The rough-skinned newt of the U.S. Pacific coast: wierd science and art

The rough-skinned newt is common on the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and northern California. My friends and I remember playing with them as children when we visited the beach. They're all over the place in coastal forests and marshy estuaries near the ocean.

Unbeknown to us, like other members of the genus Taricha, the rough-skinned newt is highly toxic. In fact, it's the most poisonous animal in Oregon -- one newt's skin contains enough poison to kill an adult person if ingested, and is more toxic by weight than a poison dart frog. The high level of toxins is the result of an evolutionary battle with garter snakes. Newts get a personal benefit from being poisonous, because not only will predators avoid a known poisonous species, snakes may vomit up poisonous prey before it's digested, still alive. Over time, garter snakes developed a resistance to the poison, pushing the newts to become more poisonous. According to recent research, snakes are winning the race in some areas, but more resistant snakes still pay a price for their hardiness, being slower than other garter snakes.

My friend David Tilchin got some great photographs of rough-skinned newts over Thanksgiving, near Lincoln City, OR.


(Yes, they ARE wearing little red felt hats.) No newts were harmed in the making of this photo. They were photographed in the woods and returned to their habitats when we were done.

David has a wonderfully twisted imagination. This is his "illustration of creative process":

Beer and sewing

My most recent project has been... well, I think it needs a little background.

In real life, I'm a software engineer. Software engineers, in general, are big fans of beer, especially here in the northwest US where we have so many great microbreweries. In July 2006, before I joined my current company, there was a grand competition between the software (writes the code) and IT engineering (deploys the code and keeps it running in our data centers) teams. A competition to build the best mobile beer delivery system into a standard recycle bin. The contest was close. They both added a certain amount of decor to the basic container, one with a wood top and one with a foam top of our logo. Each had a sound system and held a 1/2 barrel keg. We still use them for parties.

Last year we were acquired by The Borg, but they could not crush our spirit! IT and software combined forces to challenge the Microsoft Display Advertising Platform team to a new competition. An even more ambitious one. Originally there was a limit of 43" on all dimensions, but it was removed at their request. Now the only mobility requirement is that each kegerator must be able to be moved into and out of the location at which it will be used.

A lot of people have poured their time and expertise into this, and it's pretty awesome. My small contribution, aside from hanging out and criticizing other people as they programmed, was to sew a cover for the gas bottles (CO2 is mixed with the beer to make it fizz), which are strapped to the outside of the thing. I sewed it on the new sewing machine (yay!) out of black awning canvas, and hand-embroidered our logo on. Pictures forthcoming in a couple of days, when the competition is over and we have DOMINATED!

Learning to crochet

My fourth crocheted item ever, after two washcloths and a bath mitt. I was just trying to make a ball, but the directions didn't seem right and I ended up with a disc. So... jellyfish! I did the tentacles as I went, making them a part of the bottom surface rather than attaching them after. It's made of kitchen cotton, so maybe it will turn out to be a sponge for the bath.

The lives of others

I spent an hour at a huge Goodwill last week mesmerized by the picture frame section. Many of the things for sale are just frames, but plenty still have the original contents. Family photos, posters, art prints, even the occasional numbered print or original piece of art. I saw a couple of very amateur oils, some little limited edition prints of watercolors of vegetables (way too cutesy), and this collage:It totally fills a gaudy silver frame. Somebody's handmade art given to Goodwill and sold for $4 with the frame. Life is strange, isn't it?

Artist Trading Cards

I love the idea of ATCs, and the small format is sort of freeing. Sitting down to draw in a 2.5 x 3.5" area is somehow less intimidating than a whole blank page. I've had lots of ideas for ATC themes. At one point I wanted to do a pen and ink ATC for every book I read for a year. Of course, the flaw in that plan is that there are all sorts of things in my head that I'm really not competent to draw yet. And I read a lot. I'm still considering it; probably a better idea to start and try to keep up with it for a year than to remember what I read in the last year.


I could relax it and use mixed formats. I just finished Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, and that would be a nice abstract card with lots of CAPIT ALIZE DTEXT INGRO UPSOF FIVEL ETTER SXXXX.

I drew this Koi design and copied it to five cards with puff paint, then filled in with alcohol markers. A couple of these are traded away, some I still have.

Mateo's Quilt

Still don't have a card reader for the camera, and I haven't been very crafty in the last few weeks. So another older project...

