Edge lace for my sleeves - I did this on my embroidery machine, on a poly organza with heavy wash-away stabilizer, and then cut the diamonds out and hand-sewed them on.
After much experimenting, the tricks to using metallic thread without it snapping are to keep tension super-low, let the thread spool out from far away (I have it in a mug about a foot away), and don’t make your stitches too dense.
Haven’t been posting much about cosplay, but I’ve been working on stuff so expect some photos over the next few days.
Tonight’s lesson: sometimes you have to try something, and fail… and try something else, and fail… and then keep trying to get it right. Four iterations of rosettes later, I’m finally happy.
I graduated! Yaaaaaay! Now I have to find a job! TERRIFYING.
Going to try and get some DW coding done in the next few days after months of inactivity - I got my Hack all updated yesterday and then got distracted.
acI’m on the hunt for a new hosting provider - the friend who was hosting my sites previously is unfortunately not able to continue doing so. Which means - moving time! And it’s been ages since I shopped around, so I’d love some recs. I don’t need a ton of bandwidth/server stuff, but I do need to be able to install Perl/PHP modules, stuff like that.
(step 2: actually sit down and write my own application for my cosplay site, because I wasn’t really satisfied with the available CMS solutions already)
Progress work on my jacket for Jade! I drafted the pattern Saturday afternoon, spent Saturday night and most of Sunday dyeing white twill the appropriate shade of dark teal, and then started assembling it yesterday. The front closure on this design is so weird….
Very proud of the dye - it took three rounds and four different colors to finally hit what I wanted, so I think I’m justified in that :T Next up: a million yards of twill bias tape.
Someone should have told me the Vorkosigan novels were actually reasonable lengths - I had been putting them off because I didn’t want to get sucked into more Jacqueline Carey 800-page doorstop monstrositities. But I finished Shards of Honour in like five or six hours on Wednesday, and Barrayar yesterday afternoon.
because I’ve used the same password system since 2004 and I finally downloaded a password manager like it’s 2012
and oh my god, this is exhausting. I’ve been at it for about four hours now and I’ve still barely scratched the surface. I’m going through and slowly eradicating my last identity from the internet, and separating ashkatom-the-internet-presence from ashkatom-the-real-life. I’ve closed so many old accounts, changed others to random gibberish, gotten rid of the last vestiges of two old projects, locked down my facebook as much as one can
and the internet? the internet is forever. the internet is designed to revel in the fact that it is forever. one of the most forward-thinking communities I know a) requires you to ask the mods to change your username and b) has no account deletion procedure. there are communities I signed up to when I was thirteen with my old identity that cannot be deleted, the password can’t be changed. my situation is complicated by how tightly I’ve interwoven this username with my real life, but at this point? I don’t think I could disappear. not without burning everything to the ground and salting the ashes.
the thing that makes me angry is that it’s so simple. like, I feel like rule one of user-friendly, anti-harassment web design is give someone the gosh-darn autonomy to delete their account so they can control their information. I know, in my history on the internet, all my identities have become inextricably linked, but - you don’t realise how daunting it is until you face it. there’s so much information, and the internet is very good at cataloguing and cross-referencing that information.
I can’t imagine trying to lock my own information down after a breach. it terrifies me. I didn’t know, when I was 13, the kind of climate the internet would grow into. ‘don’t use your real name and don’t tell anyone your address’ was my “internet safety” lecture, and that - that’s not enough. I don’t know what is, anymore - throwaway emails for every account you sign up to, since often the account management/deletion policy isn’t obvious until you’ve already signed up and had cause to go looking? how far do you have to fudge the details of your day-to-day life in conversations with the people you meet? what’s the tradeoff between ‘being able to establish yourself an identity’ and ‘being safe’? where’s the point where safety measures are Enough and the social engineering starts instead? how the fuck do people ever trust anyone.
I am very privileged to be able to ask these questions academically.
I guess what sits most uneasy with me about being confronted with the breadcrumbs of my own life like this is that I have always been an open person. I’ve done good by being an open person, I’ve helped people. I feel very strongly about being an open person, in exposing the details I choose of my life, good or bad. it’s just become obvious to me how easily it could not be my choice.
I'm having trouble formulating the right search query for this, and I know some of you out there have some Javascript experience. I'm working on cleaning up an old Greasemonkey script, and I've got it working in rough terms, but I'd like to add the ability for users to modify one of the variables (a keyword blacklist) without having to actually open up and edit the JS file. Is this possible, or something I'd have to spin into a full-blown extension to do?
Frankly the part of this costume I’m most proud of, because I had never made any kind of hat before and it turned out really nicely! I didn’t get all the trim done in time, but that’s easy enough to fix now that it’s not Katsu-crunch. Eternal thanks to @elementalsight who held my hand and offered lots of advice and help while I flailed over this.
