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Happy New Year, everyone! It is a time to think of fresh beginnings. I am anticipating big changes this year; the end of the year is going to look a lot different from the beginning. For now, though, I am thinking of crafty resolutions.

It is important to express your creative side, to tend to your mental garden. Here are some ways I plan to do that for myself this year:

1. Design a new crochet pattern every month, on average.
2. Try a craft I’ve never done before. Possibilities include soapmaking (the right way), candlemaking, quilling, wood carving, macrame, needle felting, Chinese knotting, tatting, and throwing pottery on the wheel.
3. Finish two more pieces for my Children’s Book Quilt.
4. Make my summer hat, before it is in season.
5. Finish my Fibonacci-themed wall quilt pattern.
6. Make a clothing pattern template for myself, following the directions in How To Make Sewing Patterns.
7. Take better and more creative pictures of my finished projects. This is complicated by the fact that I live in northern New England, where (especially in the winter, but to some extent in the summer) natural light is in short supply even during the day.

I’m also taking a four-session sculpture class starting Monday. I did a semester of sculpture in college and am looking forward to getting my hands in the clay again. How are you going to tend your creative plot?

Oh, and as for my First Friday plans, I have but three words: Christmas tree bonfire.

Upcoming: You may be wondering what happened to the sketchbook updates I promised… well, I lost my sketchbook. Perhaps if I’d had time to clean as much as I’d wanted before leaving for the holidays it would have shown up, but now I’m pretty sure I don’t have time to finish it even if I find it tonight. So that’s sad and kind of a dumb reason to miss out, but there it is. Instead, we have the rest of the New Year’s Eve fun, some candy animals, a hat, and sculpture class reports – which should actually take us well into February.

I leave you with a beautiful Christmas gift from my sister:

Sometimes, you want something a little different. Sometimes, you want a hexagonal fabric coaster. It should be comparable in size to your square coasters, and so the pattern should be five inches between parallel edges, to stitch down to four inches across. But how long does that make each edge? How far is it point to point?

There are probably automatic ways to do this, but because I have an unhealthy love of doing high school math the long way, I hauled out the geometry and trigonometry.

The first step in finding the lengths we need is to figure out the triangle we’re dealing with. I can never remember that the interior angles of a regular n-gon are each 180 – 360/n degrees, so I do that the long way as well.

Okay, we have a 30-60-90 triangle, and we know the length of one of its sides (one of them is half the distance between parallel edges). We could have done that a shorter way remembering that hexagons tile the plane meeting three to a point, so each interior angle is 360/3 degrees. Regardless, now we whip out the trig.

The sine of an angle is the opposite edge over the hypotenuse. You could also use the tangent (opposite over adjacent) and then the Pythagorean theorem to find the hypotenuse. Or you could use the sine and cosine of the same angle, one to find the hypotenuse from the known leg and the other to find the unknown leg from the hypotenuse.

Anyway, we now know our edge length, and the length point to point (it is edge length plus two times the originally-unknown leg length).

In my case, with the desired distance 5″ between parallel edges, my edges were 2.89″ (which I would round to 2 7/8″) and my distance point to point was 5.77″ (rounded to 5 3/4″). The horizontal distance from the left point to the next two points around is 1.44″ (almost exactly 1 7/16″), which I would use in actually making these: make a rectangle 5″ tall and 5 3/4″ wide, mark the center of each shorter edge, mark in 1 7/16″ from each corner on each long edge, and connect each of the first two markings to the neighboring pair of the second four markings. And I would do that on paper so I then had a pattern, instead of having to re-measure every time!

Friday again! Places to go, people to see. I would love to go to a First Friday event tonight but my parents are coming into town in the middle of the evening and I need to make sure I’m ready for them.

This month, how about crafts out of their usual element? For example, ribbons and lace in cake icing and fondant. Apparently you can get a lovely lace fondant strip by running a strip of actual lace and a slab of fondant through a pasta roller together. Alternatively, by laying lace over fondant or buttercream and thinly frosting with buttercream on top of it (in a contrasting color if desired), then removing the lace and the icing on it so the remaining buttercream fills the negative space.

There is even a technique in cake decorating called brush embroidery, where icing is piped and then blended with a paintbrush to create a lacy or embroidered effect. Wilton has a very brief tutorial, and Cakes, Etc. by Dana has a collection of links to video tutorials. You can get more of an embroidery look, or a lacier look with this technique. And I love these.

How about more craft cakes? Even still more?

Stained glass goes with everything, of course. Stained glass and stained glass quilts can be hard to tell apart in thumbnail. You can even embroider stained glass patterns.

Finally, Sad Monkey Design has a detailed tutorial for getting an embroidery look for an image, using Adobe illustrator.

Hello! Last month I was partying it up in Boulder at a bachelor/bachelorette party that included a ghost tour; this month I may go to a museum’s First Friday and hear a talk about unusual Russian museums. Or I may stay home; it’s been a busy time in Reveland.

