Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Making things more awesome

I have a craft room. This is an awesome fact. The best part of the craft room is that I can do things in there to organize my crafting process. I love to pour over decorating blogs, especially ones geared towards people with craft rooms. There's something divine in a well put together room that has been especially tailored to optimizing the crafting experience.

My room however has far to go. But today! Today I take one step forward in the "This is going to be awesome" direction. I've always had an idea about how my "current" fabric should be organized and dude! It totally looked something like this in my head:

Except, get this- it's not in my head any more! It's there! In the room! Bam!

Walking home from Dr. Sketchy's tonight (which was aaaaaawesome) I spotted the halves of a futon frame next to the public trash bit on our street corner. This half the frame was perfect and I didn't feel that bad about taking only part of it because the legs were no-where in sight. So it was trash. But I made (part of it) into something sweet and useful! How indy craft girl of me!

Along the topic of making things more awesome- I totally took some seeds a while ago and put them in the dirt. Then I managed to not neglect what came out of the dirt too much. Now I've got this!

I'm not certain you can see it so let me point it out to you. There's a god damn cherry tomato growing on that (root bound, very sad) tomato plan! I've not picked it yet... not actually, you know, sure when too... but soon! And there are more on the other plants coming along (no other one actually red yet though). Also note the actually-kinda'-healthy catnip next to it. That's growing (from seed!) too and continues to meet Duck's approval every time I give him a fresh leaf from it.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Thrashing and Agile crafting

Am totally thrashing on crafting now. I've got intense urges to draw (with reasonable results), perhaps in feverish anticipation of the Inkling I plan to buy the second they go on sale. I've also got a half-skinned Zergling plush to finish, a Frankenturret plush to rev, a Frankenturret model to do final touches on, a Settlers of Catan quilt to limp along with, and a Halloween costume to plan. ... So instead I've found myself playing Mass Effect the last couple nights to chill. And any time I do pick up a craft, all I can think of is the other things I should be working on (or worse yet the nigglings of new ideas).

Despite this, I have been making minor progress. The weekends have been clobbered recently with socializing (parents in town! friends hanging out!) which leaves me only the evenings to squeeze in an hour or two of something (given how often Adam and I eat out and how much time that takes up... who would have guessed hanging out with your S.O. would consume so much time!)

I dislike the concept of Agile software development as I've actually encountered it so far. I think the ideas are nice and reasonable enough, but the way it has evolved at work is very displeasing... But! Let that not sully the entire Agile idea. I feel my recent (ongoing & diverse) Portal 2 projects sort of embody some of the basic ideas... Recently I was under the impression I could make a cute Frankenturret plushie that met the following requirements :

  • low complexity
  • machine sewable
  • durable
  • no non-snuggable parts
  • cute
  • small-ish
  • These are all things I'm bad at and need practice with. Which means it shouldn't be surprising that the first results look like shit:

    The scale is too small to be reasonably machine sewable... I've no experience with fleece (though I must say it is awesome!) and I've stared too long at frankenturret details to easily abbreviate it. So much failure... But the point is iteration! I can't just expect it to be perfect on the first go. I've got to rev my designs, put forward due diligence to get each rev as close to the "done" state as possible, but not obsessively dwell or grind to a halt if it doesn't turn out the way I like it. Try again! Am giving up on the machine sewable portion rule (at least for the head) but hope to hold onto my other goals. If anyone has any ideas, I'd be very open to them!! The 'less is more' design concept for 'cute' is a struggle I seem never to be able to win.

    At least I have my stalwart Catan quilt to stand by. It lives on the empty stereo box now and is mainly Duck's perch in the den. I'm down to 5 tiles to edge and then it's playable!!


    The darkening days has it's pros to counter the obvious cons. The season of coding approaches. I'm excited to be getting back to the Tichu project soon. Coding while the sun is up is ridiculous... but now it's well into dark by the time I get home... which means my time will have yet another contender. Along those lines, I was at work until 10-something tonight. Working on a KnockoutJS demo for our project as it shifts into the wondrous realm of JavaScript. Holy poop- Knockout is flipping awesome. Seriously! I've no doubt I'll be doing the Tichu client with it.