Sewing failures and successes, 5th Gate planning, and FTL
This was a blessedly free weekend, during which I:
- Worked on the new outline for Lioness. Trucking along through the middle now.
- Had lots of sewing failures, and some sewing success?
First I finished everything but the facings on the shift in this pattern, only to discover the size I'd made (24) was basically falling off me. It's a combination of problems--my short torso, the fact that I have tiny arms and shoulders relative to my bust and waist, and the epic 13-14 inches of ease to the pattern!(!!) I really should have taken the ease into account when I decided which size to cut. I could have probably gone down to an 18 and still accommodated my bust and waist measurements. I could literally take four inches out of it all the way around and still have it fit. It'd still be falling off my shoulders, but...
I set that aside, because it was not a high priority--I just wanted to finish it before I began work on sewing for 5th Gate. Instead I turned to this pattern, purchased when Joann's had its last 99 cent sale on Simplicity patterns. I started to cut out the tissue, and in the process I discovered that I had accidentally purchased the 6-14 size instead of the 14-24 size. *headdesk*
Giving up on that project, I started making my cloak/invocation circle instead. I used a tutorial, and some blue velveteen my mother had bought for a cloak when I was 15 or 16--I remember it was right before I went to France, and I had ideas of embroidering it with silk ribbon embroidery, which was trendy at the time.
Luckily, third time was a charm. The only complication was that making it out of velveteen required some additional finagling to keep the nap going in the right direction and not crush the pile. But I managed not to fuck anything up!
Then, however, I needed to figure out what the hell the design of my invocation circle was going to be, because it needed to be embroidered/appliqued/otherwise attached before I either lined or hemmed the cloak--as hand-work will probably stretch the material. Which led to another thing I did this weekend:
- Designed my invocation circle for 5th Gate. Or a first draft of it at least. See below:
This needs significant adjustment. For one, I need to actually get all the geometric patterns to line up--I suck at Photoshop, and in the process of making this learned a lot of better ways to do things. (For example, the ability to make circles of fixed size rather than always trying to eyeball it. Or how paths work). Also I didn't so much make use of layers, which makes future adjustments difficult.
Yes, Illustrator would probably have been a better tool for this, but I suck even more at Illustrator than I do at Photoshop
For another, I need to orient the symbols and the text so that when I am wearing the cloak, they are all facing the same direction -- so everything needs to face outwards from the center. I also think I will move some objects, as it is somewhat unevenly divided between front and back.
Funnily enough, almost everything in this circle means something--except the colors! They were mostly just to differentiate one piece from another. But the other stuff had meaning. Sort of.
* I used these instructions on how to draw a transmutation circle, which I think is inspired by the anime Fullmetal Alchemist (not certain, tho, because I've never seen FMA--I just know it through geek osmosis). It's unclear how seriously the author takes this stuff, because most of the explanation is nonsense ("here we have the promary effect area"), but it's okay, nonsense is exactly what I need for a fantasy mage/healer character!
* Inside the "strucota to focus the forces and make them more precise," I put the alchemical symbols for water and earth, which seemed the most relevant to healing.
* The "adjustment points" on the outside are three alchemical processes that seemed most relevant to healing--fixation, multiplication, and sublimation. In the rim around the edge, next to each circle, I took a quote from George Ripley's 1591 alchemy treatise, The Compound of Alchymy, written in the Theban or "witches" alphabet cipher. (Why, yes, there is a free downloadable font for that!) The quotes are:
- Multiplication: "in virtue multiplied, and our medicine right so"
- Fixation (I think this is the same as Conjunction in Ripley.... if not, oh well): "Of body, soul, and spirit, that they not strive"
- Sublimation: "The first cause is, to make the body spiritual."
* The inner symbols, or "operators," are the three alchemical primes, just as described in the wikipedia article. Finding these characters seriously took the longest time, poring over character maps of symbol fonts. I ended up having to use SVG images cribbed from Wikipedia for the sulfur and mercury ones.
* The middle is where I stand ;) I am the product of this alchemical transmutation. It makes about as much sense as anything in here does!
Somehow still in this weekend I had time to...
- Play some FTL, poorly. This was my "fuck sewing, let's do something instant gratification-y" activity. At skyknyt's advice, I decided to use the AE stuff ("advanced equipment?"), and since I've unlocked it, I used the B version of the Kestrel, called the Red-Tail. I still didn't manage to win, dying mid-Last Stand a couple of times.
This was perhaps a poor choice of an instant gratification game, because nothing is more frustrating than losing a crew member to a random away mission which suddenly involves face-eating spiders.
