I hope your holidays were wonderful!

Yesterday, after a week of incredibly cold temperatures, it warmed up enough to snow. My daughter tried to catch snowflakes on her tongue.

I hope your holidays were wonderful!

Ours were very low-key. Just our little family and Dad.
TG asked for, and got more Doctor Who shirts for her mammoth collection (seriously, I think she has 20 or 30 Doctor Who shirts now!) as well as a Kindle of her own to read Sherlock Holmes and other things she loves.

Michael was hard, but I got him a hex impact driver which he's loving and gave it to him early. I also got him 2 Firefly shirts, and a shirt by a Juneau based artist/screenprinter who does great stuff in our fandoms. You can see her work on Etsy HERE. I also crocheted him a hat. This wound up being very challenging. He's been wanting me to make him a hat, but it had to be something very plain. No spike stitches, no fun textures, no ribbing, cables or any of the other techniques that are so much fun. Originally he wanted it in just one color. After I came to the conclusion that even a quick to finish hat was going to take me *forever* in just one stitch, in just one color (BORING!), we re-visited that.

So it's all in single crochet, with a stripe pattern that was fun to work out. This hat was made to fit his largish head, but I will post the pattern later. He asked if I was going to post the photo to crop it to just the hat. You get just the hat and his pretty brown eyes! It's in an alpaca/wool blend, so it should be very warm for cold Alaskan mornings.

William of course was the challenge. I did a lot of research and found out a watch of the quality that I wanted to get him was prohibitively expensive. I did find a mechanical skeleton pocket watch that was a lot more affordable and just the style he liked, very steampunk. It has a wooden bezel around it, and is encased in a glass globe instead of a hinged pocket watch case. He was thrilled. We also got him a soldering kit, Michael is going to teach him more about electronics, and he and I will do slide pendants together.

What did I get? Well, TG made me a new doll for my huge collection of original dolls from her. This one has a thread sketched face, not embroidery thread, but sewing thread instead, and is as usual, made from scraps and completely designed on the fly. She might make patterns for individual dolls, but never reuses a pattern and never uses other people's patterns.

It's Dean from Supernatural. Under the teeshirt is the anti-possession tattoo! This one is cookie cutter style and entirely too cute. I love the big green eyes!
Michael got me enameled cast iron cookware, William and Dad gave me embossing folders. TG knit for everyone else, Michael got a Deadpool Neko, Dad got a coffee cup cozy, and William got a necktie. William and Dad gave TG and Michael each video games.

We went out to eat at a local Chinese buffet restaurant. They served traditional dinner as well as there usual great layout of Chinese, Korean and Japanese food. It was pleasant, laid back and if it wasn't my mom's full out Christmas blitz, it does suit the 5 of us quite well.

Regular postings will start again soon!

Currently working on...

An e-book of cross stitch patterns and a crocheted wrap bracelet. The bracelet pattern will be posted tomorrow.

Hopefully you are all planning a wonderful weekend!
Here's a sneak peek at the Kindle book I'm working on. It will be a collection of cross stitch patterns for words I really like with definitions. The charts will be 49x70 stitches, or just the right size to fit in a 3.5x5 inch card opening or frame. They are formatted for K2 screens and e-ink. Click on the image for the larger chart.

Tattarrattat is also both a palindrome and onomatopoeia which means that it's spelled the same backward and forward, and the word sounds like what it is.  

Swirly Heart to color

Swirly coloring pages are always fun to draw, and with Valentine's Day coming up, I thought you might like a heart to color! Click on the image for a larger version to print. Transparent PNG format.

Also, I did a little Kindle booklet with 4 Amigurumi patterns. 3 of them have been previously posted for free on my sites, the 4th is a little elephant that's always been a for sale pattern, so the booklet is priced at the same cost as the elephant pattern on Ravelry.

A pair of patterns to color

Click on the images for larger versions of these tiled patterns to color.
When I was a kid, I used to draw intricate patterns using a ruler and graph paper just for the fun of coloring them. Using the computer makes it all so much easier to design patterns to color!

