Best viewed in a narrow window, or at a very large font size.
This is the weblog for 2006 through 2015.
For entries starting January 2016, see Weblog 2016 — ?

 

This is a list of changes to the site.

If you are disappointed that I didn't mean the newer sense of "blog", see laetitia_apis — I rarely post on Live Journal, but any comments you leave there are forwarded to an address that isn't unusably infested with spam, at least not yet.

I'm on Facebook too.  I don't try to keep up with the convulsions of the site, but the last time I knew, messages left in my Facebook inbox were supposed to be e-mailed to me.

and I read alt.sewing nearly every day.


⁂     ⁂     ⁂     ⁂     ⁂     ⁂     ⁂     ⁂     ⁂

2 January 2016

While cleaning up in December, I spine-indexed one of the old sewing diaries on the Table of contents. (I mean that I compiled the sort of index one finds on the spines of the better how-to magazines.

Today I began logging changes to the site in WEBLOG2.HTM.

 

26 December 2015

I added some pictures to "Pictures of Tools", which is linked from the top entry in "Plain-Text Files" in the Table of Contents.

Forgot to change the "last edited" entry.  I'm not sure there is any.

There was.  I changed it from May to December.

I polished a rough spot in WEBLOG2.HTM.  I think it's ready to start receiving new entries next Friday.

 

16 December 2015

Found and corrected a broken link on PAGEJOY/LINKS/WRITING.HTM.

 

15 December 2015

I wanted a picture of a hat for a Usenet post, discovered that I'd never photographed the finished product in the blog of hatmaking in 2014SEW1.HTM, took a picture and added it, then figured out how to make a relative link from PAGEJOY to PAGESEW.  This won't work if I want to link to something on PAGEN3F, because I call it N3F on the server, and don't want to change the name of the local copy.  But I can relative-link *from* PAGEN3F, should I want to.

Also made a new file in the directory on PAGEJOY for 2015 century rides.  Only directory for bicycle stuff I've got.  And I put the picture of the *other* hat in HATBLOG/; seemed as good a place as any.

5 December 2015

Found some Comcast links and repaired them, corrected an error in EMBROGIG.HTM and added a comment about scissors in the remarks about drawing threads.

Created a file for a new blog; when I want to start over on New Year's Day, all I'll have to do is to change the pointer in my shortcut.

 

27 November 2015

Noticed that the arrow tutorial needs more work.  Also noticed that the link from the contents page and the link from my sewing diary go different places — at least, the tutorial you get to from the contents page has pictures, and the tutorial you get to from the diary doesn't.  To a casual glance, they are the same file names.

Maybe I'll postpone working on it until I've taken an entirely new set of photographs.

Uploaded a few more illustrations for the diary.  I'm beginning to think I'll get to wear my new jacket before the weather turns warm.

 

13 November 2015

Found and repaired a bunch of broken image links and other mistakes, deleted one of the obsolete references to Comcast.

Maintaining a web site would be easier if the readers would complain!

 

3 November 2015

Linked to a tutorial on how to embroider arrows as temporary markings, cleaned some obsolete stuff off the table of contents, made some minor changes to the file on marking.

While uploading the above, I noticed that this file is kind of huge.  I think I'll start a new one at New Year's.

If I haven't forgotten about it by then.

 

28 October 2015

Realized that the back-up on Drive E was out of date, cleaned up the files and mirrored them onto E, since they were cleaned up, this was a good time to freshen the back-up on XP, since XP was fresh, this was a good time to FileZilla PAGESEW to Peakey.

So if there were any broken links on the site, they should be working now.  E-mail me if you find a flaw.

The two photos on 2015SEW2 that I haven't scaled yet don't count.  (I plan to do that this afternoon.)

 

7 October 2015

Linked to the page where I speculate about making all of a length of fabric into a circle skirt.

 

14 August 2015

Found and deleted another Comcast link.  I'll have to do a search on "comcast" in all my files Real Soon Now.

 

13 August 2015

I tried to renew Sewing Made Simple this morning and found that I'd used up all my renewals.  My bookmark is on page nine.  I think I'd better give up my plan to review all the sewing books in the library.

 

11 August 2015

While trying to look up my instructions for making panties, I found that nothing on the Table of Contents after the horizontal rule showed until a place that isn't "-->".  I eventually deleted the "horizontal rule here" comment, and things mysteriously started working again.

Also deleted the word "always" from the briefs instructions in ROUGH039.HTM.  Didn't bother trying to figure out why I couldn't type in "ROUGH039.HTM" and went to it through ED.DIR.  There's no way I could have typed "O" instead of "0".  … unless the caps lock key was on.

Just checked:  this file works fine despite having that exact same comment at the top.

?????

 

6 August 2015

Took a picture of my shoebox of elastic; when I went to name it, I found that there was already a file by that name.  But I like the new one better.  Started making an index file for the pictures of notions.

 

21 July 2015

Made a few notes in the Embrogig file.

 

16 July 2015

Just got notice that all my Comcast Web pages will be erased on October 8.  Gotta edit all of them to say so, and give the Peaky address for each.

Well, once I've done so, I can stop updating the Comcast pages.

So go to http://wlweather.net/PAGESEW/WEBLOG.HTM for the latest news.

 

10 July 2015

The book-review page now has two citations on it.  I don't think I've put a link to it on the table of contents.  Will look into that when there's something to read on the page.

Man, books today have a lot of characters in their ID — and we thought the victorians with their long multipart titles were wordy!

Didn't help that in one book what I needed to copy was in teeny type on a pinkish-orange ground.

 

24 June 2015

Added an index to 2014 sewing diary, correcting a few typos in the process.  Saw lots more and didn't correct them.

 

18 June 2015

Yesterday I added two pictures to 2015SEW1.HTM.

 

10 June 2015

Checking a link that I wanted to put into 2015SEW1, I discovered that the link to the pictures of tools was broken, and that quite a few of the pictures hadn't been uploaded to the servers.  Corrected that.  Also discovered that the picture I wanted to link to hadn't been taken yet; didn't correct that.

 

4 June 2015

Added an index to the link to my current sewing diary, with the intention of indexing the back numbers as time permits.  I don't look so lazy when all the projects of a year are mushed together on one line!

 

3 June 2015

I spell-checked 2015SEW1.HTM this evening, and replaced some "—"s with "—"s.

