Silver Case

Now that I have some sewing skills, I thought I’d try some patterns. So if Mary, Mom, Shannon, and Megan want to send me their measurements, I’ll get their frocks down in time for Spring.

My brother in law gave me this cool present today, a self-maintaining jar-of-fire.

In the present, we have sewing machine reference cards that sew themselves

My Singer 20u Professional is a very capable sewing machine. The operating latitude is much wider. I trivially punch through eight layers of cordura and denim and make tidy seams, and I’ve also sewn 1/8″ hems on gossamer-thin silk.

The trade-off? There is no single tension setting that will work under all those circumstances, especially when I am changing thread types from cotton embroidery thread to heavy duty quilting-thread. Sewing under ‘home conditions’ normally I can just adjust top-thread tension and get the stitch I want. However, after lots of flailing, I realize I do have to adjust bobbin thread tension, at least sometimes.

In wandering around the 2-dimensional(*) adjustment matrix, I was confusing myself, mis-interpreting problems, and really wasting a lot of time, thread, and material. So today I decided to make myself a reference card set of the front/back of stitches as I moved around the top and bottom tension axes.

I used my Gutterman cotton/cotton quilting thread (red color on top, black on bottom) and two layers of canvas duck. I found a decent stitch setting, ran a row, and then methodically tightened the tension dial, running new stitches. Once I had gone as tight as made sense, I tried to go back to zero. Who knows how close I got, so I called my new location 0′ and then loosened the tension until it got silly.

I was suprised how much of a tolerable range of tension the machine had. The scans aren’t ideal, but from the fabric itself, I can see a lot of detail, and with the markings, it’s in context, so I can interpret it much better.

I did the same procedure for the bobbin thread tension. The adjustments here are much finer and more precise and give less latitude. It’s also easier to see exactly where I was set, so I had no need for the Zero Prime marker.

 

In looking at stitches, I wish I had something better than my naked eye and a really optically-lame magnifying glass on a cheap solder station. Having a stereoscope would be tremendous, especially when I am not using bobbin and top threads of different color.

(*) I’m also not sure that this tensioning is a 2d matrix. I suspect there is interaction with the fabrics themselves, and also vaguely suspicious that remaining thread on the bobbin makes a difference. I know I had a bad wind once (my own fault) and it seemed to give me an unusable bobbin. I ended up hacking the thread away.

The stairs to the attic have been welded up, and now a (rough) crew welders is modifying the bracing to get the struts out of way of the room. These guys are a bit edgy and hairy… sporting black eyes and dark expressions. Seems appropriate that they’d be upstairs in a dark attack doing the loud, brutal work.

Staircase from the attic down to my study

Woei’s Christmas present is a custom-sized pouch to hold the Playstation Portable PSP his stewardess girlfriend gave him.

I made it out of 400denier Cordura in a MARPAT pattern. The inner lining is made from a 1951 aviator’s escape-and-evasion silk map.

The purple zipper is a little highlight to remind you of the blue led’s favored by the sony PSP.

Lessons learned? Is there some sort of glue that I can seal the edge of silk with? It wants to unravel at all costs. This map is not pure silk. When I burn it, it leaves some plastic turd-blob.

---

UPDATE: I have a rolled or double hemmer foot in my collection. It feeds in the fabric, does a double roll, and sews it into a flat, neat hem. I tried it once, in the store, and it was a disaster. The machine was too fast, I didn’t feed it properly, and it was a joke. The lady demoed it effortlessly. But I checked tonight and found some online instructions. After a couple tries on the very fine, weak silk evasion maps, I know have the basic idea of it, and can do a passable job. Another couple meters of it, and I’ll be fine. So what this means is I can put a strong, tidy hem into my pieces of silk, which means no more ravelling, and no need to glue or do anything else obscene. wheee!

I made my first lined pouch today. It turned into Tien Lee’s Christmas present. Not really sure what she’ll keep in it, as it’s roughly the dimension of a 6-stick pack of White Owls.

Now that I have a lined pouch and a zipper under my belt, I’m going to do something a bit more subtle, using some of my silk evasion maps as a liner.

Zig Zag Stitch testing

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

I screwed around with the embroidery and zig-zag settings of the u20. I’m optimistic that with some practice, this machine can produce some pretty sharp embroidery on top of 1000 denier Cordura.

I need to talk to the seller. I can’t find the hemming foot. I know I used it at their demo a few weeks ago. The only other foot like that is a double-hem and I can’t figure out how to load and feed it properly.

