Friday, April 30, 2010

Testing Spiral 2 again

Made one up with red snowflakes fabric... I was mainly testing Spiral 2 with perfect circles instead of that odd shape I hand-drew at first. This is an inside-out view. From the right side you can't see the seams and it looks like any other skirt!

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Cookies and Dream



Onward with my quest to recreate junk food, minus the junk.
I call this one a success!

waffle IRON


I've had lots of waffle "teflons" and they work great for a while, then the teflon suddenly loses its unsticky and you're left trying to clean a thousand chunks of burnt waffle without immersing the contraption in water.
Anyway teflon's bad for you.
DH bought this waffle IRON somewhere, and I thought it was a cute idea, but not very practical. How do you get both sides to heat up?
Yesterday he wanted waffles really really badly (I normally make pancakes which are easier, faster and taste the same) so I used both halves like flat irons for one side of a waffle. Then I flipped them out into a regular pan. It's not like he's gonna lift the waffle to make sure it's a waffle on the back side too :-)
The crispy little squares full of syrup are the important part!

I'm Betsy Ross!!!

But with technology.

First, image of flag from Wikipedia:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/88/CSA_FLAG_4.3.1861-21.5.1861.svg/500px-CSA_FLAG_4.3.1861-21.5.1861.svg.png



Put the flag image into Illustrator and made it the real life size I want:



Traced the lines:



Hid the colored image, set printing to page tiles.


I only need sheets 1 and 2 to get started. Now there's NO guesswork about how to line the stars up in a perfect circle or how big to make them.



I really don't know how Betsy Ross did her seams. I don't know how Confederate flags were sewn in real life either! I doubt it was zigzag seams, so I get an F on authenticity, but if I actually get them MADE I will get points from my little guys :-)

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Spiral 2 finally gets tested


And YES, it makes the classic spiral skirt shape. Yay!

Saturday, April 3, 2010

MADE IN USA

I did a bunch of research to find a big frypan made in the USA!!
http://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/all-clad-d5-brushed-stainless-steel-stir-fry-pan/

Got mine on Ebay for half that much, which means I only paid four or five times the price of the cheap Chinese crap and this won't put lead into our food :-)
I love it! It's HUGE and heavy, heats up fast and evenly, easy to clean. I use it for everything. No problem scrambling up two lb of burger and a pile of vegies.


Wet because I had just washed it by hand after taking it out of the box.
Wet in this picture because I was too lazy to take another picture after I realized.




There was a convenient hook on the ceiling... otherwise finding a place to store a pan so immense would have been an "interesting challenge" :-)



For more Made in USA stuff try these portals...

http://www.stillmadeinusa.com/

http://www.madeinusaforever.com/

We might as well spend our money to improve the lives of an American family!

Friday, April 2, 2010

"God of Thunder" game

An old-fashioned game that is great fun! Part arcade, part side-scroller, an adventure game with a plot and lots of puzzles. I played my way through part one many longs ago. Now here's parts 2 and 3 for free. Srsly doubt I'll start playing again :-)
But if you have some time to kill, try using Mjollnir!!

http://www.adeptsoftware.com/got/

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Couple pics of spiral skirt



This is Spiral Skirt 3 :-)