Posted on September 2, 2026
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, period:edwardian, FreeSoftWear

Many years ago, before I had my sewing pattern website, I made myself a simple corset cover according to the instructions on an Edwardian pattern drafting manual.

It worked, I wore it. Years later I saw a blog post on Pour La Victoireon making a corset cover based on the same book, but with completely different results, and thought that it would have been nice to make another one to publish instructions for my take on it.

However, I didn’t have any embroidery flouncing on hand, nor did I have a need for a new corset cover, and the project remained on the list, on low priority (although I did buy some beading lace for it, when I stumbled on it).

Then, after finishing my vampire shirt, I noticed that I had just enough fabric left for a corset cover, and by just enough I really mean just enough, as I discovered when laying the pattern on the fabric.

So I dug in my files to get the original pattern I used, brought it up to date, and added the missing details such as the pleating guides that I had skipped when making the pattern just for myself. Doing so I realized that on my old cover I had done the fake pleat in the front wrong, making just a single pleat instead of a box pleat. Also, I originally directly gathered the sleeves in the armscyes, but watching the book again I realized that the sleeves were made up of a gathered ruffle plus a straight band.

Both issues were fixed and I could cut the fabric and start sewing. By machine, including using a narrow hem foot instead of sewing rolled hems by hand as my instinct kept reminding me would have looked neater.

But this is a garment from a sewing machine time, and probably one that in many cases would have been bought from a mass producer, and it’s underwear, so there is no real need for the hems to be perfect, as it’s going to be hidden anyway. But most importantly, I wanted to write instructions for machine sewing, for a change, and so I had to machine sew all steps that I had to take pictures of.

I did do the buttonholes by hand, because I hate the buttonhole attachment on my machine, and the buttonhole attachment hates me.

I used a lighter weight fabric for the sleeve ruffles, both because I didn’t have a big enough piece of main fabric not to have to piece them, and because I felt that it looks better, as it’s the same voile I used for the ruffles on the vampire shirt.

When it came to the beading lace, I had two that I had bought more or less thinking about this project: the earlier one was narrow and suitable to do its job, but the one I had bought more recently was taller, with an edge that made it suitable to give more fullness to the bust when gathered up.

I contemplated for a short while, and then decided to go for fullness and use the taller border for the top edge, but the smaller one at the waist, where fullness is not wanted.

The book claimed that this pattern required little labour, and indeed it did: even when taking step by step pictures it only took a few hours spread over a week, plus the time to make buttonholes by hand over the next week.

And then the reason for the whole project: I published my pattern and instructions under a free license.

I still haven’t worn the corset cover, except for these pictures, but I hope to do so later in the year when the weather becomes more reasonable.

blog.trueelena.org/blog/2026/0…

Posted on September 1, 2026
Tags: madeof:atoms, madeof:bits, craft:electronics, craft:paper

Remember the Conference Talk Timeout Ring? Well, things may have escalated a bit.

The first thing that happened is that I may have accidentally addedmore RGB LED rings, one for each size to an order of things that we actually needed, because they were cheap and potentially shiny (and I may have ideas that involve the big ones, but they are still just vague ideas).

When they arrived, I played a bit with them to check that they were working, and one was used in a pinch as a light while soldering, and worked nicely.

In the same order there was also a Raspberry Pico2 W and I decided to use it instead of the ESP32-C3-DevKit-LipoI’ve used a lot lately because it has better support¹ inCircuitPython.

So, I have an RGB LED ring with a multiple of 12 LEDs and a microcontroller board with a lot of memory and wifi, what I’m going to do? a grandfather clock, obviously. Except our grandfathers didn’t exactly have LEDs, so it’s going to be a granddaughter clock.

Have I mentioned that things escalated? well, of course I wanted the clock to show the time, but I also wanted it to be able to turn into a flashlight, and to run a countdown for conference talks and any other need, and to tell me if there are things that need to be taken care of around the house, and…

And I have an MQTT server and a number of sensors around the house that provide environmental data, and I decided I might as well use it for other things.

So I designed this to listen to an MQTT topic for commands, another MQTT topic for data, and to switch between modes when instructed to do so by a command.

Other considerations included the fact that this is keeping a number of LEDs on, so I didn’t even try to reduce power usage to run it on battery power for significant amounts (weeks) of time (although running it from a power bank seems to work for shorter durations — I’m thinking a day or two).

And then it was time to fix the part where recognising the first LED on a ring is hard, and I decided to grab my Art Attack supplies and make a case in the shape of a grandfather clock, scaled down to a suitable size for keeping on a desk or bookcase.

I used some IKEA box to make a structure, glued it with hot glue, and then wrapped everything with paper napkins and PVA for added strength, plus a bit of tarlatan for the door hinge.

I opted for a very cartoonish look (and yes, if you are old enough that it resembles something, there was a vague source of inspiration in a cultural artefact of the early 1990) with just a clock face that fits in by friction, a hinged door to access the electronics and a bit of decorative trimming at the top.

For the face I decided to make holes in the cardboard and fill them with hot glue to make a sort of light pipe, with the LEDs pressed against them on the inside. It’s not perfect, but it mostly works.