Now I need to start working on a project. I’m thinking about making a proper travel documents carrier.

53U07UX1ML
RJ03GD3CI3
YS164FDY07
8YIBLB40QH
PBMCH0CMCK
Z2EFUHEBXW
P6KHN2F6WQ
XID0EM37J8
HQYQDAZVXN
Z86TQUDWNB

I am just back from a five-day Tokyo trip. Workers have accomplished quite a bit at the house. It’s starting to look like a place now.

Curiously, the more they tile and finish it, the larger it looks. Not sure why. Perhaps because the lighting is better, and the walls don’t look like a concrete cave.

Unfortunately it’s an optical illusion. We are going to have to go through a serious purging of House Slater before we move in.

My Singer u20 Professional arrived today, tuned and accessorized. I even got an english manual.

After ripping through some canvas duck, I pulled out some of the hunks of leather I’d bought in Tokyo. Sure enough, with a proper leather needle, I sewed through quarter-inch leather with no problems. I need to get a better selection of leather needles, though. My machine takes commercial (round shank) needles. Although I can install home-use needles, they are not strong enough. My machine snapped one of the home use needles. I need to get some 16-20 shank leather commercial sewing needles before I can do much.

After playing with leather, I wanted to work on applique using the kimono fabric I’d bought in Tokyo and some of the 800d cordura fabric I’d bought in Singapore. Accidentally, my embroidery thread color matched the kimono.

As a second attempt, it worked out really well. The poorer sections of the stitching here was because I hadn’t threaded the bobbin correctly. After I got that resolved, it worked perfectly. This machine has a knee-operated lever to lift the presser foot. This turns out to be terrific for sewing the curves in applique. A small lift makes it easier to smoothly turn the piece.

Now I need to go make something proper I guess.

Brown spots or mushy ends on bananas readily make me gag. I generally can’t stand them unless they’re nearly green and entirely unmolested.

That’s why I recoiled in horror at the idea of a pump that sucks the guts out of a banana and re-injects it with cremes. Just the thought of that giant pump full of a banana slurry makes me want to puke right now.

I’m still struggling to get embedded Youtubes to not screw up my whole page layout. Changing themes didn’t seem to help. I think that I need to use a youtube brackets plugin, but right now the host site is down, so I just disabled the most recent post w/ a youtube video embedded in it.

Anyway, in the meantime it is easy enough to change themes on wordpress, so I am just leaving this test theme here. And I replaced the trite picture of the SF Bay bridge with a trite photo of my own (taken from our original RC KAP rig at Half Moon Bay way back in 2001?)

Last I checked, I was going to get a Yamato DP-1111 Industrial Sewing machine. I went by the shop today to check it out, and they showed me another model, a Singer Professional 20u. They actually recommended I take the Singer instead. It has the same functionality (straight and zig-zag) as the Yamato, almost the same power, and parts (including speciality feet) are much, much easier to get hold over. As an added bonus, it cost $750 as opposed to the $1000 Yamato.

I tried it out and it tore though many layers of my toughest fabrics, so I have no concern about its power. I did long seams of applique run, and the stitching was uniform. It was manufactured in Japan, unlike modern Singers, so it has the same build quality as the Yamato. I think I will be able to get a manual for it as well.

They’re going to deliver it to me next Thursday, a public holiday (Hari Raya Haji), the day after I get back from five days in Tokyo. Wheeee can’t wait.

Story talking about captchas and ticket scalping.

I guess the real point here is:

If scalpers are getting 250$ for tickets they bought from TicketMaster for $60, then why doesn’t Ticketmaster simply charge 250$ themselves?  Any sane businessman or economist would do this.

Perhaps  the reason they don’t is that it would cause too much hue-and-cry and bring more attention to the fact that TicketMaster is a de facto monopoly. This might jeopardize their entire business.

So why does TicketMaster make noise about scalpers?  Perhaps to divert the public’s hatred from TicketMaster onto the scalpers?  Or just because TicketMaster is bitter that they can’t capture every last dollar of the concert ticketing.

Debkafile claims that the Iran Nuclear Weapons assessment was issued as part of a quid pro quo agreement brokered by Saudi Arabia between Iran and the USA.

It’s astonishing how the USA has been so badly outplayed in the Middle East. The administration’s blinding hubris reminds me a lot of the House of Representatives, led by Newt Gingrich, after they took control of Congress in 1994. Republican leaders wanted to fight and destroy everything, giving no quarter and no compromise. They inevitably over-extended themselves, building up a huge inventory of capable enemies, and winding up with shockingly little progress to their agenda.

