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i love you, momoko

I love you momoko, please come live with me. I would be your sugar momma and give you oodles of chic couture clothing for the stylish, fun, and oh-so-cute Japanese girl that you are. I would never keep you suffocated in a box or make you pose for ugly pictures.

And yet, you're such a tease, coming out in limited production numbers only. Look at you whoring yourself out at almost $200.

Wait, what's that? You're going away forever this September? Noooo momoko! I didn't mean it! Please come back! Just give me a chance!


images shamelessly borrowed from petworks website.

tips on moving movabletype

After 2 goes at moving blogs across servers, I now feel experienced enough to present:

Handy Tips for Moving MovableType-powered Blogs
(assuming both servers are using the same sort of database)

Before the Move

1. Save all of your file directories from serverA to computer
   (cgi-bin/mt and your blog directory)


2. Export all of your entries using MT interface, save to computer


3. Copy & paste all of your MT templates into text files on your computer

1. Upload all of your saved files to similar directories from computer to serverB
   (cgi-bin/mt & blog directory)


2. Set up your new database


3. Edit the mt.cfg and mt-pass.cgi files to reflect new database info


4. Upload mt-load.cgi to the cgi-bin/mt directory, run it, then delete it from your directory


5. Log in to usual page (cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi) with user/pass Melody/Nelson


6. Create yourself as an all-powerful user, re-login as that user


7. Import your saved blog


8. Re-create templates by copy-pasting from the text files you saved on computer

For extra security, don't get rid of your old server account until you're sure everything is working ok on the new one.

Guess which step I forgot to do this time.

joann's sale

Joann's is having a huge sale all this month, and this past weekend, all McCall patterns were only $1! (Next weekend, Simplicity patterns are $2, and the weekend after that is Butterick for $1.) So I ran my grubby self over and picked up a few new patterns and fabrics. Upcoming projects are ...

left: A bias-cut full skirt in an ivory linen with black flowers printed and embroidered on. I actually bought this pattern & fabric in their spring sale, but I think I'm a little too fat for the pattern sizes I bought, so I haven't started yet.

middle: Sleeveless blousy shirt with a tie (top left on pattern) in a sheer white crepe printed with big watery teal & blue roses.

right: Sleeveless mandarin-collared shirt in a sheer wavy-striped white cotton (the red figure on the pattern).

I am very excited about starting the blousy tie shirt -- I've already cut out all the pieces, although it looks like the material is difficult to work with again.

nytimes on graphic novels

NYTimes has an interesting feature on graphic novels in their Magazine section this week, catch it before you have to pay for it! I feel so cultural for owning a good number of the titles mentioned, haha.

Did you read it yet?

One interesting observation it makes is how extremely time consuming it is to create a graphic novel. Because there are so many elements (from script to layout to colors), and because of the laborious manual process, it can take years to finish one story or novel. This is something I've thought about myself; after I finish thumbnails, I know basically what the page will do and say, but I have at least good 8 hours ahead of me to actually draw, ink, and color the panels. It makes it really difficult to finish things, because I want to just go go go and think about the next set of pages. Instead, I have to buckle down and just churn out the pages from my thumbnails, and often I just put it off.

The time and labor component of creating graphic novels also means that the novels themselves will never be truly prolific or popular, just because it is difficult to sustain such a system and be profitable, which makes me a little sad.

You can see that the current models of popular and profitable comics are all serialized instead of one big chunk of book.

In Japan, the comics are serialized in thick "telephone book" compilations and each manga artist has a team of assistants helping them out. From reading the author notes on the end flaps, it sounds like they're constantly racing against deadlines to finish the next chapter. The end result is a series of books that doesn't always flow well -- they're repetitive at the beginning of each chapter, and each section ends with a mini-cliffhanger. Reading one of those books is like watching a season of tv episodes in one go.

In the U.S., popular comics are either serialized daily in the newspaper, or monthly in the thin issues available at comic book stores. Similarly, web comics often serialize their strips according to the U.S. newspaper model -- sometimes though, they'll release just a page at a time and not be concerned with making each page/strip its own entity.

Another interesting thing the article brought up is how so many of the current graphic novelists are guys that were misfits (i.e. big dorky losers) when they were young and still are. Why is that? And why are so many graphic novels autobiographical? Is that because stories from all genres have some of the author's self invested, or is it because the medium is more conducive to those kinds of stories?

