what are you making?

[enemy anemone]

we have lots of threads on what we're consuming, and just now I wondered, what are we making, creating, constructing, or designing? if you want to talk about what you're conserving, recycling, reusing, or restoring, that's cool too. 

[who me?]

Does making trouble count?

I'm designing a forum which I probably can't tell you about because of advertising restrictions. Join if you can find it :p

[Vlad!]

Hmm, who me?'s post reminded me that the new template does not have a link to the PhAQ at top (it can still be read here). To highlight the relevant section:
==
We generally permit advertising of other personal sites and message boards, but commercial advertisements and spam will be deleted without mercy and/or mocked.
==
Since I looked at your forum and it doesn't seem commercially-oriented, feel free to post a link to it (just don't go overboard ).

Due to the aforementioned revelation, I guess what I am "making" is an updated template that supports more of schil's spiffy buttons and also has a PhAQ link up top.

[who me?]

Yes! Lol, the link is in my signature anyway

I just made two calenders and an e-card on photoshop.

And I wrote a three page essay on manners as a punishment for yelling at my sister yesterday

Since I looked at your forum

Aww, and you didn't even join! I only have one member and she's my sister!

[enemy anemone]

in the words of Over the Rhine, "if you came to make some trouble...better make it good". hehe.

I'm a knitter and always have a project or five on the needles. I recently finished making a pair of knee-high socks and have started a sweater. also am working on some afghan squares and preemie caps to be contributed to various groups. there is also a stuffed nautilus that has been waiting very patiently for a head/body/tentacles/whatever a nautilus has besides shell.

in the reuse/recycle department, I'm trying to cut down on the number of plastic grocery bags I bring home, so I use a sturdy, reusable shopping bag instead. save a plastic tree.

[enemy anemone]

the yarn that I had ordered arrived over the weekend so I am in the process of making a scarf similar to this one.

 

I'm also cutting up plastic bags and looping them together to make a ball of plastic "yarn", which I want to knit into a sturdy shopping bag. a bag from bags!

I plan on making some guacamole later tonight.

[who me?]

Man! I want a plastic shopping bag! I have to learn to crochet now.

[Vlad!]

I'm planning on making banana bread tomorrow. The best baked goods always involve fruit.

[dgp11776]

Man! I want a plastic shopping bag! I have to learn to crochet now.

Yeah, me too.  That bag looks awesome!

[Harenil]

I doing an engine swap in my car. Mostly by myself. I had to pretty much reassemble the entire engine + modify it to work right with my car... It's been alot of work, but I am no longer afraid to do ANYTHING to my car.

[enemy anemone]

I just finished making a Jayne (from Firefly) hat. it's fantastically ugly! now I just need the weather and occasion to wear it.

[enemy anemone]

I'm making a simple cardigan/wrap out of some fabulously soft (cashmere/microfiber/merino), thick yarn I won as a prize. (a whole bag! retail price over $100! machine-washable!) I'm kind of making up the pattern as I go.

[starhawk]

I'm working on artwork for a music mix I made for someone I really like.  It's going to be abstract, colors, with the winter season in mind....this won't be given for a couple more months 

I also keep forcing myself to work on a book...I have a storyline I really like, but I'm so critical of my own writing, it's difficult to do anything but edit/re-edit.  I'm going to try to take a friend's advice (the one who the music mix is for, hehe) and just plow ahead...but it's hard to do...

[Vlad!]

As someone who is just completing the writing process for a relatively major work, I find that it's really helpful to have something down for most of your chapters. When you have an idea of how the whole thing goes, revising becomes easier because you're like "wait, I said that thing over there, and it makes more sense there, so I can remove it from here".

Being very critical of your own writing is a good thing. However, once you get someone else involved (editor, publisher, whomever), you will find that the other person is also very critical of your writing, and probably in different ways than you are. Sending in a product that you've polished fifteen times until it shines like a jewel in your eyes is all very well, but when the editor marks all over it, changes your favorite passages, renames your favorite characters, and generally transforms it into something other than what you wanted it to be, it just makes it all the more traumatic that you spend all that time polishing.

However, good luck! If you enjoy the process and are proud of your final product, I would count that as a success.

[starhawk]

thanks   that sounds like good advice...I sometimes jump ahead to scenes I want to occur already, writing something for each chapter sounds like a naturally good idea...I'll give that a try.

[enemy anemone]

I made some toys.


meet Sleepy Snake and Jack the Mischievous Mouse. Jack's name comes from the way you can tell apart a venomous coral snake from a non-venomous king snake: red next to black, a friend of Jack; red next to yellow can kill a fellow. (of course, Sleepy doesn't have any yellow; he is neither a king snake nor a coral snake, just a sleepy snake.)


you can tell their friendship is bound to be an interesting one.


Sleepy is a bit narcoleptic. Jack gets bored.


Jack investigates the dangly thing at the back of Sleepy's throat.


(do snakes even have a dangly thing? or a back of the throat?)


Jack wonders if Sleepy will notice that something is different when he wakes up.

[dgp11776]

Nice short story, with pictures! 

Do you have a golf hole in your house?

[Aaron]

Babies







KIDDING!

