/me, making a set of drawers for coloured pencils
my mother> oh, you're also making separators for each individual pencil
me> not making these fiddly things. was. an option?
some reconsidering of lifestyle choices may be in order. or maybe not :D
Project #linocut steampunk #piecepack is under way!
Quite a few months ago I started the project by making this
and buying some supplies (such as non-black linocut ink :D ), and then procrastination happened and I got quite stuck.
Today I've actually drawn all most of the pieces on tracing paper, I need to add the smaller suites, trace everything from the reverse, and then finally carve the linoleum.
And then maybe I'll start procrastinating again, or maybe I'll actually do some test prints in the weekend?
I may also be thinking of regular piecepack suites and playing card suites in the same style, but first I need to actually assemble a piecepack and discover whether it will work.
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For Linux Days:
- carve a fancy Tux not wider than a pasta machine
- bring paper, ink and a pasta machine on the event site
- have people printing their own Tux with their hands ("Ooooh, look, I'm skilled!")
- gather contributions
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Yesterday @Diego Roversi gave me 3 (three!) new #notebooks from a loot of old branded gadgets at work. I've found the courage to actually write on it (ink samples on the last page) and two are even good quality paper (and the other one is an expensive moleskine, but maybe I can use it with pencils?).
And then today in the post I received another, fancy, notebook, a gift from my Aunt!
I didn't buy them so they don't count for “trying not to buy too much 2023”, right? :D
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Thanks to a chat with friends, the universe provided me with:
blessed bleach: will destroy up to 95% of bacteria, viruses and sins.
(it was related to a purification rite after a naked man has been close to an altar, the article is in italian)
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Grazie ad una chat con amici, l'universo offre:
candeggina benedetta: distrugge fino al 95% di batteri, virus e peccati!
(tutto è partito da “Altare di San Pietro profanato da un uomo nudo, si celebra il rito penitenziale” roma.repubblica.it/cronaca/202… )
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I may have accidentally a thing.
This came from wikimedia commons
openclipart.org/detail/342614/…
And it was remixed as:
openclipart.org/detail/342615/…
which isn't a sign that is very useful, but was needed for
openclipart.org/detail/342616/…
and since I was already working on this, I decided I might as well
openclipart.org/detail/342617/…
(if you're reading this on mastodon you probably can't see that the images are in the middle of the text, before the URLs).
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I've just soldered a few cables wrong on a perfboard: I counted pins as if I was on the right side, while I was working on the reverse side.
Since the cables were between sockets, and in a somewhat symmetrical shape, I've found that if I shift the boards that plug into them a bit, the connections are right.
The problem is: 3.3V and GND are in purple, and the data cables are red and black.
Some part of me is screaming “NOOOOOO, REDO THEM. NOW!”. Another, just as important, part of me is going “meh, it works, call it done”.
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<joking> electrons don't care about colors! </joking>
Personally I would redo them to remove the cognitive load of remembering to not trust colors in that specific board... since I will, for sure, forget it.
@Daniele Tricoli in theory, this is just a temporary thing (i.e. something that will remain as is on a shelf somewhere for a few years, with the only interaction being recharging the battery now and then), so it shouldn't be a big problem.
Also, the things that go into it have clearly marked pins.
But still, cognitive load.
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More than a year ago I started #knitting a #shawl. It's still not finished.
Yesterday I helped my mother translating instructions for a shawl she's going to knit.
Yesterday evening I had an idea for another shawl (different from either one).
Of course I had to start it, right?
(but this time I'm being wise and I'm working a prototype on 12 mm tree trunks with big-ish yarn that I have no other use for, from the stash, not 15/1 wool and silk yarn worked on 3mm needles)
oh no!
I decided last autumn that I'd knit myself a shawl for the winter. But I put off even starting it until spring. Now I'm just hoping it'll be finished by *next* winter.
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@Tattie spring is just (FSVO just) before another winter :D
I had notes with the hope to be able to finish that shawl last October. I stopped working on it and worked on sewing projects. *surprisingly* the shawl wasn't ready for October :D
One of my pet peeves are polls that ask you how many books you read per month/year/whatever.
What counts as “one book”? Right now I'm reading a book that is divided in two brick-shaped tomes, each one significantly above 1000 pages (but I'm only reading about half of them, since the other half is in Latin). That's about four time as many pages as your average Pratchett novel, but I'm taking significantly more time at reading it (I don't know whether it's because it has a smaller type (not by much), it's a harder read, or because I *will* lose sleep to finish a Pratchett novel, but up to now I've managed not to with this one :D ).