This is a picture book themed quilt for my cousin Mateo, masterminded by my mother and aunt. We unveiled it at his baby shower. He's a disgustingly cute little boy, as you can see at their family blog.

The Lorax square, the first in the second row, is mine. The truffula trees are fleece applique'd on, and the trunks and the lorax are embroidered. The last square in the second row is an applique job by my mother based on "Everybody Poops." She also did the first square in the third row, based on an obscure and beautifully illustrated picture book, "Grandfather Twilight." It's a gorgeous applique. I'll try to find an individual picture of it, the details are really gorgeous. The middle square in the third row is my grandmother's rendition of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

The quilt was pieced by my mom and quilted by my aunt. You can't see in the picture, but the border has names of contributors embroidered into it.

Stamp carving

Mining the photos I've previously uploaded to dA, because I had to give the camera card reader back to the person I borrowed it from, so no new pics for a little while.


This was my first real foray into stamp carving. I used the bubblegum pink speedball stamp carving medium that comes with their kits. At the time I did this I only had a basic kit, and I'd lost one of the carving tool tips, so I did the whole thing with the v shaped one. I recommend against this, it takes forever to carve out large areas. I drew the design based on the composition of a piece of dragon art I found on dA, which I've now lost track of.

French Beaded Flowers

I got into french beaded flowers a few years ago, and I haven't done anything with them for a while. I love the organic look of the french beading technique (compared to the geometric victorian style, see the difference). But I already have tons of tchotchkes and I like to use my shelf space for storing useful stuff. So I've been holding off on the beaded flowers until I find more places to apply them. I've been thinking about jewelry, but I haven't quite gotten the technique worked out yet. Traditional french beaded flower assembly wraps all the pieces together to create a stem, which is great for flower arrangements but doesn't work for anything where the flower is flush to a surface -- it's hard to apply these flowers to hair accessories or purses. And they're REALLY heavy. Anyway, here's one of my favorite flowers. I did this with a gradient of four bead colors, so I had to string as I went rather than the usual practice of loading a ton of beads on the wire directly from the hank. It took even longer than usual, but I like the look.

Swatches? For wimps

I may have started and ripped out this scarf twice, but third time's the charm, right? I think I have the right width now, and I've settled on 1:1 ribbing because it looks more like stockingette stitch but doesn't curl. My first scarf ever is mostly done now, I'm just weaving in 500 billion ends because it's striped. I need to figure out how to carry the colors along the side or something to avoid having to weave in 38 ends again.

Bead Cage Earrings

I was really on a kick of making these a couple of years ago. It's a basic wire bead cage using 26 or 28 gauge wire with seed beads strung on it. You can see that back then my wrapped loops had horrible technique. If I do more they'll actually have clean loops and use good quality wire rather than craft wire.

Gingerbread Minas Morgul

This was my gingerbread house in December 2006.
It's my rendition of Minas Morgul as envisioned in The Return of the King movie. There are no shots in the movie of the whole thing, here are a couple of screencaps to give you the idea:
131 pieces of gingerbread. 40 cups of flour. One all-nighter.

It's not as polished as I would have liked. Partly I blame this on the all-nighter -- I did the entire assembly in one huge 20 hour session because I had to leave the next day to visit my parents. I learned some valuable lessons that I will definitely apply to the next project:

1. Super-acute angles are tough.
2. If you want your gingerbread house to live up to its full potential as edible, ephemeral art, plan a party to eat the house in advance. Otherwise it will be two months old and everybody will be afraid of it. Also, more candy == more deliciousness, except for licorice, which nobody likes.
3. Using a good construction-level recipe makes a huge difference on a big house. The recipe I used appears to have disappeared from the internet... I'll hunt down and post recipes in a gingerbread tutorial in the fall.
4. Make sure your cookie sheets are flat! You could see how the large spiky pieces don't quite line up because they weren't quite flat. The aluminum cookie sheets I was using have air inside and actually warp and change shape in the oven.
5. Lots of people like the look of exposed gingerbread. If I did Minas Morgul again I would tint the dough black instead of painting it with icing.
6. Rice krispy treats are a pain to work with. I suggest mixing rice krispies with icing instead, for something that won't sag.

For the detailed description and process photos, see my journal at deviantART.

8 (1/2) Gore Jeans Skirt

This is a bit of a narrative/vague tutorial about how I made this skirt out of recycled denim.

