My new career as a seamstress*

I didn’t use to have curtains in my living room — the apt. is er south-east facing, so it has sun in the mornings and afternoons when I’m at work. But after I started working more from home, it got to be ridiculous — I had to move around all day to avoid having the sun shining in my face. (Especially in winter when the sun is lower in the sky.)

So five years ago I wandered into a curtain store and said “I need some curtains”, and the expeditress said “like, what colour? style? look?”. Never having considered curtain design before in my life, the question was rather sudden and I said “er… something light? and abstract, perhaps” and then she pulled out a fabric sample of this:

And I said sure, and a few months later I got them… and… er…

I did not like the curtains. At all! What was I thinking! Wut! Gngng. But I just hung them up and lived with my mistake.

But we were chatting about curtains on irc one day (as one does) and somebody mentioned Svenskt tenn, a Swedish company that had lots of oldee tymey Swedish designs, like Green birds.

Tada! But I thought that this time I would be more cautious and only buy enough fabric for one window, and then I could live with it for a while, and then decide whether to do the other four windows.

And this means that I should probably do the first window myself — hiring somebody to do just one window seemed like more bother than it’s worth. How hard can it be to do something like this?! I mean!? Like!??! LITERALLY!

Reader, it’s harder than it looks.

First of all, how much fabric to buy? The curtains should be 285cm high, and then with 10cm extra for top/bottom hemming. And then the pattern repeats every 92cm, and you want all the curtains to match up vertically, so that means that for two curtains I have to buy OH I GIVE UP

And — snip the vertical borders or fold them in?

I guess that’s the colours this has been printed with… Six different colours, I guess?

Yeah, snipping time. But how do you get a line straight on a fabric like this? I tried following a thread, but…

And… Hey, that kinda lines up in two ways? I definitely bought enough fabric if I line them up on the half match like this…

But I’ve got 10cm too little if I want to do the “real” match up. Oops! I guess I mathed it wrong… OK, looks good the other way around so I’ll just do that.

OK, I’ve got a sewing machine, but I’ve never used it and I don’t know how. But there’s something new-fangled called “hemming tape”, and it’s a tape with a plastic backing that you iron onto the fabric, remove the backing, and then iron on the fabric on the other side.

It’s this meshey plastic stuff that melts into the fabric.

See?

So while this is easier than sewing, it’s still so much wooork. The curtains are 305cm tall, and you fold in the fabric twice:

So you get a nice and even hem — but that means that each curtain has about 18 metres of hemming tape applied that has to be ironed on: Took me, like, three hours per curtain.

One done! Almost kinda straight! But it would be nice if it was totally straight… I mean, just because…

OK, I had a brilliant idea — what if I just peel off threads at the bottom until there are no loose threads? So I did that and you see the result above — I was 3cm off. Snip snip, and then it’s straight at the bottom.

I did the same on the side that had been cut at the factory, and that bit wasn’t straight either! *gasp* It was straighter than my cut, but they’re professionals! I have never!

And I ran out of the hemming tape in the middle because I miscalculated how much I needed (there’s that maths again), so I got some stuff from a different shop… AND IT SUCKS! The first one was from Kid and went on like a dream, and then I got the stuff from Jysk, and it’s a nightmare. When removing the backing paper, the paper frayed all the time, meaning that I had to sit there picking and picking at it. Took me hours extra. Boo, Jysk!

Anyway:

It is finished!

*phew*

Now that’s something I’m never ever doing again. I’ll live with these curtains for a week or so, and if I still don’t hate them, I’m ordering enough fabric for the other four windows, but then I’m going to outsource the cutting and hemming to professionals.

I know my limitations. Now.

*who doesn’t sew.

I scanned 21 more issues of the Comics Buyer’s Guide

I got them cheap on ebay, and they’re from around 1999-2001. These issues are almost tabloid size, so I had to scan them manually. Like an animal.

Where you can learn exciting news, like —

Is DC finally going to publish the final issues of Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing run!? Nah, never gonna happen.

These issues are, of course, on kwakk.info now (if you want to search them), and also on archive.org if you want to read them.

If you have issues of CBG that’s not on kwakk.info yet, you can send them to me.

Mystery Song Finally Identified!

I’ve been trying to find out what this song is for years (I have it on a mix tape), but nobody’s been able to identify it. But over the last year or so, I’ve been listening to (most of) my albums chronologically, and I’ve now reached 1995.

Yesterday, Annie Williams’ Ruby EP started playing, and what do you know:

Yes! IT”S THE MYSTERY SONG!!!

This EP is the only thing I have by Annie Williams, so perhaps I should get some more stuff by her… The producer is Mark van Hoen, which makes sense — he records under the name Locust, and I’ve got several albums by Locust, so that’s probably why I bought this EP in the first place?

Web Server Outages Today

Due to the unprecedented PHP vulnerability today, I took the blogs down until Debian pushed a fix, as advised. (And also Quimby.)

They pushed a fix now, so things should be back to normalish. Except that the web server on Gmane is still down — I need to do further upgrades on that machine, so it’ll remain down for the time being. I.e., you can’t sign up any new mailing lists or Gwene RSS feeds, but that should be back up within a few days. (The news server itself and other services are up — it’s just the web part that’s down.)

Jittery Web Design

I get a lot of packages, so I sit staring at the Fedex tracking page a lot. They recently redesigned it (to become more “mobile first”, I guess — just a couple decades too late), and I’m just fascinated.

I mean, it’s just a minor thing, and it doesn’t matter HANG ON: We’re on the Internet, right? OK, SO THIS IS LITERALLY THE WORST THING EVER LITERALLY. *phew* I was almost reasonable there for a second.

But let’s go through what the page does:

  • First we get a white web page.
  • Then the page shows just the header and the footer.
  • Then it expands to show “Tracking ID” and a spinner, and this moves the footer down.
  • Then it replaces the entire page with the tracking results.
  • Half a second later, it blanks to white and then redisplays exactly the same thing it already shows.
  • Finally, two seconds later, it blanks very briefly, redisplays, and adds a button on the bottom saying “Ask Fedex”.

That’s just kinda amazing, I think. It doesn’t transfer a lot of data, at least:

Just 6.8MB, which is practically nothing these days.

Welcome to my Ted Talk.