Technology Woes, and A Questioning of Stabilizers

The more you use technology, the more dependent you become on it, and thus, somehow, the more often it fails.

(As I write this using technology that barely existed when I was born)

I and another office assistant have spent the last two of the last three weeks (and the last week someone, if not one of us) at work calling our IT department (they outsource it) at least once everyday.  It started with updating our email service.  And then somehow went downhill from there.  We came into work three Mondays ago with no one able to receive or send emails on their computers or their phones (through our work emails, anyway), a real estate matter that needed to close that morning (requiring emails to and from our office, escrow office, the seller, the buyer/borrower, and the lender), and a litigation matter that had to be filed (via email, naturally) as soon as possible.

Everything did eventually get sorted out, but it took two days for them to get everyone’s emails working.  The next few days involved bugs that kept popping up with issues sending emails.  And then there's the general fun of issue cropping up due to those updates, or due to something else.

It’s kind of funny – whenever someone in technology implements an update to make something work better, it never fails to always fail in some way.  Murphy’s law, I suppose.

In other news for my personal life, I went to a musical last weekend – “Sister Act”.  It was a lot of fun (and funny)!  A friend of mine got a small role, and invited me to the opening night.  It’s been quite awhile since I’ve last been to a play.

I also hit a couple of dollar stores looking for cheap items to practice embroidering on, and came out with a child’s t-shirt and a bunch of nice micro-fiber cleaning cloths.  I used one of the designs that came with the machine on one of the cleaning cloths, and, in terms of how the stitching came out on the micro-fiber, I think it came out nice.

  

I’m not a fan of the design – the three dots are kind of weird.  It’s actually possible for me to skip that part of the design, though, so I might try that.  I also should’ve placed the design further away from the edge.  Still, even if it’s not going to become part of my sellable merchandise, it’ll be fun to have a cleaning cloth with a pretty personalized design on it for myself.  As for the t-shirt, the design caused the fabric to pucker much more than I would've liked, so I'll have to keep experimenting

I also did a few more lace designs.  These two are free samples I found online.

  

I love the thread color, but making these took much longer than it should’ve due to the thread constantly breaking.  The snowflake, for instance, didn’t come out correctly, and will eventually fall apart.  Not all of the threads were able to interlock.  I don’t think it’s a flaw of the design, but a flaw in the thread.  It’s a bit frustrating, but next time I’ll have to spend more money on higher quality thread.  I’ve recently purchased white, silver, and metallic gold thread that should be in that ‘higher quality’ category.  The white's nice but the metallic ones are a bit finicky, which I kind of did expect.  Metallic thread's always a bit different.  It's quite pretty, though.

I also bought a couple of triangle-shaped pieces of felt for a non machine embroidery project, but I got an idea and stitched a design on it.  I'm going to turn it into a bookmark (as soon as I get access to a regular sewing machine again.  I have some (small) hopes for an older machine getting fixed, but if it won't, I'll break down and buy a hundred dollar Singer I found).

Techniques-wise, I didn't use any stabilizer with the felt, and seeing how I stopped having the bobbin thread show up on top (I have the tension turned down all the way to zero, so there's not much more I can change with the machine), I gave it a go with a towel.  I did use water-soluble stabilizer on top, but that's just to keep the stitches from fading into the terry cloth threads.  As a result, I saw no bobbin thread where it didn't belong.

So how necessary are bottom stabilizers?  I'll have to keep experimenting.  Maybe with thin fabric, or with really dense designs.

By the way, here's a video of the machine going on the felt project.

Return!! With an Embroidery Project

I'm back!

(At least it wasn't a whole year or more, yeah?)

Anyway, what really brought me back on was my excitement over a recent purchase - specifically, this:

It's an embroidery machine - a small one, as I can't get a hoop (similar to hand embroidery) that's larger than 5.5"x5.5".  The way it works is by hooping together a stabilizer under the fabric you want to work with, in the area you want to work in.  The stabilizer is a thin fabric-like material that adds a stiffness to the fabric.  Generally they're added under the fabric, but if you need to make sure that none of the stitches fade into your fabric (like if you're working with terry cloth), it's apparently a good idea to use a thin see-through stabilizer as a topper.

This machine is a Janome 200E, the most inexpensive of the Janome's (also the smallest and least fanciest).  It works like a sewing machine, in some ways - it threads just like one and the bobbin works just like one.  What's really cool is how it works after you've picked a design (using the touch-screen) and arranged it how you like it.  The machine came with 55 designs, and I've come across several free ones online.  The designs have some minimal sizing (increase and decrease), can be rotated, flipped, combined, and positioned.