Then another book I'm reading right now is book one of a series of 15 doorstoppers: probably a faster read than the Latin book above, especially since it's a re-read, but still it's not something I can manage to read in a week, if I want to do something else. Since it's not the only thing I'm reading I'm expecting the whole re-read to last me a few years.
Some of the police procedurals my mother reads are, I don't know, maybe 100 pages and a bit? and the pages are even smaller than the ones of the doorstoppers. That one is easy to read in a day or two, and then you can easily claim that you read more than a hundred books per year, while reading less than if I was reading, say 10 doorstoppers.
And this is still stuff with some literary value, we're not talking about, say the collection of jokes from a famous soccer player.
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@Nicholas Laney :copyleft2: it is! round and it turns!
and there is no beginning, but there are beginning*s* :D
Correspondence Book
Posted on May 26, 2023
I write letters. The kind that are written on paper with a dip pen 1 and ink, stamped and sent through the post, spend a few days or weeks maturing like good wine in a depot somewhere2, and then get delivered to the recipient.
Some of them (mostly cards) are to people who will receive them and thank me via xmpp (that sounds odd, but actually works out nicely), but others are proper letters with long texts that I exchange with penpals.
Most of those are fountain pen frea^Wenthusiasts, so I usually use a different ink each time, and try to vary the paper, and I need to keep track of what I’ve used.
Some time ago, I’ve read a Victorian book3 which recommended keeping a correspondence book to register all mail received and sent, the topics and whether it had been replied or otherwise acted upon. I don’t have the mail traffic of a Victorian lady (or even middle class woman), but this looked like something fun to do, and if I added fields for the inks and paper used it would also have useful side effect.
So I headed over to the obvious program anybody would use for these things (XeLaTeX, of course) and quickly designed a page with fields for the basic thinks I want to record; it was a bit hurried, and I may improve on it the next time I make one, but I expect this one to last me two or three years, and it is good enough.
I’ve decided to make it A6 sized, so that it doesn’t require a lot of space on my busy desktop, and it could be carried inside a portable desktop, if I ever decide to finish the one for which I’ve made a mockup years ago :)
I’ve also added a few pages for the addresses of my correspondents (and an index of the letters I’ve exchanged with them), and a few empty pages for other notes.
Then I’ve used my a6_book.py script to rearrange the A6 pages into signatures and impress them on A4; to reduce later effort I’ve added an option to order the pages in such a way that if I then cut four A4 sheet in half at a time (the limit of my rotary cutter) the signatures are ready to be folded. It’s not the default because it requires that the pages are a multiple of 32 rather than just 16 (and they are padded up with empty pages if they aren’t).
If you’re also interested in making one, here are the files:
After printing (an older version where some of the pages are repeated. whoops, but it only happened 4 times, and it’s not a big deal), it was time for binding this into a book.
I’ve opted for Coptic stitch, so that the book will open completely flat and writing on it will be easier and the covers are 2 mm cardboard covered in linen-look bookbinding paper (sadly I no longer have a source for bookbinding cloth made from actual cloth).
I tried to screenprint a simple design on the cover: the first attempt was unusable (the paper was smaller than the screen, so I couldn’t keep it in the right place and moved as I was screenprinting); on the second attempt I used some masking tape to keep the paper in place, and they were a bit better, but I need more practice with the technique.
Finally, I decided that for such a Victorian thing I will use an Iron-gall ink, but it’s Rohrer & Knlingner Scabiosa, with a purple undertone, because life’s too short to use blue-black ink :D
And now, I’m off to write an actual letter, rather than writing online about things that are related to letter writing.
- not a quill! I’m a modern person who uses steel nibs!↩︎
- Milano Roserio, I’m looking at you. a month to deliver a postcard from Lombardy to Ticino? not even a letter, which could have hidden contraband, a postcard.↩︎
- I think. I’ve looked at some plausible candidates and couldn’t find the source.↩︎
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Late Victorian Combinations
Posted on May 26, 2023
Some time ago, on an early Friday afternoon our internet connection died. After a reasonable time had passed we called the customer service, they told us that they would look into it and then call us back.
On Friday evening we had not heard from them, and I was starting to get worried. At the time in the evening when I would have been relaxing online I grabbed the first Victorian sewing-related book I found on my hard disk and started to read it.
