Shoshiplatypus

What’s On Your Workdesk this Wednesday?

Not a great deal has changed since last week, I’m afraid. The scarves remain in a heap by the sewing machine and have not been touched. I have done a bit on my interactive bee cards but spent a lot of time doing some lovely stamping with my Tim Holtz Stamp Platform, only to realise that I’d stamped on the wrong piece! Rather than scrapping it, I decided to alter the construction a bit, and I think in the end the design will be improved. I was feeling particularly brainfogged at the time with my ME and should probably not even have attempted a session in the studio, but I hadn’t been in there for days and was getting frustrated about it.

The next step is to cut some more circle frames on the cutting machine. I need to make a decent template for this interactive card so that I can just cut the pieces and assemble them. At the moment this is all taking far too long, and there are loads of opportunities for things to go wrong.

I have been doing some more Inkscape drawings, this time making up some floral motifs to use with my card templates. Last summer when we returned to our old village for the annual village fete, I was delighted to pick up a fabulous floral design source book for pennies, and the idea is that you can trace these off and use them for whatever projects you like; there is no copyright on them.

I scanned a whole lot using the Scanner Pro app on my iPad, and traced them in Inkscape, to create svg files (scaleable vector graphics) ready to cut with the machine.

I also managed to revive my dormant account on the US-based forum for my cutting machine. Trying to get back onto the UK one, I found that it no longer existed, and it appears that the woman who was running it, as well as supplying the machines, has gone out of business. After a few problems logging on to the US site, I am now firmly back, and already people are being really helpful, answering my queries. I feel such a dunce at this – I’ve had the machine for ages, and haven’t used it nearly as much as I should. With more practice, I am sure it would have become second nature long before this. The same applied with my sewing machine! The Tudor gown finally dispelled any fears I had of my (not so) new electronic monster!

Here are the bitmap images of some of the floral designs I’ve been tracing. Where there are two images side by side, the one on the left is the original, and the one on the right is the tracing which I have altered a bit, to make it more suitable for cutting.

There are quite a few simple motifs in the book – petal and leaf elements that you can combine to make into more complex designs.

I have simplified this acorns image a little, ready for cutting.

With this next one, I have not traced the flowers, because I plan to add separately cut flowers to the window. I may cut a second piece to create a shadow on the underside of the window box.

I am particularly fond of this next one. I decided to remove the background clouds and hills and just to add a few lines to indicate where metal supports might exist in a stained glass panel. This is a work in progress and I’ve filled the background with colour to make the foreground stand out a bit more.

It might be rather fun to lay this cut image over some coloured transparent material of some sort, to create a stained glass effect. The line in the centre of the frame, which appears to cut across the leaves, is the cut line for any window I might cut in the front of a card.

My other favourite so far is this Art Deco-style palm leaves motif.

I’ve thickened the lines in order to create a shape that can be cut out.

I’ve got some very helpful advice from the forum. Originally I traced the outline of each image, adding any leaf veins etc., and this line would be for drawing – inserting a pen into the pen holder on the machine, rather than using the cutting blade. After I had drawn that, I added another line right up against the first, which would be the cutting line. This involved a huge amount of work, and someone on the forum said that there was a facility on SCAL (Sure Cuts a Lot), the new software I have just obtained, for creating a shadow layer behind the image. If I were to set this at the narrowest margin possible, this could be my cutting line. If I wanted a wider white border around the image (as you often get with die-cut stamped images from those combination stamp-and-die sets) I would just make the shadow a little larger. This is obviously going to take some practice and I may need to tweak things a little, to get them just right.

These are the only ones I’ve done so far. With many of the motifs in the book, it will be possible to draw and cut on the machine, creating embellishments to stick to the front of a card. Alternatively, some will be suitable to weld to a card edge or aperture in Inkscape, This could be done with cutting alone, or with some prior drawing, to alter the shape of an aperture and make it more interesting.

Lots of experimenting to do! In the meantime, I shall continue to trace the scans of my book’s floral designs. I should also be able to make digital versions of my stamps and use them in this way.

Food

Recipe of the Week

Veggie Scrap Buddha Bowl

I prefer to call this “Spiced Veggie Scraps” but this is what the Co-op chose to call it in their newly-published free “Food” magazine which my hubby brought back from his shopping trip the other day. This edition, in common with a lot of post-Christmas, New Year publications, is all about making a new, fresh, more healthy start! There were lots of delicious looking vegan and vegetarian recipes in this book so I decided to download them from their website into my Paprika Recipe App, and this is the first one I tried, last night.

