Miscellaneous: Blu-Ray upgrades, healthy snacking, and the road to creativity

Amazon is having a sale on blu-ray releases of (to my daughter's generation) classic 80's films... $30 for the entire Terminator trilogy on blu-ray?  Pretty damn awesome.  No, I don't count the fourth one.  CGI Arnold doesn't cut it for me.

Planter's has this new snack line (well, maybe it's old, maybe it's new... I just noticed it and that's what counts) called NUT-rition, with snack mixes planned for various healthy options like heart health, energy, and a South Beach diet mix, which if you ask me sounds like it would have a limited customer base.  Adding dried fruits and nuts to your diet, provided they're not coated in tons of salt and artificial oils, is a good idea no matter how you slice it, and has to be better for you than living on home made sugar cookies.  Let's just say I made serious inroads on my last batch, all by my lonesome.  I really have to stop making them.

Do you know any creative geniuses?  I'm not talking about your aunt Joan, who knows how to turn a napkin into a swan, or create cute decorative items out of Popsicle sticks.  I'm talking artists, musicians, writers whose work inspires you.  I don't know any personally, but I've always wondered about some of the artists who inspire me... what are they like in their studios?  Is everything neatly organized?  Or do they thrive on a chaotic environment?  Sometimes I find that during the process of organizing my own chaos in my home, I have time to think about projects... get solutions to things that I'm stuck on.  Other times  I'm wishing the cleaning was over with so I could GET TO IT ALREADY.  I want to go, go, go.  It seems to be a balancing act, and I suppose it depends on whether I'm already full of inspiration, or am waiting on my muse.

Which are you... order or chaos?  Or a mixture of both?

Miscellaneous: It Lives!

My PC is still alive!  The power supply came in a semi-timely fashion, installed without a hitch, and is now purring along in my old case.  The new one, also, has the added bonus of being 90% quieter than my old one.  I am so glad I know how to diagnose and fix these problems, because this was 1000% cheaper than buying a whole new machine.  And I'm not pulling that number out of my... um, ear. 

It has been almost two weeks since I asked maintenance to fix my faucet, and almost a week since the garbage disposal tried to make a break for it, and has been sitting on the floor of my cabinet ever since.  Maintenance STILL has not been to my apartment.  I think it's time to start looking at Texas renter's laws on the internet, and sending certified mail requests for service.

In other news, little Monkey Pants is due to be out of school soon... goodbye 6th grade, hello 7th.  We apparently need some immunizations before next year, which seems weird to me but okay... our Dr.s office is terrible about keeping us informed as to when these are due.

Also, yesterday's link to the Gabriel's Wings Shawl is now fixed.  I don't have a clue how it got sent to my "drafts" page, but I suspect it might be some kind of programming weirdness.

Tomorrow, some more television season finale thoughts, and discussion of the "New Summer Season" they're touting on some of the networks.

Miscellaneous: New Book

My real birthday is coming up this week (I got my gift a few weeks ago, a brand new Nook e-reader, which I am enjoying a LOT.  My dentist even commented on how neat it was.) so I treated myself to a new weaving book.  It's an actual paper-in-your-hands book, not one for the Nook.  You don't get many weaving e-books.

The title I got was "Woven Treasures", a book about weaving bags on a rigid-heddle loom.  As you may have guessed, I am seriously neglecting my Kromski Harp loom, which was my birthday gift last year.  My first project is still on it, untouched.  Why?  I did my usual thing and started too big too soon.  I warped enough for six placemats long side to long side.  While I enjoy the process of weaving, the stick shuttle provided with the 32" loom was as wide as the loom itself.  I hated dealing with it.  What I should have done was purchased, or fabricated, some smaller shuttles.  And I should have started with a much smaller project, to gain confidence.

Besides, we don't have a dining table... when was I ever going to use placemats?  :/

The woven treasures book not only shows simple 1x1 weaving, but has projects that use two heddles, plus some old-world techniques such as soumak, a kind of method where you twine the weft around pairs of warp threads as you go across, and piled weaving, such as is used in persian rugs.  You're getting into bags that look like latch-hook at that point, but it was still neat to see an example of the technique.

Now I'm itching to try the beginner's bag, a small 3x6 woven bag with woven strap handle.  My problem is that I only got one heddle with my Harp, and I would need to purchase a second heddle and a second heddle block.  Add in a few smaller shuttles and you're talking about an investment of $85 on a device I've hardly used. 

I'm going to have to think long and hard about this one.

The thing is, though, project bags are something I've always wanted to do on my Etsy shop, but my problem is that even commercial patterns like Butterick or Simplicity have end-user restrictions on whether the sewn items can be made for resale.  Some of them are very explicit about it, some will say its okay, and some don't say one way or the other.  If you really want to protect yourself from lawsuits, there's very few pattern options I'd feel completely comfortable using for the shop.  And three guesses as to how many of them are even attractive or functional!

The solution of course, is to not use a pattern at all, or something so basic that no one can claim it.  A woven, folded, and stitched rectangle fits that bill nicely.  Add in some of my own designs for the decorative panels of fabric, and I'm golden.

But is the $85 investment a wise one?