Using the above pattern as an example, and a limited palette of 4 colors, I colored in these two with the same colors but different patterns.

In other news- I have a new Kindle book available for beaders and knitters. It's a pair of alphabet charts for 2.99, one small, and one large enough to use for word or phrase scarves.
You can find out more about it here.

Amazon Kindle Fire! Want!

Okay, I'm in total gadget lust for the new Kindle Fire. Anyone who knows me knew that would be the tablet that evoked that feeling.

There are also new Kindles coming out. Just when I have to replace Michael's Kindle because he broke the display on it well after it's out of warranty. So I'm going to order him the shiny and new Kindle Touch 3g.

For people just wanting to get their first Kindles, there is a new 79 dollar wi-fi version, you can also add books to it using a USB port and your computer.

Kindles are what I was waiting for in the new millennium. The thing I wanted most when reading classic science fiction was the newspapers and books that were instantly available in one slim, lightweight device. Well, that and small electric cars of course. As much as I love older books, a lot of people thought I'd be hard to convert, but it's something that I wanted for so long, and Amazon's e-ink is so easy to read that conversion was easy. Add in how long a battery charge lasts and the convenience of the 3g models for being able to download a book almost anywhere? It's love. My eldest loves all the public domain books that are available for free. Even buying DTB copies at used book stores would cost more than his Kindle did. He's immersed himself in Shelley's Frankenstein, gone on adventures with Sherlock Holmes, he reads Wells, Shakespeare and poetry. Since we are on the same account, he also has access to my digital library.

Writing books for Kindle is easy too. A lot easier than many other formats because it's fairly simple HTML with a few specific tags. I wrote a tutorial with cut and paste code that's here. If you're writing a cookbook of your favorite recipes for friends or family, you could format it as a Kindle book and possibly make a few extra dollars doing so.  I have a bread making booklet and a beading booklet available. Just search for Shala Kerrigan. Planning to write one soon about planning out radially symmetrical designs, and I have a scarf alphabet that I'll be publishing in Kindle format soon for 99 cents.

So it's safe to say that I'm super excited.

The Kindle links are affiliate links.
But if anyone really really wants to buy me a new Kindle? My wishlist is here. *grins*

Threadless sale and new Kindle

One of my all-time favorites reprinted. I don't have this one yet, but for Alice fans and people who sew, it's wonderful isn't it?


And Michaelangelo is a party dude!


Only a few of these left, but isn't it just a great design?



The new Kindle? I didn't think I really wanted a DX. I sort of wanted one. It seems like it would be nice, but my little Kindle 2 was just fine for me. Well. I was wrong. Because the new DX is *black*. And it's so pretty with improved contrast and after I saw it, I started telling everyone in my family how much I wanted it. Really really truly.

Isn't that gorgeous? Well.. hopefully my yelling "WANT WANT PRETTY NEW KINDLE!" was enough of a hint.

Publishing in Kindle format- Formatting tutorial

I wrote a very basic beginners tutorial to formatting an e-book for the Kindle you can find here. For the tutorial I put together a short collection of some of my daughter's favorite recipes. You can buy that here if you're interested.

I also have an e-book for making brick stitch earrings and one that really needs reformatting for baking yeast breads.
I'm also posting reviews of some of my favorite filk music that's available on Amazon. If you don't know what filk is, it's the music of fandom. Sci-fi and fantasy inspired music that can be hilarious, touching and thought provoking.
Favorite filkers I've reviewed so far
Tom Smith's And They Say I've Got Talent
Escape Key's Shadowbeast
Vixy and Tony's ThirteenEscape Key's Michelle Dockrey new group.
Blake Hodgett's Blindsight
Marian Call's Got to Fly
These artists cover Star Wars, Star Trek, Serenity, Alice in Wonderland, Battlestar Galactica, Illuminati and sing about dragons, aliens and mermaids. I'm not done by a long shot reviewing all my favorite filk. But I think this makes a good start. If you find any of the reviews helpful, please click on the yes under the review.

