TAD 2010-20 Conductivity!

i'm a day late on this one… on friday, i tried to make some iphone friendly gloves and ran into a couple of snags when i worked on the thumb (but this wouldn't be fun without the adventure, right?). so, the next morning, i decided to abandon the thumb for a bit and work on the index finger. i adjusted based on the lessons learned and managed to get a functional index finger iphone friendly glove!

here's a quick demo (sorry about the lighting!): 

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TAD 2010-19 Conducting Efforts

OK, so I got some conductive thread (CT) for Valentine's Day (what can I say, I'm a nerdy girl!) and it finally arrived in the mail today. YAYY!!! First project I wanted to try was to make our gloves iPhone-friendly. I sat the thread in between a known working battery and LED and it worked! So, excitedly, I went straight to work – immediately I had problems threading the CT into my needle and it ended up unraveling the thread so, now I'm working with 4 loosely spun conductive yarns. These loosely spun yarns created a knot while I was threading my first pass and I ended up having to cut about 1.5 inches of the thread just to cut loose from the crazy knot! With all that happened, I wanted to make sure it was still conductive, so I used the glove to sit between my hand and the iPhone and tested conductivity – still works (whew!). I'm still having some challenges: when there are frayed edges on the iPhone side, it works great, but who wants a black glove with silver hairs growing out of their thumb? So, I cut the edges to clean it up and it stops working. So, I thought I'd post it up here in hopes of maybe some pointers from others who've used this before (???). It's probably just my imagination, but it also seems to work better the closer my touch point is to the iPhone contact point. Any insight/pointers out there?

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TAD 2010-17 Back To It

I went to Cambria for the weekend and brought only one project to work on: a scarf made out of the wool sweater I unraveled last week. Most of the time, we were disconnected from the rest of society, visited with our friends, stayed in our pajamas, watched movies and ate a lot of food. A LOT. We did go out one day to look at some elephant seals:

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tad 2010-13 Valentine Stuff

I took apart an old pillow to make this one yesterday (it's pink and really soft and fluffy – I know kinda hard to see in the pic):

From that project, I had a bunch of stuffing left over and when i pulled out that soft fluffy pink fabric, I found remnants of blue and green versions in the same stash. so i thought i'd make these for someone i'm seeing this weekend (hardly proportional and i know kinda hard to tell from the pic, but the green one is a mouse):

And, wow! 2 early days in a row!

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tad 2010-12 Valentines (Early Post!)

Wow – I don't usually get my TAD done until the end of the day, but I needed to clean out my workspace (along with my mind) this morning so I thought I'd go ahead and get this posted now, too.

I moved from LA to SF in July and, fortunately, know the new residents in my 2 old addresses, so every couple of months, a package comes in the mailbox with accumulated old mail. It's mostly junk mail, but yesterday's package had a Christmas Holiday card in it – the design on the outside was really beautiful (sorry – I forgot to take a pic before I took it apart) with silvery swirls and red doves and with the Christmas holiday so long gone already, it instantly made me think: Valentines Redux. I cut up the card into a bunch of hearts that framed parts of the original card's design, glued it onto some rich purple paper (ya, it looks more maroon in the pic, I think) and used a lilac heart-shaped insert for the message (and I'm only a little bummed about the glue marks – how do you paper artists do it?).

P.S. If you're a recipient of one of these cards and you happen to read this post, sorry for ruining the surprise.

P.P.S. Thanks to Marge for the calligraphy pens!

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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TAD 2010-11 Mentoring

A few weeks ago, someone contacted me through one of the meetup groups I am a member of and asked me if I would be her crochet mentor. Jane is a senior in high school and needs to learn and present a new skill to a panel as part of her senior graduation requirement. Today, we met up and went through a couple of basic crochet stitches and doing a couple of rounds (She needs 15 hours to complete this projects, so more lessons later!). She was a real natural and it was a lot of fun sharing. So, while she crocheted, I also started taking apart another sweater (the gray balls in the picture).

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TAD 2010-10 Unraveled

Remember this sweater?

It mostly looks like this now:

(Yes, ONE of those balls was Day 7). Alas, I could not salvage the green or blue yarn – they are in spaghetti shreds in my scrap fiber (threads, yarn and fabric) "recycling" bin… for potential projects or recycling when it starts to overflow and i can't stand it anymore.

Note to Self: Do not pick out multi-colored sweaters for yarn unraveling unless 1. the colors appear in large horizontal (and I mean minimum 4" LARGE)  worth-picking apart blocks or 2. you have a lot of time on your hands, you like the feeling of rawness in your fingers from unraveling a whole bunch of knots and you just generally want to waste the shreds of yarn you can't put back together.

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TAD 2010-07 crust. dip. Cookies

Spent the afternoon making Pie crust, spinach artichoke dip and chocolate chip pecan cookies and only got pics of the cookies.

Went out for dinner with new people (brought cookies as dessert) and currently still out so I thought I better sneak my tad in before midnight rings and my cookies turn into pumpkin stew.

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TAD 2010-07 Yarn from old sweaters

I saw this done a few years ago and tried it once last year – had great success on a women's medium sweater – I think I got about 5 full balls of yarn out of it! I was out thrifting today and saw this sweater – perfect candidate at $2.99! I've never tried unraveling a multi-colored sweater and it is not as easy as I thought this one would be (I didn't think that little bit of pattern near the top would be such a time eater!). So far, I've unraveled a sleeve. Here are some pics:

  

… By the way – the green and blue yarn are just too short to get any good strands of yarn out of… any thoughts on how else I might use it?

Oh, and if you'd like to see how it's done, I found a pretty good tutorial here today: http://www.neauveau.com/recycledyarn.html

from karizmatic’s posterous, thing-a-day