- Worked on the new outline for Lioness. Trucking along through the middle now.
- Had lots of sewing failures, and some sewing success?
First I finished everything but the facings on the shift in this pattern, only to discover the size I'd made (24) was basically falling off me. It's a combination of problems--my short torso, the fact that I have tiny arms and shoulders relative to my bust and waist, and the epic 13-14 inches of ease to the pattern!(!!) I really should have taken the ease into account when I decided which size to cut. I could have probably gone down to an 18 and still accommodated my bust and waist measurements. I could literally take four inches out of it all the way around and still have it fit. It'd still be falling off my shoulders, but...
I set that aside, because it was not a high priority--I just wanted to finish it before I began work on sewing for 5th Gate. Instead I turned to this pattern, purchased when Joann's had its last 99 cent sale on Simplicity patterns. I started to cut out the tissue, and in the process I discovered that I had accidentally purchased the 6-14 size instead of the 14-24 size. *headdesk*
Giving up on that project, I started making my cloak/invocation circle instead. I used a tutorial, and some blue velveteen my mother had bought for a cloak when I was 15 or 16--I remember it was right before I went to France, and I had ideas of embroidering it with silk ribbon embroidery, which was trendy at the time.
Luckily, third time was a charm. The only complication was that making it out of velveteen required some additional finagling to keep the nap going in the right direction and not crush the pile. But I managed not to fuck anything up!
Then, however, I needed to figure out what the hell the design of my invocation circle was going to be, because it needed to be embroidered/appliqued/otherwise attached before I either lined or hemmed the cloak--as hand-work will probably stretch the material. Which led to another thing I did this weekend:
- Designed my invocation circle for 5th Gate. Or a first draft of it at least. See below:
This needs significant adjustment. For one, I need to actually get all the geometric patterns to line up--I suck at Photoshop, and in the process of making this learned a lot of better ways to do things. (For example, the ability to make circles of fixed size rather than always trying to eyeball it. Or how paths work). Also I didn't so much make use of layers, which makes future adjustments difficult.
Yes, Illustrator would probably have been a better tool for this, but I suck even more at Illustrator than I do at Photoshop
For another, I need to orient the symbols and the text so that when I am wearing the cloak, they are all facing the same direction -- so everything needs to face outwards from the center. I also think I will move some objects, as it is somewhat unevenly divided between front and back.
Funnily enough, almost everything in this circle means something--except the colors! They were mostly just to differentiate one piece from another. But the other stuff had meaning. Sort of.
* I used these instructions on how to draw a transmutation circle, which I think is inspired by the anime Fullmetal Alchemist (not certain, tho, because I've never seen FMA--I just know it through geek osmosis). It's unclear how seriously the author takes this stuff, because most of the explanation is nonsense ("here we have the promary effect area"), but it's okay, nonsense is exactly what I need for a fantasy mage/healer character!
* Inside the "strucota to focus the forces and make them more precise," I put the alchemical symbols for water and earth, which seemed the most relevant to healing.
* The "adjustment points" on the outside are three alchemical processes that seemed most relevant to healing--fixation, multiplication, and sublimation. In the rim around the edge, next to each circle, I took a quote from George Ripley's 1591 alchemy treatise, The Compound of Alchymy, written in the Theban or "witches" alphabet cipher. (Why, yes, there is a free downloadable font for that!) The quotes are:
- Multiplication: "in virtue multiplied, and our medicine right so"
- Fixation (I think this is the same as Conjunction in Ripley.... if not, oh well): "Of body, soul, and spirit, that they not strive"
- Sublimation: "The first cause is, to make the body spiritual."
* The inner symbols, or "operators," are the three alchemical primes, just as described in the wikipedia article. Finding these characters seriously took the longest time, poring over character maps of symbol fonts. I ended up having to use SVG images cribbed from Wikipedia for the sulfur and mercury ones.
* The middle is where I stand ;) I am the product of this alchemical transmutation. It makes about as much sense as anything in here does!
Somehow still in this weekend I had time to...
- Play some FTL, poorly. This was my "fuck sewing, let's do something instant gratification-y" activity. At skyknyt's advice, I decided to use the AE stuff ("advanced equipment?"), and since I've unlocked it, I used the B version of the Kestrel, called the Red-Tail. I still didn't manage to win, dying mid-Last Stand a couple of times.
This was perhaps a poor choice of an instant gratification game, because nothing is more frustrating than losing a crew member to a random away mission which suddenly involves face-eating spiders.