For the record, it wasn’t actually Victorian, it was Margaret J. Blair. System of Sewing and Garment Drafting. from 1904, but I also had available for comparison the earlier and smaller Margaret Blair. System of Garment Drafting. from 1897.
Anyway, this book had a system to draft a pair of combinations (chemise top + drawers); and months ago I had already tried to draft a pair from another system, but they didn’t really fit and they were dropped low on the priority list, so on a whim I decided to try and draft them again with this new-to-me system.
Around 23:00 in the night the pattern was ready, and I realized that my SO had gone to sleep without waiting for me, as I looked too busy to be interrupted.
The next few days were quite stressful (we didn’t get our internet back until Wednesday) and while I couldn’t work at my day job I didn’t sew as much as I could have done, but by the end of the week I had an almost complete mockup from an old sheet, and could see that it wasn’t great, but it was a good start.
One reason why the mockup took a whole week is that of course I started to sew by machine, but then I wanted flat-felled seams, and felling them by hand is so much neater, isn’t it?
And let me just say, I’m grateful for the fact that I don’t depend on streaming services for media, but I have a healthy mix of DVDs and stuff I had already temporary downloaded to watch later, because handsewing and being stressed out without watching something is not really great.
Anyway, the mockup was a bit short on the crotch, but by the time I could try it on and be sure I was invested enough in it that I decided to work around the issue by inserting a strip of lace around the waist.
And then I went back to the pattern to fix it properly, and found out that I had drafted the back of the drawers completely wrong, making a seam shorter rather than longer as it should have been. ooops.
I fixed the pattern, and then decided that YOLO and cut the new version directly on some lightweight linen fabric I had originally planned to use in this project.
The result is still not perfect, but good enough, and I finished it with a very restrained amount of lace at the neckline and hems, wore it one day when the weather was warm (loved the linen on the skin) and it’s ready to be worn again when the weather will be back to being warm (hopefully not too soon).
The last problem was taking pictures of this underwear in a way that preserves the decency (and it even had to be outdoors, for the light!).
This was solved by wearing leggings and a matched long sleeved shirt under the combinations, and then promptly forgetting everything about decency and, well, you can see what happened.
The pattern is, as usual, published on my pattern website as #FreeSoftWear.
And then, I started thinking about knits.
In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras knit underwear was a thing, also thanks to the influence of various aspects of the rational dress movement; reformers such as Gustav Jäger advocated for wool underwear, but mail order catalogues from the era such as archive.org/details/cataloguef… (starting from page 67) have listings for both cotton and wool ones.
From what I could find, back then they would have been either handknit at home or made to shape on industrial knitting machines; patterns for the former are available online, but the latter would probably require a knitting machine that I don’t currently1 have.
However, this is underwear that is not going to be seen by anybody2, and I believe that by using flat knit fabric one can get a decent functional approximation.
In The Stash I have a few meters of a worked cotton jersey with a pretty comfy feel, and to make a long story short: this happened.
I suspect that the linen one will get worn a lot this summer (linen on the skin. nothing else need to be said), while the cotton one will be stored away for winter. And then maybe I may make a couple more, if I find out that I’m using it enough.
- cue ominous music. But first I would need space to actually keep and use it :)↩︎
- other than me, my SO, any costuming friend I may happen to change in the presence of, and everybody on the internet in these pictures.↩︎
In giro ai margini del centro di Varese con un'asciugamano rosso appeso alla vita (per la precisione era appoggiato attorno alle bretelle, ma quelle non si vedevano): FATTO.
(se qualcuno ha detto qualcosa, non l'ho sentito)
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walking in downtown Varese with a red towel hanging from the waist (it was wrapped around hidden braces): DONE.
(if anybody said anything, I didn't hear them)
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90107381001310876439032117425523386285527369064955290152127497749962802572547619498228034614224174373888785932290535335802792711060672475883887094683542269956016098828012518360248528894800410694512031313946160169110306524425970765198849243195401705152172988051644198232153630160977209718291848454429628769625278676363957961530676189210110321852252064385407457271026719172983966355070994806498844797108773266015836167049954977047493534434218252818493160591608360040003853160312
This is interesting. I've just asked okular to print page 128 of a 32 pages document (I know. I had my reasons¹), and the printer spewed out a single page with the word "UNIR" at the top left and nothing else.
