Patchwork Quilt: 1. A Kick Start

As we may have mentioned before, we both come from families full of creative people. When we got married Joe's mum started talking about making us a patchwork quilt. We love patchwork quilts and currently own four of them (one made by each of Jenny, Joe, Jenny's mum and Joe's mum). However these are all single quilts, and this time the offer was to make a double quilt. At around the time of our second wedding anniversary (the 'cotton' anniversary), the idea was brought up again and we looked at some patterns and chose some material, but the busyness of life took over. Too many things to do, too little time.

Our current quilt collection.

Getting close to our fourth wedding anniversary we decided it was time to act. A few weeks ago Joe and I made the drive to Hampshire, trusty sewing machine in tow, for a weekend of sewing to kick start this project.

It ended up being a slower start than we'd hoped for as we all scratched our heads over the complicated paper piecing idea that we'd not looked at for years. Each square is made up of four identical quarters, each of which is also made up of four smaller triangles. There isn't a nice angle in the lot of them and our first set of templates had printed slightly skew. We do like a challenge.

Once the templates were all sorted we ploughed in with enthusiasm and then tripped over again and again as we lots of made little discoveries. We realised that this design is fairly sensitive to the direction of the pattern on the material, and that if you cut out the pieces through multiple layers of fabric then you don't end up with four identical pieces - but with two correct pieces and two mirror images. I'm sure if we'd (read "I'd"!) been slightly less enthusiastic we'd have spotted these sooner - but hey ho. Stitch unpickers at the ready!

Finally we got into the swing of it though. With a rhythm of work between the cutter, the presser and the sewer we produced our first three squares.

We've split up the jobs to be done before we next meet to sew and the project was, at last, started.

Apologies for the lack of photos - we were far too absorbed in our sewing!

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Photo Friday - Reflections on a Holiday

Lyme Park (National Trust), Peak District
It's quite wide - click the photo for a bigger image.

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Google Reader, Bloglovin' and Feedly

Joe and I both spend our day jobs developing software in our different ways. We both enjoy playing with technology and announcements such as the closure of Google Reader at the start of July send us straight to the internet to dig out alternatives.

Not heard of Google Reader? Its a very nifty tool that goes to all the blogs you like to catch up on and checks to see if there's any new posts. If there are then it puts them all on one website for you to read at your leisure. It makes it much easier to keep on top of blog life and means you don't miss that vital post when it comes. Both Joe and I were big Google Reader users.

So what next? Fortunately Google Reader is not the only option out there, and Joe and I have gone our separate ways in a bid to find something that suits our reading habits. I thought I'd deviate a little from our normal posts and share with you here what we've chosen and why in the hope that it might help those of you trying to make a similar decision, and maybe encourage those of you who haven't used a blog reader before to give it a go.

This isn't a comprehensive review of all the alternatives, just the ones we picked (both of which seem fairly popular). Both AOL and Digg are launching their own readers soon but we didn't want to hang around waiting!

Bloglovin'

Personally I decided to make the switch to Bloglovin. I liked the clean layout, and at first glance it looked a lot like Google Reader to use. Then I discovered the thing that made me like it most. A lot of blog readers take the post you're wanting to read - the text and the photos - and put it onto their own site. Google reader does this, and the end result looks something like this:

You end up with the essence of the blog - but you don't see the blog itself. If you want to leave a comment, or explore other areas of the site you have to follow the link through to the original site. Don't get me wrong - I used Google Reader for years without thinking about this so it can't be that bad. Bloglovin takes a different approach though. It takes you to the original blog for each post you want to read - you get to see all the effort the different bloggers have put into making it look good and its easier to leave comments and see what else is going on. When you're ready to look at the next blog with a new post you can use the toolbar that Bloglovin puts at the top of the screen to jump straight to it which is really handy.

One interesting side note is that while they do have a set of apps I still choose to visit the website as the app versions don't take you to the original blogs in the way I've just been describing. Instead they pull the content from the blog into their own simpler format, which for me looses the point.

I read a lot of personal and lifestyle blogs and find that Bloglovin lets me do that in a really nice way, but there are other alternatives out there. I'll let Joe say a little bit about why he has chosen to use Feedly:

Feedly

I went for Feedly. Easy integration with my Google account meant no fussing with registration. The overview has 4 levels of detail, from a list of titles to whole articles on a summary - I tend to run in "magazine" mode which you can see above. I like to see the pictures - several of the blogs I follow are either webcomics or do single photo posts. The reading mode works quite well - click on an article and it smoothly expands its section (below left). It doesn't always work but for those times there is a full preview mode that tries to load the site in a window (below right), or if that fails the usual link to the original (use your imagination).

When on holiday I discovered the perks of its quite nice iOS app (but then everyone has an app).

The one thing I currently miss on feedly is the lack of a notification icon for chrome. There is a full feedly plugin that is nice but no notifier for the number of unread items!

It is rumoured to be in development and given the mass exodus from google they have been working hard on new features!


Both Feedly and Bloglovin make the transition from Google Reader really easy with one click "import" buttons to move all your subscriptions over, and to make it even easier to add The Urban Cottage to your reading list I've found a couple of buttons for you.



I really hope all this helps :)

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The Mechanical Doorbell, Part One: Ding

I have been scheming this doorbell for quite a while. As you may know I scheme quite a bit. This one has finally come to fruition for one reason: I decided to scrap the plan to buy the expensive bits and decided to build the whole thing with stuff we have stashed around the house. 

This doorbell handle releases a marble that rolls down a run, making a noise on the way. The first half is completed - enough to get it to chime! 

The bell pull is an old road bike brake, pulling a tensioned chord to the marble release. 

The release mechanism is an angled hole drilled in a block of scrap wood. It is held under tension by a bundle of elastic bands, all mounted on a bit of old Ikea desk. Enamelled copper wire provides the feed mechanism and stabilises the release.

From here part of a toy marble run (yes I know, definitely cheating) transfers the marble over to the rest of the bell.

When I say bell, I really mean acoustic bass guitar. It had been gathering dust in the back of a cupboard for too many months. No modifications have been made to the guitar - it hangs from the bracket (a pair of old shelf supports) and everything else is suspended around it.

To catch the marble a plastic scoop is made from an old water bottle, upturned and supported by a length of wire coat hanger.

This then feeds into a section of bamboo sushi mat (used once for making felt) that directs the marble onwards.

And that is it for phase one. A single "ding". Keep an eye out for part two!

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Photo Friday - on holiday

There will be no excuses about being away - just a sunny picture from the Peak District!

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Knitting for Small People

I'm going through a knitting phase at the moment. I love knitting to unwind of an evening, usually accompanied by whatever our favourite TV show of the season is. I've discovered that I'm most productive if I can find a pattern that's of the right level - simple enough that it can be mostly memorable, but complicated enough to keep my interest - I tend to get bored by line after line of garter stitch!

One of my recent projects was this baby jumper. The seed stitch combined with the shaping required provided a good level of interest and I whizzed through the pattern (comparatively - I'm very slow at finishing a project). Rather than buying buttons specifically for this knit I decided to use some I had lying around - resulting in a rather colourful flourish!

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A Tale of Two Tables: Part 5b

We have caught up with ourselves! The first table is finished, the second is mostly assembled and waiting a lot of sanding. Sundays will switch to a few other bigger projects until we can bring you the final part. Here is a sneak preview of the finish:

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