Paw Prints

This morning’s digest version of the Yahoo group for artistamp[s] has an interesting discussion of gumming paper. There are recommendations to buy gummed paper but two “gum your own” solutions. One suggests Elmer’s glue applied with a roller, the other gelatin with a bit of corn starch. The gelatin/starch method was recommended for before making stamps, apply with brush; the glue technique was after making stamps, apply with roller. Probably a key thing to note was that the glue method is activated by an iron, so ironing those sheets flat would stick them to the surface, while the gelatin methods suggests an ironing finish step.

Both cases set out the importance of keeping the paper from curling; it seems i’d be more likely to use low tack masking tape to hold the paper flat on the absorbent surface, just because that’s what i’ve got. I’m left wondering whether i can really “sew” a straight enough line to make perforations. Someday i suppose I’ll get around to finding out.

Eric Kallen offered the corn starch method; Jim Lewis the white glue method.

I’ve found Howard Packaging’s Photo Postcards to be preferable to the PhotoPostos. The PhotoPostos seem to be about the weight of printer paper — if even that heavy. The Howard Packaging Photo Postcard product is available at Ritz Camera. While i haven’t seen them at my local store, they are available online.

Howard Packaging Make-Your-Own 4×6 Photo Postcards; 12+3 Pack
Mfr # 77215
$3.99

I’m in the middle of a passionate love-hate relationship with iLife. I’ve just finished a 25 minute movie using stills and video clips from our trip to visit family just before Christmas in 2007. It’s been great fun to “be” with them while engaging my creative/editor self.

iPhoto can make a quick slide show for you with a backing track, but if you want titles and more control, you need to go to iMovie. Your photos must be in iPhoto, though! (The new iLife ‘08) iMovie is a great editor for an amateur like myself. (I had played with the earlier iMovie and never quite finished a project: the Ken Burns effect with photos wasn’t as clear to use and the transitions had an odd workflow.) At over twenty minutes, i wanted my movie to have chapter markers (imagining my young nephews particularly wanting to repeat one section; my spouse’s siblings another).

If you want chapter markers, go to GarageBand.

I’m not sure i understand this division: there is definitely a great deal of audio editing in iMovie. I think i had more power to shape the volume levels in Garageband, but as someone merely mixing in existing clips, the compositional powers were not used. I’ll thank Magnatune for their reasonable licensing rates. While i looked at CCMixer and some of Archive.org’s media, i didn’t feel i could “share alike” in this project. Magnatune and Christine’s suggestions of particular works provided a great celebratory texture, despite my occasionally giving in to using some sound effects. From Garageband, to iDVD where the themes support chapter navigation and adding “extras.”

Moving between applications general meant producing the final version for that ap before going on to the next. While the applications claim to share a media library, i found it awkward to use. It’s clearly designed for the person who has all the disk space in the world, helped on by TimeMachine, no doubt. It wasn’t a barrier to my use, although i did have to use the command line to get produced movies out of the iMovie project and move them to my preferred storage location.

And now for credit and production notes, in progress:
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just recently finished a work project and need to catch up on everything, it seems. It’s hard to know where to start. I’ve received some mail art from Cascadia Artpost recently: first day postcards for the IUOMA stamp, promoting www.iuoma.org (International Union of Mail Artists and a powerful presentation album of a sheet of stamps in Jack Lattemann’s “The Sorrows of Empire” series: “Remember Fallujah 2003-2008.”

Today i received documentation from this call (And just discovered that the search is broken on this site. Curses!) It’s a very nice full color zine from Niku for participants in “The Ephemeral Mailbox Museum.” She also included a participant directory…. (I owe folks plenty of mail… sigh….)

On Saturday, i played with acrylic paint and iMovie. I love the latest iMovie! It makes pulling together a movie so straight forward!

It documents my experiment with Golden acrylics (fluids mixed with gel medium) and Speedball Block Printing Ink.

Working on a Father’s Day gift as a break from working on work. So far, bee butt. The legs are wool over “Chenille Stem” — i guess “pipe cleaner” is now politically incorrect. Look, pipes aren’t just for smoking! Lots of small tubular things need cleaning: those are pipes, too!

For some months we were having an intermittent access issue, which seemed to be tied to too many spam comments in another blog on our server. We installed Akismet there, and all seemed much better. Then it seems someone started pounding the server with track-back spam.

It’s not clear when the site will be stable, as neither Christine or I have a great amount of time to track down these issues. (Although it’s very tempting as a procrastination method.) The past few days seem like an almost complete outage, so we’ve restarted the server.

I know i haven’t done several months of Creek-In-The-News posts, as well as posting on other topics as they come to mind.

Hopefully, the technological barrier of the Denial of Service will drop, but i fear we’ve just worked around it again.

This morning i determined that i should give my Golden fluid acrylics a try as a stamping ink for “block prints” with cork and eraser. I have the acrylics & glazing liquid, i like blending the colors…. All i need is a breyer. I can always give the Speedball block printing inks a try later. I am delighted to see a kit of six with primary red/yellow/blue plus white, black and bonus gold are available. This is in response to the continued nagging sense that stamping pad inks are a rip-off.

Meanwhile, i’ve been working on the Yellow/Blue Trefoil Stole and an idea occurred to me.

What if, instead of the trefoils, i had a beaded leaf? That introduces some issues: what one would string the beads on? Something thin enough for seed beads would be awfully slow to work up in a scarf. So, what if one ran a beaded thread along with a heavier weight yarn. Could one thien just do the leaf in the thread?