I didn't really want the style of the traditional skirt-from-jeans. And besides, I had one pair of jeans that don't fit with holes in the knees, but I also had two disembodied jeans legs and an extremely ugly button-up sleeveless denim shirt that's way too big for me. I've been carrying these things around for at least 6 years, some of them more. And I love this particular 8-gore black skirt I have.

Thus: 8 (1/2) gore denim skirt!

I started by making up a pattern. I looked at a couple of instruction sets online for making n-gore skirts. Basically you need at least four measurements: the circumference at the top, the circumference at the bottom, the minimum width to fit around your hips, and the length of the skirt. Get the top by measuring around yourself wherever you want the top to be. Mine was 32", though somehow the finished skirt ended up seeming bigger. Oops. The ratio of the top to the bottom will affect how much the skirt flares. I measured the bottom of the skirt I already had, which was 84". Also make sure to measure your hips at the widest point if your hips are bigger than your waist, and make sure the measurement at that distance from the top of the skirt will be large enough. Calculate the size of each piece by dividing the total measurements by the number of gores. Within the top, bottom, and minimum hip measurements, you can leave the pieces as trapezoids or shape them to make the skirt flare out towards the bottom like I did. When cutting the pieces, make sure to add the hem. I left 1" at the top and bottom and 1/2" hems on the side. If you are going to attach a separate waistband you probably don't need so much at the top. Also, if you don't curve the bottoms of the pieces you'll need a bit extra because you do want to hem them in a slight curve at the end.

Because of the limited size of my random denim things, I had to make nine gores to get the hem width I wanted, two of the gores being slightly bigger because I had two bigger pieces. I think this is where I screwed up, not recalculating the size of the waist when I added the ninth gore.

The picture on the right is of the pant leg pieces. One of them had fun embroidery. I think I owned that pair of pants in approximately 1997, when the 70's were temporarily back in style. The second one is of the shirt pieces. I got two out of the back and two out of the front. The front had functional pockets -- often lacking in skirts.

Hmm, apparently I'd already used the back of embroidered leg for silkscreen practice. Someday I'll post about the silk screening in embroidery hoop experiment.

Can you guess what comes next? That's right, actual sewing! I have a sewing machine on loan right now, a nice new Brother. I'm not using special top stitching thread or needle.

I pinned and sewed all the pieces together in a chain, and ironed the seams to both sides. I'm generally allergic to ironing, but ironing the seams does make it so much easier. Then I hemmed the top, with one row of stitches at 3/4" and one at 3/8".I've never sewn in a zipper, and I'm afraid of button holes. So I stole a fly from another pair of jeans. This one was already seriously denuded by the time I got to it.

I cut out the fly, cut the buttons apart from the buttonholes, and sewed the buttons onto the right side. At this point I also wrapped the whole thing around me and realized it was too big, so I took about an inch off that piece while I was at it.

Then I fought and sewed and ripped out seams for a while trying to get the other piece in. Was trying to sew the fly in by cutting a rectangle out of the side of the other piece. Realized it was 1:45 am and thought it would be a good idea to actually sleep. The next day, I ripped off the last gore on the left, slimmed it, and attached it to the bottom of the fly's flap. This took off more extra fabric. Now you see where the 1/2 gore comes in. Good thing it was too big to begin with. It also disturbed the symmetric-ness, so the pockets in the back were off center, but oh well. Better next time.

Now all I had to do was sew this semi-gore back on on the left side, and sew the part below the fly to the other side to join the skirt together. There was a bit of fussing to make sure the flap ended up on top of the buttons, but it turned out well.

The hemming on this is straightforward. I measured from the top when I was pinning to make sure I was doing it to a consistent length. Remember that for it to be a consistent length, the bottom will be slightly curved.

And now I have a new skirt! With pockets! And two bits of embroidery!

Here's the back:

Intro Post!

This is a blog for my craft projects and crafty art projects. For tutorials and vague hand waving (I can't follow a pattern myself). For being a geek. For dislike of the color pink. For beading, and wire work, and sewing, and card making, and knitting, and crocheting, and stamping, and embroidery, and gingerbread houses. For not scrapbooking. For loving illustrators and concept artists and all the other people who keep craft in art. For recycling and remaking and turning random things into awesome. For things you can use or wear or eat, because I don't have any more shelf space for pretty knickknacks. Even if I don't actually do anything new for a while, I have some past things to post about to keep things going here for the first few weeks.