3 posts tagged “design”
Yes, I should be asleep.
Yes, I had intended to be asleep.
Yes, my sleep "schedule" is currently a thing of havoc and dismay.
But it's very, very cold in my bedroom, so I've been up while waiting for my new heated mattress pad to dry! A wonderful early Xmas gift from my mom, to ensure that I don't have ridiculous chill-induced foot cramps while I'm trying to sleep.
I found a few utterly wonderful things. I wrote about one for DIY Life, and you'll just have to see that when it goes up. The other is not really appropriate for that site, so here it is. I think it's wonderful.
(They showcase the sort of things that I collect... and are perfect for all those of you who have lately been head-over-heels about that Petit Pattern book series from Japan. Oh, I'll admit it: there are a few of them on my Amazon Wishlist, too.)
Oh, dear. So now my fiance, who I have depended on to be the Hauler of Stuff throughout our relationship but particularly since our car accident (he wasn't very injured, and healed quickly), has hurt his back.
Worse, he has no idea how! It's been bothering him mildly on and off for the last week. He drove 90 minutes each way on Thanksgiving Day, sitting in an uncomfortable folding chair most of the day in the interim, then on Saturday and Sunday, he exhibited at a convention where he also sat all day on uncomfortable chairs.
He takes stuff into the con, too, but the thing I can think of that is most likely to have injured him is his Tub O' Original Art For Sale, which is so heavy that I can't even attempt to pick it up without pain. (It's several hundred sheets of bristol board, around 12x15ish.) Don't know, though. There was no moment where he did something and then thought, "I shouldn't have done that."
He has lots of good drugs from the doctor, two days off work, and a heating pad that I lent him after his appointment this morning.
On top of all this, as mentioned in my last psot, my dog has been sick this past week. Not too horribly sick, but she had a bladder infection and a yeasty ear infection. She's still being treated for both. $400 so far; I took responsiblity for half of it. *groan*
I found the missing library book I mentioned in that post. It was right where it should have been, in my stack of library books on the part of the bookshelf that I reserve for them, only I couldn't see it. It was between two larger books. I was looking at the spines, and the book I sought was pushed back a little, so the spines of the larger books met around it! You could only see that it was there by looking at the stack from a different angle.
Button Angst
And now, to the title of the post!
The other night, as a Present To Me, I ordered this purple cashmere v-neck cardigan and the matching tank that you can see in the picture. They were on sale ($60 total), and I like to be warm in the winter. It isn't here yet.
I've heard some bad things about this year's Target cashmere (like, "it's thin and itchy"), so we'll see. Last year's was great. Eucalan wash -- I use the lavender version -- helps soften most protein-fiber clothing, and you can also use a bit of diluted hair conditioner on cashmere to soften it further, as long as you can stand the conditioner being against your skin.
It seems as though the buttons will color-match, but they look whitish in some of the photos, and it's difficult to tell whether they match or not. They might have picked up a flash reflection, or they might just be light-colored buttons.
I love the intaglio/lens/cabochon buttons made by Winky and Dutch, which are a picture under a clear dome set into a metal backing and which the company itself seemingly only sells to merchants. Some time ago a friend's cousin added an entire set of their pin-up girl buttons to a sweater she had de-and-re-constructed for herself.*
It looked really cool, but the buttons themselves are pricey, as buttons go, and not all that easy to find. I'm more likely to buy something in person than to mail order it. For example, somewhere -- still in the mess of boxes from my last move -- indifferently packed by the worst movers ever, and not labelled -- I have W&D barettes, the "Sad Puppy" design in a hair-pin setting, from a shop I used to go to. Their other jewelry is not too difficult to find.
So, I noticed that ReproDepot has been having a sale on the W&D buttons, which they sell at a decent price to begin with, most of them in two sizes. It seems like they might be trying to sell through their remaining stock. The selection has decreased over the last few years; they used to carry many more "sets" than they do, IIRC, and a lot more single-button designs.
The problem is that my sweater, assuming I even want to replace the buttons on it, has five buttons. I don't like either of the Sci-Fi collections enough to buy one; I wanted the Robot or Tourism collection. No robots to be seen, and they only have a few of the Tourism buttons, one of which doesn't really match the others.
I was going to get London/Tokyo/Hollywood/Miami, all of which have blue skies, but the only other one available is Brooklyn Bridge, which doesn't. Pegasus would have been OK as the fifth match, but it was unavailable in the smaller size, about 1/3" or so, that I needed. This is the size for "shirt" buttons. There is a larger size, more like 3/4", which would work for stuff like chunky handknit sweaters. I have at least one or two of each, but not enough to work for this project.
Some searching took me to EQuilter, which has tons of cool stuff and seems to be the only other regular online merchant of these buttons. They have a larger selection (with a few more designs at the "previous page" link), but they only sell them in sets of three -- usually three of the same button, but sometimes three thematically linked buttons -- or in larger sets. They do have the robot set.
They charge, however, much more than ReproDepot does. The buttons I wanted are around $1.50-$2, depending on whether or not there's a sale, at ReproDepot. They break down to over $3 each at EQuilter, probably because they only sell the larger size (it seems). This is a lot more than I want to spend on potentially putting wacky buttons on a sweater (even $1.50 is possibly excessive, but I've wanted to do this for so many years that I was willing to go for it).