The answer seems to be yes! That’s about a foot of random seed beads on[Y5] DMC Traditions Ecru along with some natural colored Lion Worsted cotton from IrisDragon. The worsted i worked with G/6-4.25 mm hook (blue); the thread with US7/1.5mm (steel). I rather think i need more practice working with the beaded thread. My leaf pattern seems ok — the back view is pleasing. The beads down the center of the leaf work well. I wonder about using a high sheen floss that gets lost in the worsted weight but stands out well when worked into the leaf pattern.

Well, i would like to order the PhotoPOSTOS now, but there’s some problem with PayPal. And I’d like to order a brayer, but if i order online, i should pick out enough stuff to balance the shipping & handling. I’m off for business travel, so i’ll take my yellow trefoil net work for the plane. I might continue thinking a bit about 2.5″x3.5″ ATCs and some ideas around a “green fire” theme project.

RitzPix’s digital photobooks are a nice product. I found the online web layout tool to be wonderfully flexible. In one photo of a trail, i was able to put a small inset of the stone grain with a penny for size. The “flaoting frame” could be placed anywhere, with edge effects that were different than other photos. The edge effects offer some interesting flexibility and images could have their transparency adjusted. The total was around $25 for a 6×6 hardback book with twenty pages counting the inside cover and the back page. One surprise was that the pages had a white boarder — they weren’t full bleed. I note that they do have a notice to this effect on one of their pre-order pages.

Admittedly, Apple’s hardback book looks like it may be a better deal in some ways: 8.5″ x 11″ hardcover keepsake books include a suede-like cover with a foil-printed title on the cover and a customizable dust jacket. 20 pages (10 sheets) $29.99 The dustjacket is a very nice touch as most hardback books lack any sort of printing option. (Some have inset windows to see a cover image and title.) Another aspect that’s better about working through iPhoto: you don’t have to upload all the photos to a remote server before you begin your layout work. I don’t recall the layout being nearly as flexible as RitzPix’s, though.

The most remarkable difference about the RitzPix book, though, was that i was able to pick the book up from the Wolf Camera on El Camino here in Mountain View the next day. I may have even been able to pick it up in a hour. That’s a wonderful “immediate gratification” aspect that stands out.

***

Another lesson was RitzPix’s photo cards: one can layout images on a 8″x10″ sheet. The “card” and the high price led me to hope i was getting prints on cardstock weight paper. Nope. I’m not sure what the benefit to the purchaser is in choosing this function over the standard reprints. To duplicate what i received for $9, i could have purchased 3 different “4×6 Plus 2 Wallets Glossy” at .49 each and two 4×6 Glossy Borderless at .21 each — $1.89 (and i’d have more photos).

I risked the order because i continue to wish to make photo postcards in small quantities. The cost per card with other print on demand options (plus waiting for shipping) doesn’t appeal to me. I did find adhesive photo postcard backs for photos: 50 4 X 6 PhotoPOSTOS $13.99 (.28 back+.21 print per ~ .50 ea). There is the opportunity to commission custom backs in sets of 1000: i’m not sure that’s within my needs and means, but it is a very clever marketing ploy.

***

And more lessons: Our camera is bloody noisy at ISO equivalent 1600. On the other hand, i think i’ve figured out how to manually set the focus to infinity, and i think that’s better than the auto settings in my attempts at sky photography.

night sky, print on demand, postcards, photo books

I’ve started on the yoke of the Cinnabar but it kept looking wrong. I’ve ripped it out a couple of times. So, i started searching. This link suggested that there were errata, and i eventually found them:

Corrections to Doris Chan’s Everyday Crochet:

We make every effort to provide accurate patterns and helpful information to our readers. The following corrections are for the patterns found in Everyday Crochet. The corrections are listed by pattern, page number, and row number. Large areas of red highlighted text indicate a revision in instructions. We hope you will find this useful!

Tall Latte (Page 53)
First column, addition to line 34:
Size 36

Row 7: Ch 3, 2 dc in first dc, sc in next ch-sp of sh, work in pattern across, end with 3 dc in top of tch, turn.

CINNABAR, Page 66-67, corrections for Size 35 from Row 2
ROW 2: Ch 3, (dc, ch 1, 2 dc) in first V, V in corner ch-sp, SH in V, *[V in shell, SH in V] to next corner ch-sp, V in corner ch-sp, SH in V*; repeat from * to * 2 times, except omit last SH, instead (2 dc, ch 1, dc) in tch-sp, dc in third ch of tch, turn — 10 pattern repeats.

ROW 3: PATT ROW 2, fasten off, turn.

Add sts to shape front neck, increase corners as follows:

ROW 4: BASE CH/SC 6 (for front neck extension), V in first dc, SH in V, INC-V in next corner ch-sp, *SH in V, [V in shell, SH in V] to next corner ch-sp, INC-V in next corner ch-sp*; rep from * to * 2 times, SH in V, V in top of tch, ch 1, BASE CH/SC 6 (for front neck extension), turn.

Other help

Images of someone else’s yoke here.

Flatware box[1] covered with Loris of Florence “Ecological recycled paper” “Made in Italy” and weldbond glue. Crocheted strap and button. Button insert is modified beer bottle cap. Crochet is “Royale Fashion Crochet Thread Warm Rose” [Y4] and orange and yellow wool from a lot of crewel yarn bought on eBay. Hook: US1, 2.35 mm.

This project from yesterday evening and today.

[1] I’ve had the very sturdy silverware box for over a year. We refer to the flatware as “the heaviest flatware ever.” We’d gone through a number of purchases that had all demonstrated that no matter the price, the flatware was cheap. This purchase we inspected carefully, down to the beveling on the edge of the spoon and fork. Did we realize that it would be so heavy it would cause our drawer to start shedding sawdust? No. Oh, well.

It seemed a waste to just recycle such a strong box, so i reengineered the inset (to which the silverware was attached) to act as a lid, and then created the button and strap so one could open it.