Part 1 of 4: In the sun

Three weeks. I haven’t managed to post in three weeks! The days really crept up on me like bad spandex this time, just a little more silently and stealthily. I’ve been doing my usual things, just a few more dozen of them than usual. So in exchange for my absence, I humbly offer you some beautiful butterflies and flowers today.

People think I must spend simply acres of time on the computer, due to my being a geek, and at work that’s true. But at home, outside of comics and digital manuscripts, I tend to avoid my computer. I wrestle the dog and cook and sew and since it’s summer, I’ve spent time sweating on edible plants and weedy trees outside. Also, lately, I’ve been building websites, which has taken up what little time I spend on the computer at home. Ironically, one reason I’ve neglected the blog writing is to create a new blog template. Hmm. Methinks I should remember Content Before Design.

I also just realized my third blogoversary was yesterday! I started my blog in 2007 after playing around with a bunch of short-lived and hopefully no longer extant websites and blogs. I was mostly practicing HTML and CSS. In the process I wrote various silly pages on trivia, ancient manuscripts, recipes, traveling, and other exercises in existentialism and futility. I recall writing something called the League of Extraordinary Monkeys at one point.

One day I put together a page on crafting, and it turned out I had more stuff to put on that page than any other page. So my next experiment was a crafting blog. I tried LiveJournal, Blogger and Typepad, but really they aren’t so much fun when you want to get your hands dirty. And at the time, I was all about doing the coding myself, all from scratch.  Actually, I’m still into that, and it takes forever. Anyway, I migrated to WordPress next and I’m still here.

My first few posts were random, and then I wrote about making beer. My dad and I made a batch of beer (which didn’t turn out at all) and I wrote about making it, and the ingredients, and all sorts of stuff. I took pictures. I made chemical diagrams. I did research. And it was awesome, because it was intellectually interesting, and I got to do something fun with my dad, and because of the blog I had a reason to record it in words and images. And now I have that memory preserved, like many others. I can go back and read all about the things I’d normally forget.

Anyway, I’ve uploaded pictures, an Im going to start updating about all the various things I’ve been doing since I wandered off into la-la land three weeks ago.  Like flaming dogs, and muslin, and tailoring, and more!

Monday Tech: Photography

Since this is Monday, here I am again armed with more technology. Today I chose Stuff You Can Do With Photos, since I use these sorts of things a lot, and take photos a lot, etc.

photojojo First of all, if you want to find more cool stuff to do with your photos, you should sign up for the Photojojo twice weekly newsletter. They email you stuff to do with your photos, and stuff to buy for photography (heads up to this keyboard skin for people who have a love/hate relationship with Photoshop).

big huge labs If you’re on Flickr, chances are you know about Big Huge Labs. Haven’t heard of them? Use your own photos to create mosaics, print items like calendars, jigsaw puzzles, the Hockneyizer, the Lolcat generator, Wordpress blog header, generate color palettes from photos… you get the idea.

pictobrowser If you want to embed photos in your website, blog post, whatever, I recommend the Pictobrowser. Uses Flickr and Picasa photos to create and embed swank Flash slideshows, customization of look available. Super simple to set up. [The following is a pictobrowser made with my Flickr photos that have the tag "afghan" in them.]

scan cafe Got old pictures you want to save? Worn, torn, dirty, discolored? Try digitizing and fixing those with Scan Cafe.  They also will just scan your old pics, making you much more digital. I’m about to do this with four boxes of my old pictures. They can create things with your photos too.

gorillapod My favorite tripod is the Gorillapod. It’s pretty much as cool as they say. They also have the Gorillatorch (portable light) and Gorillamobile tripod for iPhones.

photo editing online

No photography list would be complete without some of the online photo editing websites, so here’s what I think of some of them. Piknik is simple to use with some fun extra photo effects – some things are free and some aren’t. FlauntR seems similar (editing, create print items),  more extensive although you have to sign up first.