I wasn’t sure what to put in this edition of First Friday, my link round-up and inspiration-source-sharing post. However, going through some old files I discovered a cache of images I had downloaded to give a friend for sculpture inspiration. The source of the images, indirectly, was Google Images, which I had used with various adjectives as the search terms. Unfortunately I don’t remember where I got that idea, since it is a good one and I would like to give credit. However, I will pass it along. Some adjectives don’t work well – less abstract ones or ones that are associated with a major product (“effervescent” gets you a lot of Alka-Seltzer; “coy” gets you a bunch of misspelled fish). I did some searches before writing this; “symmetric” is good and “dynamic” is interesting. You get to see what each adjective is most commonly applied to: “silky” nets you a pile of terrier pictures. “Hilarious” is illuminating if not necessarily heartening. Let me know if you try it and find a really good or interesting one.

In addition, let me share a Random Stripe Generator that was passed along by someone on Ravelry. You choose your colors, the total number of rows, and the acceptable widths of stripes of each color (from 1 row to 20), and it generates a random stripe pattern. For example, I selected three colors and the widths 2, 4, 6, with a total of 100 rows, and it gave me this pretty thing:

Finally, since I just came across it today, I want to share this impressive array of silhouettes.

Incidentally, as an update on other projects, I did finish both July crochet challenges on time and they will appear in the usual Ravelry post, next Thursday. I did not, however, finish the QR embroidery on time. It has been tabled but should still eventually see the light of day. Too bad. However, as of Saturday afternoon I was short on sleep and looking at 12 hours’ work (or more) plus washing to finish. I declared stitchy bankruptcy and haven’t regretted it!

Coming attractions: the remaining June crochet challenge, something fishy, and possibly the August Stitch-Along on Feeling Stitchy.

When this appears I wil be in Colorado for a wedding. Last month I spent a good five and a half hours at the Sew-Op, talking to people and embroidering in between. It was a good time, and I got the luggage tag blanket stitching done and made progress on the Landscape of Love.

In June, looking for a picture of a sarcophagus of the ancient Egyptian variety, I learned about Etruscan sarcophagi. The Etruscans were very different from the Greeks and Romans, with highly permissive sexual mores even by modern standards, and a much higher level of freedom for women. The better standing of women translated into sarcophagi (and urns) for couples, in many cases, with corresponding images on top.¹

The most famous is the Sarcophagus of the Spouses, which is also written about here. I prefer this sarcophagus with an elderly couple (additional image here, from this page), because there’s something about people who are happy to have their image through eternity be them in their old age. My absolute favorite, though, turns out to reside in Boston: a sarcophagus with a married couple in bed. Intimate but not sexual, it conveys a wonderful devotion.

Coming attractions? Well, Iron Craft tipped me off to the following:

QR code made with QRStuff.

I have Plans for that, but I knew I wouldn’t finish them in a week, so I held off entirely. If you want to make your own QR codes, the best generator I’ve tried is Kerem Erkan’s.

As for the rest, this month will feature: cock-a-doodle-doo! Meow. Squeak squeak! Harrumph.

¹ Disclaimer: I am neither an archaeologist nor a historian. All Etruscan cultural information gleaned from the innertubes. While information online is guaranteed minimally 107% correct, my interpretation need not be. Do not use this website for a term paper. Results not typical. Void where prohibited.

It has come to my attention (via Iron Craft) that June holds the 30 Days of Creativity challenge, where you are to create something every day and submit it to the challenge. I won’t be participating; daily is just too much and I will have uncertain internet access at the end of the month. However, I thoroughly approve of the idea and wanted to pass it on!

Fun, nonsense, and coming attractions.

I hope you have an art gallery you can go to for a First Friday reception – now!

If not, well, you can look at some cool color-choosing webpages. Color Collective and design seeds take images and pull the component colors out of them. Color Collective is mostly paintings and photos of people, and design seeds is mostly still life, animals, and locations, though both cross over into the other’s terrain. Creature Comforts’ “color crush” category takes a palette and finds multiple objects that fit that color scheme: food, clothing, and household objects, primarily. In all cases you can see how the colors work together in “real life” and use them to inspire your own color selections.

These are from Wild Olive, whose embroidery basics series contained a color choice lesson with those links. She also curates her own Lovely Colors pinboard for wonderful combinations. Hat tip to my Iron Craft pal Kat for leading me to feeling stitchy and thence to Wild Olive.

In other news, I am excited for a spring project I have in the works… it involves destroyingpuncturing plastic bottlecaps (and a few metal wine bottle screw tops – I knew I saved them for a reason). Good clean fun! Hint: it is actually dirty fun.

There’s also a sooper seekrit wedding gift in progress, which will hopefully be finished soon but not published until Memorial Day, after the wedding.

Ooh, velvet and silver. Fancy.