Posted on March 2, 2026
Tags: madeof:atoms, FreeSoftWear, craft:sewing

For my birthday, I’ve bought myself a fancy new expensive¹fountain pen.

Such a fancy pen, of course requires a suitable case: I couldn’t use the failed prototype of a case I’ve been keeping my Preppys in, so I had to get out the nice vegetable tanned leather… Yeah, nope, I don’t have that (yet). I got out the latex and cardboard material that is sold as a (cheaper) leather substitute, doesn’t look like leather at all, but is quite nice (and easy) to work with. The project is not vegan anyway, because I used waxed linen thread, waxing it myself with a lot of very nicely smelling beeswax.

I got the measurements² from the less failed prototype where I keep my desktop pens, and this time I made a proper pattern I could share online, under the usual Free Culture license.

From the width of the material I could conveniently cut two cases, so that’s what I did, started sewing the first one, realized that I got the order of stitching wrong, and also that if I used light blue thread instead of the black one it would look nice, and be easier to see in the pictures for the published pattern, started sewing the second one, and kept alternating between the two, depending on the availability of light for taking pictures.

One of the two took the place of my desktop one, where I had one more pen than slots, and one of the old prototypes was moved to keep my bedside pen, and the other new case was used for the new pen in my handbag, together with a Preppy, and now I have a free slot and you can see how this is going to go wrong, right? :D

1. 16€. plus a 9€ converter, and another 6€ pen to get the EF nib from, since it wasn’t available for the expensive pen.↩︎
2. I have them written down somewhere. I couldn’t find them. So I measured the real thing, with some approximation.↩︎

blog.trueelena.org/blog/2026/0…

Posted on February 3, 2026
Tags: madeof:atoms, madeof:bits
Today I had a day off. Some of it went great. Some less so.

I woke up, went out to pay our tribute to NotOurCat, and it was snowing! yay! And I had a day off, so if it had snowed enough that shovelling was needed, I had time to do it (it didn’t, it started to rain soon afterwards, but still, YAY snow!).

Then I had breakfast, with the fruit rye bread I had baked yesterday, and I treated myself to some of the strong Irish tea I have left, instead of the milder ones I want to finish before buying more of the Irish.

And then, I bought myself a fancy new expensive fountain pen. One that costs 16€! more than three times as much as my usual ones! I hope it will work as well, but I’m quite confident it should. I’ll find out when it arrives from Germany (together with a few ink samples that will result in a future blog post with some SCIENCE).

I decided to try and use bank transfers instead of my visa debit card when buying from online shops that give the option to do so: it’s a tiny bit more effort, but it means I’m paying 0.25€ to my bank¹rather than the seller having to pay some unknown amount to an US based payment provider. Unluckily, the fountain pen website offered a huge number of payment methods, but not bank transfers. sigh.

And then, I could start working a bit on the connecting wires for the LED strips for our living room: I soldered two pieces, six wires each (it’s one RGB strip, 4 pins, and a warm white one requiring two more), then did a bit of tests, including writing some micropython code to add a test mode that lights up each colour in sequence, and the morning was almost gone. For some reason this project, as simple as it is, is taking forever. But it is showing progress.

There was a break, when the postman delivered a package of chemicals² for a future project or two. There will be blog posts!

After lunch I spent some time finishing eyelets on the outfit I wanted to wear this evening, as I had not been able to finish it during fosdem. This one will result in two blog posts!

Meanwhile, in the morning I didn’t remember the name of the program I used to load software on micropython boards such as the one that will control the LED strips (that’s thonny), and while searching for it in the documentation, I found that there is also a command line program I can use, mpremote, and that’s a much better fit for my preferences!

I mentioned it in an xmpp room full of nerds, and one of them mentioned that he could try it on his Inkplate, when he had time, and I was nerd-sniped into trying it on mine, which had been sitting unused showing the temperatures in our old house on the last day it spent there and needs to be updated for the sensors in the new house.

And that lead to the writing of some notes on how to set it up from the command line(good), and to the opening on one upstream issue(bad), because I have an old model, and the board-specific library isn’t working. at all.

And that’s when I realized that it was 17:00, I still had to cook the bread I had been working on since yesterday evening (ciabatta, one of my favourites, but it needs almost one hour in the oven), the outfit I wanted to wear in the evening was still not wearable, the table needed cleaning and some panicking was due. Thankfully, my mother was cooking dinner, so I didn’t have to do that too.

I turned the oven on, sewed the shoulder seams of the bodice while spraying water on the bread every 5 minutes, and then while it was cooking on its own, started to attach a closure to the skirt, decided that a safety pin was a perfectly reasonable closure for the first day an outfit is worn, took care of the table, took care of the bread, used some twine to close the bodice, because I still haven’t worked out what to use for laces, realized my bodkin is still misplaced, used a longand sharp and big needle meant for sewing mattresses instead of a bodkin, managed not to stab myself, and less than half an hour late we could have dinner.

There was bread, there was Swedish crispbread, there were spreads (tuna, and beans), and vegetables, and then there was the cake that caused my mother to panic when she added her last honey to the milk and it curdled (my SO and I tried it, it had no odd taste, we decided it could be used) and it was good, although I had to get a second slice just to be 100% sure of it.

And now I’m exhausted, and I’ve only done half of the things I had planned to do, but I’d still say I’ve had quite a good day.

1. Banca Etica, so one that avoids any investment in weapons and a number of other problematic things.↩︎
2. not food grade, except for one, but kitchen-safe.↩︎

blog.trueelena.org/blog/2026/0…