Thursday, October 7, 2010

Things I want to try

I come across sooooo many amazing tutorials, I've decided that bookmarking them wasn't sufficient enough. The little entry here will document all the tutorials I've gotta try!!
Crocheting
Easy granny square crocheting tutorial
Official Sailor Moon Amigurumi Pattern (I'd much rather have the original version, but it's hard to find in Japan :( )
Jewelry Making
Anthropologie Bonheur Necklace

Lanvin Inspired Bracelet
Ribbon and Pearl Necklace
Ribbon Pearl Necklace
Ribbon and Pearl Necklace (obviously, someone has a thing for ribbon and pearls :P )
Paper Crafts
Make awesome Harry Potter Wand
Polymer Clay
Oborochann Octopus Charm Tutorial (loooove this! so irresistibly cute! if you look in her gallery, she also has a tutorial for making a strawberry and panda charm. but, this one is my fave.)
Oolong's Zoo: How I make cats
The Polymer Clay Spot: Seven Petal Rose (dude, the rose earrings are awesome!)
Sewing
Plushie Making Tutorial
Another Plushie Making Tutorial (super cute alien)
Reversible Scalloped Apron Tutorial
Reversible Tie-top Handbag Tutorial
Sweetheart Pin-cushion
Vampire Bunny Plushie
Wee Wonderful's Pointy Kitty
Leather Accessories
Other
Posterized Wood Plaque

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Prefer readonly to const!

Prefer readonly to const! Ugh! I'm such a dummy!

Seriously! I never imagined I would find myself in a situation where it would bite me in the rear! -___-'

I made a 'fix' in some code where we had a connection string temporarily hard-coded. Unfortunately, I didn't noticed the const identifier on the variable declaration. I replaced the string literal with a property that looked for the connection string in a config file. However, because the type was a const the variable was compiled with the literal instead of only retrieving it at runtime from the config.

I probably wasted hundreds of dollars because of this mistake. :(

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Crafting Mama!

Aaaaah! Craftster has a new challenge next month: Pixelate Mama


(image from thread)

The goal of next month's challenge is to create a pixelate project featuring Cooking (Crafting) Mama!

My brain is churning with ideas right now. I will most likely use fabrics and sewing as my medium. Hopefully, the finished project will come out half as good as what I'm envisioning. :)

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Ambitious much?

Okay.

It is most unfortunate. Despite the size of my ever growing craft book collection, I've not one craft to show for it. This fact is very discouraging and has prompt me to create a goal of sorts: At least one completed project a week.

Simple enough, no?

I think so. This week I shall start with a small amigurumi project, a really cute and free Onigiri couple pattern curtsy of HandmadeKitty. I've actually almost completed one save sewing on the details, and I've got two more in the works. Maybe I can complete each project before Monday. We shall see!

If I some how pull this off by Monday, I shall complete a bunka doll next. My book came in today. :3 It's full of pretty pictures and one full pattern. It really sucks that I cannot understand a single word, but fortunately (as with most Japanese craft books), following the instructions is pretty straight forward. :D

(If you would like to create a bunka doll of your own, but you're unable to find a copy of this book, here's a really good tutorial at Three-Fourths.)

Well anywho, wish me luck!

EDIT:

Hmmmm...I almost forgot. I ordered some polymer clay tools this past week. Should they arrive by Wednesday, let's add the goal of making at least one piece of miniature food in polymer clay. :D

Saturday, September 4, 2010

*sigh* I'm hopelessly addicted to Japanese craft books!

They're much more interesting than most American ones I come across. Unfortunately, just when I think I'm satified with my current collection, I always find more that I fall in love with. :-(

Recently, I've taken a great interest in doll making. What sparked this interest was me stumbling upon Bunka dolls. Extremely cute cloth dolls.

I found a pretty good tutorial on making the dolls. But, that wasn't enough for me. I searched around and found this book:



It's currently in route from Japan to my house, and I eagerly await it's arrival. Anyways, after discovering Bunka dolls, I decided to look more into Japanese handmade dolls and I found all kinds of adorable dolls to make. My searches eventually led me to ball jointed dolls. So while searching for a great book to get started on the topic, I found this guy:



From what I read, it's one of the best on the subject. I purchased a copy on Hobby Link Japan. (This seems to be a good site to purchase reasonably priced doll books.) I also got really lucky and found a translation available for the book. :-D

I'm currently on a quest to get ahold of two Japanese hemp books from the publisher Ondori. The one I REALLY want is Hemp Strings and Stones:



Unfortunately, the one place that had a copy is now sold out! :-( I requested for two people to search to see if they can find it in Japan, so hopefully one will have luck! :-)

I hope once my quest for the two hemp books end, I will then be content with my current collection of craft books. I have dozens and I've no finished projects to show for it. :-(

I blame my poor time management skills for that one, >:-( but I do hope to do better. A finished craft a week would be a nice goal. :-P

I'll be sure to post reviews on the books once they arrive and I've finished one project!

Monday, August 9, 2010

Reversing a string in Python

I recently purchased a new Python book, Python for Bioinformatics, by James Kinser. As I was skimming through the introductory portion of the book I came across a rather interesting piece of Python code related to slicing:


>>> st = 'I am a string'
>>> st[::-1]
'gnirts a ma I'


It never occurred to me to use slicing in this way. I'm really disappointed I managed to overlook this ability. However, should I ever run into a situation where I need to reverse the contents of a string in Python, I now know of a nice one liner. :)

It works the same with lists (and tuples and arrays):


>>> lt = ["Bob", "Ash", "Mike"]
>>> lt[::-1]
["Mike", "Ash", "Bob"]


But, if I need to reverse a list, I'll probably just stick with lt.reverse(). (Unfortunately, that strings do not have this method.)

For a more detailed explanation of why this works, check out the Python documentation on Extended Slices.

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Retro Sprite Art with Perler Beads




I finally found a craft project that I can finish easily in one sitting: 8-bit sprite art using perler beads.

I was inspired Friday when I stumbled across a post from Geek Crafts' blog, 10 Awesomely Geeky Perler Beads Crafts. Since then, I think I have become addicted to these awesomely geeky creations. XD

Fortunately, there's many classic sprites available online. Two websites that I found particularly useful were http://www.videogamesprites.net/ and http://www.spriters-resource.com/.

To help visualize where to put beads in the board, I used gimp. I just opened up my image and zoomed in about 2000%. It sucks that grid lines aren't available, but the enlarged image was enough to get the job done.

So far I've made two Mario's, a question block (from Super Mario Bros.), Kirby and Lakitu. I hope to make a project with Phoenix Wright and Domo-kun, but I need to get a larger perler bead board. :)

Here's a few more pictures of my little creations:

Pink Mario. He's so cute. :)

Finished hunger Kirby


I CAN HAZ INTRODUCHUN?

My first blog post. Yay me.

So, about me:

I'm 23 years old.
I'm in love with this furry brown monster name Domo.
I'm a software developer living in the great state of Alabama. :)
I LOVE crafting (although I have a problem finishing projects x__x ).
Huge fan of video gaming (console gaming in particular).
I live happily with my husband and our cat, Lola.

I'm maintaining this blog to document my crafting adventures. :) And possibly a few of my software adventures.

So here's a early "thank you" for anyone out there reading this far. :)