In 2001, seeing what American was apparently doing to Afghanistan, the DPRK, Libya, and Iraq, the Iranians were scared and very keen to come to some agreement with the USA. But the Administration was so full of itself that it told relative-moderate Rafsanjani to fuck off. But of course it’s folly to think that the Iranians would simply roll over and die. They’d have to play whatever hand they had left. And now, six years later, Iran has got itself much closer to power parity in the Middle East than it did years ago.

The worst immediate loser from all this is Israel. I’m not sure how much sympathy the world has left for Israel, but no one should forget what ends Israel would go for self-preservation. Now they must feel further backed into a corner.

More and more Bush and Rice have, as they say, fucked things into a cocked hat.

As always, comments are OFF. This is my blog.

From ebay I bought an old print of a Soviet Submarine moored alongside a surface ship in 1979.

The legend has a bunch of details

Squadron: VS 33

Pilot: Lt Goulding, Ltjg Baker

Name: Oskol AR/Tango Sub

CTV: UR

Coordinates: 3606N 01051E

???: ANCHOR

Sensor: 35mm

FL: 100

Alt: 500

Slant Range: [not indicated]

MSN NO: [not indicated]

DTG: 150702Z May 79

Class: Folio

VS 33 is a an antisubmarine flight squadron attached to carrier group 9.

In May 1979 two pilots photographed this Soviet submarine with their plain 35mm camera and a 100mm lens. Not exactly ultra-spy material.

One thing I am not sure of is the location. 36.06N and 010.51E gives me a location only 1.5 miles offshore Tunisia. Doesn’t this seem sort of close to shore? But if I use 01.051E, that puts me in the middle of an Algerian desert. Is there any other interpretation of these coordinates that might make more sense?

An Oskol AR vessel is a Soviet repair ship. A tango-class submarine is a conventional attack submarine.

 

 

Does anyone know anything more about this, or how to better interpret the photo and its legend?

What a liar.

U.S. President George W. Bush “has no recollection” of videotapes of CIA interrogations of some al Qaeda suspects

I think anyone who’d seen a videotape of a waterboarding would not struggle to remember it.

These righteous idiots’ charades seem to be crumbling at an accelerating rate. January 2009 won’t be able to come soon enough for this administration.

Ling was putting Luke to bed.   I try not to be around, because it means I have to sit in the dark and wait for him to fall asleep.  It’s trying.  So instead, I took my bike out and went to a Jazz Club that I had heard about.  Unfortunately, I went there at 7pm. At that point there are no customers and there is no music.  Band doesn’t start until 9pm.

So I went off in search of something else.  I ended up stopping at a totally random street-food place that was quite busy.  I pointed at what the other tables were eating and said I’d have that.  One table was eating towgay (bean sprouts) which I love to eat.

They brought me a heineken, this bean sprout dish, and a plate of, basically, fried rice.

The heineken was cold.

The towgay dish was bean sprouts stir-fried with mixed animal organs and quail eggs.  I don’t know exactly what parts, but things like bits of kidney, liver, esophagus, lung, whatever.   The towgay wasn’t cooked adequately so it had that nasty rhyzome/green taste to it.

The fried rice was quite oily, but what was weirder was that it was cooked to the point that %25 of it was cooked to a crisp.  Not very pleasant.

Then I looked under the tiny table I was sitting at (everyone sits on tiny stools 6″ off the ground and tables 14″ off the ground), kicking away all the waste paper and squeezed limes, to reveal approximately a half-dozen gnawed-on chicken claws-and-calf.  That was pretty rude.

Airborne

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

Still puttering around. Luke’s cold has took a notable turn for the better. He’s not producing 12oz of snot each day, for instance.

Luke keeps asking to go see the (water) puppets again. Ling keeps persistently saying he won’t be interested a second time. I doubt her. So tomorrow she’s going shopping and he and I are going to the puppet theatre again.

Ate at a “well thought of” (a friend told me about it, I didn’t go based on the insipid review) restaurant, Green Tangerine, today. Lot of decorative French fusion. ZZZZZZZZzzzzzz.

It brought me to the realization that, like Steve McQueen, I demand authenticity [in my food]. (McQueen demanded authenticity in his crummy movies). Real stuff, where the focus is more on using best ingredients and preparing it right and with care. Not, like tonight’s example, covering a dull fish tartare (really just a ceviche) with a “latticework of homemade pasta.” The pasta was bone white. They used a fucked-up flour for it, and I think it wasn’t air-dried. That’s why it looked and tasted like soft paste.