¹ it was a pdf with 128 A6 pages laid out on 32 A4 pages, and I mixed up the two numbers. could have happened to anybody! :D
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Filed under: hard choices.
I'm writing my second letter to a penpal, and I have to decide which one of my *cough* #inks to use.
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some years ago one of the places I buy fabric from had some plastic fleece on sale, and I bought 3 meters of green fleece to use mostly as a green screen.
I don't usually like green, and it's a colour that I don't really wear.
And now that I've put away most of the winter clothing, but this was still around, I'm a floating head and hands, wrapped in 3 meters of warm green screen.
#TIL: running a gathering stitch sashiko-style with a long needle (a darning one) and the thimble at the base of the middle finger is faster than doing so in the way I had always done.
I wonder whether it also works with two needles, to run two gathering threads at a time, but that's something I'll try in another garment.
@MaryPot for sashiko (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sashiko) the needle is guided with the thumb and middle finger, and moved forwards with the base of the middle finger, so that's the part that is covered by the thimble.
Using the base of the middle finger allows to push with a bit more strength, enabling one to sew more stitches before pulling the needle.
#TIL what Sashiko is and about the special thimble!
athreadedneedle.com/blogs/with…
How to Use a Sashiko Thimble
When I started sashiko stitching, the sashiko thimble was a mystery to me! It's an odd shaped soft leather thing that doesn't resemble any thimble I ever saw.A Threaded Needle
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Dear #HistoricalSewing -verse, have you ever stumbled on late victorian / early 1900s instructions on how to sew knit fabric at home?
I don't think I have, and all of the references to knit garments I can think of are of things that one would buy ready made, and thus sewn in an industrial setting.
Which is not any kind of proof that people weren't sewing their own knit underwear at home, of course.
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, I'd still start with the V&A it's their thing. They have an API for searching their data
Museum of London | Free museum in London
Discover the history of London at the Museum of London, near St Paul's and Barbican. The greatest stories from the greatest city in nine galleries.collections.museumoflondon.org.uk
ok, this morning I'm going to cut a new set of pajamas, the ones I'm currently using are full of holes and I badly need a new one or two.
* gets the appropriate fabric from the cupboard
* prepares the appropriate fabric on the table, stats to lay out pieces on the fabric
* realizes that the fabric has been put away before it has been pre-washed
and the forecast for these days is a bit of rain today, more rain tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day and…
I'm trying to pre-wash it anyway (but just the amount I need for the pajamas, not the whole 8 meters)
Thankfully, the jersey for the combination suit was ready, so I could cut at least that (it was the second thing I wanted to cut today).
The Dreamstress has had some unexpected big expenses last month, and now all of her patterns are on sale to raise some money to cover them.
I've bought many of them, both modern and historical, and even sewn some ( O:-) ) and they were really good (both as patterns and as detailed instructions and extra material), but also from the blog she looks like a really nice person.
thedreamstress.com/2023/05/scr…
Scroop Patterns on Sale! - The Dreamstress
It's sale time for Scroop Patterns! For the next week you can get a whopping 30% off all Modern patterns, and 25% off all historical patternsThe Dreamstress
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Thank you for this prompt. I have been meaning to get a mantle pattern, and have used her patterns before as well.
So off we go! Now, I just need to make about 10 yards of lace for the trim....
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@mem_somerville yeah, that may be an unwanted side effect :D
I'm tempted to buy something, but I've already bought a lot of them, and I'm not sure I really want to add another era (the 1910s) to my wardrobe.
Hei @PHP @PHP Foundation #php , what's up here?
How firefox is doing "unusual traffic from [my] computer network" (requiring a captcha to continue) , while GNOME Web isn't ?
Oggi è il 13 maggio, secondo sabato del mese: questo significa serata craftaggio, con ritrovo dalle 20:30 in poi all'indirizzo meet.gl-como.it/craftaggio
Il piano è sempre lo stesso, portate il vostro lavoro creativo, qualunque esso sia, per passare la serata facendolo mentre si chiacchera con gli altri; siete tutti¹ benvenuti!
¹ con le ovvie eccezioni, paradosso della tolleranza ecc. ecc.
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I hate proprietary software
Posted on May 12, 2023
Even when it’s \m/.
Years ago I watched my SO play Brütal Legend and of course loved it, but I’ve been only using used computers for a long time, and none of them was really able to run modern games.
Admittedly, he told me that I could use his computer to play the game while he wasn’t home (and I do have an account on that computer, that I’ve sporadically used to do computationally intensive stuff, but always remotely), but it was a hassle, and I never did.
