Happy day after Christmas! Did you survive?

I worked 9 PM Christmas Eve to 7:30 AM Christmas morning, got a couple of hours of sleep, then was called back in at noon to work 8 hours on a couple of time-sensitive samples.  It made for the most unremarkable Christmas I’ve ever had, but that’s okay- the work I did allows for organ transplants to go forward, and you’ve got to figure I played a role in making Christmas very, very good for some of the families on the transplant wait list.

It also gave me a little time to doodle, and with all the snow Denver’s faced lately, my doodles took a particularly seasonal theme.

I doodled you guys a new embroidery pattern.  I quite like this one, even though it does have a disappointing lack of tentacles.

The Yeti

Even Yetis bundle up in the winter cold.

My Christmas may have been unremarkable, but I have today off and I plan (after a quick morning trip to the DMV) to indulge myself in a belated, personal holiday celebration. And also clean; my place is utterly trashed after this workweek.  But funnily enough, I’ve found that when it’s my own little apartment and my own little mess and I have no other pressing demands for the day, cleaning itself is a kind of indulgence.

Click on the picture, and you’ll get the full-res.  I release these free bits of line art under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

You are allowed and indeed encouraged to do whatever you want with the piece(s) (use, reuse, abuse, remix, share, and of course, embroider), just follow these two simple rules:

1) Give me credit (a link back is always appreciated- that way, everyone else knows they can use it too)
2) Don’t make a profit off any use or modification of my work.

To be fair, I won’t sue you or anything if you don’t give me credit- I’ll just feel all hurt, and no one wants that.  Also to be fair, should youreally want to use them in a profit-making venture (ie: stitch it on something you then sell in your etsy store, use it as a print for your own fabric line, etc.), talk to me and maybe we can work something out so everybody wins.  Should you want to say thanks, leave a comment and/or tell a friend or six.  Finally, if you do make something, embroidery or not, let me know and I’ll happily blog it!

You can find a reminder/introduction to embroidery, including basic stitches and a by-no-means exhaustive list of methods of transferring patterns to fabric in this post (there’s also a good round-up here and another one here).  Finally: if you’ve got suggestions for embroidery patterns you’d like to see, I would love to hear them (no promises, though).  You can find the rest of my patterns under the Embroidery Patterns category.

Stay warm, my friends.

If I don’t hear from the winner in a week, I’ll pick again.  Cookies for all!

Meanwhile, I’m just going to be dying in the corner of one hell of a respiratory infection.  Hack, cough, doom.

Let’s start with a question.  What is the etiquette for posting recipes to your blog? After all, there’s a thriving community of cooking blogs composed almost entirely of recipes; a community whose activity and sheer bulk overshadows even the sprawling craftblog community.  You’ve got to figure most of those recipes did not spring virgin and fully-formed from blogger’s heads.  They’re probably from cookbooks, from other blogs, from family- or if not directly from, than deeply inspired by.  Sharing recipes has been integral to the whole human food experience, I suspect, since we started writing the damn things down, but sharing and copying run too close together for comfort much of the time.

It seems to be a fairly popular topic in the food blog community as well, much as the line between inspiration and copying as been hashed and rehashed in the craft community.

Factoid number one: copyright law doesn’t protect a list of ingredients.  It’s all the other stuff- the precise diction of the instructions, the carefully-staged pictures- that gets protected.  But forget the law; what, in food-blog-world, is polite?  You see, I’d like to start posting more cooking here, and I’d like to share the recipes with a bit more than a link, because this is the internet and the link that is here today may 404 tomorrow.  But I would hate to venture forth into the world of food blogging, only to make a total ass of myself from the get-go.

For today, then, we’ll stick to a link.  I’m always on the lookout for better cookie recipes, and even like to take a somewhat experimental approach to it.  My chocolate chip cookie experiment, for example, is legend amongst my coworkers (who get to eat the leftovers).  The current victor in the experiment gets the hallowed title of “go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe”… until it must defend its title from the next challenger. Dun dun DUNNN!