*Also, the softshell crab appetizer was shit. They put so much fucking oregano in the marina that it stunk. The last time I ate something so over-herbed was when Megan and I poisoned ourself with a pizza made mostly of sage.

It’s alright, because I found a really good guide to the food scene in Hanoi. It gives excellent citations (so far everything I’ve tried has been good) and it gives current, accurate addresses. I find Hanoi perhaps the easiest city I’ve ever had to navigate. Every single street is clearly marked (unlike Chengdu). Every single building is clearly and consistently numbered (unlike Tokyo). And I bought a small street directory book (instead of a crappy folding tourist map) which is complete and accurate and indexed.

I unfolded my Dahon this evening and took it out for an hour’s spin while Ling put Luke to bed. It was teriffic. The temperature was mid 60s? A temperature that you don’t even notice, yet just cool enough that even at 80% exertion on my bike, I wouldn’t sweat. The driving scene here is insane, so it felt like being a bicycle courier or something, weaving traffic, swerving, wrong-ways on one-ways, etc. Although, it’s actually quite harmless and there is some sort of chaotic organization to the place. Sort of like how they say flocks of birds or fish show complex organization even though they have no leader and they follow only a few simple rules.

Hoa Binh Dam

Photographed by Cục Sắt.
We took a two-hour drive into the countryside today to visit the Hoa Binh Hydroelectric dam.

The dam was started in 1979 and finished in 1994 (I think) at the cost of, apparently, one hundred eighty “workers and expatriates [Soviet workers]”.

I was disappointed, as when I heard “dam tour”, I thought that would include seeing the power generation/internals. I was looking forward to seeing nasty 1970s Soviet Power Engineering. Alas, this is still an ostensibly communist country and they still enjoy their petty secrecies, so I only got to see the damn wall and sluice gates. Apparently there are eight 240mW turbines at the facility.

Also, these photos are not mine. This time of year the air is terribly hazy. It was also 2pm, perhaps the worst time of the day to take a photo. Lastly, the sluices are closed. So the gate was dry as a bone. Instead I am including this link to a photos from a more ferocious time of the year. For my own photos, I settled for some moody shots that I might work into a photo fiction some day.

The 41 Springleaf update I received today

•   started tiling works at kitchen and bathrooms
•   awning works still in progress
•   electrical and plumbing in progress
•   concrete works at side and backyard done
•   started drainage works
•   covering floor at attic done partially.

“Now you have the U.S. intelligence community coming out and saying formally that Iran halted its weapons program four years ago. This will certainly undercut any push to get new sanctions,” she added.

Iran must be absolutely astonished that the US would allow this to happen.

Bush and  Rice look like abject fools.

“People need the opportunity to absorb what they’ve heard,” Rice said. “We have been completely transparent about what the intelligence assessment says. And people need a chance to read it. When they do that and when they read it in its detail and nuance, they will be able to see the points that I have made.”

mmm… yes… details and nuance zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz   Get real.

I guess this is essentially the end of the Bush Presidency. Losing South Korea. Losing Russia.  Recession and seriously wrecked financials. Iraq quagmire. Pointless Israel/Palestine peace efforts. And now utter capitulation towards Iran.

I have played the “seafarers” variant of Catan. I think we all found it guilty of making the game more complex faster than it made it better. Tonight I discovered a second variation that I must confess I enjoyed a lot.

Called ‘Full Explorers’ gamemap, it has a bigger map area. And offshore are a lot of unknown white tiles. There is a new piece to buy, a ship (wood and sheep) which is the equivalent of a seaborne road. As you move offshore you start uncovering new territories and are rewarded with the resources you find. Apparently settlements built on this new territory count as two points. There is a resource card in the most extreme corner that looks like a waterfall. This, if you score it, allows you to choose which resource you want.

Anyway, I played it twice. The first time was a serendipitous accident. I had no idea what was going on, but I managed to score 2nd. The next time I played it, I won.

It added enough new stuff to make it interesting, yet not cumbersome. I’d play it again. I am not sure if this is an invention of “asobrain” or a true variation from the Settlers manufacturers.

If you are annoyed that I am writing about Settlers of Catan instead of my Hanoi Vacation, go look at flickr instead….

Waiting for Flight to Hanoi

Originally uploaded by karavshin.
A day’s worth of photos posted