This year, however, he gifted me a shiny new CPU and motherboard, and among other things that meant games from this century!
The first thing I’ve spent time on was 0ad (which admittedly already worked on one of the old computers, as long as the map wasn’t too big), but now it was time to play basically the one recent proprietary game I had been wanting to play.
So, this afternoon I started by trying to copy the installer (it was bought from an humble bundle, I don’t have steam) from the home server to my PC, and the home server froze. Ok, I could copy it through something else than git annex (or from the offline hard disk backup, as I did).
Then I tried to run the installer, which resulted in the really helpful error message:
bash: ./BrutalLegend-Linux-2013-05-07-setup.bin: cannot execute: required file not foundok, then surely ldd can help:
not a dynamic executablemaybe it doesn’t like being a symlink (remember, git annex), but no, that wasn’t the problem. ah! maybe
file can help, and indeed:BrutalLegend-Linux-2013-05-07-setup.bin: ELF 32-bit LSB executableargh. Why does proprietary software hate us?
Oh, well, wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/HOWT… , dpkg --add-architecture i386 followed by apt update and apt install libc6-i386 and the installer started.
Of course this didn’t mean that the game could run, but at least it was spitting out the right error messages, and I could quickly see what the other missing packages were:
apt install lib32z1 libbz2-1.0:i386 libgl1:i386 libglu1-mesa:i386and the game started!
and…
no. audio.
I often play games with no audio, because I can’t wear headphones, but here the soundtrack is basically 50% of the reason one would play this game.
Back when my SO had played the game audio was still through pulseaudio, while now I’m using pipewire (and I wasn’t sure that the game wasn’t old enough to be wanting to use alsa), so I started to worry a bit.
And this time, there was no error message to help, but some googling (on searx) and trial and error gave me this list of packages:
apt install pipewire-audio libpipewire-0.3-0:i386 libpulse0:i386 pipewire-alsa:i386and that was it! the game started AND I could hear music!
And then it was time for dinner, and I couldn’t play.
(You may notice that this post has been posted quite some time after dinner. Most of this time wasn’t spent writing the post.)
Anyway, as soon as I’ve defeated and crushed Doviculus I’m going back to 0ad. or maybe wesnoth. or some other Free Software and frustration-free game.
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@Paolo Redaelli I agree that there are more valid reasons to hate proprietary software than the frustration it causes when trying to play a game.
The thing is, I've been lucky to be able to make lifestyle choices that allow me to avoid using proprietary software everywhere that it counts, so the only exception happens to be games and other narrative media, where you can't really get a free software / free culture equivalent (you can often get free works that are in same general category / genre, but if I want to follow the story of the world where Ormagöden, The Eternal Firebeast, Cremator of the Sky, and Destroyer of the Ancient World is real I can't really play a free software RPG or RTS instead.)
And this means that most of the proprietary software I deal with are games from the Humble Bundle, and they are all full of frustrating issues and bugs that a Free Software game would have fixed (such as being built for 64 bit).
And when your desire to play a game that you have wanted to play for years is frustrated, is easy to rant, even when you're otherwise writing notes to remind yourself how you've fixed the problem in the future :)
Also, this morning I wanted to keep playing, and guess what: another gamebreaking bug.
This morning's #tea failure mode:
* put the bread in the bread heating appliance¹
* heated water in the kettle (100°C)
* put the filter in the mug
* put the leaves in the filter
* poured water in the mug
* set the timer
* heard the timer
* turned the bread heating appliance off
notice the lack of “removed the filter with the tea leaves from the mug”
luckily I came back to get the mug only half a minute later or so, the tea is a bit strong, but not horribly so.
¹ it's a sandwich maker, if you're curious, but I tend to abuse it a bit
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“ Strong-minded women who have never worn a pair of stays, and gentlemen blinded by hastily-formed prejudice,alike anathematise an article of dress of the good qualities of which they are utterly ignorant, and which consequently they cannot appreciate.On a subject of so much importance as regards comfort (to say nothing of the question of elegance, scarcely less important on a point of feminine costume), no amount of theory will ever weigh very heavily when opposed to practical experience.”
From The corset and the crinoline : a book of modes and costumes from remote periods to the present time by Lord, William Barry, 1868
(Disclaimer: the historical accuracy of the book is, let's say, peculiar :D )
edit: I forgot the link to the book: archive.org/details/corsetcrin…
Since more than a year, a lot of space in my work bag has been taken by a skirt in aida cloth where I've started to embroider a line of #crossStitch swirls around the hem (it should be about 20 swirls).
