The final fit seems to be fairly good, although next time I'll probably cut the upper sleeves a bit wider.

That pleat on the back is not part of the pattern. I started doing it because the pattern actually wants the back to be cut as separate pieces, and the first time I made this tunic I didn't take the seam allowance into account when I cut the it on the fold.

I'd planned on doing a decorative stitch for the hem, but I was using the silver metallic Gutermann thread (not the same as the metallic Brother embroidery thread) which fluffs up a bit too much for real decorative stitches, and my mom liked the way the regular zigzag looked, so I ended up just just a plain old zigzag hem. My no-model-name-or-number "Heavy Duty" Taiwanese Necchi had thrown a hissy fit over the metallic thread (and protested the use of top-stitching thread too,) but the BU Mira handles it wonderfully.

Some tips for using that metallic Gutermann thread:

• Always use a top-stitching needle.
• Thread the needle using a needle threader, don't try to just thread it normally; It's kind fluffy and frays easily, so it's really, really hard to get all of the thread through the eye.
• Use a Thread Stand It keeps twisting to a minimum and feeds more easily.
• Use regular thread in the bobbin, preferably in a color that matches the fabric.

Silk Panel Silk Panel Pattern Closeup Y'all know that "If Microsoft made cars" joke? Remember the line about accepting that every so often, it'll suddenly stop working and you'll have to close all of the windows and restart the car? The other night when I originally took the pictures of the panel, I was having trouble getting my computer to recognize when I plugged the memory-card-to-USB converter into my USB hub. Dunno what the problem was, but restarting the computer fixed it.

So anyway, here are the full panel and closeup views of the silk border print I've gotten in my last two mystery bundles. (I got a two-panel piece in each bundle. They were labeled as two yards, but each panel is actually about 42 inches, so each piece is about two and a third yards.)

It's definitely heavier than I'd think of for chiffon; I'm not totally sure what it is. Crepe de chine, maybe? Georgette? I don't have swatches of either of those in my fabric dictionary. I'll have to go through more of my old mailers to see what swatches I might have that haven't yet found their way to their respective fabric dictionary entries.

It's not too transparent, but I wouldn't call it opaque either. I do have some trouble gauging the sheerness of fabrics that are neither totally sheer nor totally opaque. Are there any guidelines so far as lighting and such for determine how sheer a fabric is? In the picture you can see the two horizontal lines from the glare off of the picture frame that's behind the panel. It recovers well from being pinned to the wall, too. At first I just pinned the selveges on the side, but it drapes too much not to add a pin in the center. The pin didn't seem to do any damage.

I don't know which way is up. Sense seems to dictate that the stripe would be at the bottom, which is certainly the most practical so far as making it into a garment; the horizontal line would be at the hem.
But it almost looks upside-down, doesn't it? Maybe that's because some of those sets of three wedge-thingies are green, yellow, and pink which gives them a traffic-light look. And the design has a kinda martini-glass shape to it. It's that stem-glass shape with a line sticking out the top. Although turn it upside down, and it looks like hanging lamps. Or suspended citrus wedges. Folding or feather fans? But then those sticks point out the top would bop the user in the face.
Why I'm turning a geometric fabric print into some kind of non-blobby Rorschach test, I'm not sure. It just seems like it needs an explanation.

Well, I'm sending one of the pieces to dfr, so maybe she'll be able to explain it. And figure out what it wants to be. She's the one with decent style/overall look visualization ability. My visualization ability is generally limited to spatial manipulations; rotating and flipping around shapes and such. Somehow things like imagining a fabric as a garment, or what a garment would look like in another fabric never come easily to me. There have been quite a few nice patterns that I never considered just because I wasn't fond of the way they looked in the fabric on the front of the envelope. I may be getting a tad better at that with practice, but my progress there is slow.

Copyright note: I watermark photos I upload because I took the photographs, and because images are so very easily swiped on the internet. I am posting these photos of the physical object (fabric) that I received in a mystery bundle, in order to better describe and comment on said bundle.
Obviously I did not design the fabric or the print, and as such, the copyright for the print does not belong to me. The selvedge identifies the copyright owner as Calamo Silk, Inc., which appears to be a custom silk manufacturing company.
(A word of caution about their site: It's a flash site. The sound can be turned off. As far as I can tell, the same is not true for the scrolling background. And by "scrolling background" I don't mean that it scrolls as you scroll down the page, I mean it continuously scrolls horizontally, right to left, underneath the text and everything. It's a grey-on-black world map, and while it's not initially as obtrusive as the sound, it actually started to make me motion sick after a little while.)

Opening the Layers/Channels/Paths/Undo Dialog in Gimp There's been some talk on PR lately of images, and companies and/or people using them without permission, and it's come up that a lot of people (including dfr!) don't know how to watermark their images. The thread that prompted this post was the one started by Rebecca of Tales of a Wannabe Seamstress about pattern companies publishing blog photos on Facebook, but there have been several other threads recently on similar topics.

While someone with much photo-editing skill can probably remove most watermarks, just having it decreases the temptation to simply swipe an image because it's easy, and increases the likelihood that if someone else does use your images, they'll at least credit you.
In general, circulation of your work through comments, links, excerpts, etc., is usually positive, and inclusion on gallery and "social collection" sites like Pinterest or Wists is generally a good thing. Whenever you put something up online, you shouldn't have the expectation that it will be private, and usually visibility is what you want. But having your images simply stolen is never fun.

