Oh deer

    Almost midnight. The Expected Party is tomorrow. I just won't be able to finish Balin's evening undercoat in time...the only thing left is the hand sewing--hems, facings, fasteners--and I just can't squeeze in the time to do it! It is good to be working so much again, but it means zero free time. I'm glad though that I have a commitment to family time tomorrow or I would probably work all weekend, too.
    The house is smellful with apricot lamb stew, homemade chicken liver pate, homemade hummus, and other good stuff, all in preparation for tomorrow. And I get to enjoy it without having produced any of it myself!
    
    I mentioned some deer in the yard many posts ago. The have now taken up residence in our back yard. When I go out in the morning, there they are, a doe and two nearly grown fawns, curled up under the oak trees. If I come too close to get into my car, they skitter around and run behind the garage. They are much more relaxed if I don't behave like a predator by looking at them directly. They've pretty much stripped the yard of ivy which was taking over the fence, and they've absolutely done for the orange tree, the last remaining chard in the garden, and a couple of ornamentals I've been ignoring. So there isn't much left to eat. I think they come mainly because the yard is pretty protected and they feel safe. We could rescue the remaining vegetation by closing the driveway gate again, but without getting to romantical, there's something very cool about being a deer resort, with providing a safe haven. Even if most people think of deer as pests.

This picture is from a couple of months ago. The fawns were preteens at the time. They are a bit bigger now.

The message is the title

not even going to pretend to have anything to say tonight. too much yawning.

Cowardly pondering

Shall I like Galadriel
fight the long defeat
or should I just
turn off the news?

Somebody stop me before I rhyme again

Feeling a little...not so great
For coherent thought I'm in no fit state
Headache all day, maybe something I ate?
Or maybe I just shouldn't stay up so late

My hands turned only a little kingfisher blue before I finally found the gloves

    Lovely, busy. productive in a fun way, day. I spent most of the day dying outfit pieces that I made a couple of weeks ago. The colors turned out amazing, though I was surprised that the color called Orange Sherbet really turned out to be the same color as orange sherbet! I've been disappointed many times at the differences between colors on the color card versus the colors on the actual fabric...but not this time. While I wasn't expecting anything quite as bright as this, it really is lovely, though perhaps not quite wearable. But you never know.
    One of these days I will get around to taking pictures of everything I've done this month when I could have been writing. Ha!
    When I finished adventures with dyes, which took all day--vat dying is very time consuming but not hard; in between stirring sessions I took the opportunity to lean back with coffee and a book in a lawn chair in the unseasonably warm sunshine--I did the last little bit of machine sewing on Balin's evening undercoat. I sadly won't have time to make much of a start on the overcoat before the Now Expected Party, which is only six days away. However, the undercoat will be ready in plenty of time. There's just the hand-sewing left and I'm done.
    So, no poetry today, which may be something of a relief for some readers, but plenty of craft today, which may or may not be interesting to anybody but me.

Choices part 2: You took the first step and didn't even know it

You were not born for this

You were not fated:

Only the one who pulled the sword
Who opened the book

Who found the ring
               

The path was not decreed

Only foreseen

It could have been anybody

But it was you

You do, and I promise

Thus you charmed me
smile like the rising sun
voice like the river over stones
hands like the drifting leaves

Forever I will walk
each morning with you a winding path
each evening with you the top of a hill
each night with you wrapped in stars

What the heck is a codec?

Well. I've been trying to figure out how to export another Magix composition with pictures so it can be a video. I can export it, all right, but the file size is HUGE and unusable. I can't remember how I did it last time (see "Proof of concept" on January 2). It didn't seem this hard!

I did manage to finalize the piece, though, and that is delightful and fun.
*   *   *   *   *
A few minutes later:
When exporting videos, I have some choices in which codec to use...not that I actually understand what a codec is. Apparently, though, if I use a Microsoft codec rather than an Intel codec, I get a smaller file. So let's see what happens when I publish this

Once again, I can't take credit for the musical phrases--they are all Magix loops. And of course I can't take credit for any of the pictures. All I've done is assemble a puzzle.

Now, after all that, I will hit publish. If it doesn't work, I will just have to leave it for the time being because it is already tomorrow again.