And then everything stopped: while I waited for the PVA to dry I started doing something else, and then there were other projects, and other, and the clock lingered in the Pile. There was a brief interruption as I started to paint the first coat of brown, and then I moved back to the other projects.

Until, months later, I decided it was time to finish using the brown and white tubes of paint that I had on my desktop, so I could put them away², and in a reasonable time I finished painting the clock, including a second coat of brown, and black contour lines to add a bit of depth in a way consistent with the cartoonish look.

And then it was time to go back to the internals: I got the LED ring and raspberry pico back from their respective drawers, connected them with dupont cables and fit them in the case for a test: it worked.

However, the raspberry had quite a lot of pins, and it felt wasteful to use it on something that basically needs one. On the other hand, I had recently bought a few Seed Studio XIAO ESP32C3 for another project³, and those are quite smaller, and also slightly cheaper, and I could spare one out of the 13 I had.

Up to now on the XIAO boards I had been using MicroPython: I had started to use it on the ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo because, contrary to CircuitPython, the generic ESP32-C3 image worked on it, and on the ESP32 boards there is no CIRCUITPYTHON partition, which in my opinion is one of the advantages that make CircuitPython more convenient to use than MicroPython.

However, the code I had already written for the clock used CircuitPython, so I flashed one of the XIAOs with the other interpreter, and after changing just one pin definition the software I had worked.

Going back and forwards between the two interpreters will be interesting, especially since I have already started to write some code for the other project in MicroPython, and they are supposed to interoperate. I may end up rewriting one of them, if I start getting hindered by the subtle differences.

The next step involved dealing with the temporary connections to make them a bit more permanent: I have been using LibrePCB for that other project, so of course what I did was… grabbing a bit of perfboard and YOLO a growing rat nest of cables over it, without bothering with drawing any kind of schematics in advance. And having to desolder stuff and solder it again a couple of times, because I had issues with the difference between left and right, and with the concept of rotations in 3D space.

Everything was brought back into the case, in a mostly stable configuration with an usb cable coming out of a hole in the back for power and surprisingly it works.

Or at least, 95% of the issues it still has are software, plus I still need to add a few features, so right now it lives above my desktop, with the cable dangling close to an USB port, so that I can continue working on that in the next few weeks.

The external look is not going to change, so there will be changes onthe git repository, and there may or not be a third post here in the future, depending on whether there will be something funny or interesting, or it will just be small incremental improvements.

1. I think that CircuitPython on the ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo only requires fixing two PIN definitions in the files for a very similar board and a recompile, but the latter part looks like a PITA and I haven’t committed to it.↩︎
2. to make room for other crafting supplies for other projects, of course.↩︎
3. yes, it will be blogged! unless it fails in a catastrophic way and gets buried under a layer of litter to forget about it. :D↩︎

blog.trueelena.org/blog/2026/0…

Posted on August 31, 2026
Tags: madeof:atoms, madeof:bits, craft:3dprinting

Note

this article had been almost completely written before the weekend, and I decided I might as well focus on stuff I’m creating, finish and publish this.

For many years, I’ve been sporadically dabbling in creating 3D models; for reasons that are probably obvious to anybody who knows me I usedOpenSCAD and saved my projects in git, which made them at least somewhat public.

However, SCAD sources in a git repository aren’t the most convenient way to get a 3D model, and for a long time I never had a consistent way to publish “binaries” for my models: some have been added to my old website, some to my craft patterns site, but it was always an ad-hoc thing.

Then two things happened more or less at the same time.

One was me finding out that slic3r had been definitely removed from Debian. I know it was going to happen, and I postponed thinking about it as long as I could, but eventually I had to move over to PrusaSlicer, whose packaging is in better shape.

The other was that lately I’ve been doing a bit of lucet, and talking about it online, and I’m really happy with the shape of the lucet I’ve designed and printed, the one in the picture at the beginning of this post, and while there are other models available, I wanted to make it more convenient for people to also get mine.

Since PrusaSlicer did look still maintained upstream in a way that doesn’t feel like at danger of immediate enshittification, I considered making an account on Printables, and asked on the Fediverse if somebody knew something bad about the company behind it, as it’s getting more an more common these days.

Apparently nobody did, but in the thread somebody mentioned that there is a federated platform for publishing 3D models, called manyfold !

I didn’t want to add “self host a(nother) web thing”, especially not one that is not in Debian, to my list of projects, but I did create an account on a public instance: @Elena ``of Valhalla'' <3dprint.social/creators/valhal… and started publishing models, both a selection of old ones and a few new ones I designed in the last few days, since I was in a 3D printing mindset.

Then I decided that since nobody had serious objections to it, I could also create an account on printables, as that’s probably more easily accessible to the general public.

I have been somewhat slower at publishing models on the latter, but I expect that eventually most of what I design will end up on both platforms; I still have a few older models I want to add, and a few ideas for new models to make, then I guess stuff will slow down, and only get new ones now and then, as that’s how I usually approach hobbies.

Of course, the self-hosted git repository is not going away: that’s still the canonical location for my models, with all of the non-self-hosted options as a convenience option.

blog.trueelena.org/blog/2026/0…