This was an ideal Tuesday recipe for me, because it uses a lot of bits and pieces from my weekly grocery delivery. When prepping my veggies I usually just put the trimmings into a bag in the freezer, to make into stock once I have enough. This recipe uses the green leafy trimmings from leeks, cauliflower leaves (which I usually cook as a green vegetable), a broccoli head including the stalk, etc. The pickled cabbage garnish should be made from red cabbage but I didn’t have any, so I just used some green Savoy cabbage that I had. I was able to use some of my home-made houmous which I make from the nut pulp left over from making almond milk, and some of my home-made natural yoghurt.

It’s also a really good recipe, because people throw away an appalling amount of food, most of which is perfectly good to eat, and nutritious too. Vegetable stalks and outer leaves are made of the same stuff as the parts we always eat, and are just as healthy! OK, they may need slightly different methods of preparation, but they are far too good to throw away. Even the stalks of my fresh herbs get put in the bag in the freezer, to add flavour to stocks and soups.

This dish proved to be absolutely delicious with a little heat from the spices, and the piquancy of the pickled cabbage. The rice had parsley from the garden – there isn’t a lot left to pick, but I noticed that the curly parsley seems to be sprouting again which is good – unless we get a heavy frost, of course. Anyway, we both tucked in with relish, and there’s enough for another day.

Here’s the link.

In their picture, they appear to have left the pieces much larger. Mine are more finely chopped and homogenised, and they seem to have lost more colour in the roasting, but no matter – still delicious!

My new blender

I was hoping to have received this by the time I published this blog post, but no… The company seem pretty laid back when it comes to replying to emails, sometimes taking up to three days. Then, they invoiced me for an ex-demo model instead of the brand new one I’d ordered, so that PayPal invoice had to be updated, which took another couple of days. Then they were some time sending me the return label for my old machine, once they had received my payment. Yesterday afternoon the parcel eventually went off, returning my old blender, after which I informed the company, which was the go-ahead for them to send the new one. Proof of dropping off the parcel at the appointed collection site was apparently all they needed – they didn’t need to receive the actual parcel before despatching the new one. I am sure I shall have it by next WOYWW anyway, and if they pull their finger out, it may be here by the end of the week. I can’t wait. I have been managing (just) with the Bullet blender attachment on my Veggie Bullet machine, which does an OK job, but it is very small and I have to make my almond milk in batches, which takes twice as long and is a bit of a faff. I’ve also got a list of soups I need to make because my freezer stash is getting a bit low, and I’m waiting for the new blender to arrive before I can get on with that.

Kitties

Neither of them are very keen to go out at the moment – they do go out, but are soon asking to come in again! Yesterday was so stormy and wet that they just cuddled up together on the chair for most of the day.

The other day I found Ruby doing her dormouse impression in her hammock.

Could she get into a tighter ball if she tried? I often wonder how they can breathe like this! I love the way her tail goes right over the top of her head, between her ears.

Health Update

I have now got an appointment to see the surgeon in Exeter on 29th January, when I hope he will make a decision about the best way forward for the treatment of my parastomal hernia. Over the past few weeks things have not been so good. The area seems to be getting less stable, as it did before my last repair surgery, although it’s not so bad yet – I do not want it to get to that stage because it meant I was having to change my stoma bag several times a day. As it is, I am getting some leaks and this causes very bad skin irritation, which I am having to treat constantly. I am 100 percent certain that I will need further surgery, but given the waiting lists etc. and the fact that my condition is not exactly urgent, who knows when that will be? That’s assuming, of course, that I don’t get lost in the system again!!

I had a phone call from the GP surgery the other day, querying a prescription order that had been made. The pants people have put in an order for the prescription for the final two pairs of pants, and they reversed two of the digits in the item code, which gave rise to the query. I was able to confirm to the surgery the items which I require and which were being made for me, and it is going through OK, but for goodness sake what else is this company going to get wrong?!! The fitting lady told me she had put in an urgent request for the first pair to be altered, to arrive by Christmas, given the trouble I have had, and even so, they didn’t arrive until the New Year. Presumably the final two pairs are now on the way, and let’s hope they haven’t made a ****s up of those… Their track record is now so bad that I actually expect things to go wrong at every turn, and am pleasantly surprised when occasionally things go right!

I’ve had rather a rough week health-wise, feeling very exhausted and foggy on several days. I tried to do some stuff in the studio on Monday evening and had to give it up because I kept making really stupid mistakes… I had another headache on Saturday, and seem to be developing one today, but they do seem to be fewer than previously, so I think the amitriptyline is working. My internal clock is well and truly “out” – I’m wide awake at 3 a.m. (and later, if I don’t force myself to go to bed) and feeling “wired” which doesn’t always make for good productivity despite my being awake, and I can’t get going in the mornings. All this is par for the course with ME, as fellow-sufferers will know, I am sure.

Have a great creative week, everybody.

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