Once you've done all that, all you do is push the start button - the grey one right above the needle... and let it go!  It does have to be supervised, in case the thread breaks and the machine doesn't notice (and yes, it's smart enough to most of the time), or if the stitches are coming out funny and the tension needs to be adjusted.

It took me a little while to figure how to put the thread on the machine to minimize thread breaking or tangling, but the position it's currently in seems to be the happiest.  Below is a picture of my first embroidery attempt.

Except for one incident where I didn't notice that the pink thread had broken and the bobbin thread was the only thing coming through, that came out well.  The purple thread was the one that I had the most trouble with, as the thread kept coming out twisted from the spool and getting tangled in the machine.  Still, I'm really happy with the end result.

Close-ups!

 


For this project, I used a tear-away stabilizer on the back, and a water-soluble film-like stabilizer for the front.

I really wanted to do some free-standing lace, though, so, as I couldn't find any free ones (and the ones that came on the machine won't work for it, so I went ahead and bought a set.  Here's a couple of the results:

They're as small as they look - the cross is about 1.5 inches tall.  I made two crosses and the lamb.  I'm going to turn the crosses into earrings.  I'm not sure about the lamb.  It might become an ornament, or I suppose I could just sell pieces like that as-is.  It definitely wouldn't make for a good key-ring (too fragile) and I don't make necklaces.






I made all three of these on a single hoop, double-folded fabric-like water stabilizer.  The fabric material took a lot more to wash out then the film material, but the film material has more of a tendency to tear when it's used without fabric, and there's no way the film would've held up to the stress of making multiple projects on a single hoop.

I also tried to do a lily (equally small), but the thread caught on something when it was almost half-way done, tore in half, and resulted in a bunching of thin threads.  In a on-fabric job, this could probably be fixed by re-threading the machine, going back a few stitches, the machine going over the affected area, and then trimming the thin extra threads.  With free-standing lace, if all the threads don't interlock together correctly, the design falls apart when you wash out the stabilizer.

I saw a lot of complaints about these machines  (well, not so much the really expensive ones), and, despite the issues I did have today, 99% of them are user-error issues.  Also, why on earth would you try to learn a new tool with your good clothes?  Until I can get consistent results, I'm working with old towels and faded pillow-cases.

All in all, it's really, really fun, and I can't wait to do more.

Extra: Free Download!

I can't believe I forgot - this weekend, through the end of May 29, Glimpses is completely free!  Just click on the sidebar of the blog to get to it.  (And let me know what you think!)

Etymology: Fusty

As this past week has been uneventful, I thought I'd do my fallback of looking at the etymology of a word.

The word for the day (week? month?) is fusty.  It's one of those words I came across a long time ago (I don't remember where), and I keep those in a file and just add on as I stumble upon more words I find interesting.

'Fusty' (also with the forms of 'fustier' and 'fustiest') is an adjective.  As defined by Dictionary.com:

         1) having a stale smell; moldy; dusty
         2) old-fashioned or out-of-date, as architecture, furnishings, or the like
         3) stubbornly conservative or old-fashioned; fogyish

(Fogyish is a bit of a fun word, too)

Its origins start in Latin, fustis, meaning staff or stick of wood.  Then, in Old French, you get fuist or fuste, meaning wine cask (which were made of wood).  In the late fourteenth century in France, the word fusté comes into play, which means 'tasting of the cork'.  As the wood would take on the smell of the wine, the word 'fusty' came to refer to the stale smell of the wine-scented wood.  Full circle back to the Latin!

It doesn't take too much imagination to see where the references to something (or someone) being out-of-date comes from there, does it? 😊

Regularly-Scheduled Life

I'm finally getting to be back in my regular schedule this weekend, although after missing a couple weeks of dancing led to me actually having to take a nap after class (instead of just considering doing so).

I did spend a few hours beforehand wandering around the mall with a friend before, but I don't think that wore me down that much :).

Part of my regular weekend schedule is going to my bi-weekly writer's group on Sunday afternoons.  I might've mentioned them before, but we first met doing NaNoWriMo a few years ago, and someone decided to keep it up.  It was initially just monthly, and we've expanded in the last year or so to twice a month.  It's been a great way for me to keep up on my writing, and I have to admit that some months, the only time I do any writing at all is during those three hour sessions.