I managed to take photos really quick while I was working on stuff, but did not have time/energy to upload them before Katsu (or even right after Katsu, haha). The underskirt edges were airbrushed, because I make a lot of poor choices but I wasn’t going to let hand-painting 30 yard of hems be one of them. I made some stencils/masks out of plastic, spaced with little wire loops (so that I could spray in between them without the wire blocking off fabric). I used basting spray to hold them down on the fabric, because it cleans up with soap and water if things got gummy. It took a good eight to ten hours to do both the layers.
The top skirt was mostly freehanded - I made some attempts at stencils but they didn’t give me the quality I wanted, so I ended up making a basic template to trace the outline off of using tracing paper, and then sat with a brush and painted in all forty of them. I ended up using part of a Gutterman thread spool to stamp the circles, because my ability to freehand circles with a paintbrush is basically non-existant. This took another eight hours or so total (which explains why I didn’t get a bunch of other stuff finished in time)
The only photo I got of my fancytier because I only wore it a few hours and wasn’t organized to get more shots of it. My make-up came out really nice though.
Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk.
During an otherwise quiet evening on the desk, someone messaged my co-librarian on our library’s chat service with a specific, but not quite specific enough, request. She wanted the title and author of a book in a murder mystery series, published post-2000. She then provided a some 200-word synopsis of the plots and characters in the series, which involved a young girl in rural postwar England who solves crimes in her village “using her bicycle and chemistry skills.”
She’d tried book-related listservs and message boards, to no avail. Since our go-to fiction RA librarian was gone for the evening, we were on our own. But not quite alone: I jaunted over to NoveList Plus, that magical database beloved by librarians and bookish folks everywhere, and entered keywords from the patron’s description—and which serve as this post’s title.
Boom. First result:
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is the first of five books in Alan Bradley’s Flavia De Luce mysteries series. Since NoveList’s plot description was surprisingly sparse, and I wanted to make sure I got the right book in the series, I cross-checked it with its Amazon page and sure enough, NoveList was right on target.
Putting the same search terms into Google yields nothing close to what I was looking for. Google can do many other things well, but its wide generalist’s net can miss what a targeted niche search like NoveList will catch every time.
Which, of course, reminds me of the Neil Gaiman quote you can find on every corner of the librarian internet: “In a world where Google can bring you back 100,000 answers [or in this case 6 million], a librarian can bring you back the right one.”
Thanks to the life-changing magic of NoveList, we got it right tonight.
More feathers - I don’t have the energy for a full write-up but basically, for whatever reason, the batch of feathers we got do not want to take up dye. All the tutorials are like ‘just swish them around for a few minutes’, and the two left hand groups in that photos were in the dye baths for a good two hours. The ones on the right I left soaking overnight and then heated up, which finally actually made them more or less the right color and shade.
In sewing, trying to stitch cording in an even geometric pattern across a surface that curves in more than one direction is… basically impossible, really, but you can fudge the sizing some. After a few attempts at laying it out with pins or straight edges, I made a little square of card (actually a business card I had in my wallet, I was in class and going stir-crazy), and started marking out the corners with loops of thread. Tedious, but it works. I have about half the cord down - hopefully I can get the rest done tomorrow. I also turned and ironed the hems of the scalloped underskirts. They still need to be painted, but they’re looking pretty good.
Finally, some fabric porn from my better camera - like I said before, my point and shoot doesn’t really capture the colors (for ex, look at the corset photos), and even the DSLR doesn’t get the full depth of the dupioni in a single shot. But man, is it gorgeous.
Emerging briefly from under my piles of fabric with evidence that I am actually working on things. Stuff being dyed (these fucking feathers, man), giant pile of underskirt hems, overskirt at a super awkward angle, inner layers for the corset. The dupioni I’m using for the overskirt and corset is gorgeous but does not photograph well with my point and shoot.
Cosplay Progress - fancytier Aradia and West Witch
Yaaaay Aradia’s almost done - just need to make wings and the little gear buttons for the cuffs and garter ends. The beading on the shirt turned out… decently (the flash shine makes it kind of hard to see). Boots were some grey Ugg-knockoffs that were $20 on Amazon - I took out the back seam, poked holes with an exacto knife, and then used one of my tapestry needles to thread the charmeuse ‘ribbon’ through. The soles are painted with red Angelus leather paint, which held up well on the sandals I did for D*C
Meanwhile, in Sakizou land: giant bling, giant hat, giant skirt. Making molds of the rhinestones right now so I can make copies in the colors I need, and then I sketched out the underskirt border on one of my muslin panels to get an idea of the size.
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