fig time
*chirp chirp* I guess wedding projects are boring if you're not getting married.
In other news, I'm starting to see figs again at work! I'll probably get sick of them soon, but for now, I'm hoarding them away at my desk every time I see them around.
1 year
This past weekend was also our one-year anniversary. Yay! I think it's pretty nice that it coincides with the Perseids.
Enough time has gone by that I can finally think about all the projects we did for the wedding and the projects I still mean to do (like making a photo album composed of family/friends' great pics) without getting a severe rash.
So, would it be interesting for people to see the kinds of things we made and maybe some tutorials along with that? These are projects like: the Chinese papercut above, hand-silk-screening invites, making a bouquet, origami instructions for the guests, and many more because I went insane for the year leading into the wedding.
perseids 2007
Lassen Volcanic National Park is the most awesome place to go stargazing ever.
We went camping this weekend, and dragged our lawn chairs to a parking lot where we shivered from 10pm to around midnight. It was amazing. Except for the part where we didn't think about the wind cutting from behind and underneath the lawn chairs, making our sleeping bag/blanket useless.
The sky was pitch black, and the milky way was this enormous stripe of silvery hazy light. We must've seen ~40 meteors each, from tiny little streaks to fireballs that went across half the sky and left a glowing trail for a second or two afterwards.
It was too damn cold for me to fiddle much with the camera though, and I gave up after a few shots to just enjoy the night.
a super-photoshop-enhanced version with the milky way going through the teapot constellation
maybe a meteor? if so, the only one I caught on camera
Here are the (mostly) unadulterated photos on Flickr, though it doesn't really do the night justice. Next time, must remember gloves, hat, down jacket, and many many socks.
You can still see some shooting stars tonight if you run outside!
Edit:
I went back and played in photoshop a bit .. I think I might've caught 2 meteors on another one of the photos. What do you think?
skinny cat with white pants
Seen on a recent evening walk.
tara top finished
I finished the BurdaStyle Tara top 2 weekends ago.
It looked like a scandalously cut top, so I decided to line the top half (so you could skip the undies) and put in ease stitching at the V neck (so it didn't gap). Then after I finished, I found out it was so scandalous that you don't want to wear it without another top underneath. Unless you like surprises.
I think it's pretty cute, but maybe a bit blousy / gives you extra tummy pooch, and the straps sit on the very edge of my shoulders. Did I make it a size too big?
Here's how to hem the sleeves and bottom on slippery won't-take-an-iron fabric:
1. run small stitch along the fold/seam line (I did 1.5)
2. fold and press along stitch
3. run small zigzag stitch right next to the fold (again 1.5 length and I did "3" width)
4. trim off excess fabric
animating fabric
Animation + fabric! What could be more fun?
Anyway, I've been admiring how this one anime is doing the clothes on their show. Instead of going the usual route of simple lines that are easy to animate, they've been scanning and masking actual traditional Japanese fabrics. I thought it was a pretty nice way of getting detail while working with the limitations of the medium.
image probably belongs to Shaft animation
It's from Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei (Goodbye Mr/Teacher Despair), a very odd anime running right now in Japan about a kind-of-suicidal teacher and schoolgirls with personality disorders. You can see the effect better with his arrow-patterned hakamashita about 30s into this youtube clip.
P.S. Watcher beware. The show is funny iff you like weird humor and have seen other anime before.