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On Pricing Handmade Goods

When I was looking into getting a zafu—a Japanese meditation cushion useful for sitting on the floor—I found several sites that talked about how to make your own, but one site in particular stuck out to me. Zafus don’t come cheap. The inexpensive ones start around $30, and the finer quality ones will run you […]

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When directions fail?

It’s not often that a patterns leaves me scratching my head.  And when it does, I’m often not sure if the problem is the pattern, or me over-thinking it. In this case I was making a teeny-tiny zipper pouch, a free pattern available on Craftsy.  The pattern instructions don’t have much in the way of […]

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Don’t ever tell me I’ve “aged well”

I don’t make resolutions as such, but one of my areas of focus in this coming year is to keep on top of this site, among other things. The short version is, stuff happened, I got busy, and things like blogging slid. But I wanted to talk about something else today. 2016 was a hard […]

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Fixing the Problems (The Saga of the Mock-up, Pt. 2)

I had identified two main sources for the problem with keeping the dress where it was supposed to be: the fabric’s tendency to relax, and lack of a support structure. The first thing I did was add a stay-tape, something I first ran into in corsetry: inch-wide twill tape, in this case fitted snugly right under the […]

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The Limits of the Mock-up

Just recently I bumped into a huge weakness of the mock-up: you do not wear them all day. If you sew garments, at some point or another you will come across the advice to always make a mock-up. Also called a muslin, calico, or toile, it’s a test version of the garment that lets you fine tune […]

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Zippers and Unforeseen Complications

There is something just a little bit insane about cosplay¹.  We—the fans—look at something that usually exists only in a 2D world and decide “I am going to replicate that.  In my spare time.  On a budget.  And I am going to make it awesome.”  Crazy, right? Add to that the fact that many of us—probably most […]

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Ven diagram of my diet

Low Carb Chocolate Cookies

Skip to the recipe After getting a chocolate chip cookie recipe I was happy with, chocolate cookies seemed like the next logical step.  I looked at a brownie recipe from Cooking with Coconut Flour and approximated some things, and came up with something halfway between a cookie and a brownie.  I used Hershey’s Special Dark Cocoa […]

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Image Transfer Revisited

After watching Donna Kato’s video on image transfers I decided to give it another shot.  The key seems to be to use a really really light touch once you start getting close to the clay. I had some moderate success this time around.  This oroborus only smudged on one edge, with is doing pretty good. However these […]

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Low Carb Chocolate Chip Cookies

Skip to the recipe I’ve tried a couple different low-carb cookie recipes, and right now this one is my favorite.  For one thing, you could almost forget you were eating a low-carb baked good.  But it’s not from a cookbook; I reverse-engineered it from cookies we found at our local health food store. The cookies in […]

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Of Black Holes and Jellyfish

These jellyfish charms are super cute and I’ve been eager to try this out for a while.  The biggest change I made is that the tentacles and the top (body?) of mine are separate, allowing for some movement. But do you notice that one at the end?  That blue one that looks a little lonely?

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