Aviary is a suite of fairly intuitive media editing online applications for photo editing, effects, etc, even vector images.They’ve put a lot of work into these applications, and they’re pretty.

Photoshop.com reminds me of iPhoto with editing and albums, but you can have friends and “decorate” pictures too. Not sure why you’d use this if you have iPhoto and Flickr, but if you don’t – BINGO. I hear Gimp is second to Photoshop but I haven’t tried it.

Other mostly interchangeable, simple, upload-and-edit photo sites are Dr Pic, FotoFlexer, Phixr, Snipshot.

There you go! Hope these are of some aid to some people. I know about them because I have photography nerd friends, whereas I am just a tech geek, but I try to pay attention when they talk

Projects on the Web

Tech Stuff Monday – The other day I was thinking about what projects to post in my blog for my “projects in my queue” day. That got me to  thinking about how I find and catalog projects when I see them.  For example, I got a newsletter from Lion Brand with some crochet vegetables I was thinking about making – I might be able to do that soon. Then I saw something in my RSS feed for some furniture that I wanted to make (that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon). So what do I do to save those links?

I don’t know if other creative people collect patterns, projects, materials and ideas like this, or how they manage it.  I seem to always have an information overload – and the presence of that phrase in the news media leads me to believe I’m not the only one.  So I thought I’d share some of the ways that I manage my ever-increasing library of crafty-arty links. There are a million possibilities, this is what I chose.  (Note: the epic logo graphic to the right is from Flickr user Ludwig Gatzke.)

Tutorials and Materials

• Delicious: I save lots and lots of things to Delicious, and in fact use it more than any of the other sites in keeping track of web links. I have three primary uses for it:  (1) saving links to places to get materials, (2) a place to stash online tutorials (i.e. not entire projects) and (3) to save ideasI want to share on Crafter by Night.  If you look at the bottom of this website you’ll see a list of links that automatically is generated by certain of my Delicious tags.
• Wish Lists: I use the Wish List feature of the Blick Art catalog to remember art supplies I wanted to get. Sometimes I don’t get them there, but the convenience of the feature is nice.  I also use Amazon to make wish lists of craft books I’m interested in.
• I think the invention of the RSS feed has made my life (a) livable and (b) completely overloaded with information. The links I find there feed into a lot of these things I’m mentioning today, but when I’m first going through them if I think I want to save it for later review, then I either just Star them through Google Reader (Seems like Google owns my life), or click the Instapaper bookmarklet to save it to read later.

Crochet Projects

• Ravelry: No project management list for the yarn arts would be complete without a mention of Casey and Jess’ brilliant knit/crochet/spinning/weaving project masterpiece. I was an early adopter. I don’t use it as fully as I might, but I do use the possible projects queue, and I keep track of the progress of my projects there, and use it to combine my Flickr photos, blog posts and then project summaries.

Sewing Projects

• Evernote:  I use this to catalog sewing patterns. This web program allows me to “clip” pictures – of entire websites, screenshots, pieces of text, my own notes. Plus I can classify things.  I keep an offline notebook of clippings on which I make notes and sketches. I’m sort of trying to make Evernote into a way to do the same thing digitally for sewing patterns. I can’t do sketches the same way, but I can put together a nice visual catalog of sewing projects I’m interested in.  It has an iPhone app for convenience.

Recipes

• I almost always do one of two things with recipes I see.  I get a lot of my recipes online from All Recipes and Epicurious. I mentioned that I use the Epicurious iPhone application.  Both of these websites have online recipe boxes and shopping lists to which you can add the recipes you like.  The other option for blog recipes, etc. is that I print and save them in my offline recipe box, but I may begin to use Delicious for these types of recipes.

Projects & Miscellany

• I track things I want to buy on Etsy through the favorite items, sellers, etc. ability in my account.  That also feeds in here to my blog for the side bar.
• Flickr’s Favorite Photo feature lets me remember projects that I like there, or people that I’m interested in, and their Groups gives me access to a wide range of things I wouldn’t otherwise come across.  And of course I use Flickr on this here blog quite a lot.