And so to bed

It is still Wednesday as far as I am concerned, since I've just finished my work for the day, even though it's almost 2am Thursday. I missed wiring yesterday because I had some time to sew after work was finished and then I completely crashed. A good tiredness, the good of knowing that you've accomplished something. But I felt the lack of my blog date all day today! So weird how integral to my life this has become. Sometimes I spend a couple of hours just trying to come up with something non-diary-ish, but there is no time for such a luxury tonight.

The green-haired star is west of the Pleiades now, still mostly a fuzzy blob. I can see better pictures of Comet Lovejoy on hundreds of websites, but they don't replace the wonder of actually seeing it in the sky with my own eyes.

I would really love to come up with something profound to finish this off tonight, but I am apparently all out of profound.

A night

Still working on the first layer of Balin's evening outfit. Even the simplest pattern can take days and days when you're trying to do everything right. Being sure to iron every seam four times, seam finishes, all the little things that take way more time than the actual construction seams. So far I haven't had to rip anything out.

Brain is fried. Time for a toddy and a chapter or two of Fellowship of the Ring.

I'm a method seamstress: I have to immerse myself in the world of the project. Or maybe I just want to immerse myself in the world, and making an outfit is a pathway.

Sheesh. No wonder cosplay is so popular, all that world immersion...although I couldn't really say for sure, since I'm only just now learning about what cosplay is, and apparently, what I make isn't cosplay because I'm not trying to dress up as any particular person. I'm not trying to make stitch-perfect replicas of costumes that some designer way more talented than I am brought into being. My style is more Inspired By rather than Based On.

Blaa, blaa, blaa. It is obviously time to call it a night.

The real point is...sharp

I took the night off last night and went to bed at a reasonable hour--11:30!!! It meant no blog, but for sleep, beautiful sleep, it was worth it.

I've been thinking about sewing, planning for sewing, rethinking my planning for sewing, looking through my crates for alternate fabrics, deciding that a potential alternate project wasn't going to have enough fabric, going online to look for more of said fabric and taking about an hour to come to the conclusion that I have the only piece of this fabric left on the planet except for someone on Etsy or some other site I've forgotten who had some she didn't know what to do with. So back to plan A. Plus a trip to the hardware store to pick up the last few supplies I need for dying a related project which I won't have time to pick up later this week. And then finally...sewing.

I'm making a dwarf costume similar to Balin's in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. But the fabric I have on hand is black and silver, so this must be Balin's evening wear. Love or hate the Hobbit movies and The Lord of the Rings movies, they are a treasure trove of costuming inspiration. I crave to make these things. Why, exactly? It isn't as though I will get much wear out of them...or any out of this, because I'm cutting it for a man and thus saving myself days of agonizing over altering the fit. It will be part of the Now Expected Party, so it should get shared around a lot in about two weeks.

After that, who knows when it will see the light of day again. But somehow, that really isn't the point.

The real triumph of the day is that I didn't stab myself at all! Not even once! This is progress.

Sunlight in another guise

Moon
Comet
Satellite
Space station

Storytelling

A well-crafted tale
may contain anatomically correct details
meticulously detailed memories
affidavits
perfect sentence structure
rhythmic language
footnotes even
but that still doesn't make it true
or beautifully told
or interesting

When

She was never more herself than
when midnight stars silvered her hair
when flowing water sang around her legs
when cradled by the mountain
when shadowed by the trees

Awe and doodles

I definitely did not fully express the awe and wonderfulness of seeing the comet two nights ago. It was really...words fail me. Spiffy. To see a visitor in a sector of the sky that I know well enough to be able to see when something is different. Even if I need binoculars to do it, since I sure as heck would not have been able to see it on my own, at least not without quite a while to let my eyes adjust to the darkness. Anyway, today has felt special just because I saw it. As it was, once I knew where to look and after a quarter hour of shivering, I was able to see the barely green, very small, cometical smudge unaided. But the tail wasn't visible even with my (admittedly underpowered) binoculars. Just a little glowy...yup, smudge is the right word.
    But special things are happening all the time that we never see. The world is an awe-inspiring place, in spite of those who would kill people they don't agree with rather than appreciate a sunset. 