 

31 May 2015

I cropped and scaled pictures for the last incomplete links in 2015SEW1.HTM this evening.  I may leave the photographs that are merely listed as they are.

 

30 May 2015

Oops!  I scanned a pattern, forgot that I had created BLOG3XIV, and created BLOG4XIV.  Oh, well, I'll need it before the year is out.

I scaled the scan, but didn't process any of the old images; there's still at least one for April 29.

 

27 May 2015

BLOG2XV is cluttered and doesn't include any pictures of my current project, so I started BLOG3XV.  No immediate plans to put pictures in it.

I've figured out how to copy documents on the scanner:  Let it make its PDF file, then use Gimp to extract the actual image.

Cropped and scaled two pictures for 2015SEW1 last night.  And uploaded them to both copies of the site.

 

26 May 2015

After entering today's sewing report into 2015SEW1.HTM, I read the note saying I'd left off at "sewed some hardware cloth", and decided not to process those pictures.  But I plan to process something before going to bed, just to be able to change the note.

 

15 May 2015

Scaled and uploaded a bunch more pictures for 2015SEW1 today.  Started by processing today's take of pictures, then opened the file with Pale Moon and paged down from the top looking for alternate text.

 

3 May 2015

Scaled and uploaded four of the uncompleted pictures in 2015SEW.  Four down, umpty-bump to go.

The almost-readable (calling a PDF an e-book should be a horsewhipping offense) manual for my camera says Web quality is 640 x 480 pixels.  I've been using 600 x 450.  Perhaps I should make my pictures a little bigger.

 

29 April 2015

Took a picture for a mailing-list post, added it to my 2015 sewing diary, discovered that everything after February the twenty-sixth was centered, spent the whole morning correcting errors found by the W3C validator.  Never found the one that caused the centering, but it stopped a while before I got to that date in my correcting.

Also noticed that I have a lot of incomplete photographs in that file.

 

23 April 2015

Added a paragraph to ROUGH015.TXT:  ripping seams

 

18 April 2015

I still haven't written up the calling-card sewing kit.
 

12 April 2015

Corrected a broken link in the Table of Contents; noticed that "slipped clove hitch" had been left out of Knots.
 

2 April 2015

Proofread "Pleat Math" and added Peakey to the exit links.  In the process of checking the changes, I discovered that a lot of my links to the Comcast copy of Rough Sewing were broken.  Since Comcast is flaky, it took me a while to suspect that the mistake was mine:  I'd somehow copied an index.html from another directory into PAGESEW.

 

13 March 2015

I've started BLOG2XV, but will put any new pictures of the jacket into BLOG1XV.

I'm planning to start writing a fold-bottom pocket tutorial today.  I haven't decided whether to move the pictures into a directory for the tutorial and change all the links to them in 2015SEW.HTM, copy them into another directory to save changing the links, or link to them where they sit.  The first, I think; it will be easy enough to locate the broken links by viewing 2015SEW.HTM with the browser on the other computer.

5 March 2015

When the jacket is finished, I'll close out BLOG1XV and start BLOG2XV.  BLOG1XV is already too cluttered to work with.

4 March 2015

Today I learned that Gimp allows you to nudge a selection to a precise height and width, and promptly cropped a picture to 600 pixels instead of scaling it to 600 pixels.  Well, I went poking around looking for such a feature because I though that that was a good idea.

I hate, hate, hate the controls on my new scanner.  They don't allow any control; click "photo" and get a JPG, click "document" and get a PDF, and that's about it.  No bitmaps and no GIF.  Sometimes I think I'll plug in the old scanner and see whether it's really dead.  The old one took a few extra clicks to crop automatically, but it allowed me to decide what it would do.  The on-screen manual says "see the on-line manual" — and the on-line manual is an exact duplicate of the on-screen manual.

I did four more pages of Pretty Plain yesterday, but they are over-sized and have little contrast.  I can't honestly proceed with this project until I find out how to trick the scanner into making usable copies.

 

28 February 2015

I've figured out what causes the crashes, or at least how to prevent them.  All I need to do is to exit the file manager before I detach Drive G.

 

23 February 2015

Today I finally realized that when I'm adding a picture to the diary, I should fill in the ALT text before I fill in the filespecs — that way I can see what the alt text looks like.

I edit with the source on one computer and the file open in a browser on the other.  How did I ever get on when I had only one computer?

And now I'm labeling each day's batch of pictures with the date as well as the stage of construction — makes it a lot easier to see where to put them.

But the first two pictures I take tomorrow will be for today.  It was too dim to get a focused shot of the finished shoulder seams.

Perhaps I should read the camera manual!

The out-of-focus effect I get in dim light appears to be shaky cam; I should pay more attention to bracing against something solid when I shoot.

 

14 February 2015

I was tired at wrapping-up time yesterday and didn't feel like making links for the raw pictures I'd taken, and came up with a better idea.

I just copied the filespecs and descriptions that I would use for creating the links from ED.DIR to the day's entry and put "<pre></pre>" tags around the plain text.  This guarantees that I'll know where the pictures go, and guarantees that I'll notice that those pictures need to be cropped and scaled.

I haven't done much cropping lately.  I'm getting better at framing my shots — and less fussy about including useless background.  One can scale and save-as pretty fast if one doesn't stop to think!

I've been taking a lot of pictures so that I can illustrate "pockets" and "basting"; I intend to make each illustration set a separate file that can be linked to from plain text, then incorporated when that file's turn to be hypertexted comes up.

Hypertexting is a lot of work, because the whole chapter has to be re-written from an essay meant to be read from top to bottom into a work of reference.

 

11 February 2015

Sigh.  While validating 2015SEW1.HTM, I finally figured out that one is not permitted to put a non-breaking space inside an anchor.  But one *must* put a printable character there, spaces are automatically omitted, and I don't want the anchor text to show.  Perhaps I must re-write ^h to put the anchor inside the header — but that was *terribly* complicated, and I never did figure out how to make it validate.

 

9 February 2015

Splash page made.  I think I'll leave the raw link raw.  It isn't as though there were a lot of pictures in a Web log.

 

7 February 2015

I have a big pile-up of photographs to crop, scale, write captions for, and figure out where in 2015SEW1.HTM they belong.  Epiphany:  from now on, I'll put in links from the raw file to the raw file on the day that I take them, and write as though the pictures were already there.  Then when I get around to editing the pictures, the link is already in the proper place, I don't need to remember why I took that picture, and there will be pictures of a sort for those who read the blog before I get around to doing it right.