I'm currently working on a short story challenge for a contest.  I've got until the end of June to finish it.  The way this challenge works is there's about a dozen art pieces (paintings and photos), and you pick one to write a story of 2000-5000 words inspired by the artwork.  Sounds fairly simple (I've done the same thing, for poetry, in a writing class), until I looked at the artwork and realized that all the pieces are modern, real-world, non-quirky images.

I don't write reality; it's not really my thing.  I gave it a go with a couple of different pictures, but finally decided that I'm a fantasy writer (and abstract-y), I'd write fantasy.  So the story ended up being a mix of fantasy and reality, with the main character losing the ability to tell the difference between the two.  It's only a couple of sentences from being fully written (I haven't decided if I want the ending to be 'strange' or 'horror'), and then I'll have quite a bit of work to do for re-writing and editing it.  It kind of reads like I threw up on the page, at the moment (apologies for the visual :).  But really, it does!).   It's all a bit out of order, I think I'm leaving out certain important details, and there's very little dialogue.  Not necessarily a bad thing, I think, but it's something for me to consider.

I realized recently that a lot of my writing style is based off the older books I read growing up, like random philosophers (Plato, Alexis de Tocqueville), long lists of fairy tales and mythology, Frankenstein, Dracula, etcetera.  Books with very little dialogue.  I suppose the fairy tales saved me from habitually using paragraph-long sentences.   At any rate, it wasn't until I wrote a scene some years ago with five people talking in the same conversation that I actually learned how to write dialogue.  My first story - in it's current incarnation as Nightmare (one of the short stories in my book) - is an example of how I wrote before I figured out dialogue.

Inspirational Birthday Cake

At my workplace, a cake is brought in for each person's birthday (unless we have multiple people with birthdays at the same time).  It's a bit amusing that, over time, the cakes have gotten taller and taller.  More often lately they've been chocolate, but otherwise, they're usually pretty plain.  Which isn't a bad thing, mind.

I've mentioned before, I think, that I enjoy making fancy cakes.  So whenever I see a cake with something interesting, I make a note of it and how to do it myself.

As I said, these cakes are generally plain.  Layered chocolate cake, not too sweet, smooth frosting, perhaps some writing that says 'Happy Birthday'.  This one had three layers of cake and two layers of non-sweetened chocolate ganache.  It also had, within the ganache, pockets of liquid salted caramel.

I've tried to make cakes with caramel filling, but either they don't taste right or the filling is too hard.  The best caramel, in my opinion, is between soft and liquid.  I'm not sure how this was done.  It looked a bit like the ganache was placed on the cake and then spots removed and replaced with the liquid salted caramel.  The caramel was soaking into the cake layers above and below each.

As a result of the soaking, this cake tasted even better the next day, and by the second day, what remained of the cake was even more soaked in the caramel.  Generally speaking, cakes dry up, and by the end of day two, if there's any cake that remains, we have to throw the rest away.  None of this cake was thrown away :).

It's been a while since I made a cake, but the next time I do one, I definitely want to try this sort of thing.

Desert Retreat

I'm typing this post up as I'm sitting on a balcony of a hotel room, listening to the desert wind rush through palm trees, birds chirping, and water splashing against the rocks.

Where am I?  Well, I'm in a desert at a hotel, as you probably assume from the previous sentence.  A better question would likely be 'why'.  My workplace is paying for a weekend retreat.  They do this every year, about this time of year.  I missed the previous one by about two months.  (It's a little funny to think of how much time has passed since I started this job - ten months!  It doesn't feel half that long, and yet at the same time I feel like I've been there a long time.  Which is nice.)

It's a bit wild that the firm does this, though I think it's pretty cool.  I've never heard of a job that had that as one of the perks.  They pay for the hotel room (villa.  It's more like a mini-apartment, really) and dinner at a very nice restaurant.  Mind you, when I'm paying, very nice is, well, $20 a person.  So I'm looking forward to tonight's dinner.

I brought my sister with me, and she drove all hundred plus miles to get out here yesterday afternoon, which was great.  I'm not a fan of driving.  We haven't done much so far except avoid the heat (the temperature's a bit high for my taste) by shopping.  She needed a new bathing suit (there's a water slide here we're going to check out later), I forgot to bring sandals, and, as there's a kitchenette in our villa, we grabbed some food to cook for breakfast today, lunch, and breakfast tomorrow morning.

Our plans are a bit vague at this point (hit the water at some point), but the general theme is mainly just to chill.  If anything exciting happens, I'll probably put up an addendum blog, but otherwise, see you next week :)