sewing projects

Posted on June 1, 2016 by Kathy

Some time ago I made a holder to organize my circular knitting needles. It is a simple rectangle of leftover fabric doubled over and stitched to make horizontal channels for the circs. I folded up the bottom and added vertical stitches to make pockets for the sock needles I use most frequently. A knitting needle gauge fits into the top channel. In the photo a set of steel guernsey “pins” hangs from the hook. They are a fairly recent acquisition and I am still figuring out how to store them.

circ_holder

I got my 1960s vintage Sears portable sewing machine out a few days ago. One of my white blouses wore through on the elbow. I cut the long sleeves off and hemmed them to make a short sleeved summer blouse. There are several other projects I need to get moving on so decided it would be good to leave the machine out and make it a cover to keep it from getting dusty and slow the evaporation of machine oil.

I used an old cotton/polyester blend pillow slip. First I ripped out the hemmed opening and sewed it shut (to get more length). Then I pinned it together to check for fit, then folded it and sewed the sides with the pocket turned inside. Then I turned it right side out and made a vertical seam to form two pockets that hold the machine’s manual and a printout of its schematics I downloaded several years ago.

I didn’t try to “box” the corners because I wanted the cover to lay flat to store the manuals while the machine is in the case. The configuration of the pockets could be adjusted to hold small sewing tools such as scissors, needle packets, measuring tape, etc.

160601_001

This is the layout that fits my vintage Sears portable. The top and side edges are the original seams, so the entire cover is double fabric. The sewn shut opening forms the top of the pocket. If I were using fabric scraps, I would line and/or interface the front and back then make a finished seam at the sides.

dust_cover

I still have some polyester and cotton/polyester blends (checked with the burn test) in my stash as well as sewn items needing to be recycled. They are good candidates for dust covers.

Posted in Needlework | Comments Off on sewing projects

kitchen tip

Posted on November 18, 2015 by Kathy

inside refrigerator door

When I bought a new refrigerator after the last move I found that most of the smaller ones had built in beverage can racks. I don’t drink “pop” — besides way too much sugar the cola beverages contain enough phosphoric acid to crystalize with calcium forming lumps under my skin. (Wacko metabolism due to mitochondrial disease.)

So, it was nice to find that jam jars that would otherwise be sent to recycling fit the rack nicely!

My collection contains:

  • dry yeast (for raised buckwheat cakes)
  • flax seed meal
  • walnuts
  • sunflower seeds

Makes it easy to find ingredients for cooking or a quick snack.

Posted in Cooking, Photos | Comments Off on kitchen tip

still more updating

Posted on October 14, 2015 by Kathy

OS X 10.11 “El Capitan” came out at the end of last month but I held off downloading and installing it because I wanted to get an external hard drive to use with TimeMachine. Monday was my shopping day and the Seagate 2T Backup Plus Slim at Staples looked good. They put the shelf display box in my bag at the checkout but that was quickly fixed by the manager who had someone retrieve the actual hard drive from their stockroom.

I attached it and it went right to a dialog asking if I wanted to use TimeMachine and it backed up my hard drive in a bit less than half an hour.

I then did the System Upgrade: 6 GB, 5 hour download and 30 minute install. It also went well until I made the mistake of logging in to iCloud. Well, it was after midnight by then.

Today I am backing up a 500 GB external hard drive connected to the MacBook Air USB port. TimeMachine doesn’t do that by default but it turned out to be configurable. First open the TimeMachine System Preferences:

prefs

Next click the options button in the lower right hand corner. This lets you choose which mounted volumes to exclude:

options

Simply click the external drive you want to back up, then click the minus sign to remove it from the excluded list.

Turns out I am pushing the software to the limit. One of the files on the external drive is a 5.9 GB disk image. It is taking a while…

Posted in Photos, Technical | Comments Off on still more updating

Upgrading – part 4

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Kathy

I like the Launchpad in Yosemite OS X 10.10 but it was kind of dismaying when I finished downloading Garage Band, Keynote, iPhoto, and iMovie from the App Store to see that it went to two pages. Found lots of good information on Apple Support, i.e. you drag one application icon onto another to create a new folder. These kinds of things seem to be easier to find with a search engine rather than the site search. So now I have the Launchpad organized into folders.

Had the first OS X upgrade yesterday. It took over an hour to download via DSL, but installed nicely and I’m at OS X 10.10.3 now.

I have been transferring photos from my Samsung SGH-S390G via Bluetooth better. Found that if I avoid the “accept all” option when sending files in batches the connection doesn’t hang.

Just out of curiosity, yesterday I timed how long it takes to boot the MacBook Air — around seven seconds! Solid state drives are amazing.

Took the new MacBook Air on its first outing yesterday. Was planning to meet a friend at the library in Kittanning (with WiFi) to do some genealogy research. Had a change of plans as there was a meeting scheduled for the room with genealogy materials when we were planning to get together. So, went to the Dairy Queen instead. Don’t need much of an excuse to go to the DQ.

A week ago this morning I took Atticus out and discovered this:

red car with no wheel covers

A thief had come out on Maundy Thursday evening in a rainstorm to “shop” our parking lot, took all four of the wheel covers from my Fiesta!

The act was captured on three of my landlord’s surveillance cameras. I supplied them to the State Police when I filed an incident report. The only empty flash drive I had was one I picked up at Staples two weeks ago for $3. The ones on sale were kind of interesting. Being an Angry Birds fan I chose a green piggie although I would have rather had one of the birds.

flash drive in the form of a green Angry Birds piggie.

Occurred to me while waiting to see the officer that might not have been a good choice.

Posted in General, Photos, Technical | Comments Off on Upgrading – part 4

Upgrading – part 3

Posted on March 14, 2015 by Kathy

While going through my storage area on Thursday, I found the LaCie pocket drive box which contained an external power supply that I had never used. Just on a hunch I connected it and the pocket drive mounted immediately on the new MacBook!

Also retrieved the LaCie external CD RW drive I got when I was using a G4 desktop, two computers ago. It had both Firewire and USB connectors. It is huge but it works with the new MacBook Air, so burning backup CDs and listening to audio CDs directly or importing them into iTunes is fairly simple. The external drive I bought at about the same time only has FireWire connectors but that is accessible through the older iBook using the Lightning/ethernet adapter though ethernet. Not sure why I did it but discovered some of the directories with backups had restricted permissions.

Oh, yeah, finally found the bright yellow RJ-45 ethernet cable — right beside the laser printer where I probably put it when I went through the computer gadgets box to get the other cables.

I managed to crash GraphicConverer when I was working with a photo of Atticus from the FaceTime camera.

atticus_2-28-15_at_4.27_pm

The crash generated a dialog box to report the crash. Within a few minutes I had an email message from Thorsten Lemke asking if I could reproduce it. Discovered that it happened when I adjusted levels with the slider on the histogram and reported it. Within an hour there was an upgrade to install which fixed the problem. GrahaphicConverter is available from Lemke Software GMBH.

I’ve also been exploring features of Apple Numbers (which is included with the MacBook, you just have to download it from the App Store). Sure has a lot more features than AppleWorks spreadsheet which I was using on the iBook. Using a spreadsheet is second to accessing and providing content on the internet for me. Numbers not only has more features but seems a lot easier to use, main thing is overcoming old habits.

Still occasionally making bloopers in using the trackpad, but like with the spreadsheets, think it is mostly from reverting to habits developed on the iBook.

Photo Booth and the FaceTime camera sure makes makes taking selfies easier! This is one I took to show the last sweater I finished and have been wearing:

dark blue tweed sweater

Posted in Photos, Technical | Comments Off on Upgrading – part 3