The Peakey site is working, after a fashion, but all the absolute links take you to Comcast sites.  I need to keep one single original, but upload two slightly-different versions.  I don't think there is a way to do that.  Perhaps I could change all absolute links to relative links to a page of nothing but two sets of absolute links.

And those could be on the splash page I've been wanting for Rough Sewing for some time.  I've finally found the perfect cover decoration for a website about practical sewing:

patch in progress

Note total rawness of link, which will be corrected when I get around to editing the picture for the splash page.  In the meanwhile, click on "view image" and your browser will shrink it down enough that you can see it.

 

14 January 2015

Added a page of pictures.

Made assorted small edits.  I need to edit ^h to add a tab at the end.  Y'all won't notice if I do.

 

29 December 2014

Today I took a picture of the completed camera curtain to illustrate 2014SEW2.HTM.

The edit of ^h seems to have worked; it makes neater source code and seems to parse correctly.  It was more like starting from scratch; I edited the date header, then copied it with "record keystrokes" on.  Took several tries to get one without a fatal error.

I think there is at least one backspace that could be deleted along with the previous character, but I'd rather live with a self-correcting error than risk deleting the wrong backspace.

5 December 2014

While checking the off-site backups of the archive copies of the Beeson Banner, I discovered that some of files were empty.  So I uploaded a fresh copy of one of the files; the "0" changed to a suitable number, I replaced another empty file — and the first one was empty again.  I went a few rounds before giving up.  DH is investigating a site-hosting service for reasons of his own.  You may see all this stuff moved to a new address.  (I'll keep refreshing the Comcast site as long as it works at all, of course.)

I'm planning to re-redo the defining sequence of ctl-h, for cosmetic reasons.  Meanwhile, I edit after inserting the date.

 

1 December 2014

Re-wrote the defining sequence for ctl-h to insert the current date into documents of this sort correctly.

I hope.

Made a typo while entering, figured I'd search the number sequence for backspace and delete that character and the one before it, discovered that I had a few non-erroneous backspaces.  Should have made a note of where the mistake was.

Oh, well, it's the computer, not me, that has to do extra work.

Slipper blog spell-checked and validated.

Calling-card kit not even thought about.

Time to start spell-checking, validating, etc. the 2014 sewing diary.

 

 

25 November 2014

Final upload ready.  Still need to run it through the spell checker and the validator.  Have to upload before validating, of course.

Went to plug in the new picture of the villa-olive slippers, and discovered that the Daisy-Duck look was from failing to correct the length attribute, not from a bad camera angle.  Compared old and new pictures, chose the old one.  Compared old shot of black slippers to new one, old hasty shot over concrete is better than the careful shot over carpet.  But now there is finally a picture of the twinkle-twinkle slippers.  Also found and corrected a typo.

Still haven't written up the calling-card sewing kit.

In the process of uploading the missing photographs, I discovered that some pictures are missing from BROADJPG too.  Which led to backing and forthing, and deleting some pictures from the local copy instead of uploading them to the web.  I left in a photograph of my embrogig backpack and a picture of some weeds because I didn't know where to move them too.  No wonder no-one responded to my Usenet post asking people to look at the picture and tell me what the weeds were.  But I think I tested the link that I posted after it was posted — perhaps this page is also somewhere else.

Well, the page is uploaded now, so I can validate.

 

 

18 November 2014

The slipper blog is complete and uploaded.  Still need to do some proofreading and tweaking.  Also need to take a picture of the twinkle-twinkle slippers, and a better picture of the villa-olive slippers.

 

 

16 November 2014

Linked to some of the pictures I edited yesterday.

Still haven't written up the calling-card sewing kit.

 

 

15 November 2014

Finished the slippers and edited the photos; the project blog still needs a few hours of work.

 

 

9 November 2014

Wrote up yesterday's work and posted the updated file on the Web.

Still haven't written up the calling-card sewing kit.  (I'm going to repeat that until I do it.)

 

 

8 November 2014

Took some pictures that can be edited and added to the slipper blog.  Haven't written anything since the first entry.  Been thinking about what to say now and again.

Still haven't written up the calling-card sewing kit.  (I'm going to repeat that until I do it.)

 

 

6 November 2014

Today I started a project blog for my new slippers.

 

 

28 October 2014

Still haven't written up the calling-card sewing kit.

I have officially given up on documenting the construction of the black pedal pushers.  Now what use can I find for the few good photographs?

I'm about to create a new subdirectory to stash illustrations for RUFFTEXT in.

 

 

2 September 2014

Noticed today that I've never written up the calling-card sewing kit.

 

 

13 August 2014

Edited pictures of my loot from the flea market and posted them on my sewing blog http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/~roughsewing/2014SEW2.HTM

Noticed that I haven't added that blog to the table of contents.

 

 

25 July 2014

Fiddled a bit with the embrogig page today.

 

 

8 July 2014

I distinctly remember being quite certain that the word "all" would suffice to remind me of what I meant to say.  Can't blame the delay on the not-quite-a-derecho taking down the lines, as that didn't happen until July the first.

I polished up the first half of my 2014 sewing diary and uploaded it today.

Also fiddled with EMBROGIG.HTM and made a new gathering-line guide.

 

 

20 June 2014

All

 

 

18 June 2014

While DuckDucking "standing fell seam", I found "drapery seam" and "self-bound seam".  Some additions to the chapter on seams appear to be required.

 

 

13 June 2014

Added a picture I haven't created yet to "Diary of a Poncho Shirt".  At the moment, the raw photo is in BROADJPG, since it was in the camera with the photographs I'm taking to document the construction of my pedal pushers.

In the process, I noticed that at least one of the pre-existing photos lacks alt text, and height and width attributes.

And I just now realized that my new header doesn't work properly with months that have more than three letters in their names.  I noticed that a mysterious space has been appearing before "<a name=", but didn't realize that it had started on the first of June until I noticed that "<a name=Jun" appears where "<a name=June" is supposed to be.  A quick review of the month's names assures me that this is acceptable.  And editing a string of numbers when I know the character represented by very few of them is a royal pain fraught with error.  Particularly when all the ascii-character references are in hex and the defined-key code is decimal.