The problem is, I can't do cross stitch and other counted thread embroidery while I'm doing something else, not even on easy fabric such as this, so I never pick it up to work on it, and it never gets done.
Today I've forced myself to do so and managed to do about 3 swirls. Will I be able to keep working on it at least a bit every day, and finish the skirt by the end of this month?
Also, I really hope that the haberdasher will have more floss in the same colour when I'll go there later this week, because I definitely do not have enough to finish this.
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Also, if the haberdasher does not have it, I've found that DMC sells online and filled a 50 EUR cart.
(and then closed the private mode browser window, so that it is now forever lost)
(but I remember what I had selected, more or less)
(I really hope that the haberdasher has the colour I need :D )
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the second haberdasher I tried had DMC floss in the right colour (except it's one of the colours that have changed, ouch, but this means that I just can't find exactly the same colour anywhere).
the first haberdasher was out of this colour, but had a pair of proper braces to be used with buttons and everything. which is something I wanted to make myself for a long time, but was missing part of the materials, so I ended up buying them.
(12 eur of unplanned shopping is still better than almost 50, right?)
@Delib For some reason my brain has a really hard time concentrating on audiobooks, but it can listen to people talking on video while only glancing at the video now and then, so that's what I usually do while handsewing or knitting.
If I have to count things, however, it all breaks down and I can't listen to anything (but then I get bored after a while, because I miss having something else going on at the same time. Brains are weird.)
Tonight it was the 70s and I apparated with a group of Death Eater adjacent wizards in an empty muggle house to listen to their music (it was a Black Sabbath album, btw).
And the thing that bothered me about the dream when I had just half-woken up? That when I plugged in the stereo it was a shucko socket rather than an English one.
Speaking of coronation souvenirs, I've just realized that today I'm wearing a necklace pendant that depicts a royal.
Not a mere king of an irrelevant island, however, this one is His Imperial Majesty Krosp I, Emperor of All Cats.
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It's now officially too warm, and I still haven't changed the hooks and eyes on the linen jacket I finished last autumn, so that's the sewing thing I'll have to do in the next few days.
3 hooks and eyes attached. 28 remaining.
(I'm removing the old ones in batches, so I can probably still wear the jacket while I work on this.)
Hiking Slippers
Posted on May 5, 2023
When I travel for a few days I don’t usually1 bring any other shoe than the ones I’m wearing, plus some kind of slippers for use inside hotel / B&B rooms.
It’s good for not carrying useless weight, but it always leave me with a vague feeling of “what if my only shoes break”, followed by “on a Sunday, when the shops are closed”.
So I started to think in the general direction of hiking sandals, shoes that are designed to be worn when resting, and lightweight to carry, but are a passable substitute for regular shoes in case of an accident to the main ones, maybe with the help of an extra pair of socks2 (or when crossing fords, but that’s not really a usecase I have).
My requirements are easier than the ones for real hiking sandals, since I’m only going to be walking on paved streets (or at most easy unpaved ones), and the weight considerations are a thing, but not as strict as if I had to carry these on my back while hiking many hours in a day.
My first attempt was a pair of hiking sandals from things I already had in my stash, with vibram soles, neoprene padding and polyester webbing. After a couple fixes they sort of worked, but they had a few big issues.
- While comfortable when worn, the neoprene made the sandals hard to make, as it tended to deform while being assembled.
- Polyester webbing is slippery. Some strips of hot glue in strategical places helped, but they weren’t perfect and in time they are peeling off.
- Most importantly, to make the sandals stable enough to wear while walking I had to add a strap around the ankle that needs closing: this makes it a bit of a hassle to use the sandals, say, when waking up in the middle of the night for metabolic reasons.
And then, one day I made my linen slippers, and that lead me to think again about the problem: what if I made a pair of slippers with a rubber sole, technical materials and maybe uppers made of net, so that they would be lightweight, breathable and possibly even still suitable in case I ever need to cross a ford.
This was also readily attainable from the stash: some polycotton for the sole lining, elastic mesh for the uppers, EVA foam for padding and vibram soles.
I decided to assemble most of them by machine, and it was quick and painless (possibly also thanks to the elasticity of the mesh)
For the soles I may have gone a bit overboard with the vibram claw, but:
- I already had it in the stash;
- if I need to wear them on an unpaved road, they are going to be suitable;
- why not?
