Sempstress

I had some excellent teachers when I was younger. The ones that were the most brilliant exemplified the sort of razor-thin line between creativity in the classroom and outright psychotic sadism. (My favorite was a bio teacher who came in to a dissection lab dressed as your classic maître d’, white gloves, linen towel on the arm and everything, carrying a silver tray, neatly lined with lettuce, and the objects of our academic investigations – cow eyeballs, each one with a toothpick neatly inserted into its optic nerve. It was brilliant object lesson in our cultural views on food. Half the class looked like they were going to vom.) I don’t teach biology, so I don’t get to play the gross-out card. Sadness is. But I do teach design, which has some other possibilities… ;) Read the rest of this entry »

My beautiful girl-cat passed on just after 5am on December 9, 2012. She was 18 1/2 years old. Some day, I might tell you more about that. But that day will be when I can remember it for the beauty of her last hours and tell you about some of the funny things she used to do (instead of tearing up and going all soppy over it). It will be when I’m feeling centered enough to face the possibility of feedback from Those With Firm Opinions(tm) and The Well Meaning(tm). Right now, I’m focussed on the obvious: I have been a crazy cat lady for literally half my life. I am out of cats. That makes me … just crazy? I’m thinking I might need a slightly updated self-definition.  Read the rest of this entry »

This makes me giggle. I finally got the old iMac all apart (a fight) and reassembled sans guts (another fight). Soon it will have some form of plant light in it. But in case anyone was wondering just how far Apple has progressed in the last decade and change…. Read the rest of this entry »

Actually, most things are easier than making shirts. Shirts are seriously annoying creatures. However, the point of this little demo is that every sewing room needs good lighting, and good lighting is something you can make with far less skill than you need for most of sew-land. Curious yet? Read the rest of this entry »

So I had a minute this evening (rare), and I’ve been testing upgrades on my local dial-a-nuke code playground and then applying them to this site. I think I was only 4 or 5 releases behind on WordPress.Wow! Multi-fle uploader?! Yowza! That makes a difference!

Anyway, I’ve kinda tested things (the Pinterest share button has oddly disappeared), but if you stumble across Mas Hinkiness, please drop me a line. Thanks!

I didn’t mean to. I really, really didn’t. I have nothing against Girl Scouts (now that I’m out of grade school). I think it’s kind of adorable when they actually go door-to-door selling their little cookies – way better than sending a parent in to the office/theater/classroom with a sign-up sheet. And when I could still eat their fiendishly addictive little delights, I did, often with wild abandon….

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m all Mac, all the time, except sometimes at one of the works where there’s a PC on my desk. (And, often, the PC gets shoved back so I can put my Air on the desk and work. My poor little first-version-2008-never-seen-anything-like-it-Air has a better set of debugging tools, starting with a flipping command line.) But I’ve been noticing one thing about the PC that I really like: it’s got a bigger monitor. Doing graphics on a 13″ screen is … painful. I didn’t even realize how painful until I started doing them on a 19″ screen. Noodle on this: all of the eBooks so far have been done on that small little screen… Yikes! Read the rest of this entry »

Yeah, right, so the girl who can’t be friends with FaceBook signed up with a twitter account. Really. What? Why? Because sometimes I get lonely when I’m out in the garage sewing and I want to talk about what I’m doing, but “Only 12 more bias strips to go! Whee!” hardly seems blog-able…. Read the rest of this entry »

So, there’s some sort of mysterious rule of small business that says that the second you get into some sort of flow with the business plan you’ve committed to (my eBookies and patterns), a side job will pop up to tempt you with money. So you take it, because you need some of that, and then another side job pops up. So you take that too, because you’ve been living off savings trying to make a business and you’re worried that your bank doesn’t think you know how to use a deposit slip. And then another side job pops up, but this one promises to be regular income and the other two are one time gigs, and, I gotta tell you guys, regular income kinda rocks, so you take that too. So now I’m stupid busy with side jobs, but I have a plan for getting things done…. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve spent the last two days crawling through the inner workings of the site, trying to make it work better…. Half this post will read as “blah blah blah techno-blither blahdedattadee.” and I won’t be sad if you skip it. It’s mostly here to document some technical issues and how I resolved them, in case anyone is asking Google similar questions. ;) Read the rest of this entry »