Brick Stitch Earrings

I finished my how to make basic brick stitch earrings e-book! Lots of fun. I got the coding done easily enough including a clickable TOC which my bread book doesn't have (I need to fix that now that I know how!). I made mistakes uploading it though and had to correct those, which delayed my announcement. But it's all up and live now and I've bought a copy myself so I could see exactly how my graphics looked on my Kindle. They are very clear, and the patterns take up the full screen of my Kindle 2 so you could bead straight off the screen. You can buy the e-book here. I haven't made up a PDF version yet.


This is the pattern from the cover. Since it's only 2 colors, it shows up very well in the e-ink tech.
Still to do today:
Working on a pair of earrings I'll post next week on Beadwork at Bellaonline and review a really wonderful bead book.
Dinner tonight will be pizza quesadillas. My back hurts pretty badly from everything we did yesterday.
I think I also want to write a tutorial on writing Kindle books for people like me who only have very basic HTML skills, but like a lot of my ideas, it's on a list for now of things I might do in the future.

Books and liqueurs

Well, everyone knows now that Kindle is available for PC right?
I love my Kindle. I got it right after the coverage went nation-wide because the original coverage wasn't available in Alaska. For me, it's this whole futuristic thing that appeals to me even more than flying cars would. I read a lot of cyberpunk and sci-fi well.. pretty much my whole life. The Kindle, with the ability to follow blogs and newspapers, near instantly download books and all that.. it is the future to me. Well, that and my ipod.
I love to read. I read all the time, and the reason we lived in the same place for 11 years without looking for a bigger house is because my husband flat out refuses to move my books again "anytime soon". Having the Kindle at least slowed down the books coming into the house. I still buy craft books and cookbooks, plus what I get to review. But fiction I buy mostly in Kindle format.
Anyway, all that gushing to say, I have a list of mostly freebies with the exception of a little booklet I wrote about baking bread that has a bunch of public domain cookbooks.
I need to add some of the Storey Country Wisdom Bulletins to the list. They are under 4 dollars each and are short booklets with a ton of information on all sorts of things. I just finished the one on making liqueurs for gifts which was exactly the information I was looking for. I want to make a vanilla cream liqueur for Mike's boss for the holidays, and I need information on how to make it. It didn't have a recipe for exactly what I want to make, but that's fine, I prefer to make things up myself once I understand the process. I'll post the recipe after I make it. I think it will be a good one for in coffee.
E and I are going to also work on dairy based homemade flavored creamers for coffee that won't have corn syrup in them (boo hiss!).

Ideas, links and thoughts

I finally made up an Amazon.com Listmania list of some of my favorite cooking and craft related free books for the Kindle, they are all in public domain and all available on Project Gutenbergas well. Here's my list.

I was reading KissThisGuy.com this weekend, actually I was singing it to my family, looking up favorite songs. I realized, that would make the BEST party game. Go there, find songs, and make little slips of paper with the misheard lyric, the actual lyric, song and artist. Fold slips in half and put them into a bowl and let your guests take turns taking out slips and singing the misheard lyric. Prizes for the people who guess the most right songs and artists, and for the people who perform the best so the songs are recognized.
*singing to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody* Scare a Moose, Scare a Moose, Will you do the fan tango?
Dr. Kiki used to do a podcast called Food Science that was one of our favorites. We would hook up the iPod to the tv and watch it together. The episode with nitrogen frozen ice cream was one of E's favorites. We've made ice cream using the two canister method before, and I actually do have an ice cream maker. But I think next time we are going to try this dry ice method. It looks like a lot of fun. Dry ice can also be used to carbonate soft drinks using this method. We usually use yeast. It does create a slight alcohol  content in the beverage, but not enough to worry about.

Also Spoonflower is selling people's designs if they wish now, which means I can make some of my patterns there available for sale if there is any interest. You can see the designs here. I have them in vector format so I can resize and recolor fairly easily. What do you think?