Just another dent in the damage…

It’s actually amazing what you can teach yourself given an hour or ’sew’ to focus. After finally fixing up Max’s gi (one of the bigger boys at Brazilian Ju-Jitsu ripped it up) I decided it was time to teach myself the buttonhole! For Christmas I received Cath Kidston’s awesome book Sew, complete with bag project. Problem is I’ve been too scared to tackle the project because of those dreaded buttonholes required to attach the bag strap. Well, turns out they’re not so bad! With not so much help from Alison Smith and surprisingly my machine’s manual I set to work and with a few tweaks managed something that resembles a buttonhole in about an hour (and most of that time was spent threading my machine because the naff cotton I’m using keeps snapping).

Anyway given The Sewing Book’s reputation as a seamsters’ Bible (which I have to agree is, most of the time) I was a bit disappointed to find it lacking a clear step-by-step explanation of how to actually create a buttonhole – how to position the foot, which stitch to use, what to do to adjust the stitch balance etc. Sure enough it includes beautiful photographs of each stage and when you’d use the different types, it even gives instructions for the more fancy buttonholes but honestly I’m a total beginner you have to spell this all out for me. I still haven’t managed to work out how to round the corner for a keyhole buttonhole but I will. So… take a look at what I did, all by myself!

Here I’m learning how to build the stitches:

My buttonholing foot:

And here’s a close up!

I’m not much of a New Year’s Resolution type person but last year I did write a list of 25 things I wanted to do in 2009. I thought it’d be worth going over what I did and didn’t do ready to prepare a new list of 26 things I want to do in 2010. So let’s see:

1) Set up an Etsy store and start selling small crafts: Well, I got the Etsy store bit sorted but getting the stuff to sell has been harder. I thought it’d just be a case of make a load of stuff and get it listed but it turns out a lot of the patterns I’ve been using to make consumables are all copyrighted and you can’t sell the stuff you make using them. Turns out I need to start writing my own patterns if I want to sell anything I make. The only things I really have for sale are my SSCS crochet whales as it’s OK to make money you intend to donate to charity, but a store with only one item to sell would be pretty naff right? I’ll work on this one. Promise.

2) Make more use of sewing machine and create at least one skirt from scratch: Again I kinda half did this. I reorganised my craft room so I can actually get at my machine without having to carry it about everywhere and I sorted out all the stuff I need to get on with making things – I just didn’t get round to making the skirt. But, I did make a lovely cushion (and embroidered it) and ploughed through one of my sewing books so I can learn more about what my machine does. I think this coming year will be my skirt making year so watch this space!

3) Learn to dive: CHECK! I actually did this one. This year I not only got my PADI Open Water but I completed my PADI Advanced Open Water and got qualified in Enriched Air diving. I’ve got about 20 dives logged now and am super excited about getting out and seeing more of the world’s oceans. At Christmas I went to Malaysia and got to play about with my new camera, here’s Nemo:

4) Learn Photoshop basics to improve photographs: So Photoshop is harder than I thought and there is definitely a lot to learn on this… but I’ve made a start. I’ve managed to cut three people out of one image and put them in to another, I’ve rubbed out plastic bottles and lamp-posts and learnt about image size and how to crop (ya’know – the simple stuff). My cutting out skills definitely need working on though. Max also showed me how to open my eyes – i.e. cut out Claire’s open eyes and stick them over my closed eyes!

This is a photo taken of Claire and I with Todd Kowalski from Propagandhi. On the original picture we were outside a pub and my eyes were closed. Here we are in Hawaii with my eyes open (if you look very closely you’ll notice they’re very similar to Claire’s eyes).

5) Take more photos and get uploading to Flickr: My new camera has helped with this one. On my last holiday I took about 1000 photos! Can you ever imagine doing this with an old camera that needed film? Crazy! Anyway I’ve slowly been making more use of Flickr and you can go and see my photos any time – lexrigby’s Photostream.

6) Make Donna a big granny blanket: Yes yes I did this. It got completed on March 18th for her birthday. Here is a picture of me admiring the finished product:

7) Print some Moo cards: Totally failed on this one. I figured I didn’t really need any if I didn’t get the store up and going. They’ll come eventually when I’m all business like.