The soles were glued to the slippers rather than being sewn, as I don’t think there is a reasonable way to sew these soles; I hope it won’t cause durability issues later on (if it does, there will be an update)
As for the finished weight, at 235 g for the pair I thought I could do better, but apparently shoes are considered ultralight if they are around 500 g? Using just one layer of mesh rather than two would probably help, but it would have required a few changes to the pattern, and anyway I don’t really to carry them around all day.
I’ve also added a loop of fabric (polycotton) to the centre back to be able to hang the slippers to the backpack when wet or dirty; a bit of narrow webbing may have been better, but I didn’t have any in my stash.
The pattern is the same as that used for the linen slippers, and of course it’s released as #FreeSoftWear.
I’ve worn these for a few days around the home and they worked just fine, except for the fact that I had to re-glue the sole in a few places (but I suspect it was glued badly in the first place, since the other sole had no issues).
Right now I have no plans to travel, so I don’t know how much I will be able to test these in the next few months, but sooner or later I will (or I’ll keep wearing them at home after I’ve thoroughly tested the linen ones), and if there are issues I will post them here on the blog (and add a link to this post).
- the exception would be when I’m also bringing some kind of costume, and even there it’s not always true.↩︎
- and one should always carry an extra pair of clean socks, as they are useful for so many things, as Pratchett reminds us.↩︎
rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua reshared this.
@Diego Roversi had just finished a confcall
me> black or green?
diego> (thinks for a few seconds) black
me> mug or IV?
diego> (no answers)
I should serve the tea in an IV drip, right?
Linen Slippers
Posted on May 4, 2023
I hate going out to buy shoes. Even more so I hate buying home shoes, which is what I spend most of my life in, also because no matter what I buy they seem to disintegrate after a season or so. So, obviously, I’ve been on a quest to make my own.
As a side note, going barefoot (with socks) would only move the wear issue to the socks, so it’s not really a solution, and going bare barefoot on ceramic floors is not going to happen, kaythanksbye.
For the winter I’m trying to make knit and felted slippers; I’ve had partial success, and they should be pretty easy to mend (I’ve just had to do the first mend, with darning and needle felting, and it seems to have worked nicely).
For the summer, I’ve been thinking of something sewn, and with the warm season approaching (and the winter slippers needing urgent repairs) I decided it was time to work on them.
I already had a shaped (left/right) pattern for a sole from my hiking sandals attempts (a topic for another post), so I started by drafting a front upper, and then I started to have espadrille feeling and decided that a heel guard was needed.
As for fabric, looking around in the most easily accessible part of the Stash I’ve found the nice heavyweight linen I’m using for my Augusta Stays, of which I still have a lot and which looked almost perfect except for one small detail: it’s very white.
I briefly thought about dyeing, but I wanted to start sewing NOW to test the pattern, so, yeah, maybe it will happen one day, or maybe I’ll have patchy dust-grey slippers. If I’ll ever have a place where I can do woad dyeing a blue pair will happen, however.
Contrary to the typical espadrillas I decided to have a full lining, and some padding between the lining and the sole, using cotton padding leftovers from my ironing board.
To add some structure I also decided to add a few rows of cording (and thus make the uppers in two layers of fabric), to help prevent everything from collapsing flat.
As for the sole, that’s something that is still causing me woes: I do have some rubber sole sheets (see “hiking sandals” above), but I suspect that they require glueing, which I’m not sure would work well with the natural fabric uppers and will probably make repairs harder to do.
In the past I tried to make some crocheted rope soles and they were a big failure: they felt really nice on the foot, but they also self-destroyed in a matter of weeks, which is not really the kind of sole I’m looking for.
Now I have some ~ 3 mm twine that feels much harsher on the hands while working it (and would probably feel harsher on the feet, but that’s what the lining and padding are for), so I hope it may be a bit more resistant, and I tried to make a braided rope sole.
Of course, I have published the pattern and instructions for the slippers as well as those for the braided rope sole as #FreeSoftWear.
Now what is left is trying everything under daily use, and I hope I will have updates on this at the end of the season, rather than soon :D
reshared this
Playing openttd I've just sent a full passenger train to the depot, sold the engine, bought a new one, attached it to the old carriages and then allowed it to continue on the route. Which, in the game is afaik the standard way to do so.