I'll end this incoherent post with links to my favorite web comics:

Copper: beautiful scenes and colors, excellent characters, funny and thoughtful by turns
Scary Go Round: brilliant shenanigans with hilarious dialogue
Low Bright Comics: irreverant, gross, funny short stories
Bruno: a very open-minded woman's search for her place in life
Player vs Player: it's funny

stripes undone

In the Garment District thrift store, there is a room filled with mountains of musty old clothes called Dollar-a-Pound. Everyone sits on the floor and sifts the smelly mountains into smelly piles looking for treasure. Once, I found a very pretty roan and gray-striped silky shirt with a unique simple collar and shiny small butterscotch buttons. (Is roan a color when not applied to cows and horses?) It must've cost me less than 50 cents.

I loved that shirt and wore it all the time, but alas, my manly shoulders were too much for its seams and they gave way. But, I kept it, planning to remake it into a sleeveless or cap-sleeved shirt.

I started the project recently by picking apart the remaining shoulder seams and detaching the sleeves. The armhole shape and sleeves needed to be redone, so I tried a test run by pinning one armhole so that it was the right shape and attaching a sleeve out of trace paper.

It didn't work very well though -- it's hard to adjust things when you have to keep trying on a slippery shirt stuck full of pins.

I think this means I need a dressmakers dummy. I've seen instructions on making one that is exactly the shape of your body out of all sorts of materials (duct tape, paper mache ...) but I like this mailing tape dummy the best. I'll think about it; maybe next month.

midsummer garden

A midsummers update on gardening projects:

Rose bush is doing well at a snail's pace of a bloom a month. It's recently developed worrisome white powdery curling leaves; I suspect powdery mildew. Picked up a fungicide yesterday and sprayed the plant, except the bottle nozzle was all messed up, so I got poison all over myself and the plant was dripping milky liquid fungicide at the end. Ew.

Tomato grew up nice and tall, then all the leaves started mysteriously withering away. Then whiteflies attacked and it withered some more. Now, a sad showing of 5-10 tomatoes are clinging to a plant that's supposed to have a "prolific" and "heavy" yield. Sprinkled basil seeds in pot last week so that at least something useful will happen in the space.

Had grocery store miniature roses that didn't like being in the pot they came in, so I stuck them in the ground and gave them haircuts. Then my sister dumped her dying miniroses on me, and they went into the ground too. They like the ground much better, and my set has just produced a fat cream-colored bloom. I seem to remember them being creamy pink roses though.

Multicolored poppies in permanent state of stasis, excepting one tiny yellow blossom that popped up two days ago. The yellow makes me think that the seeds were just plain orange-yellow California poppies instead of the pretty multi-colored ones on the packaging. Booo on all counts.

Zinnia seeds never sprouted. Planted wrong time of year? I don't see why it matters in California though.

Sunflower seeds sprouted a quick 10 days after planting, and then decided they didn't want to grow anymore. After a few months, the tallest plant is only 5 inches high.

So sad.

tomato, sunflower, poppy, mini rose

quick question

Would the 3 people that read this blog prefer to see ongoing projects and plans, or just the finished thing?

linen & paisley bag

For a friend's belated bday present (and with me, they are always belated) I made a little handbag using the very simple jordy square-bottomed lined bag tutorial at craftster.org as a guideline. It turned out pretty well, although it's a little on the wobbly side.

Fabric: outside is embroidered ivory-colored linen, and inside is a green-paisley-patterned ivory-colored cotton. A fusible interfacing was ironed onto the outside fabric to give it strength.

I did a few things differently from the tutorial; used the lining fabric in the handle too, topstitched top edge, and used a snap closure instead of velcro.

Things to change next time I make something like this: use a stiffer fusible interfacing to give bag more structure or maybe add interfacing to both inside & out, shorten handle a little, and perhaps a little pocket inside. And I should iron the pieces after I sew them to make it look crisper. I was lazy.

bzz bzz bzz

Last week, I picked up Animal Crossing again after about half a year or more of not playing. One of the many fun things you can do in this game is collect all the fish and insects that appear in the town.

Another fun thing you can do is shaking trees. Fruit trees will drop fruit that you can eat or sell. A normal tree sometimes hides a bag of money that will drop out after a shaking. Even more rarely, a hive of bees will fall out, chase you, swarm around your head, and sting you black and blue. Then you look weird for the rest of the day and all the townsanimals make rude remarks about your black eye.

One of the 50 insects that you can catch is a bee. The trick to catching them is to shake the tree, and when you hear the scary buzzing music, run round and round the tree so that you outrun them a bit (they are slower at turning), quickly take out your net (you can't hold a net and shake the tree at the same time), turn around, and aim for the clump of bees! It's really really hard. And you end up with a lot of black eyes.

But! Last week! Out of sheer luck! I was running and running and I accidentally swung the net when the bees were still behind me, but! I caught them! I don't know how! But here is proof!

(You can see my black eye from earlier unsuccessful attempts.)