8) Get funding for the IATUL conference in Belgium: I failed this too but it was kinda out of my hands. I wrote my statement about why I should be awarded the funding but at the last minute one of my bosses decided to write the entire thing himself on my behalf. I don’t blame him for not getting it or anything as I was told the application was exceptional, just not exceptional enough. Life goes on.

9) Design a cross-stitch pattern to raise more funds for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society: This was another one of those half did/half didn’t ones. Whilst I didn’t get around to design the pattern I longed to do I did get all subversive after buying Subversive Cross Stitch and started writing some cross stitch patterns inspired by Propagandhi lyrics.

10) Organise another SSCS fundraiser: This one is another ’still to do’. I think time ran away with me on this one. Whilst I didn’t organise a fundraiser myself I did volunteer at a number of events this year (including the International Dive Show at the NEC) and completed the first round of volunteer training. I’m now listed as an official volunteer on the Sea Shepherd UK website, so it’s all good in the hood still.

11) Make sushi: No making but plenty of eating. I’m going to get Donna to show me how to do this, she makes amazing sushi!

12) Finish Ursula tattoo: Yep, done and dusted. This is on my back:

13) Start work on Kali tattoo: I didn’t do this but I did get a whale instead, I think Kali needs more thinking about. This one is on my left inner arm – it was pretty swollen so excuse the chubbiness, I think the photo is a bit squished too (I got it off Myspace because I couldn’t be bothered to take a photo):

14) Keep up the weekly postings on my work blog: I did this! Want proof? See Librarians’ Blog for Science and Engineering.

15) Master the art of false lashes (just because there’s got to be at least one vanity thing in here): I did this too but none of my pictures are close enough for you to see them clearly. I’ll work on getting proof of this.

16) Keep up with the personal training sessions: After a year I figured these were just getting far too expensive to continue. I went from about August 2008 to August 2009. I fully intended to restart them but really £120 a month on top of my £42 a month gym membership… really.

17) Tick off the to-do list and write up results: I guess the result of this is this blog post. I did tick items off in my book and did refer back to my list to remind me what I needed to do, I just didn’t do as much as I wanted. I had planned to do a scrap book but I definitely think a blog post is more my thing.

18) Start open uni short course on marine biology: The Open Uni course I wanted to do is a short module called Life in the Oceans: Exploring our Blue Planet. It looks like the greatest short course of all time but a las I’ve not had a spare £150 to do it yet. I will though, studying Richard Attenborough’s Blue Planet sounds like the best thing ever.

19) Prepare for Cilip (this is the professional association of librarians) chartership: I simply changed my mind on this one I’m afraid. I just don’t know if I want to charter just yet. The chartership means doing a lot of work I just don’t want to do at the moment. Career development portfolios and all that malarky… snore.

20) Cook for Max at least once a month: I managed this one I think for a few months. I mainly make him puddings like cookies and cake. This will change this year though as I’ve a new cook book and it’s amazing. I won’t tell you anything else yet as I’m working on a post for this beauty that stands alone.

21) Visit Stef in Canterbury: Sorry Stef, you just come home too much. I’ll visit her this year for sure.

22) Read Moby Dick: I didn’t do this either, but I did read a lot about other whales!

23) Cycle to work at least twice a week in the Summer: This is my main regret I think. I should have done this, but I didn’t. Curse me.

24) Watch a broadway show: For my 25th birthday Sarah got me some gift vouchers for a London show and after loads of faffing about she never got to come with me. Instead, Max and I went to see Wicked… and it was wicked. I’d already read the book (and thought it very strange) so was interested to see how it would translate to stage. I liked it, it worked well and luckily they kept all the sexy scenes out.

25) Finish decorating the kitchen: YES, YES and YES and it’s the greatest kitchen of all time.

I’ve already written this year’s list… I might put it up later but in the meantime, thanks for reading.

Check out this wicked QR Code scarf on the Craft Video Podcast. I’d knit this by hand if I was actually good enough.

