Random Thoughts

Couture: Plastics

I’m still still still waiting for the right squeegee (the squeegee shop owners apparently went to France for the summer) for doing screen printing, but I got a shipment of t-shirt blanks. So I had to make something.

I bought a different make of iron-on transfers — this time for black shirts. Sigel Foil T-Shirt Transfers. Or something:

These are pretty nice. You print out onto the transfer “paper”, remove the backing, and then iron the plastic onto the shirt. The end result is kinda stiff, so it makes the shirt bunch up a bit, but it does look quite nice.

For an iron-on transfer thing. How’s that for a review.

I Am Consumer

Look at how nice the latest album from Peter Christopherson (from Coil) is. (Although he died a few years ago.)

It’s called Time Machines II, and it comes on a wooden USB stick inside a pewter box wrapped in a leather bag.

And the music is high-class, too. AIFF with lots of bits and stuff.

My New Horticulture Blog

The seeds I planted a couple of weeks ago are growing pretty well. Probably because I’ve almost never forgotten to water them. It’s an achievement!

But it’s very windy on my balcony, so I thought it might make sense to shield the plants a bit from the incessant wind. I bought some plexiglas (i.e. plastic) sheets, drilled some holes in them (with a wood drill bit — I was afraid the plexiglas might shatter (it’s quite brittle), but it worked fine), and tied them up with some fishing line:

Looks almost invisible, eh? But they’ll probably grow gross as time passes. We’ll see.

Anyway, I think this is the reason for the windiness:

I’m on the edge of a hill, sort of, so even if there’s the slightest air movement in the hollow down there, I get a blast of wind.

Or something.

Couture: Transparent

While waiting for the screen printing equipment to arrive, I’ve been experimenting a bit more with Inkodye. Because of reasons.

Here’s an extreme close-up of a shirt exposed with a “normal” over-head projector (OHP) transparency:

The white area with pebbled red spots is supposed to be totally white, but because the OHP transparency is so “pebbly”, there’s tons of tiny white holes where it’s supposed to be totally black. And the result is pretty bad.

But then I got “digital negative” transparencies. These are for sale only in photo speciality stores, and are more expensive. But the result is a lot better:

No pebbling, so no orange spots where it’s supposed to be totally white. I did screw up the print, anyway, because the shirt bunched up a bit.

One of these days I’m going to make an Inkodye shirt that looks almost usable. Although how usable a white t-shirt is…

My New Horticultural Blog

I decided that I should grow my own food, so I planted some radishes and peas and carrots and stuff.

I need to start thinning out in a couple of days…

In other horticultural news, everything’s coming up roses:

After the previous post, a kind reader identified the bugs as aphids, and I went out and got some aphid-killing poisonous poison that I sprayed onto the roses. All the bugs disappeared within a couple of days, and then the roses started flowering.

I moved the veggies to the other balcony, though. I mean, like, poison.