However, while doing so my mind was thinking of what the passengers were experiencing.
And well, not even our local commuter train company has ever done something like this :D
@Kermode ora che ci penso... :D
Non mi prendo impegni, ma quando posto qualcosa (ovvero quando non sto rispondendo ad altri) cerco di farlo sempre (a meno che sia un repost dal blog, perché quelli sono troppo lunghi e automatizzati per tradurli senza troppo sforzo :) ).
Programming the ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo with Arduino
Posted on April 30, 2023
A few months ago we may have bought a few ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo boards from Olimex.
Since every time I go back to working with them I’ve forgotten how to do so, and my old notes on the fediverse are hard to find, this is the full procedure.
Setup
I start by sort-of-following docs.espressif.com/projects/ar…
- Install arduino from the distribution packages (version 1.8 is ok).
- Under File → Preferences, add the development URL to the Additional Boards Manager URLs field. (on 2023-04-30 that’s
https://espressif.github.io/arduino-esp32/package_esp32_dev_index.json). - Under Tools → Board → Boards Manager make sure that you install a version of esp32 by Espressif Systems that is above 2.0 (on 2023-04-30 there is a 2.0.8 that works).
Programming
- Under Tools → Board → ESP32 Arduino select ESP32C3 Dev Module.
- Under Tools → USB CDC On Boot select Enabled.
You can now compile and upload your sketches.
If something goes wrong, to force the board to bootloader mode bring GPIO9 to GND.
Note that the serial port device /dev/ttyACM0 only appears when in bootloader mode, but uploading sketches and the serial monitor will still work even if the port is not set in the arduino IDE.
blog.trueelena.org/blog/2023/0…
I've decided I need to do something vaguely useful with a few microcontroller boards I have, use some of the simple ESP8266 ones to collect temperature and humidity data from various rooms of the house to a MQTT server, collect that data in a RRD and show the current values on an epaper panel together with the current time and weather forecast.Current status is:
* the MQTT server at home is no longer working (uops, that's why I wasn't receiving other unrelated notifications. I believe I know what the reason is, and how to solve it, but not today. I have mosquitto installed also on the laptop and that one is working)
* the python library I wanted to use to read data from MQTT is broken in debian testing (bug opened at the end of november)
* I can't find the ESP8266 boards. I know that they are around here somewhere, but WHERE???
reshared this
And then you think you've gone through all of the sort-of-urgent repairs, move to another room to put away things, and discover that there is another hole that needs fixing, and it's on one of the good shirts, even, so you have to mend it *carefully*.
The Pile of warm weather things that required some #mending love has been taken care of. And I've finished adding buttons and buttonholes and lace to my new linen combinations (there will be pictures).
Now (for “tomorrow” or “next week” values of “now”) I need to change all of the hooks and eyes on my linen jacket, and then I think I may be sort of ready for the hot season?
(I'm never going to be ready for the hot season.)
@Kermode Usually up to around 30-ish is pretty common, 35°C would be an exceptional day (of which of course we expect to see more).
Luckily I don't work outdoors.
TFW you finish sewing a pair of slippers with rope soles (there will be pictures), take off the slippers with vibram claw soles you have been wearing (there will be pictures also of these) to try the finished ones on, and they feel slipperryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.
after a few minutes I realized it was just a feeling caused by the comparison, they aren't *that* slippery, but for a second there I was worried.
rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua reshared this.
The nice thing about #handSewing is that today I wasn't feeling very well, and had very little ability to concentrate on things.
But at least there are 7 more buttonholes that weren't there earlier this afternoon, and the day doesn't feel wasted!
(at least 4 are still missing on this garment)
rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua reshared this.
rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •Elena ``of Valhalla'' likes this.
Yaku 🐗
Unknown parent • • •ModestinoSycamore
Unknown parent • • •Il bello di essere expat è anche questo: mi potrò risparmiare questa alluvione appiccicosa. All'estero in 24 ore massimo la notizia sarà già sparita dai radar.
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Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Yaku 🐗 • •@Yaku 🐗 @Angie eh, è proprio l'hype del momento che ossessiona :D
(poi per carità sono anche io intenta a fare battute sulle chat di cazzeggio che frequento, eh)
rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua reshared this.
Yaku 🐗
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •@Angie
Elena ``of Valhalla'' likes this.
nihil22
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to nihil22 • •nihil22
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •Elena ``of Valhalla'' likes this.