Bagged

I recently ventured into the wonderful world of bag-making, a craft that I need to perfect. I wanted to make a bag for my sister to present to her when we visited her in Portland. I wanted to primarily use a fabric she had seen in Austin and had really liked. A combination of sewing without my partners, PMB and EH (who have far more bag experience than I and whom I would have had to explain my design to and therefore potentially identified the flaws in it), and my over enthusiasm for this fabric, led to some serious obstacles. I think that the bag turned out alright, esp after I found some cheap earrings that I turned into buckles on the bag:














I like the Winnie the Pooh lining of the bag, and the fabric generally. The style is a bit awkward -- is it a purse? Too big. Is it a gym bag? Too small. And I have since found far better buckles here in Portland at the best fabric store I have ever been to: Bolt.

Jam on!

I have had the pleasure of making 2 trips out to Marble Falls this May to pick berries at Sweet Berry Farm The first trip was for strawberries, and my friend PMB and I picked 3 boxes (one for each of us, and one for our friends TF and DG. Here is PMB at work:















As I have a number of times before, I made strawberry jam with the Sure Jell pectin. The mystery that drives me batty in this recipe is that it tells you to heat the the berry, sugar, pectin mix at a "roaring boil" for "exactly" one minute. The problem here is that "roaring" is not a scientific designation, I mean my "roaring" boil could be your "vigorous" boil. And at what exact moment does the one minute start? It is next to impossible to know. I am all for approximations in the kitchen, BUT when a recipe uses the work "exactly," I get nervous. Anyhow, the strawberry jam turned out really well:

A few weeks later, we went back to the farm for blackberries. We had to use gloves and really get in there for the blackberries. It was not as easy as the strawberries, but it was equally rewarding. My blackberry jam came out slightly runnier, and I am not sure why. Perhaps there is more juice in fresh berries than the Sure Jell recipe accounts for? I think that I let the jam cook long enough, but I did not get the jam off the stove fast enough, and this may have had an adverse effect. The jam tastes fantastic, and after a few hours in the refrigerator, it is definitely spreadable.

Shut Down

Ironically enough, I encountered my first tech-related obstacle this summer with this very blog. About 2 days after I created it, I was no longer able to add to it. The message that appeared told me that my blog was under investigation for violation of the agreement (my wording is off, but that was the gist of it). After a few days of confusion, I googled this message only to find out that many folks using blogger have encountered the same problem. I guess that google is slightly over zealous in checking for spam. I then realized that I should have had an email asking me to confirm that I am in fact a real person (whatever "real" means in this context). After finding said email in my hotmail trash, I had to wait another 2 weeks or so until google allowed me regular access again. Questions that this situation raised for me -- when should I be proactive in solving such a problem? How should I be proactive? Should I have contacted customer service, or something? Should I have abandoned hope sooner and found another place to host my blog? The good that came out of this situation is that I have set up another, more private blog for my professional development needs. Though this blog related to my professional development, I think that it is best to keep these 2 arenas separate, an organizational insight that had not originally occurred to me. Such a consideration grew out of this snafu with my google blog. If only all technological frustrations could have such a silver lining...

Sewing It Up!

In the past three months, I have completed a few small projects that I am pretty happy with. I made a pair of pillows for my sister for Christmas, and then I liked them so much that I had to replicate them for myself. I made 14inch ones for me; the ones I made for her were 18inches, and they were huge. Both sets of pillows are in a log cabin pattern, complete with the red middle that I understand is the tradition for the log cabin look. For this second pair, I used "invisible zippers," which, until I get better, I need to avoid. They are a pain to work with.



I have some friends whom I have sewn with pretty regularly for the last 6 months. I don't know what I would do without these ladies (for a number of reasons, but I will stick to the topic at hand -- sewing). They are not all that more advanced than I am, so we fumble through projects and when we put our minds together, we get turn out some fantastic things. Here is a bag PMB made yesterday. She then gifted it to me. How sweet is that?!

And EH made this really cute pencil case. Earlier in the year, she made a really cool dress with the brown fabric pictured here. She definitely struggled with the directions for the pattern of the dress. Actually, in true sewing circle spirit, we all struggled with it. What is it about patterns? It was like a foreign language. We have thought about taking a class on patterns to teach us the secrets.





I worked on what I thought was going to be a change purse, but ended up larger than expected. I am thinking that I will put a CD in it and give to my friend KJH for her birthday. My lesson of the day was buttons. It was the first time that I sewed a not-just-for-practice button on. I made a few mistakes: 1) I don't know how/when to use the guard on the feet. My directions book said I would need it, but then when I used it, my thread got that bunched up beard thing on the bottom. 2) I made the hole too small. I thought that I had measured the button correctly, but alas! Luckily, I also screwed up one of the ends of the hole, so I was able to just extend the slit slightly. As you can sort of see, none of this tearing is too visible:

Introduction

On this blog, I am going to write about my learning processes as I learn to make things both real and virtual. The "real" things will primarily be in the domestic arena -- cooking, sewing, knitting, gardening, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I have been honing my cooking skills for many years now, and I have been a mediocre knitter for almost as long. Sewing and gardening are both fairly new for me, however, so I want to keep track of what I am learning.

My virtual products include this blog, though more notably, I have a new job at the CWRL at the University of Texas at Austin, which will encourage me to play with virtual tools such as web developing (with Drupal), podcasting, iMovie, and who knows what else. How my creations with these tools will be like my domestic endeavors I have yet to know. What I can remark on now are the differences. I often feel lost and confused in a virtual world, whereas when I am using my hands to physically figure something out, I am much more confident. I guess that my goal then in some ways is to transfer that confidence into technological creations.