 

 

12 June 2014

A delightful discovery:  I realized that every character can be an html &#nnnn; entity.  So I have the option of replacing "-" with "&#8208;" instead of fiddling with white space to keep a word from breaking at the hyphen.

But I thought of the trick pretty soon after I had a problem it could solve, and I don't know how many years I've been typing source code, so I may not find a lot of use for it.

 

 

3 June 2014

Searched for "hyphen, linebreak" in this file, found and repaired a few.

 

 

2 June 2014

Last Saturday, I found out that my camera has a close-up button.  I foresee more-detailed illos for Rough Sewing.

I already have a use for the anchors added to 2014SEW1.HTM — now I must get around to editing the linen-jersey diary to add a link to the mending episode.

Done; now I need to shoot a close-up of the darn to illustrate the link.

 

 

22 May 2014

I'm starting "Choose fibers by their properties:" and so far, no corrections.  I suspect that I proofread some of this before.

All done.  The essay sort of fades out instead of ending.  The section "Selecting Fabric and Straightening the Grain:" doesn't have anything about selecting fabric in it.  I'll think about changing the heading later.  Much later.

 

19 May 2014

I'm proofreadng "Fabrics"; have done a search for orphan hyphens and corrected them.  Was down to "True Bias" when I noticed that the washer had stopped making noise.

When resumed, noticed that there are a lot of *s that need to be changed to <b>s.

Changed * to <em>; searched for hyphens just before a linefeed & repaired them; proofread to the beginning of "Shrinking".

 

 

14 May 2014

Ta Dah!  I have finally succeeded in modifying ^h to include an anchor target.  Also found out that "anchor target" is the right name of the tag.  And that the latest GrafixML deprecates it because the latest convulsion of CSS allows a dozen confusing alternatives.

Still haven't proofread "Selvages".  Got a little sewing done, and fiddled some with the Bike Knicker notes.

 

11 May 2014

Fabric linked even though I'm only down to "Selvages" on the final proofreading.  May not upload the changes because it's after midnight and I'm tired.  I think I added the bike knicker instructions to the table of contents yesterday.

 

 

9 May 2014

Yesterday or the day before, I began writing instructions for assembling bike knickers, to read when I've worn out the pair that I'm making now.  So far, they are linked only from an entry in 2014SEW1.HTM.

Now they are linked from the index page.  That will make them easier to find when I've worn out the knickers that I'm making.

 

 

5 May 2014

Redefined ^n to type <name="5May2014">.  It *should* type <name="6May2014"> tomorrow.  If it still works on the tenth, I'll try to figure out how to incorporate it into ^h, which types the current date as a header on these entries.

I think the revised "fabric" is nearly ready to link to.  I saved the plain text file as rough014.old, just in case.  The new source code isn't easy to read; I may have to consult the old file to find out what I meant.

 

28 April 2014

The missing doctypes may be just as well.  Whatever doctype I put in, WC3 says my code is incompatible with it.  But I have to have a doctype if I want to use a validator to help me find my mistakes.  And why does the validator keep telling me that h2 headers have to be in a "container" while totally ignoring the three h3 headers, which are identical except for the rank!

I think I've got "Fabric" organized and that only tweaking such as finding extra spaces after hyphens remains to be done.  And I have to read the whole document to make sure it makes sense.  Today I changed the asterisks on "warp knits" and "weft knits" to bold tags, discovered that bold tags don't work in headers that are already bold, changed them to emphasis tags, came out italic and look funny, decided that what I really needed was quotation marks, but before looking up the tags for quote marks I realized that the bolding of those words was left over from before I split that sentence out as a header.

Then on to — what file was it that is a terrible mess?  Oh, well, I mentioned it in my sewing diary; I'll be able to find it when the time comes.

I DuckDuckGoed a sentence from an early entry in this log, and found this log as the only hit.  I've been indexed!

I wonder how recent a sentence I could find that way, but don't care to experiment.  I can be sure this sentence hasn't been indexed, because I haven't uploaded it yet.

April 3rd has been indexed; April 24th hasn't.

 

 

24 April 2014

Inserted a missing "#" in Notions; began converting "Selecting and Preparing Fabric" to hypertext.  Noticed that a lot of the hypertext files had TOCs added before I realized that "unordered list" was the right way to do it.  Near as I can tell, *all* of them are missing doctypes.

 

 

3 April 2014

Added spaces between sentences in Notions; corrected a minor error.

I haven't selected a target for fiddling yet.

 

 

27 March 2014

Added an internal link from "facings" to "curved hems" in "Edge Finishes".  Surprisingly complicated.  Now I should delete that icon so that I'll open some other file the next time I feel like fiddling.

 

 

3 March 2014

Polished off Pleat Math and altered ROUGH.HTM to link to it, but haven't uploaded either file yet because FTP was down when I tried to back up something else a while ago.

 

 

21 February 2014

I've added some photographs of a hat in progress to my sewing diary.  I've probably done some other updating since last October.  Notably, I've written an essay on pleat math, which may be the first new file in RUFFTEXT since I split up GARMENTS.

I'd better check into whether I've linked to it!

 

 

4 October 2013

The debeeson sites are officially dead.  I doubt that I've found and removed all links to them.

 

 

30 September 2013

And now I've got to edit all files to reflect the loss of the debeeson mirror site.  Not tonight, dear.  (But I did delete the bilocation notice from this file.)

 

 

20 September 2013

An exchange from Live Journal, preserved here for use in composing a header for my Web pages:


oyd666 (murgatroyd666) replied to a comment you left in a LiveJournal post (http://girlgenius-lab.livejournal.com/638398.html). The comment they replied to was:

> > nntp stands for Network News Transfer Protocol, and was originally used for newsgroups, but now is used on other networks such as Baen's Bar and SFF net.

> > Many mail readers do a little nntp on the side.  When I installed Thunderbird, it was already set up to read Mozilla's support net.

> > Since I prefer to read nntp groups with Agent, I deleted that account, so I'm not sure, but if a Thunderbird user can find the menu where you tweak the settings for reading Mozilla's help forums, he'll probably see a place to create an account for Eternal September.  I know that the setting is *somewhere* because my spouse reads all his newsgroups with Thunderbird.  (And you can always ask on one of the help forums!)

> > To see something other than Eternal September's help forums, you have to go to usual prefix eternal-september dot org/ and give Ray an address where he can send your password.)

