Thing-a-day.com

I’m still crocheting my hands off trying to finish a shawl, but tonight I took some time out to decorate a plain white box I found on sale this evening. The little stickers are a mixture of Hello Kitty (and friends), Petopia (defunct dotcom), FreeBSD (from my Agent Smith), and some odd ones I’ve had since I was a teenager. The box will be used to house some of my drawing odds and ends. Normally I use Apple keyboard or laptop boxes but I wanted to make use of some of the stickers that have been sitting in a drawer for years. It was a very relaxing way to spend the thirty minutes.

Something simple (from http://www.enchantedlearning.com/paint/subjects/dinosaurs/dinotemplates/Stegosaurus.shtml where you can make your own):

I’ve been busy working on my shawl, so this cute stega was coloured to match the stega image tattooed all over my site and again on my hip.

Catching up and getting the crocheting my hands off….
On Wednesday (6) I made a wrist warmer sized for the Agent Smith in my life. Thursday (7)  I made the second one. Then Friday (8 and 10) I started a scarf which I finished then today. In addition, I worked through half of a shawl (9) which I’ll finish this week.
Pictures of the scarf and wrist warmers are below.

The pattern for the wrist warmers is here: http://www.hipvintagecrochet.com/WRISTWARMERS1.pdf. I used a skien of Lion Brand black wool blend. I’m not perfectly happy with how they turned out, but they were good practice.

I used a skien and a bit of Lion Brand Chenille (Royal Blue) for the scarf and the pattern is one I made up:
1) ch 10
2) Then working Tunisian style, hdc acrossd–you will have 10 loops on the hook
3) Then pull a loop through first loop on hook, then pull a loop through two loops on the hook repeating until you just have one loop
4) Repeat rows 2 and 3 until it’s the length you want and then block.

I need a small box to store hard drive screws as I tend to scatter them about when working on machines. So I took a small pre-made white box, and painted it using some old nail polish. Then I put a nice gloopy flourish on top and let it dry.

Today I finished a very long project:  pushing over 8 years of website log files through Analog and Awstats (two stats packages that can take the lines and lines of data and make it readable.  It took two weeks as first I had to get Awstat running on a machine at home.  Then I needed to organize all the log files which date back to March of 1999.  Then I had to batch them through a script to take each daily log and cat it in with others from the same month.  Finally, I ran each month’s worth through Awstats one by one (Awstats is picky and will only work with sequential data.)  I also completed runs for 2006 and 2007 through Analog (my automatic process died when I installed Tiger back in 2006). Finally, I made an organized web page from which to access all the data. Here is a simple screen cap the finished work. (Now that I’m done with my own site I need to do the same for a few sites I run for friends/family.)

I stole this idea from nyar who in turn grabbed it off Strobist: it’s a a macro photography studio made out of a couple of boxes. I modified the design heavily, as I really wanted something sturdy yet easy to break down AND easy to swap out the softening window paper with either different weights or colours. Thus I made it so the sides will fold up to an almost flat state and the window filters literally hangs down into a small gutter.Here it is laying flat and then again assembled.

Now I will be able to take better images with something other than my iPhone.

I started this earlier in the week and finished off this afternoon. It’s made from Bernat Boa Nouveau yarn using a size P hook. The edging is black wool-synth blend I had laying about using a size E hook. The pattern is a simple one I made up.

Pattern:
ch 19 turn
dc in 2nd ch, (ch 1, skip next ch and then dc in next ch) repeate () to end.
turn and repeat until you have the desired length
then do an edging in the Bernat all the way around the entire scarf
attach the fringe (2 pieces in each st)
then in the wool-blend:
sc around the entire scarf (with a sc _around_ the fringe on the ends–use two if you need the extra width to avoid scrunching)
then REVERSE your direction and for the last row, sl down each side but sc around the fringe at the ends, but this time you’ll be on the other side–this allows the edging to even frame the fringe.

I made some cranes and boxes today. They’re all smaller than a quarter. (Shown here with a hard drive to give a sense of scale.)