FutureSarah

New host

Miss Krafty — Mon, 05 May 2008 21:12:17 +0000

If you get this message (either from an RSS reader or futuresarah.wordpress.com), you are looking at an outdated version of my blog.

I have migrated futuresarah.com to be hosted by lunarpages.com, allowing me more freedom in designing my site. Please update your links accordingly!

Site: http://futuresarah.com

Feed: http://futuresarah.com/?feed=rss2

Memorific

Miss Krafty — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:58:10 +0000

I don’t usually participate in blog memes, mostly because they take too much time. This one from The Spun Monkey looked easy, though, and hey – it makes me look (a little) cultured!

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you own but have not read.

Not counting the books that were required reading in school (I rarely finished them, and never paid attention), and not counting the books that belong to the BF:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose (Jon’s got this one, and I hear it’s fantastic, but probably more dense than I’d like to tackle these days)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods love Neil Gaiman
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (I had this at one point, but I think I sold it, having realized it would never be read by me)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon (my unicorn – After starting for the third time, I am finally about 200 pages in I think)
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – LOVE! Have read it twice
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit (Really? I wouldn’t have guessed this to be on a list of unread books anywhere)
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

One for the chillin’s

Miss Krafty — Thu, 01 May 2008 06:00:01 +0000

Well, this latest hat is too small for a Sarah, and too big for a bear,

…it must be for the kids! This is the first child-sized hat I’ve made, and I’m thrilled that I chose this particular yarn for the project. You never can tell, with variegated yarns, what the color pattern is going to look like. This hat turned out to have the coolest swirl, like a soft-serve ice cream cone!

I am going to try and get this, and some of the other hats & scarves I’ve made, onto Etsy this weekend. While I’m at it, I will evaluate whether or not to migrate this blog to one I host myself, so I can add all those cool widgets that are supposed to attract the elusive customer! The downside: it [dreamhost] costs a whopping $6 a month!

UFOs no more!

Miss Krafty — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:09:30 +0000

To “celebrate” pulling off a great milestone at work (for me personally, anyway), I continued my current workaholic streak by finishing a handful of UFOs (UnFinished Objects, for the non-knitters in the audience)! I pulled three bags of projects in various states of completion from the downstairs closet, and one from the closet in the guest/craft room upstairs.

Here is the result:

There’s a hat I whipped up in the last week, a drop-stitch scarf and Victorian lace shawl that still need to be blocked badly, and the “Fisherman Shrug” from some knitting magazine that I started, oh, a year and a half ago.

Also, I have discovered fd’s Flickr Toys! Fun!

ETSY ETSY ETSY

Miss Krafty — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 05:16:27 +0000

I did it! The latest group of coasters provided me with four sets of six – two of these are going to Angelfish & Co., the other two are on my ETSY PAGE!!! I have no idea how to drive traffic there, except that maybe the 5 people who read this blog will tell others about it:

“Boy, I was thinking the other day, I really wish I had some new coasters to brighten up the room. These old ones are just so…store-bought.”

“You know, I know a girl who makes coasters, among other things, and happens to sell them online. You should check it out. What was that URL again?”

http://futuresarah.etsy.com

Happy Date-iversary

Miss Krafty — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:57:30 +0000

This is what I made my sweet to celebrate two years together.

He sent me roses at work! As best as I can tell, they are the “Fire and Ice” variety – red on the inside and white on the outside. I have no idea what the hybrid varieties symbolize.

‘Tis a strange thing, getting the girliest of girly gifts at a company largely populated by asocial programmers. Can’t say I hated it, though.

…

Googlerific! “the white rose is usually seen as representing innocence and purity, while the red rose is one of Western culture‘s most prized symbols of romantic love. So, to present a person with a flower that appears to be white with red edging, but in reality is equally divided between white and red, is a tacit way of telling them that you connect with them on a spiritual level, but that there are non-Platonic feelings that run far deeper than they have been acknowledged to run.”

Wow, I hope Jon knows what he got himself into

Spring is here.

Miss Krafty — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:02:59 +0000

Spring is here, at least, in California (sorry to the Spun Monkey, the Parises, and everyone else in the northeast). My next set of coasters reflects the fact that the sky is blue, the grass is green, and the cherry trees are Barbie Pink.

Taking WIP photos is fun,

especially when Dom gets in the mix.

My current “TV time” craft is a knitted scarf, fantastic kelly green in a drop-stitch cross pattern, but that won’t photograph well at all until it’s been blocked. Pthththth, you’ll have to wait!

There is always more.

Miss Krafty — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:55:33 +0000

I hope I can keep up my momentum with FutureSarah. While I am extremely happy that as of Thursday morning, I will be working 20 minutes from home rather than 50, I can see that extra time per day going to staying later at work. Already I have pretty much lost my scheduled gym time because I’ve been working too late to exercise AND make/eat dinner.

We have a huge milestone due in mid-April, and I keep finding more problems with what we currently have running. In addition to the tasks we knew I was going to have to do, I seem to be spending an awful lot of time fixing other people’s broke-ass code. (Non-technical people: I just have a ton of un-fun work to do in the next month).

Here’s hoping that there is an end to the unplanned work*, and I can get back to making happy coasters, aprons, bibs, bags,…. Sigh. Just thinking about sewing and knitting both calms me down and makes me wish I was anywhere but in my cubicle right now.

*See blog post title

Finished! Quilted coasters

Miss Krafty — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:38:35 +0000

I was able to find enough seam allowance to finish two sets of six quilted coasters. Aside from the stuff I mentioned in my last post, I think they turned out pretty good. They’re headed for Angelfish sometime tomorrow

WIP: Coasters

Miss Krafty — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:44:34 +0000

These things are not turning out exactly like I had hoped. I think I am unskilled at ironing round objects. A handful of them were quilted too close to the edge, and now I can’t turn under the edges. For those, I will bind with bias tape instead, and keep it in mind for next time.

Actually, things will be completely different next time anyway – I’m going to add a layer of interfacing to increase the stability, and I will sew the sandwiches together before I do the quilting.

The one plus: I have gotten a lot of practice with machine quilting since I started this project. On a small scale at least, my Kenmore sewing machine handles it just fine.