End result: I bought six Tokyo buttons from ReproDepot for about $1.50 each. The other one I really liked was London, but I didn't think that mix-and-match would work unless each button was different, which I couldn't manage with ReproDepot's current selection. Since the sweater is purple - if I use it on that - the Tokyo design both seemed like a better match for purple and more appropriate in terms of color scheme. (Purple and sky blue seems more "Japanese" than "British", right?) Obviously, I bought one extra button "just in case."
It being Christmas, and having already bought the sweater set, I had to completely ignore every other thing I want from ReproDepot. (At the last link, it's the Ayumi Uyama felt animal kits: I like the deer, rabbit, dog, and duck, in order of preference. The Minigurumi kits are all pretty adorable, too: they look like designs from a book I have, Mame Wanko, which is all about tiny fabric dogs and their accessories.)
A Mysterious Yarn-Related Project
The other crafty thing I ordered lately was Lang Mille Colori yarn in color number 68, a sort of earthtone mix. Mille Colori is a self-striping wool/acrylic blend. #68 is on color chart 2, at that link, the strip on the far right.
This is for a mystery project for which I wanted a relatively tough self-striping yarn, worsted or bulky, with non-garish colors and thin, rapidly-changing stripes.
I looked at a bunch of Berroco yarns: Keltic (stripe pattern too long and subtle), Jasper (composition made me worried it would pill, didn't see an appropriate color scheme, stripes also too subtle), and Foliage (the only color I liked for the project had been discontinued, plus I was worried that the spin was too loose/uneven -- it seems that Foliage is basically Berroco's version of Kureyon). I nearly chose Keltic's "Argyll" or "Tartan" colors; my friend memorably described most of the other colors as "week-old stale vomit" -- ouch. I considered Noro Kureyon (too uneven) and Big Kureyon (not the right colors for this project), and Rowan Tapestry (DK weight, too drapey).
I found Mille Colori in a weird, serendipitous way... it kept popping up in Google Image Searches, then also popped up when I did a search on "self-striping" and variations of the term at the site where I almost ordered some Keltic.
I hope people like this thing when I'm done with it, because I really have agonized over the yarn. If it goes right, it'll be a free pattern. If not, I will cry real tears of tears: I've been planning it for months, and I'm putting off another project to do it, and as I mentioned a few posts back, my last attempt went really wrong.
* The same girl, who supposedly didn't even particularly like me, gave me this great pair of black Doc Martens oxfords that I wear to this day. They were almost new, but she was moving and wanted to travel light, packing most of the stuff she was taking into her soft guitar case around the instrument itself. The shoes were too weighty and bulky for her to take. I still think of her gratefully every time I wear the things... and last I heard, she was doing OK.
Knitty's Winter Surprise - the extra patterns and articles that they put out between formal issues - went up yesterday. How does it stack up?
First of all, I picked on one of their most recent Surprise patterns, Smock, for being kind of shapeless on the top (you can see that post on the earlier iteration of this blog). I suggested that it would have been cuter with a ribbed scoop neck. Well, this season's surprise includes a really cute sweater, Thermal, that has a ribbed scoop neck. Thermal is the first Knitty item in ages that I'm likely to make. It looks like a great, comfy, not-too-bulky everyday sweater. However, I'm a slow knitter, so if I want it for next winter, I'd better get on it.
There's another cute-ish sweater called Dragonfly, but I think it has some design problems, and I don't know if I would bother to make it as presented. The issue is that the bottom half is in a variegated yarn, but it's also patterned with butterfly stitches. Optimally, the area with the butterfly stitches would have been done in a solid color, because those stitches depend on light and shadow for their effect, and the variegation interferes with that. It seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a patterning that will only show up close, and then look busy. There's a pretty, delicate dragonfly motif in the point of the v-neck, though. It would be difficult to decide to make changes to the design, perhaps by using only one of the designs all the way through (the variegated yarn would look great as a full sweater without the butterfly stitches) because the fit of the sweater depends on the yarn change. It might be better to make a shaped v-neck sweater in whatever yarn you like and add the dragonfly motif to that design.
The other two new patterns are basic, a reversible cabled scarf and felted mittens. So, all in all, this is a decent update as far as patterns go.
The articles got to me, though.
Specifically, I was bothered by an article by Julie Theaker about color theory. It's not that it's particularly bad, it's that when an article on that concept is written, it should probably be written by someone who's actually educated in the concept, rather than someone who's sort of picked it up along the way, as Theaker seems to have done.
The suggestion that people figure out which colors of yarn will go together by photocopying their shade cards and comparing greyscale tones isn't a bad one. But most people who have had any sort of art training whatsoever know that it's not at all necessary to go to the trouble of photocopying anything to see it in greyscale. If you want to see colors in greyscale so that you can compare value, simply look at the colors through a piece of transparent red plastic film. This can be a gel made for theatrical lighting, or it can be a piece of plastic cut from one of those flimsy report covers with the little sliding plastic spine. It only matters that it's very red, and that you can look through it.
I'm pretty sure I've seen an overpriced variation on this in at least one or two knitting catalogues (probably Patternworks or the old Knitpicks). You can also find a similar tool in study kits made in Japan, which come with the film, a green marker, and a red marker, so that someone can obscure answers to quiz themselves with; J-List occasionally sells these. At any rate, since most people don't have photocopiers at home, it's a much easier and more portable, sensible solution. Stick one in your craft toolbox. In fact, since you can do it so cheaply, stick a separate one in any toolbox you use for any craft that may involve making color/value decisions. This information is just as good for beaders and scrapbookers and so on as it is for fiber craft people.