CRAFT Video: Machine-Knitted QR Code Scarf from make magazine on Vimeo.

Emptying my bins on Thursday night is a weekly task and little thought ever goes into it but this week I had a revelation! Opening up the bathroom bin to see pretty much a whole carrier bag full of cotton wool pads got me thinking… ‘what if I could find some alternative that is better for the environment and cheaper for me to buy’. It was a little thought, one that was there and then went as quick as it came and life went on until morning. Anyway as the daily routine of opening up Google Reader came about I whizzed through a few hundred boring news feeds and then BAM Eco Peek-o from Craft Candy hit me smack bang in the middle of my falafel sandwich! The answer to my prayers: Machine washable exfoliating round facial scrubbles from ‘Buy Hand‘ on Etsy.

So after browsing a few more of these little scrubbies I was just about to hit the buy button when I had a second brainwave – why don’t I just make some myself? And so, I did. I tried with single crochet, double crochet, magic circles, amigurumi spirals etc and settled on the pattern you’ll find at the bottom.

I think the double crochet ones worked the best. First off they’re an actual circle and not a sort of flattened hexagon like the single crochet type on the left. I also preferred starting with a magic ring rather than the typical chain method as you’ll notice in the picture below a magic ring means the centre hole is much smaller – but seen as this is just a preference I’ve included both in the pattern.

You’ll need:

• Kool Kotton – machine washable double knitting in white (or a colour of your choice);
• 5mm crochet hook;
• tapestry needle;
• scissors.

Instructions:

rd 1 – chain (ch) 3, 12 double crochet (dc) in 3rd ch from hook, slip stitch (sl st) to join round OR make a magic ring with 12 dc in round, sl st to join round (12);
rd 2 – ch 3, 1 dc in same stitch *2 dc in next stitch, repeat from * 11 times, finish round with sl st in 3rd ch stitch (24);
rd 3 – ch 3, 2 dc in next stitch, *1 dc in next stitch, 2 dc in next stitch, repeat from * 10 times, finish round with sl st in 3rd ch stitch (36).
Finish off and weave in ends.

Voi la and see you later disposable cotton wool pads, I’m hanging out with my new friends now.

I saw this a while ago but considering it seems to be doing the rounds again I thought I’d throw in a quick “what the hell were you thinking woman!?” I love granny squares but this is seriously yak. I’d be a little impressed if Cate Blanchett actually made it herself… but only a little.

I absolutely love crocheting, knitting, sewing, crafting… Anything that involves a needle of some sort and a piece of thread/yarn/whatever. I love reading craft weblogs and looking at pictures of other people’s craft rooms and I’ve always wanted to try and use this blog to show you more of the stuff I do but I just never seem to get round to it.

This week I’ve had a massive clear out of my craft room to try and create an inspiring yet functional place! Most importantly FUNCTIONAL. I moved to by new house just over a year ago and was super excited about getting a work space but the more kit I brought to fill it out the more it got crammed into bags and baskets, hidden away to keep the room looking tidy-ish. So after mistakingly managing to pull one of my only two shelves off the wall I decided it was about time to sort this tip out. I got pots, baskets, tins, jars and new shelves and set to work. It took a couple of evenings and a few missed episodes of Hollyoaks but I’ve FINALLY sorted it and thanks to Max I’ve an extra couple of shelves to store all my crap on! Tonight I got my camera out to start snapping away but the damn battery died so alas… no pictures yet. It doesn’t really look that different just much better organised and I can actually get to my sewing machine!

I uploaded a few choice pieces of some of the stuff I’ve been doing lately to Flickr in the hope that it’ll prompt me to document my activities better. I’m working on a couple of craft related posts so if you don’t see something by the end of October nudge me, please… I need it!

For now I’ll leave you with this little guy:

Made by my own fair hands for my pal Vic! The pattern is available from Ana Paula Rimoli’s Etsy store (she’s the writer of Amigurumi World and Amigurumi 2), if you’ve never heard of her go check her stuff out, she’s seriously amazing (her patterns are so simple to follow and are all totally adorable).

The other day I was quietly working away when I overheard:

But I don’t want to use Twitter, I’m not interested in what people are having for their lunch.

