Thing-a-day.com

Just to prove that I have not been completely slacking on Thing-a-Day, here is what I’ve got so far of the baby blanket that started here. More than 60 percent completed! (It’ll be 7 x 7 squares.) Of course, there’s that small matter of the blue square that needs to be ripped and reknit in the correct blue, and then there’s the hours and hours of seaming, but I have to finish all this soon, because the wretched beastie is due sometime in March.

Anyway, I have not been idle. I’ve also been toiling at another public domain clip-art set, which I haven’t yet posted on Flickr.

And on 2/28 I made another pretty good dinner for my mom, a combination of these two recipes—Pork Chops with Mustard Sauce and Pork Chops with Mustard-Cornichon Sauce—but with the addition of mushrooms, and with capers in place of cornichons and white wine in place of chicken stock. Spinach salad and rice on the side.

I also made a couple of decent illustrations for work: on 2/12, I made a sort of homebrew tritone; on 2/18, I tried out a new technique for turning a flat shot into something that looks more lively; and on 2/28 I made the collage that appears on this page, which wasn’t that much Photoshop work in the end, but which did require a surprising amount of image research.

Was this flimsy output what I wanted to achieve during Thing-a-Day 2008? No, but I did make a few things that I would not otherwise have made, and I did discover several other people whose work I really liked, thefabricator and Jason Das, in particular.

It’s been fun. I’ll see you next year.

I’m not much of an improvisational cook, but I made a very tasty dinner for me and my mom this evening, if I may say so myself: cheese-and-garlic tortellini with a chunky accompaniment (I tried to keep it relatively dry, so it wasn’t what I’d call a sauce) of sautéed onion, chunks of chicken, sliced chorizo, coarsely chopped plum tomatoes, white wine, thyme, chopped kalamata olives, and capers. For a side veg we had sautéed zucchini with garlic and a dash of balsamic vinegar (Mom was out of lemons). Toss and serve immediately with Daily Show and Colbert Report reruns.

This is not a new thing, but it’s a follow-up to the unfired plate I posted about last week:

I hate it.

Can any experienced potters out there give me a hint about some way to do this design that would not have come out a gloppy, uneven mess? Laying down a solid orange ground under the brown (except where the blue is) would have helped, I’m thinking, but how can you tell where you’ve already painted, when you’re trying to get a deep color? I’ve clearly got four layers of glaze in some places and one in others. (It only looks blotchy on the unfired photo because the last coat hadn’t yet fully dried; once it’s dry, it all looks the same.)

I drew these from photographs, for an illustration I’m making for my job. It’s for a story about the other kind of WASPs—white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. I’d never tried to draw a real bug before (though I did draw a finger puppet and a pin two years ago); they’re, um, complicated.

Update: Here’s the final illustration—

Just knitting. And I find progress shots of knitting to be pretty boring—especially when what you’re knitting is a seemingly endless sequence of garter stitch squares—so I haven’t bothered to post any. I’m on the third square of the third strip of that baby blanket, though I didn’t finish the second strip because I spilled some very strong tea onto the lightest blue square (of course). I tried to soak it out, but the spots are still there, so I’ll have to rip back to the beginning of that square and reknit. Blah, blah, blah. See? Knitting’s horribly boring.

Meanwhile, Wednesday is the night I make dinner for my mom, so I did make some food, in addition to knitting. (Making food may not seem like much of a project to normal people out there, but although I’m a pretty good cook and like doing it, I rarely bother cooking for myself. It’s not nearly as much fun as cooking for someone else, and the leftovers too often end up festering in my fridge.) Mom had pretty much nothing in the house to make dinner out of, besides stuff we’d both eaten too recently to repeat, and we weren’t ravenously hungry, so I said, “Well, I could make David Eyre’s Pancake . . .” (more…)

I couldn’t resist trying another CD cover (here’s my first one, with the rules of this meme). This time, it took me, like, fifty tries before I got a CC-licensed photo that gave me permission to alter it. I lucked out, though, finally getting this photo of a new Apple //c by dansays / Dan Budiac.