In my world, there are similar bouts and title belts for sugar cookies. Right now, the title holder for “Go-To Sugar Cookie Recipe” is this hard-fighting badass: the Best Cutout Sugar Cookies (indeed!) recipe from ApartmentTherapy co-blog, the Kitchn.  The cookies manage to stay soft while still being easy to cut out and transfer to a baking sheet, hold their shapes fantastically through baking, and are delicious.  Make some. Nom them.  Thank the Kitchn.

A little while ago, I whipped out a batch and immediately made them as nerdy as possible.  Behold, lab cookies!

Yes, that is a beaker, an erlenmeyer flask and a test tube.  No, they are not beautifully decorated, mostly because I wanted to eat the damn things already.  These are the notorious Science Lab Cookie Cutters (which I picked up from ThinkGeek), and just imagine what you could do with them, were you more patient and less hungry than I.  If your imagination is failing you, then how about taking a look at the fine flask-y cookieworks of other, more talented bakers.  Go on, click on a few. I’ll wait.

Awesome, right?  In fact, I wouldn’t post these sad (but very, very tasty) excuses for science cookies at all, if it weren’t for one detail.

See it? What is that, standing unopened behind my cookies?  Could it be a bright and shiny, brand-new, whole other set of Science Lab Cookie Cutters just for one lucky reader?

Oh, it could. Erlenmeyer Flask, Beaker, Test Tube and even an atom (well, in a symbolic sense)!  All you need to do to win these beauties and make your own nerdtastic cookies is leave a comment.  Make sure you include a method of contact (or how will I tell you you’ve won?), and you’re good to go!

But wait, there’s more! Get a second entry by sharing about this contest somehow.  Blog, tweet, facebook, tell your Aunt Cathy over the thanksgiving Turkey, I don’t care; just leave a second comment telling me how you told someone else and you’ll have two entries

(Science break! Or, well, math. The problem that has always nagged at me with the get-a-second-entry-for-sharing! deal is that, if the people you tell actually come over and enter, then your second entry won’t do a whole lot for your chances.  I mean, say two people enter.  They’ve each got a 50% or 1 in 2 chance.  But then let’s say person 1 tweets the giveaway, gets a second entry, and then three people come over from twitter and enter.  Now each person has a roughly 17%  (1 in 6) chance except the tweeter, who now sits at around 33%, which is not as good as their original 50% chance.  Boo, probability! Maybe you want to keep it secret. Keep it safe. Tell no one.  That sort of thing, y’know?)

The contest is open to readers in the US and Canada and runs from today, 11/22/2011, to two weeks from today (12/6/11) at which point I will select a commenter at random, drop them an e-mail for their address, and send them some geeky fun just in time for the Holiday cookie season.   Good luck!

Octopus, in other words, would LOVE Halloween.

Yes, I know, it’s November first and the season of bats and pumpkins and spooks and masks has fallen behind us, but as far as I’m concerned masquerades are always in season.  We poor bipeds may struggle to manage a single mask, as we need keep hands free for drinks and vittles, but this ambitious little critter has no such limitations and subscribes to a philosophy of “the more, the merrier.”   At least, when it comes to disguises.

Apologies for putting this one up the day AFTER Halloween- I was all set to throw it up yesterday, but couldn’t find my micron pens.  Still can’t find them, in fact; I moved months ago and still haven’t quite figured out where all my stuff ended up.  It is maddening, in a vague sort of way.  Still, it gave me an excuse to explore a local art store or two, and that’s a good thing!  I’ll get to know this “Denver” beastie yet.

I know it’s been a while, but you remember how it goes, right?

Click on the picture, and you’ll get the full-res.  I release these free bits of line art under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

You are allowed and indeed encouraged to do whatever you want with the piece(s) (use, reuse, abuse, remix, share, and of course, embroider), just follow these two simple rules:

1) Give me credit (a link back is always appreciated- that way, everyone else knows they can use it too)
2) Don’t make a profit off any use or modification of my work.