    On a lighter note, I took a break from work and figured out what was going on with Music Maker. During one of the nearly daily updates my computer seems to undergo, a suite of CyberLink programs was installed and a gadget was placed on my desktop. After some research which took even more precious time away from all the other things I wanted to do tonight before my business partner called and requested that I put in some hours on my evening off, I found out how to disable the gadget, and now the playback marker works the way it should and I can again export...I really feel pretentious calling these compositions, but "doodles" isn't quite right, either. Now that it is nearly one in the morning, again, I really feel I should not even open Music Maker or it will suck me in and I will be oblivious losing even more hours of sleep. 

Even though this is posting as Wednesday, it's still Tuesday for me.

Darn

I have to work unexpectedly tonight.

Yay grr

    A clear night, not too cold...oh, let's cut straight to the action: I saw the comet tonight! I needed binoculars and a map and direction from my companion to find it, but find it I did. It really is green. Ish. It looks more like a fuzzy blob than a classic comet-with-tail. But everything is beautiful in its own way.
    I started and finished a whole piece of a costume. I made a tabard, which is supposed to be one of those one-hour projects, but I can never manage to just make a simple anything. I had to cut a facing and hand finish the shoulder seam...after which I came to my senses and machine stitched all the hems--I did want to complete a project within a single month for a change.
    I wanted to make a third layer but as this outfit is not actually for me and it requires some fitting and the person for whom it is intended lives a long way away, I am not going to put myself through a nightmare of guesswork. So two layers it is. For now. I will dye each piece a different color on the next day off I can wrangle.
    The next outfit is all planned out. I think I have everything I need down to the pewter clasps and the thread.
    So I guess all this is to say that stories and poetry and songs are being neglected for the time being. I have so many interests and there are only so many hours in a day. This is a sore trial for more.
    On the downside, the Magix Music Maker program that I was so happy with has stopped allowing me to export to MP3--or anything else. It's lovely that I can make or record music, but if I can't play it anywhere but inside the program, what's the point? Their online help is not helpful. I went to the online forums and found that several other people have had this same problem. No one has been able to fix it and the manufacturer doesn't seem very helpful.
    Grr.

Long-haired stars

Ahhhhh---work done for the week! It's been a haul, with no time for writing--not even little poems for my blog dates--and almost no time for reading. Which is a real trial to my soul.

But I have all day tomorrow to work on costumes for the Now Expected Party. It's three weeks away from tonight.

I'm all diary-ish tonight because of the aforementioned busy-ness. Oh well, that's the way it goes sometimes. Many times.

On the celestial front, there could be hundreds of comets right overhead and it still wouldn't matter because it has been partly to fully cloudy every night since I first heard about Comet Lovejoy. There's just something about comets.... In 1996 and 1997 we had Comets Hyakutaki and Hale-Bop. They happened to be brightest and most accessible in the sky during warmer weather, so we sat out on the deck and drank good California wine in the dark, gazing over the western hills at long-haired stars. I haven't seen a single comet since.

Maybe the weather will cooperate soon and my binoculars will not fog and there I will see it: the green comet with the charming name.

Why is it always cloudy when something extraordinary is in the sky?

Somewhere beyond the clouds
between Orion and the
Bull--grasped by the sun

Comet Lovejoy streaks
her lovely hair, trailing glow,
Round the bright jewel

then again away
carried away by her own
sheer speed...she'll be back


from the article on the site: http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/new-years-comet-lovejoy-reaches-its-peak-watch-it-n281561

Farewell to the red and green

Wow. Christmas really is over. Today is Epiphany, and work has exploded. Yay, money! Dang, no time! Creative work today has been limited to coming up with a novel solution to a bedeviling problem at work.
   
Farewell to the red and green
The ivy and the holly
Welcome to the day-to-day
To struggle would be folly

Yikes. That was terrible. And slightly depressing. But it was extemporaneous. Impromptu, even. Sometimes rhythm and rhyme lead you to say things you never would think to say under normal circumstances. It doesn't mean that they are true things. But maybe they are.

Shut up, shut up, go to bed.

