fixin’ stuff

Well, all the posts appear to have been migrated over from the old version of WordPress on the old version of the site successfully. A lot of the image links are broken, so I’ll just have to go through and fix them by hand. Eventually. I suppose if there’s something that someone really wants to see and they tell me about it, I can make that one a priority.

Also being updated is the website; it’s kind of a pain because the last time I did a site, not only was it before drag-and-drop builders, it was also before @media detected things other than screenreaders. And I really love responsive pages, because I have the worst time trying to read stuff on the phone. Even the tablet can get kind of annoying. So I want to include that functionality, but I have no idea how to code it.

But I have an Adobe subscription! So I have can use Dreamweaver, which I’ve never actually used before, but it has templates! Most of which aren’t what I want, but there’s one that’s a nice clean single-column layout with the graphics in the same place I was planning to put them, and it’s responsive. So all I should have to do is change the text and link to a different image, right?

Except it didn’t work that way. There weren’t any comments in the file, so I wasn’t always sure what a particular bit of code was doing, especially since I hadn’t written the CSS so I didn’t have a good idea of what all the classes were supposed to do. And then even though it *looked* like it was supposed to respond in a certain way, I couldn’t get it to handle the images appropriately. It wouldn’t resize or use a different image so I gave up and told it not to load them at all, but it insists on loading them anyway, just invisibly so the text still wraps around the blank spaces. It also insists on wrapping just beyond the right edge of the screen. I spent so much time fighting with it that I was thinking it would have been faster to start with a blank file.

waking up

I wasn’t sure that the hop would survive the winter outside, even in the pot. But there’s one sprout a fingerlength long, and another just starting to poke through. I guess that means I should get around to cutting the old vines down now, and figuring out a better way to support it this year. I was thinking about putting the pot in the corner of the patio, and then stringing lines from the mast to the house so the hop could make a kind of shade over that corner; we shall see.
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just awesome

The filename of this image, which was posted a while ago to a Ravelry group that I can’t remember the name of, is “dmcseriesv_model6a.” Some googling turned up the D.M.C. Library series, which covers all sorts of thread work from embroidery to tatting to crochet and others, most of which were published in the early 1900s. I found scanned copies of some other volumes in the series, but not this one.

I want this book, if only for this image. I think it is made of awesome.

ETA 10/6/19: Found original image & updated link to new location.

thrift store score

This time, from the Greenwood Wildlife thrift store:

According to a tag on the back, this was “Created especially for you by members of Thrilled to Pieces Quilt Club, Lafayette, Colorado, 2005.” A second tag says “Autumn Evening Judy Kurtz Jan 2005.”

Also at the thrift store: A 1980-ish electronic knitting machine. No, really.
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updates: dyes

The gorgeous magenta juice I got out of the prickly pears is no longer magenta. It’s this:

I had it sitting outside on the patio to stay warm so it wouldn’t mold. It stayed beautiful for quite some time, and then overnight the color vanished. The only explanation I can think of is that it got too hot one day, and the color browned.

I plan to try again, but I need to find a bigger container to roll the pears in so I can de-spine them faster. As much as it amuses the cat, it’s kind of a pain to only do three at a time.

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results: avocado and copper dyes

From left to right: Ammonia and pennies, vinegar and pennies, avocado peels-n-pits. These were started at the beginning of July and let to sit outside for about thirty days.

I thought I had a picture of the copper jars after I got the pennies out, but I can’t find it. So you’ll have to trust me– the vinegar jar was that nice pale blue you see, but the ammonia jar was that kind of deep saturated electric blue that jumps off the shelf and assaults your unsuspecting eyeballs with the sheer force of its blueness. It was so blue that it deserves not only capitalization, but italics and exclamation points as well. It was !!BLUE!!.

In this picture, though, the ammonia jar looks black. Not because it’s concentrated– because there’s a mysterious black precipitate coating the inside of the jar and the pennies. I have no idea what it is, and I’ve been afraid to try and clean it off because I’m not sure if it’ll come off at all. (Not that I’ll be upset if I can’t save the pennies, but I want to save the jar!)

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catchup: plant dyes

First dye experiment: black bean soaking water. I used two pounds of black beans from the local Sprouts, soaked them overnight in just tap water, and then poured off the water and let the yarn soak in that for about three weeks on the front porch. The beans themselves got cooked and pitched into the freezer.

I didn’t get nearly as much scum as I expected– just a little on the top– and no mold or stankyness. I suspect that the jar’s getting our strong afternoon sun every day may have heated it up just enough to retard growth, but not enough to change the color.

I used two skeins each of three mordants, and gave one skein of each mordant a five-minute vinegar soak afterwards.

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