[enemy anemone]

Do you have a golf hole in your house?

my dad has a little golf strip thing for practicing.

[Vlad!]

Cute!

[murlough23]

I'm working on artwork for a music mix I made for someone I really like.  It's going to be abstract, colors, with the winter season in mind....this won't be given for a couple more months 

Cool, good to know someone else here makes artwork for their mix CDs. Though for most folks, I think making the CD is enough work, so I can forgive just scribbling the song ttiles on the blank CD insert.

Do you list the song titles as part of the cover, or make another sheet for those (a back cover or a fold-out insert or something) so as not to obscure the cover art?

NP: "Pardon My Dust", Chris Rice

[bethany]

Food, every day. I'm planning cinnamon rolls in the morning....mmm.

[enemy anemone]

I made a scarf and proceeded to humiliate the cat with it.



as a side note, the other cat won't let me humiliate her with anything.

[Vlad!]

Aww, you have some cute cats. The longsuffering expression on the top one is excellent ^_^

bethany: I'm impressed. I find cooking every day to be so tiresome. I like cooking and baking and whatnot, but I still end up going out with my friends a couple times a week rather than making something.

[dgp11776]

Food, every day. I'm planning cinnamon rolls in the morning....mmm.

I cooked last night.  My wife is a stay-at-home Mom, but I still try to cook when I can...mostly because I love cooking.  Cleaning up is another matter entirely.  I made cajun chicken pasta.

[Aaron]

Food, every day. I'm planning cinnamon rolls in the morning....mmm.

We're all coming to your house..Cinnamon rolls!!!

[bethany]

We're all coming to your house..Cinnamon rolls!!!

They should be out of the oven in about five minutes - head on over!

I haven't had a job, so I've basically had nothing better to do than plan meals and make them. I mostly enjoy cooking (though I prefer baking), but I'm starting a full-time (albeit temporary) job tomorrow, so we'll see how much the whole cooking-every-day thing lasts. I think between the two of us, we'll still cook pretty much every day, or do leftovers. Not eating out is a major way we limit our expenses; we pretty much try to limit it to when we go out with friends once every week or so.

[starhawk]

Cool, good to know someone else here makes artwork for their mix CDs. Though for most folks, I think making the CD is enough work, so I can forgive just scribbling the song ttiles on the blank CD insert.

Do you list the song titles as part of the cover, or make another sheet for those (a back cover or a fold-out insert or something) so as not to obscure the cover art?

NP: "Pardon My Dust", Chris Rice

Hm, it depends on the mix.  I have made a "best-of" album last year that had all of the song-titles on the back cover, in text that fit the art style I aimed for.  However, for this winter mix, I'm thinking of making a seperate fold-out piece that has the song titles, to make it look like a "programme", or something with that feel.  The title of the mix is still listed on the sides though.  I have a buddy who helps me print paper for these covers with the edges perforated like that for folding into a jewel case.

[murlough23]

Hm, it depends on the mix.  I have made a "best-of" album last year that had all of the song-titles on the back cover, in text that fit the art style I aimed for.  However, for this winter mix, I'm thinking of making a seperate fold-out piece that has the song titles, to make it look like a "programme", or something with that feel.  The title of the mix is still listed on the sides though.  I have a buddy who helps me print paper for these covers with the edges perforated like that for folding into a jewel case.

Awesome. I usually just print 'em out on plain old printer paper, cut 'em out, and insert (I could do a back cover if I really needed to, but I haven't done one of those in a while).

I'd love to actually print a full lyrics booklet for some of the mixes I make for my wife (she likes to sing along, but doesn't pick up lyrics nearly as fast as I do), but I'm having a hard time figuring out the right order in which to print out the pages and staple 'em together, plus I can't print double-sided.

[Vlad!]

Anyone who can print single-sided can print double-sided. You just gotta print odds first, turn the stack over, and then print evens.

[murlough23]

Anyone who can print single-sided can print double-sided. You just gotta print odds first, turn the stack over, and then print evens.

Guaranteeing it'll print the two sides exactly back-to-back is tricky, though. It could be off a little depending on how the paper is placed in the tray.

[Vlad!]

You just have to tell it to center it, and make sure the elements for the front and back are equal width. You can do this in Word or Writer by setting the page width to the width of your insert and then centering the text, or in LaTeX by using the \usepackage{geometry} and \begin{center} commands.

It's not like there's anything egregiously wrong with doing it your way; but since you mentioned it I figured I'd share some tips (heck, Word 2007 probably has a special mode for printing CD inserts; I'm sure by this point they've run out of useful features to include and are instead stuck adding things like that).

[murlough23]

To be fair, I've never actually tried the double-side printing; I'm just a perfectionist so I worry that it won't work and I'll waste paper.

Plus I'm printing from PhotoShop. So it could be different.

NP: "Cold Water Symmetry", Fiction Plane

[Vlad!]

Ah, I see. I've never been enough of a graphic artist to justify buying a copy or had the lack of ethics to pirate one, so I've never used Photoshop. If I'm going to be coughing up over six hundred smackers on a piece of software, though, I expect it to not only design the album cover for me, but print it properly, gift wrap it, burn the CD, and deliver the entire thing to the intended recipient amidst a chorus of angels and flourish of heavenly trumpets.