To be fair, I won’t sue you or anything if you don’t give me credit- I’ll just feel all hurt, and no one wants that.  Also to be fair, should youreally want to use them in a profit-making venture (ie: stitch it on something you then sell in your etsy store, use it as a print for your own fabric line, etc.), talk to me and maybe we can work something out so everybody wins.  Should you want to say thanks, leave a comment and/or tell a friend or six.  Finally, if you do make something, embroidery or not, let me know and I’ll happily blog it!

You can find a reminder/introduction to embroidery, including basic stitches and a by-no-means exhaustive list of methods of transferring patterns to fabric in this post (there’s also a good round-up here and another one here).  Finally: if you’ve got suggestions for embroidery patterns you’d like to see, I would love to hear them (no promises, though).  You can find the rest of my patterns under the Embroidery Patterns category.

Of course, I could hardly stumble my way down to the Denver Zombie Crawl 2011 (held last weekend) alone.  This time, I brought my own little horde:

I did pretty much all the makeup for the group, with the exception of a wound here or a bruise there.  You can tell because I start to repeat motifs after a while: I think just about everyone who could got a gash on the left side of their forehead, and a matching gash on the right side of their neck.   To be fair, by the time I got to person number four (myself included in the count), my hands were cramping.  And hey, I was a zombie! We undead are not exactly the most original thinkers to begin with.

All my various bits of zombie-making advice from last year stand; the only thing I did differently this year was to get a bit more liberal with the application of so-called “thick blood“. It’s shiny and gross and awesome.

And I carried around a severed hand.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.

We named it “Charles”.

Let the Halloween revelries begin!

I love to see what people do with the patterns I put out. There’s nothing that inspires me more.

Now, where’s my micron pen?

Arrr.

I’ve got myself some stretch velvet, 2.5 meters of costume satin, and 2 meters each of a couple of sheers I pulled off the red tag shelf.

And I’ve got some matching feathers, and a white headband to go with them.  Is this all starting to look familiar yet? I’m retreading an old path here, you see.  I’m making a matching set.

Another clue? How about I just give it away?

Oh yeah. It’s that time of year again. Time to get sewing.

Four big pillows (two down, two not) and one little one.  Oh yeah, and one cat. (There’s always a cat in these pictures, because there’s always a cat following me around my apartment like a little orange shadow.)  Anyway, let’s look closer at that little pillow.

Pretty simple.  Two squares, four seams, a zipper on the back side.  It’s supposed to be 16 inches but I stuffed a much bigger pillow in there after picking it up cheap from IKEA. I even added some piping, look!

I’m kind of proud of the piping.  Sewing piping is not exactly a difficult technique, but still, I don’t think I’ve ever used it before.

But wait, there’s more! I mentioned I have a pillow problem, you know, and one little throw pillow (on top of four other pillows, plus the body pillow you can’t see in this picture- what? what are you looking at?) is hardly enough to qualify as a “problem”.  Let’s examine the couch next, then.

There’s four pillows on this one.  Also, a blanket (I have a blanket problem too) and the inevitable cat with all his inevitable cat fur.  I’m rather proud of these pillows, however- you see, a fair anount of my living room decor revolves around the Hubble Space Telescope. All the pictures Hubble takes, as the result of a taxpayer-funded government project (of AWESOME!) are public domain, and so when I found myself pondering what sort of wall art my geeky little self should acquire, the NASA archives immediately came to mind.  And so first came the walls:

And the matching pillows naturally followed:

They’re pretty on both sides:

The pillows are 16 inches, and were made of fabric printed up for me by Spoonflower on their cotton sateen (and look, you can even get some for your very self!- just make sure you cut it a bit more carefully than I did.  There’s a side or two that’s off center.)

But why, you ask, do I claim to have a problem? It’s simple, really. I look at the six pillows for my bed and the four on that couch up above, and I think “You know what that could use? More pillows.”

Hello.  My name is Tala Cox, and I’m a pillow addict.

And with that, I must leave you again.  You see, there’s this little orange shadow sitting here, and he very obviously thinks I have better things to be doing than blogging, like feeding, petting and/or playing with him.

He’s a demanding thing, but at least he’s cute.