Firstly, how can you not be interested in what people are having for lunch? I actually find this fascinating and often recommend good places for people to get their chips and falafel from. But I understand that there are people out there not as nosey as I am or generally interested in what people do.

So, instead of arguing about why I think Twitter is the best thing ever I thought I’d put my energy into thinking about things you can do with Twitter (other than telling people how good your falafel wrap was). I know there is already a wealth of information for the Twitter user out there but you know, I wanted to throw my two cents in as well.

Who do you follow?

Well, generally I follow people who match one of this criteria:

• people from real life – friends, family (although my Dad hasn’t discovered Twitter yet – shame it’s the perfect way to spy on me) and work colleagues;
• librarians or information specialists posting interesting links to current issues or discussing new technologies etc;
• news services – including The Guardian Tech, New Scientist, Hollyoaks and Heatworld (obviously);
• whale defenders and marine conservationists – because we’ve got to save the whale to save ourselves;
• vegans – I like stealing recipes and looking at pictures of cake;
• and crafters – it’s a good way of finding free patterns etc.

The problem I have then is keeping the personal and the professional separate, particularly as I worry about being too personal in the professional. For example I’m majorly opposed to whaling (as you probably know) but as this has no relevance to my work do colleagues really need to know it? And should I be telling people about long line fishing in the Galapagos whilst having a break from my book orders? Plus there are those examples of how not to use Twitter. Yet given I actually love my job, my boss is really cool (seriously) and I don’t moan about being bored (usually because when times are quiet I get on the look out for new blog material or ways to improve services for students) then I don’t really see this being an issue for me. I did bad mouth Bloglines once though after a frustrating morning and got caught out by their auto searching, but they were actually more helpful than anything else.

One way of overcoming these problems are to make your updates private, but seen as Googling ‘lex rigby’ fills out the first however many pages of my stuff (although I was never a Communist Student and have nothing to apologise for) then it seems odd to try and make my tweets private. I’m quite an easy person to find out information about. I’m a science and engineering librarian particularly interested in new technologies, I’m insanely fond of whales and cats, I craft, I read stuff about Iran (mainly involving women and human rights) and I’m vegan. Simple eh. And I guess that if people didn’t want to know what Bella’s up to they wouldn’t follow me anyway.

What do you use it for?

The most useful thing I have found to do with Twitter is to do with #tags or hashtags. Hashtags are assigned to subjects/people/categories/conferences/companies/hobbies/films or whatever and are a great way to find out what people are saying about them. In putting a hash sign in front of a word you’re essentially creating a link to a stream involving everyone talking about that particular subject. And the great thing is is that it’s all in real time! A real-time search engine, now that is amazing.

OK, so say I attended the 2009 Lilac conference (I didn’t but some of my colleagues did) and I wanted to say something about what I was hearing alls I need to do is say it (or rather type it) and put a #lilac09 tag in. Voi la. But then say I wanted to know what other people were saying alls I’d have to do is go to Twitter Search (or one of the other many search sites) and put in #lilac09 and start eavesdropping. It truly is a fantastic way of searching – built for the people, by the people.

I discovered this during the Mumbai attacks last year. I wanted to know what was happening before the news stories told me and stumbled upon Mumbai attacks coverage powered by a service called Monitter. Brilliant, now I was getting real time updates from the people there on location, as well as others reporting on events as the news unfolded.

But what could I use it for?

Well, other than using #tags to keep on top of your interests there are a vast number of other things to use Twitter for:

• Use Twitpic to share your photos;
• use Tiny URL to shorten links into your 140 character limit;
• use @ signs to reply to tweets and engage in conversation e.g. ‘@lexrigby that was really funny’ (or direct messages to make your responses private);
• use Tweetworks to start discussions or join groups;
• use Twittangle to filter your timeline by rating users and tagging favourites (very useful if you follow people like Stephen Fry and get sick of his updates);
• use Twtpoll to create a survey;
• use Trackthis to track a package from UPS, Fedex, USPS, DHL etc;
• use direct messages to update your LibraryThing book shelf;
• use Twittercal to update your Google calendar;
• use Tweetbeep for a bit of vanity searching;
• use Fuelfrog to track your gas mileage;
• use Botanicalls to get your plants to tweet you when it’s hungry;
• use a Greasemonkey user script (a Firefox add-on) to get Twitter updates in your Google results page;
• or use RFID chips, computers and cameras to keep track of your cats.