(Can you tell I think PS is a little overpriced?)

[murlough23]

Ah, I see. I've never been enough of a graphic artist to justify buying a copy or had the lack of ethics to pirate one, so I've never used Photoshop.

Me neither, but I have it at work.

[enemy anemone]

I'd love to actually print a full lyrics booklet for some of the mixes I make for my wife (she likes to sing along, but doesn't pick up lyrics nearly as fast as I do), but I'm having a hard time figuring out the right order in which to print out the pages and staple 'em together, plus I can't print double-sided.

earlier this year I took a class on digital publishing and used Adobe InDesign to create a DIY cd envelope for trading concert recordings. the envelope was optimized to be ultra simple--you fold it up yourself, very little trimming and no glue necessary--and lightweight, since jewel cases cost money, weigh more, and break in the mail. plus there was an optional booklet that just happened to fit inside the envelope. figuring out the page order thing for printing a 16-page mini-booklet out of two sheets of paper (trim each sheet, cut in half, fold each half in half, staple or hand-sew through centers of folds) was kind of very puzzling at first. the key is to use software with *threaded text frames* (like InDesign) so you can indicate where text should flow, but it's still puzzling. seriously, I had to cut blank pieces of paper, fold them like so, stack them, and number them 1, 2, 3, etc and then reassemble them as sheets to figure out the text frame order so it could be printed on regular ol' paper. (of course, one could just print the paper, fold it up, and make the reader unfold it and read it as a piece of paper, but I wanted a proper booklet, goshdarnit.)
I don't have InDesign on my computer and wanted to be able to create more booklets, so I had downloaded a freeware program, PagePlus SE. haven't used it since then though, but it does have the threaded text frame thing and will work well enough. I'm also thinking maybe Word has an add-on thingything too, but after using digital publishing software I was too snobby to resort to word processing software, haha. I want to be able to kern and track the letters/words/lines to death. 

[I will acknowledge that I probably made the whole project harder than necessary and that there is a probably a super-simple way to make a cd-sized booklet. but for the class, the idea was to learn InDesign, and struggling to create something that seems ultra simple is a pretty good way to learn something complicated, I think.]

anyway, if you have InDesign at work I could email you the file for the lyric booklet I made. it would be pretty simple to clear out the text, paste in your own, and tweak the page breaks to your liking. (I wanted each song to have its own page; easier to read and prettier that way.) since the text frames are linked, you could fiddle with font size and stuff and the text would still flow from page to page in the right order. (without threaded text frames you'd have to move stuff around every freaking time you edited something.)

of course, if you don't want to mess with any of that, cutting up a sheet or two of paper, assembling your booklet, marking pages 1, 2, 3 etc, putting the cut pieces back together to figure out what booklet-page should go where on the sheet, and then manually placing the corresponding text in separate text boxes, like in Photoshop, will work too. to me that seems way more headachy though. XD  but then, if your booklet only requires 8 pages, or one sheet, it would be kind of simple. I made one just now and side one is laid out like this:

8 | 1
------
6 | 3

and side two:

2 | 7
------
4 | 5

place text, print, cut on dashed lines, fold on solid lines, stack, and staple in the middle.

a two-sheet, 16-page booklet would work in a similar fashion, just a bit more complicated.

anyway, that's probably way more than you want to know and either explained to death or completely baffling, I don't know. so I'm going to go knit a sock now.

oh yeah, getting stuff on side two to print nicely with side one can indeed be tricky, and you will waste paper with test prints. that's just the way it goes. I've found that my home printer (photo inkjet that can print borderless) works better than a laser black and white, and that putting the paper in the same way for side 2 as for side 1 (that is, either from the tray or from the manual-feed-slot-thing--sorry I can't think of the term) keeps things lined up better.

[enemy anemone]

finally finished the head and tentacles for this knitted and stuffed nautilus I started over a year ago. maybe two years ago.



it doesn't have a name yet besides the pattern name Nautie. it loves to attack my face and sit in trees.

[Vlad!]

A tentacle monster named Nautie. I like it.

[enemy anemone]

I keep wanting to spell it Nauti so I think that will just be its name.

from the pattern page:

"For almost 500 million years, nautiloids were the coolest kids around. They ate trilobites, had shells in a variety of fantastical shapes, and ranged from bite-size to 12 feet long.
Every scary prehistoric beast should be made into a huggable toy, and I say it's the nautiloid's turn. With this pattern you can make one in an evening, in easy stockinette on dpns.
Most nautiloids are gone.
Their living relatives include the squid, the octopus, and the famous chambered nautilus."

12 feet long! maybe someday I will endeavor to make a large one. not 12 feet but maybe pillow-sized. "the better to attack your face with, my dear."

[enemy anemone]

earlier I said that the other cat won't let me humiliate her with anything. I somewhat successfully humiliated her with this Jayne hat though. the pic was taken in low light; I don't want to use the flash and make the cat hate me even more. actually she loves me, just doesn't trust me very much. XD



also I finished making this sweater.