> > There are a lot of Usenet access providers, but Eternal September is free and very reliable.

> > I don't know which other mail readers also read nntp.  There are also several nntp readers, some of which do a little e-mail on the side.

Their reply was:

You can also get there, a bit clumsily, via Google Groups: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!forum/rec.arts.sf.written


Notes:

I am not responsible for the gratuitous uses of singular "they" in this quote.  (Since singular "they" is the emblem of those who are new to the idea that both sexes are human, and haven't quite internalized it yet, I wish to make this point very clear.)

I munged Eternal September's URL because LJ's nanny bots frequently block posts containing URLs — spam usually contains a link.

You shouldn't post by Google Groups if you have any alternative at all, because of the embarrassing way they mangle outgoing posts.  Some of the mangling can be compensated or prevented if you are alert, but they keep changing the mangler to keep you from learning how to live with it.

GGs connection to usenet is intermittent.

 

 

11 September 2013

Yesterday I cropped and cleaned some bitmap scans that I'd made a while back, converted them from bitmap to gif, and replaced the illos in Hand Sewing Stitches with better ones.  (And added an illo of a french seam.) 

Today I ran that file and the index file through the WC3 validator and made some corrections.  What's this expletive with not allowing "--" inside comments?    everything inside a comment should be ignored!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

9 September 2013

A while back, I began linking to some files I downloaded from oocities, and I've realized that I need to add "pencil pockets" to the essays on pocket types.  Are pockets in a file of their own?  [Yes]

It's way past time I wrote up instructions for reaching alt.sewing.

That was easy:  the way to make a cross-reference from "mending" to "False Hems" is to write "see also" at the top of the file.

Which led to reading Edge Finishes and making some minor edits.

And, in looking to see where to put "pencil pockets", I realized that I badly need a Table of Contents for that file, and copied all the headers up to the top as a start.

And I've given some thought to what "pencil pockets" ought to say.

I must be Olde English — I keep trying to type "hwat".  Which is a much more sensible spelling; I wonder whether our modern spelling is a result of scribes getting their fingers tangled up.  I don't recall transposing letters when not using a keyboard, but it's been decades since I hand-wrote anything longer than a shopping list.

 

 

6 August 2013

The update to ROUGH010.TXT was saved, but somehow it didn't get copied to ROUGH010.HTM.

So I copied ROUGH010.TXT to ROUGH010.HTM, and that should take care of it.

But there should be a link from Mending to False Hems.

 

 

5 August 2013

Added a suggestion to the "False Hems" entry in "Edge Finishes":  embroider over the faded streak with matching thread when the garment being let out is supposed to be dressy.

The correction mysteriously vanished, and Explorer says that I didn't accidentally save it to the wrong folder.  But now that I know that it belongs in "edge finishes", it won't take long to re-create it.

I just discovered that Firefox still had a copy from when I was looking at it while in progress, and e-mailed it to myself.

So the file *was* saved, or Firefox couldn't have been looking at it.  And I just re-loaded and Firefox says that it's still there.  ??  I'll deal with this after my nap.

 

 

25 July 2013

I changed the splash page for my personal site on Comcast to be an index to all my sites and their mirrors, and changed the index page to the mirror pages on the TIS site to include links to the Comcast site.

 

 

22 July 2013

I suspect that the previous entry was intended for 2013SEW, but that file also has some entries intended for this blog.

Today, when answering a post on Creative Machine, I noticed that there was no link from the essay on Roll Pouches to the tutorial on making a bicycle-tool kit, so I edited the file.

Must get around to writing an essay on how to access alt.sewing, and I must edit all files to reflect the bilocation of Rough Sewing.  Preferably before one site or the other crashes.

 

 

30 May 2013

Overhanded the rip in the patch on the jeans I'm wearing, sorted out the major pieces of the pattern for my jeans and put them on the black bull denim, pinned one pillowcase hem.

 

 

29 May 2013

Downloaded mail just before mounting up for today's bike ride (it will be the only decent day this week, the National Weather Service says) and among the messages was the third "courtesy notice" saying "renew those books or bring them back", so I bagged Sewing 911 and Hand Mending Made Easy and put them into my panniers, to be returned unread and unreviewed.

I need to review books in the library, where there are no distractions, but I can't type without a half-way decent keyboard, which rules out bringing my own device, and I can't write with one eye on the clock, which rules out borrowing a library computer.  And I've long since lost the ability to use a pencil and paper for anything that requires a full-size sheet of paper.  (I can still jot a few words on a memo pad.)

 

 

28 May 2013

Gimped the sampler scans to 600 pixels wide and made them into links to the full images.  Still have to write the text — and move the links into appropriate order.  Great thing about hypertext is that I don't have to re-name any of the files to change their order.  Some files on this site are in more than one order at the same time, without any extra copies of the files!  (You have to have gotten out a publication with manual typewriters and ditto masters to appreciate this feature of hypertext.  Pocket knives and ink erasers were essential tools.)

Also noticed a link to the source code for Fitting, Pattern, and Design, on my desktop, finished cleaning it up, and uploaded it to both sites.  Now I suppose that I should check the links to the page to show that they lead to the HTM version, and not to the same thing in TXT.  The TXT and HTM files are identical so that I can treat the files as if they were a single document even though some are plain text and some are hypertext.  (I doubt very much that anyone wants to know the details).

The document still needs return links from the footnotes, but I think I'll delete the shortcut or change it to point to SAMPLER.HTM.  You folks know enough to push the back button, right?

An expert on alt.html said that the symptoms prove that it's something Comcast does or doesn't do that has snipped off my illos, and I have to take it up with them.  Since I never get anywhere trying to do business by telephone —I can't even give directions if I haven't thought it out ahead of time; I once told a fellow that I'd never heard of Route 5 and later realized that I was very familiar with State Street/Central Avenue— Internet Chat is even worse, and Comcast wasn't interested in helping anyone with Web pages when they were still advertising them, so I think I have to let this slide.

And Total Internet Solutions is also showing signs of not working at all well.  My stuff is doing fine, but I'm tucked into a spare corner of capacity DH has rented for his own purposes, and if he dumps (or is dumped by) his service, mine goes with it.

 

 

27 May 2013

I scanned fresh images for Hand Sewing Stitches a while back, and this led me to discover that the Comcast site wasn't displaying images in that file.  I checked the filenames for non-matching case, validated the file (this is like spell checking a document) and found some mistakes that had nothing to do with the non-loading images, and tried various other things.  Today, I gave up and posted a query on alt.html; no doubt they'll point out that it's something terribly, terribly obvious.