Underdress

    I used to hate hand sewing. I have dresses that I made 25 years ago still hanging in a closet waiting for a hem or buttons or to have the facings tacked down. Maybe all of the above. I'm not exactly sure when the transition occurred, but I don't hate it anymore. Give me a long hem and a couple of episodes of This American Life and I'm a happy craftsman-gal. I still don't like sewing on buttons, but I don't dread it anymore.
    The underdress that I mostly finished yesterday requires a lot of seam finishing because it is made of a ravelly cloth, and because I don't make costumes: I make clothes that are simply out of fashion. I want them to wear like clothes and not fall apart the first time you wear them in public. Or when answering the door for Trick-or-Treaters. Or ever.
    I will finish seams with a sewing machine most of the time, but there are seams that you just can't get to without being able to reach up inside a sleeve or without being able to guarantee that four layers of fabric won't skid apart when you squash them with a presser foot.
    On this project, there's a little of hand and a little bit of machine. So I'm able to be satisfied without getting too bored or antsy that the project isn't moving fast enough.

    I still have some hemming to do, but here is the gist of it. It will not stay white for long. I got a small selection of dyes from Dharma Trading and once I get all my pieces made, I'm going to start dunking and stirring them in buckets.

    And that's that for tonight. I have some writing to do, but nothing that will go in here. Not for awhile, anyway.

Stuff I did today

    Success. I made most of the first layer of a three layer outfit based on the costume for the town of Dale in the Jackson-version Hobbit. I made it really big with a drawstring neckline so that it will fit most people who try to wear it at the Expected Middle Earth Party noted in the previous post. I just have to hem the sleeves and the bottom. And finish the shoulder and side seams. And then dye the whole thing. After that will come an over dress and either a long vest or a loose coat.
    I started writing a poem or song for tonight's entry, but it's going to take more work. I don't want to rush to publish just to have something to post.

Christmas is over

    Projects ran toward costuming today rather than writing or music, though as I had an unusual Saturday off, I managed to squeeze in some more exploration of Music Maker. I do note that there are more recent iterations of this program, but I got the 2013 version for $15.99 and it has more features than I know what to do with, so I'm not in any hurry to expand to the $99.99 version yet.
    My social life seems to be running very much along Tolkien lines this last year and it isn't over yet--another Unexpected Middle Earth Party is set to occur at the end of the month. The unexpected part is that I had no idea that this would be a theme party until a few days ago. I guess that the unexpectedness of the party has worn off by now, so I'm more planning for an Expected MEP.
    As a result, today I put Christmas away, including the wrapping paper (I finally got everything wrapped and mailed--I've always thought Christmas should be more of a season than just a single day), enjoyed a brief couple of hours with a clean useable dining room table, and then completely covered it with sewing stuff. It took me about two hours of research and reminding myself that I do more or less actually have a clue what I'm doing before I had the confidence to start tearing into the fabric. I'm a measure 15 or 20 times, cut once kind of person. And even then it is still possible to mess up.
    So far so good, though. I will sew tomorrow and then the quality of my calculations will become apparent.

A sixth tonight

I have no poetry in me tonight
Stories--I'd rather read 'em than write 'em tonight
So it's good night for tonight
And I'll add a fourth line just so I can write tonight for a fifth time tonight

Proof of concept

Cough cough
or as it would be in the comics: *cough* *cough*
Though I'm not sure what the point of the *s is. To indicate a fake cough? A cough of communicative significance?

Anyway, that's the sound I'm making a lot recently. Damn you, bronchitis!

I'm loading this just to see if it will work. Let me know if it won't play on your computer.

Hmm. Well, the sound comes through all right, but the transition between images is very rough, at least when I play it on the blog page. I don't know if this will play at all on anyone else's computer.

This is the first "composition" I, um, composed in Magix Music Maker 2013, the extremely basic version which has many more mixing options that I have brain to understand. I just used the program's loops for most of it, then recorded a tiny vocal track without headphones or anything to help sync, so it's a little off. I didn't use any effects or balancing except on the vocal track since the purpose of this exercise was just to learn how to use the program. And then how to manipulate the file to allow me to upload it.

Yay!