After I posted this on Flickr, a kind commenter pointed me to a page he made which shows only CC-licensed random “interesting” photos from Flickr. It’s just what I need, because this game is totally addictive.
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Yesterday as part of my friend Sarah’s bridal shower festivities, I went with a bunch of friends to a paint-your-own-pottery studio. I picked out a large square plate, not coincidentally of a size suitable for displaying a cake. For the design, I knew I wanted it to be very simple, but what? Well, I really like the print on the dress I was wearing, so . . .
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I picked up this meme from my friend Cindy’s blog:

“The CD Cover Meme group has only three rules: (1) The first article title on this random wiki page is the name of your band, (2) the last four words of the very last quote on this random quote page is the title of your album, and (3) the third picture here, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.”

As Cindy points out, you really ought to make sure that the image you’re using is CC-licensed, with remixing allowed. I refreshed the image page three times until a usable image came up as the third item.

I think it’s funny how in sync my random band name and photo are; the image was even square! The album title? meh, but I can live with it. I’ll probably try this again at some point when my Internet connection is less floppy. It’s fun, and I never get to use blackletter at work.

Photo: Martenmount by Éole; some rights reserved.

Type: Albo and Musée by Dino dos Santos.

Here’s the first completed strip of the baby blanket I’m making. Six more of these (each knitted in the same sequence but starting with a different color), and then a whole lot of clumsy seaming, and poof! that is one overheated baby!

Each square is about 5 x 5 inches, unblocked. (And it’s superwash wool, so presumably it won’t shrink.) The finished blanket will therefore measure about 35 inches square.

The nice thing about this project is that knitting row after row of garter stitch is so easy that even a feckless, mistake-prone pseudoknitter like me can manage to read while knitting, without screwing anything up. I’ve been catching up on a lot of unperused browser tabs, therefore, and picking up my knitting while I wait for my sloooooow computer to process commands.

A sketch of the baby blanket’s progress. I’m now 4½ squares into the first strip. At this rate, I could finish in about ten days. That’s unlikely, of course, but it’s possible.

Then I remembered that "Blanket" is the current Illustration Friday theme, and I thought, "Hey! I’m making a blanket—I should draw it!" Originally I imagined doing a super-macro drawing of just a couple of stitches, but I started too small, and grew crosseyed and bored very quickly, so I gave up and went for evocative abstraction. Even so, this took me the entire length of In Rainbows.

The first square of a forty-nine-square baby blanket I’m knitting for my brother’s forthcoming sprog.

The whole blanket will be knitted in Knit Picks Swish DK, on Denise interchangeable needles. The pattern is the Circle of Friends Garter Stitch Blanket (except that I don’t have any friends helping me) from Joelle Hoverson’s Last-Minute Knitted Gifts.

Yes, I realize that it’s kind of sad that I have to follow a pattern for something this simple, but there you have it—I am a follower of patterns. I measure most of the ingredients when I cook, too. At least I changed the yarn and colors. This square is in Moss (as in The IT Crowd). Next up: Storm (as in X-Men). I will try as hard as I can to encourage this kid to be a geek.

Today’s project took a lot longer than an hour, and it consists of design and artwork that I didn’t make, but I hope you will agree that it was a worthwhile activity: I pulled out a bunch of cool images from this public domain book—

English Literature: An Illustrated Record in Four Volumes. Volume II: From the Age of Henry VIII to the Age of Milton. Part II, by Richard Garnett and Edmund Gosse (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905)

—cleaned them up in Photoshop, posted them to Flickr, tagged them, and typed out the captions and all the text that I could make out within the images, so that it’s all searchable.

Here’s a more detailed blog post about this project: A thin slice of history

Bought a pair of Fluevogs today, after months of pining for them.

I used a mix of pen and colored pencil, because I needed brown but my pocket pen set doesn’t contain any browns.

I made two things yesterday for the first day of Thing-a-Day 2008:

1. Sautéed kale with garlic and white wine
2. A drawing of the kale’s twist tie