Also started to edit the scanned images, but somehow ended up starting a new file for the embroidery sampler mentioned in Hand Sewing Stitches, and now have links to all the scans of the samplers that I made on my previous bout with the scanner and forgot about.  But I need to edit the pictures into 600-pixel thumbnails — should I call those edging spades?  What's the right word for a file that's a reduction of a file that's too big to put on a page, but folks might want the detail in the original so you make the page-size copy into a link.

And I need to write the text that these images are meant to illustrate.

 

 

16 May 2013

Removed some dead links in the "get out of here" file.

Made the illos to "hand sewing" visible on the debeeson site, but the Comcast site continues to claim that they do not exist.  Both sites are copied from my local copy.  The problem at debeeson turned out to be a capitalization error that the local site covered up, but I haven't a clue as to what is going on at Comcast.

Thinking about adding links to alt.sewing to all pages; since I read alt.sewing nearly every day, posting there is the best way to engage in conversation with me in an open forum.  Facebook is useless for conversations, and Live Journal allows conversation only as a side effect of allowing comments.

 

 

27 March 2013

Added a link to my offsite back-up to the top matter of this file.  The Comcast site was grandfathered when Comcast went out of the personal web-site business, but FTP to the site isn't as reliable as it was.

 

 

21 March 2013

Today I scanned four more two-page spreads of Mrs. Humphrey's book and added them to my other website.  No sewing in the book, unless you count her advice to shorten your skirts:  everyone is wearing them a full inch off the ground.

 

 

2 March 2013

That day didn't have any afternoon, but in the evening I scanned my Enthoven samplers and the page the combination stitch is on, and tried to scan a page of _How to be Pretty_, but the scanner stopped working.  I hope that it's just that the software needed to be reset.

Urk.  I haven't backed up the files yet.  But it's after midnight —subtract one from that automatic date— so I'm not going to do it now.

 

 

28 February 2013

Linked to the three rotated and cropped scans of hand sewing stitches, discovering in the process that HandSew.htm had been messed with by somebody else.  DH doesn't remember doing it, and says he hadn't known what the intrusive codes had meant back when I gave him a few files to fiddle with.  The messing-up wasn't messy enough to have been done by machine — leastways all the programs I might have inadvertently looked at the file with would have scrambled it instead of just inserting a few "up to date" tags.

Then I rotated and cropped the combination-stitch illo, and clicked on the eraser intending to repair a mistake in the original.  Whereupon I discovered that the resolution was so fuzzy that the line of stitches was just a line.  Not to mention that the page had been tilted in the scanner.

Perhaps this afternoon I'll fire up the scanner and re-scan the page (which has a few more illos on it), then scan my Enthoven samplers and a few pages of How to be Pretty Though Plain.

http://www.joy.debeeson.net/PAGESEW/ROUGH.HTM is now available.  May be a little behind the Comcast copy.

This file needs something pretty to mark where the introduction leaves off and the entries begin.

Maybe I can find something to scan.

 

 

23 February 2013

The back-up copies of my pages at www.joy.debeeson.net are almost ready for prime time.  These will be available when Comcast is down.

Comcast is trying to get out of the personal web page business — I'm grandfathered, but don't bet your life the main pages will always be available.  The debeeson pages may not be quite as up-to-date as the Comcast pages, but I refresh them from the originals on my own computer, so they aren't affected by anything that happens at Comcast.  (Unless Comcast also goes out of the Internet-access business!)

 

 

30 January 2013

Minor edits made to ROUGH039.  Not uploaded because server isn't working.

 

 

25 January 2013

I took some more pictures and added three of them to the bike-kit project blog.  One more proofreading and I'll link to it.

After adding a link to the new file to my table of contents, while I was uploading ROUGH.HTM twice and renaming one of the copies "index.html", I had me an idea:  I should make index.html a splash page, which would save trouble when I modify ROUGH.HTM, and make a prettier entrance to the site.  Trouble is, what do I do for splashy graphics and clever-but-relevant text?  My idea was to parody adverspeak — but adverspeak is already parody.

I edited this file today, too.  The intro at the top was a little out of date.

 

 

24 January 2013

Finished deleting unwanted material this morning; need to take a couple of pictures before going live.  If you can't wait, replace "/WEBLOG.HTM" with "/BIKE_KIT/BIKEROLL.HTM" in the above URL.

 

 

10 January 2013

Finished my new roll-kit yesterday.  And cropped and scaled two of the photographs in 2013SEW.  When I've done all of them, and have taken a picture of the final product, I'll trim a copy of that section into a semi-tutorial and link to it from ROLLKITS.HTM.

DH has shown me how to copy pictures in the camera directly to my own computer, all by myself.  I may put pictures into Rough Sewing more often than I used to.

 

 

4 January 2013

I closed out 2012sew2.htm and started 2013sew1.htm a few days ago.  This time I planned from the beginning to cut the year into two pieces.

Today I began taking pictures to document the construction of a roll-kit for my bicycle's emergency kit.

 

 

12 December 2012

Added a sentence to the panties section of women's underwear.  Need to add a sketch.  Copy-edited some of the parts before the panties section.

 

5 December 2012

Polished up the format of of 2012SEW1.HTM —substituting "—" for "—" and the like— and officially declared it closed.

 

30 November 2012

Cut 2012SEW into 2012SEW1 and 2012SEW2 so my spelling checker would resume working.

I use an old word processor that has features that have been improved out of modern processors — not to mention that it doesn't constantly change without my consent and make writing with it like trying to use a snake for a blackboard pointer.  The old word processor can find only that part of the RAM that old computers had, so after the file grows to a certain size, it doesn't have room to load WORDS.MAS.  I don't know how big the file can get before it stops working entirely; I once loaded an entire novel into it, and discovered that there is a limit to how many characters can fit onto one line.  I don't recall how many — about half a novel's worth.

Revised the index, poked around and found and corrected an "hte" in PONCHSHR.HTM.

Experimented with an HTML entity called an "asterism".  I think I like it.  If you see centered question marks between sections, those are supposed to be three asterisks arranged like the dots in the "therefore" symbol.

