Holiday Gift Wrap-Up #2 -- Glove Love

Girl gifts are soooo much fun to make! For Christmas, the 16-year-old on our gift list got a pair of shabby-chic fingerless mittens made from old T-shirts.

One of my favorite speakers last summer at the Surface Design Association conference in Minneapolis was Natalie Chanin of Alabama Chanin. We can thank her for making reverse applique cool, as well as an economic boost to her hometown and keeping lots of T-shirts out of the waste stream.

Two of the three old tees used in this project originally resided in our closet. I was able to cut around the stains. The third was a probably-never-worn machine-embroidered souvenir tee I thrifted for 25 cents.

I layered the fabrics together and cut from a pattern I made by trial and error. I used a chalk marker to position the thumb hole. I think a disappearing marker would work better, if I could find where mine is.

What worked like a charm was the bent shaft scissors I bought some 15 years ago for cutting the reverse applique.


I didn't buttonhole stitch all the applique edges -- just the edges of the gloves, the thumb holes, and along the seam lines. There's a reason for the prices on those Alabama Chanin garments.

The three-layer thickness and machine stitching I used give these fingerless mitts some body. Maybe that's only important to me because I remember how frustrating it was when we played dress-up with Jody Newhart's mom's opera gloves and they kept sliding down.

Fingerless mittens went to another girl on our gift list. Next time.

What Helps You Learn?

Would you help me with an experiment? I'm looking for feedback on some digital teaching tools. I've tried to make it worth your while with a free video and two screencasts on digital fabric design. But since I changed to Blogger's Dynamic Views, you'll have to click on the header for this post to see the whole story and the links.

Here's the backstory. Twenty-five years of training and experience in adult education have convinced me: Students benefit from having an idea of what the "big picture" looks like. Then, when you break down a technique or design concept into do-able parts, they have a better idea how the parts fit into the whole.

So I've been sampling different teaching tools and delivery methods for helping students glimpse the big picture and setting the stage for learning before a workshop or e-course.

To begin, I produced an 8-minute video that follows the transformation of a digital photograph into the seamless repeat pattern pictured at the top of this post. One short video won't make anyone an expert on Gimp, an open-source software alternative to Photoshop that you can download for free. But the video shows exactly what I did to turn a snapshot of a sumac leaf into a design I could print on Spoonflower, a print-on-demand fabric company that can turn your ideas into yardage.

The screencasts show how that design can be altered after it's on Spoonflower. The first uses the Picnik imaging utility, which can be accessed directly from Spoonflower. The second shows the Color Change utility within Spoonflower.

I'd like to get your impression of the content, and your help with testing the technology on a wide variety of platforms -- for example, Windows vs. Mac, operating systems of different generations (XP to Windows 7, for example), desktop vs. iPad vs. smart phone, that type of stuff. I need to know if you experience any delays in the buffering or problems playing the video or screencasts, the type of internet connection you were using when you viewed them, and sound quality you experience on different players.

In other words, I need feedback that tells me several things that I think you really need to be kept private.

So here's my plan. I've password-protected the video. If you'd like to view it, use this link to email me with your email address. I promise I will not fill up your inbox with spam. What I will do is add your email to the "approved" list for viewing the video, and send you the password. You're under no obligation of any kind, but you will have my email so you can answer my nosy questions as privately as one can, I suppose, in the digital age.

The two five-minute screencasts that follow up on the video's content are here:

Fall Color Fabric With Picnik
and
Fall Fabric with Spoonflower Color Changer

You're free to download or share those. In fact, I'm happy to share the password-protected video to any friend of yours who contacts me by email. But I would appreciate it if you not publish my email address in any form readable by the bots that troll the web looking for vulnerable email accounts. You can print my email as donnastitches [at] gmail [dot] com and advise your friends to remove the bot inhibitors, if that helps.

I really appreciate all the help I can get in this digital sampling session. And as always, thank you for your comments and feedback here on Two Red Threads, on Facebook and wherever else we connect!

The Cutting Edge

The warm weather we're experiencing in northern Wisconsin may not be the best thing for maple syrup producers, but it sure makes the spring willow harvest pleasant. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll post images and share some information about how I harvest, sort, store and prepare willow for baskets, trellises and other uses. I'm delighted to be able to post this for your information and entertainment, and it will give me a chance to sit down and rest.

But first, let me introduce you to the tools I use.

The Curved Knife. I cut fine willows (up to about the diameter of a pencil) with a curved pruning knife I bought years ago from A.M. Leonard. With a curved knife I can cut faster than with pruners, and it's easier on my hands. Of course, this is only true if the knife is sharp. Any knife is safer to use and more effective if it's sharp. I used to sharpen this knife on a flat whetstone. Now I use a handy carbide sharpener Bill got from Snap-on Tools. I make a few passes through the sharpener before I start cutting, at the end of each row, or any time it feels like it's my hand doing the work instead of the knife.
 
The Pruners. Heavier willow I cut with a pair of Felco pruners, which I also bought from A.M. Leonard. Like my knife, I keep my pruners sharp. When I bought them, I also bought a triangular sharpening stone. One side of the pruner's cutting edge is sharpened at 20 degree angle. The other side is sharpened at a 5 degree angle. When I was learning to sharpen this tool, I think I made it duller instead of sharper. Like anything, you get better with practice. The model I have was designed for smaller hands, and I've had them so long I don't remember what model they are (I guessed on the link). Even so, when I cut a lot of willow with the pruners I almost always get a blister on the inside of my thumb, my hands get tired sooner (especially when it's cold), and it's not as fast as cutting with a knife.

I have larger pruners, loppers and pruning saws for cutting really big willow. But most of the harvest is done with these two tools. They've served me well for many years, and I really think they'll last the rest of my life -- even when I sharpen them at the end of every row.