How to Create New Layers in Gimp

You should consider carefully before objecting to properly attributed excerpts, even if you weren't asked. Interlinking and commenting on what other people have done is what makes the blogosphere go 'round. If someone has quoted you or shown a reasonable picture or screenshot of something you've done that could be considered fair use, and has linked to you and properly credited it, you should probably be happy rather than angry. The guideline on fair use is that their use shouldn't decrease the value of what you've published. That doesn't mean they can't criticize it, it just means that they can't include so much that your own post would become redundant to their readers. The legal criteria for fair use are outlined by United States Code Title 17, Subsection 107.

Gimp Opacity Slider and Layer Mode Selection

How To Watermark Your Images

So, some quick instructions on watermarking. Most of what you're going to do uses the Layers/Channels/Paths/Undo dialog. It should open along with GIMP, but if it dosn't, you can access it through the "windows" menu in GIMP's top toolbar. (You can view the larger versions of images in this tutorial, and on my blog in general, by clicking on them.)
What you're going to want to do is create a new layer for the watermark.

Note that when you add text, that text is always added in a new layer, and the layer is automatically labeled by what the text says. So if you're watermarking using text only, you shouldn't need to add your new layer manually.

New layers added using the "add new layer" button (Circled in red) are by default called "New layer," "New layer #1," etc. If you right click on the layer in the layers dialog (Not in your image!) the first option is "Layer attributes," which will allow you to change the name of your layer if you wish to do so.

Once you've created a new layer, whether it's text or an image (I've created a GIMP brush for my watermark, so I can easily stamp it anywhere) you can manipulate the layer opacity and mode using the options just above the list of layers. Whatever layer is selected will be the one affected by your selections. Opacity should be fairly self explanatory: 0 is completely transparent (invisible) and 100 is completely opaque.
The layer modes contain things like overlay, darken only, lighten only, and value. They dictate how the layer shows itself. For example, if you make a layer the "darken only" mode, you'll only see the contents of that layer in places where the selected layer is darker than what is under it.

When you select Edit > Paste as > Paste as New Layer, your newly pasted layer will be a floating selection, not yet anchored to a "real" layer. You can fix this by clicking the "create new layer" button. Otherwise, if you paste anything else, that floating section will automatically anchor to the layer beneath it. I believe anchoring is the same as merging down. It's not the same as moving down, which is simply rearranging the order of the layers.

The Google Friend Connect module that has been having lots of problems and more problems seems to be working again. I'm not sure what I did different. I uninstalled and reinstalled the Google Friend Connect module, but I did that before, too. I ran the update script, but I did that before, too. It seems to be working in both Firefox and IE now, and I'm not getting any more red error messages. Why? No freaking clue. I'm pretty certain that I only did things that I'd already tried. Maybe Google finally fixed something. I'm not sure if it's going to recognize all of the same usernames, or if it's going to create new ones. When I signed in on IE, it created Maggie_2. But it's behaving better than it was before.

Tiny Stevia Seedling
I ordered a packet of Stevia Seeds along with an Amazon order awhile ago, before I actually knew anything about growing stevia. The overall rating was low, but included "reviews" like "how many seeds are in this packet?" and of course, non-review reviews piss me off to no end. They were eligible for super saver shipping, so I ordered them to push an order over the $25 necessary to qualify for the free shipping.

At the time I didn't realize that germination rates on stevia are rather low, so I only planted a few outside. I don't think they've sprouted outside, but I planted them out in the big garden and that's not really a great place for starting seeds. After learning that they're fairly difficult to start, I poured the rest of the packet into cup of dirt inside and sat it on the windowsill, not really expecting much since it was a fairly small packet. I've actually gotten two started, though!

I divided them into separate cups, and placed one of them outside and left the other on the windowsill. Both are growing slowly (as seedlings tend to do before they establish enough leaf surface area for faster growth,) but are growing.

There have been subsequent reviews (after I bought these seeds) stating that they don't grow at all. This I find pretty strange, especially since one person says that they ordered three packets. I'll have to leave a review stating that mine are growing, but since they're tiny and not really established yet, I'm still holding off making judgments either way about them, particularly since I've had massive problems with strawberries sprouting as tiny seedlings and then dying.

Just to be certain (given that I use a significant amount of artificial sweeteners, growing stevia would be really nice,) I'm kinda considering ordering an already started plant. As far as I can tell, there is one place online, Michigan Bulb Company that sells established stevia plants. If I want to order, I'll have to soon, because their spring shipping season is almost over. But they have flat rate shipping, and I can't order just one little thing when there's flat rate shipping involved! ..So I'm still debating it. Maybe I'll tack on an order for a grape plant.. if I can figure out where I'd want to set up supports and all for grapes. Grapes are something I keep thinking about growing anyways.. it's just the "where" that's a tad problematic. And I don't want to give up on my started plants. But three plants are better than two, right?

Some of those dwarf citrus trees are pretty tempting too. But then I have to decide just which one or two I want, and I have problems deciding what I don't want to grow. I want to grow everything!

I'm also still a tad nervous about ordering live plants online. I've ordered plenty of seeds online, but still haven't ordered any actual plants. I know some come as bare root and some actually come potted, but I'm having trouble picturing just what a plant traveling through the mail would look like.