 

 

16 November 2012

Corrected a typo in embrogig.  Must check to see whether embrogig.htm is linked — after checking to see whether it's *fit* to link.

 

 

12 November 2012

While waiting for the wash to wash, I found a missing link in JoyTest.htm, the "validated" version of LinJersey.htm, and repaired it.  Somehow "validating" had removed the text you click on — perhaps because it was a repeat of the URL, and there was nothing but punctuation in between.  I left the "updated" date alone.

I idly wonder whether anybody ever reads this weblog.  I think I'll post a query on LJ so that you can say "yes" without making a big deal of it.  But that won't last long, as old posts are not available — at least not when I'm logged in.  I recently got spam "comments" on posts that are so old that I can't see them, so they must still be there.  Fawchunately, one can delete a comment via a link in the e-mail that reports it.

Grammatical problem there — "posts" is plural, but there was only one comment, repeated on different posts — and on different journals, as I read on "More Words, Deeper Hole" —James Nicoll's LJ.  (I'm not sure how to spell "Nicoll" — Google |"english language" AND "dark alley"|.

 

 

19 October 2012

Yesterday I edited ed.htm to make "enter" put in <p/><p> instead of <p>.  There's some sort of superstition that you need to do that in order to be compatible with browsers designed to read GraphicsDesignMarkupLanguage.  I didn't edit the line that makes ctl-h insert the current date in the form of a header, so it still uses plain paragraph breaks; perhaps I'll go back and GDML-ize ^H too.

You shouldn't notice any difference whatsoever.

 

 

17 October 2012

Called Edge Finishes finished for now and resumed converting Fitting, Pattern, and Design to hypertext.  (Don't recall having begun, but there were some changes already made to the file.)  This calls my attention to errors and infelicities and incomplete remarks, and I'm correcting some of them.

 

 

14 September 2012

Added parenthetic comment to TOC entry for "crash course in math".

Added comment to EMBROGIG.HTM — I really should finish this essay.

 

 

24 August 2012

The hypertexted "Edge Finishes" has been linked from the Rough Sewing Table of Contents.

Found a mistake while seeing how it looked on my husband's computer.  Made a few minor edits while I was in the file.

 

 

20 August 2012

I edited the comment I added to "pins" in "tools".

"Edge Finishes" will be ready for linking when I've completed the Table of Contents.

And when I've proofread the whole mess.

 

 

15 August 2012

Added a definition of french binding to "Edge Finishes".  I may get caught up in revising this chapter.

 

 

15 June 2012

Added a comment to the Pins section of the Tools file.

 

 

1 June 2012

Made some proofreading changes to ROUGH014.TXT, the file on choosing and preparing fabric.

 

 

23 May 2012

Yesterday I added a description of my laser level to the Tools file, and tweaked around a little while I was in there.  I vaguely recall leaving something half done . . .

Ah, yes, I was adding a mention of Don's cardboard dress dummy.  Done, and will be uploaded when I upload this.)

It's way past time to hypertext the Tools file so it can have a linked table of contents, but that takes time — particularly since I always find something that needs to be re-written when I do that — and one can paste entries in the ASCII TOC into one's browser's Find, so it isn't all that urgent.

 

6 May 2012

Yesterday I corrected some mis-nested tags in the Notions Chapter.  Those had been removing all of the most-important paragraph breaks!

In the process, I noticed that the chapter on making bias tape doesn't mention how useful a "laser level" is; must search all files to see whether I need to add a discussion or a cross reference.

 

11 February 2012

Added a reference to hams to the misc. section of my page of links to other sites.  Noticed that all of the irrelevant links are obsolete; didn't do anything.  I'm pretty sure that all of them still connect to something.

The Final Calling came in the mail a few days ago.  Haven't opened the package yet.

 

17 January 2012

Edited the defined key that puts date headers on blogs.  I commented out the old version and worked on a copy!

 

4 January 2012

Checked the links and uploaded the new version of the crochet pattern.

3 January 2012

Pictures edited and in the proper folders, but I'm going to have to re-arrange the folders and change some links before I upload; I changed the name of the folder from "CROCHET" to "PAT" to make the pathname fit into PC-write's "open file" field, and the folder is in the wrong place in the tree.

I created 2012SEW yesterday and closed out INCTEST today.  When I searched for hyphens that were immediately followed by end of line, I found a surprising lot of them.  Also search-and-replaced "--" with "—".

Should have changed the dashes first, and searched for broken words afterward.  I created only one more broken word, but might have also un-created some if I'd done it the other way around.

(I'm leaving "un-created" unrepaired, so that you can see what happens when a hyphen is the last character in a line of source.  A small flaw, but irritating.)

Later, I noticed adventitious white space in the Notions chapter and removed it.  The line spacing could still be improved, but it is no longer confusing.

31 December 2011

I now have the pictures and the picture-editing program on the same computer.

Can't read the pictures with Firefox, for some inexplicable reason, but it works often enough for me to feel that they are really there even though I can see, at most, one of them.  Thought it was because the files are so humongous, but clearing the cache didn't help.  Annoying, because I meant to open all of them in tabs while I wrote labels in the directory, but I can dash back and forth while I'm editing in Gimp.

I took a couple of shots of a coffee-mug mat while I was at it, so I'm going to have to edit HEARTTAT too.

Read a bit of this log, realized that I'm going to have to update the essay on flat-felled seams in elastic casings to reflect later experience.  First you have to learn to press all seams, then you learn that flat-felled seams are better unpressed, then you learn that *some* flat-felled seams need pressing after all.  A lot like life in general, actually.

While checking links, discovered an error in "Crash Course in Math".  Calculated very simple problem three ways, got three different answers.  Can't find any flaw in any of the three calculations.  I think it's nap time.  (Cutting out a beta shirt before the nap may prove to be a mistake.)

Cutting went well, except that I measured and pinned very carefully without first lining up the cutting mat, which complicated the cutting.

And I finally realized that I'd been writing 39" and thinking "meter", and a meter is forty inches.  Good plan to back off!

But when I backed up the result to Drive E, I wasn't asked "file exists:  replace?" so I probably missed backing up that whole folder — I'll look into it after my nap.  Or next year; we've got some partying to do.

30 December 2011

Photographed some booties to illustrate a crochet pattern on my personal web site.  Have yet to crop, size, and insert the pictures.