See, it’s not just good for finding out what people had for lunch! It’s so much more than that.

Attention all you cat lovers! Mental Floss has a short article on cats taking over the interwebs. There are loads of ways of getting your cat on the net other than a Facebook Catbook ya’know. check out my Fake Bella pages, dedicated to my furry little friend or read this Cat Blogging and Blogging Cats .

I wanna get one of these Twitter/cat flap things fixed up to monitor the feline as I’m positive she just sleeps in my bed all day. And, I’m really into this Cat Cam idea too but I worry that if I got her hooked up to all this she’d be too weighed down by her collar to even go off and explore anywhere anyway!

So until I create some miraculous technology to track her every move that is little more than a grain of rice I’ll leave you with this:

(a cute picture of Bella hugging a Henry Rollins doll I made).

This year, since I’ve got my own house and all with a proper craft room – I thought it was about time to get on with some crafting. And so, here is a collection of some of the stuff recently keeping me busy:

The devil is my first amigurumi project and so I’m pretty pleased how he turned out. I totally forgot about his horns though so had to add some felt at the end. One of my faves is this whale. I made loads of these to sell at the Shark Water viewing to raise some much needed cash for the Sea Shepherds.

Unfortunately Craft magazine have printed their last magazine! Volume 10 of Craft is to be the last printed edition and the future of Craft remains in the hands of the online community. I think this is rubbish!

As much as I enjoy the blog I look forward to the print edition hitting the door mat and continually use all back issues for reference and inspiration.

Rubbish rubbish rubbish.

From the Crafters behind Craft:

Two and a half years ago, inspired by the DIY creativity of a growing number of indie crafters, we launched CRAFT Magazine along with its companion website, Craftzine.com. Since then, we’ve become an integral part of the new craft community. We’ve been fully committed to encouraging more people to discover the joy of crafting.

All along, we have noticed that Craftzine.com has been growing steadily. At the same time, we’ve come to realize that there were more and more challenges in publishing CRAFT as a print magazine, especially with the costs of print and distribution rising, and diminishing interest among advertisers in print. So we’ve decided that Volume 10, our Celebrate Like Crazy issue, will be our last print issue and that the future of CRAFT is online.

Creating a print magazine was a great pleasure for all of us on our amazing team, and we’ve appreciated the many readers who told us how much they enjoyed CRAFT. Our print magazine helped to gain recognition that craft is thriving today, more than ever. We’re going online exclusively with CRAFT because that’s where we can best reach and serve our audience.

On Craftzine.com, we have a talented team, led by Natalie Zee Drieu, who is returning from maternity leave. She’s excited to expand our efforts online. We have a lot of work to do to bring the best of the magazine to the website but the team has started to pursue that goal. We will focus on bringing you more craft projects, just as the print magazine did but we’ll be able to do so with greater frequency. We want CRAFT online to be visually appealing and easily accessible; we want it to be fun but also useful. CRAFT will continue to venture into new territory, creating projects that integrate high tech wizardry and high fashion.

I also want to assure you that craft and crafters will continue to be an important part of the program for Maker Faire. We have always regarded crafters as we do makers, a creative vanguard who are remaking the world in ways that are especially vital today. Also, we will continue to publish MAKE magazine in print. The closure of CRAFT in print allows us to focus our limited resources on growing a single DIY magazine instead of two.

As we’ve talked to some of CRAFT’s contributors and advertisers about our decision, we felt that they understood why we made the decision. Nonetheless, the initial reaction is one of disappointment. I suspect many subscribers will feel the same way. However, as we talked about the future with all these stakeholders, they also became as excited as we are about the possibilities. I look forward to exploring what lies ahead. I hope you will join us as we share our deep interest in, and appreciation for, the diverse approaches to CRAFT on craftzine.com.