29 December 2011

Discovered that the link to the toddler apron on my personal website led to an obsolete file on my N3F website, discovered that the local copy of the offending file had it right, uploaded it, and deleted the obsolete file.

27 December 2011

Changed "--" to "—" in HEMSHEET.HTM

Neatened source code on TOC page

Polishing read of CLTHLACK.HTM

10 November 2011

First draft of a section on organizing thread written into the chapter on Notions.

"Diary of a Summer Dress" continues, etc.

6 September 2011

I've moved a lot of garbage out of PAGESEW into a new folder, PAGEXOUT.  I don't think I've deleted the garbage from the new domain yet, but we haven't figured out how to let you in yet either.

The Summer Dress blog continues to grow, with no pictures and no progress toward starting work on the dress that started it.  But when I do make it, I'm going to have a dandy pair of drawers to wear under it.  (If they were a bit frillier, the drawers would be pettipants.)

29 August 2011

Copied whole mess onto Dave's new domain.  Still need to delete some folders that should not have been copied to a public folder — megabytes of raw photographs, mainly, but also two chapters from the Vintage Sewing Library that I have no right to pass around.  (Must check to see whether I've included that valuable site in Get Out of Here.)

I've moved the trash to a new directory on my machine, so it won't go along the next time I upload the whole site.

22 July 2011

Added a comment to "slopers"; updating of inctest (Summer Dress) continues.

6 July 2011

Linked to Cookbook — oh, that's the *other* website.  Maybe I should start a weblog for joybeeson too.

I've been neglecting inctest.htm over the holiday weekend and subsequent worthless spell.  Did link to it some time or another.  Pulled a few weeds today; may get some sewing done tomorrow.

8 April 2011

Added a link to "Get Out of Here"

Actively updating "inctest.htm".  Perhaps I should add a link to it.

Link added to rough.htm, some entropy removed from rough.htm

updated Poncho Shirt diary.

1 April 2011

Over a year!  I haven't been idle all this time, I've just forgotten to update this file.  The Notions chapter is more-or-less organized, and I've created more than one diary-of-a-project blog.  Putting the record of my work out where anybody could look at it tends to keep me at it.

Currently I'm recording progress on a New Summer Dress.  No pictures, as I haven't come to terms with the interface between the camera and the computer.

29 October 2010

I've been working on the Table of Contents for the notions chapter, and uploaded the HTML version a few days ago even though it still needs work.

A few weeks ago, Keith Lynch told me the <ul> tag would make TOCs much easier and neater.  I must, as time becomes available, re-work all of the old TOCs.

Today I started adding a paragraph on organizing thread to the Notions chapter.

Will resume work on the poncho-shirt page when I get around to photographing the work in progress.

20 August 2010

Corrected broken link in "Get Out of Here".

I see that I didn't mention starting a new diary for poncho shirts.  First shirt completed, starting a new one today.

Linjersy has been completed.  Still needs some touch-up work, such as adding "alt" to some of the photos, not to mention length and width attributes.

I wonder when I added this new ruler line to ed.htm, and made remapping the main enter to automatic for .htm files, so I didn't have to put ".!ed.ent" as the first line, and then remember to comment it out before posting?  It wasn't too many months ago.

Certainly after May 19, 2010!

I've been chipping away at hypertexting the plain-text files.  I'm carefully keeping the source code readable — particularly in the interval when it's partway changed and it doesn't yet work as hypertext.  Tables of contents have been a real problem.  Mostly, I keep the old TOC, comment it out, and write a garbled mess of links.

May 19, 2010

Re-opened the shirt-making blog in the linjersy file.  Must add some navigation anchors.

Not too long ago I did a little hypertexting in some of the text files, cleaning up as I went.  Need to finish the job and change the links on the index page.

February 25, 2009

Having found out what "DOCTYPE" is for, I deleted doctype declarations from many files.

February 24, 2009

Added link to EMBROGIG from ROUGH.HTM.  Corrected assorted typos in various files.

February 21, 2009

Added knitting needles and crochet hooks to the page on roll pouches.

February 11, 2009

Revised comments on seam rippers and razor blades in "tools" and "ripping seams".

Wasted a lot of time reading the files and making trivial changes.

February 6, 2009

Added section on dealing with flat-felled seams in elastic casings to "edge finishes"; considered converting that file to hypertext so I can use headers to organize it.  Also noted that "notions" uses "appliqu," a lot and should be hypered so that I can say "appliqué".

February 5, 2009

Added parens to last sentence of next-to-last paragraph of "Flat-Felled Seams" in "Rough009".  This whole section should be re-written.

January 8, 2009

Worked a little on EMBROGIG.HTM. Still not ready to post.  Not sure where I go from here

21 October 2008

Did a little clean-up on rough023.htm, Changed "appliqu‚" to "appliqué" and the like; edited the essay on my drafting-board case.

Don't seem to have recorded that I changed the "Bags" link to point to the hypertext version.  Fat lot of good this blog does.

I'm hypertexting the poncho file now.

July 13, 2008

Decided to keep a log of my new purse in the text file on "bags".

Since I intend to convert all these text files to hypertext, I might as well type the new material in hypertext to start with.

Hunted around for a copy of the code that tells PC-Write that I'm writing in hypertext.  Found a log of knicker design that I wrote but never posted.  Edited "rough.htm" to link to it.

Put in paragraph marks to keep browsers from mushing everything together.

Took nap

June 19, 2008

Purged some trouble-causing non-ASCII characters from the text files.

Made some minor edits this process brought to my attention.

Noticed trouble-causing angle brackets in some of the files. Fixing not a minor edit.  Posted warning on TOC page.

Noticed that the headers in most of the text files are a mess.  Decided that it was time for my nap.

December 13, 2007

Moved "Toddler Apron" from N3F page to Rough Sewing page.
Corrected missing angle bracket in link to pattern.

November 19, 2007

Added "Fold-Flap Bags" to the text file about bags.

Added a TOC to the text file about bags.

Found a few links that had broken when I moved Rough Sewing to a site of its own.

June 29, 2007

Added a parenthetical comment to the hems in Assembling Broadfall Pants.  (The suit pictured is still in service.)

Wondered whether I'd made other changes and forgotten that I had a log.

September 6, 2006

Added a postscript to rough38.txt, "Poncho Shirts"

Started a Web Log

Noticed some links to Earthlink, updated to Comcast, went hunting for others
Found and replaced a whole bunch.

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