Brunch Ice Breaker "Cootie Catcher"

Hey all, I made this printable for an ice breaker at a womens' brunch. This is a 90's "cootie catcher" or fortune teller like you may have played with on the playground. It's a great way for women to get to know others at their table.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Rocket Ship: When to Flee

Yesterday I ran across the following quote:

"If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, get on, don't ask what seat." -  Sheryl Sandberg

Which leads me to a related point:

"If you're on a poorly maintained, poorly fueled, poorly aimed rocket ship... for goodness' sake GET OFF RIGHT NOW."  - Me

If this happens while you're taking off, flee!
 (Image Credit: NASA)

Recently I quit my engineering job at a Fortune 500 company. Although I've had a few days where, fueled by boredom and loneliness, I have wished I was still there, I'm very happy to be free.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a believer in intelligent, well-educated women.  I enjoy what I learned in graduate school, and I'm looking forward to applying it in the future.  But I was sacrificing my health to remain at that job, and I only have one body to live in.

I don't want to get personal about what went wrong.  I'm trying to forgive those involved.  But I can't work somewhere where creative, hard-working, prolific people are constantly put down (even though it's unintentional).

Engineering ladies, if this describes you, find a different job before you burn out!  It's really hard to wait for your self-worth and motivation to grow back.

Dropped-Waist/Blouson Dresses: A Curvy Girl's Survival Guide

I am on a quest to find perfectly comfortable casual dresses to wear.  I have a very dynamic life as a stay-at-home engineer.  My outfits need to go from cleaning the sink to writing software to shopping for groceries to doing laundry to wrangling kindergartners at my church.  I want to be stylish and comfortable.

I impulse-purchased a knit racerback dress for $20 at Target in the spring. (Yes, I know, that's like fashion mistake #1.)  It was A-line and kind of hung like a bag on me.  I belted it and ignored the odd silhouette, mostly because I wanted to get "my-money's worth" out of it before attempting alterations.

My first try was to add a strip of elastic to gather the waist, like other casual dresses I had seen at the store.  This converted the dress to a blouson style.   Which leads me to make the following Public Advisory Notice:

Warning: Some blouson dress or dropped-waist dress styles only flatter stick figures.

 

For those of you out there that already knew that, feel free to say, "I told you so."  I will admit I was taken in by an ill-conceived fad this time.

So I guess I'll be removing my original alterations and trying something else. (Good thing they weren't permanent.)  I plan on detailing my sewing quest in an upcoming post. In an attempt to determine my next steps, I've created the following helpful style guide for curvier women (such as myself).

Blouson Dresses

Extra care must be taken to define a waist in the presence of a lusher torso. 

No, no, no

The following dresses fail at this concept.

These dresses have elastic bands to draw in the waist.  But because there's so much bulk both above and below that waist, it's worse than no waist at all.  All that's left is a crease that draws your eye right to it and the added bulk there from the cinched fabric.  Just say no!

Much Better

These styles define the waist by slimming down the skirt.  The sense of unbalance between the top and the bottom makes the waist look smaller.

Potentially Even Better

These dresses feature a dropped waist instead of a blouson style.  The two styles sound similar to the untrained fashionista and might be used interchangeably.  The key to choosing the right dropped waist is similar to choosing the right blouson: intentional unbalance.  Here, the top is slimmer than the bottom, whittling the torso and elongating it without sacrificing the frill of the full skirt.

Well, there you have it. Hope this helps someone!

Fixed: Gimp 2.9 crashes and/or segfaults on Fedora 23

I love GIMP 2.9 because the user interface is way more modern than GIMP 2.8.  Because GIMP 2.9 will never be released (it paves the way for a future GIMP 2.10), I built it myself over six months ago.

However, it started crashing after our recent updates to Fedora 23.  GEGL was broken, causing the application to hang.

This fortunately has a pretty quick fix as I discovered today.  Just rebuild and reinstall GEGL system wide.  The GEGL developers have patched the problem in the master branch.

It's working again :)

Learning Vulkan for Fun XOR Profit: Part 2, Getting a Spinning Cube to Run

Let's work on getting your environment set up.  I'm using an Intel Broadwell GPU and Fedora 23.

1. Build your Vulkan driver:

        a. Get your Vulkan driver:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa
cd mesa
git checkout -b vulkan origin/vulkan

        b. Install your dependencies:

sudo dnf install libxshmfence-devel 

        c. Configure it

./autogen.sh

        d. Build it

make -j4 

     2. Get a linker.  Vulkan, like OpenCL, requires a system to go out and find the correct Vulkan install:

sudo dnf copr enable ajax/vulkan
sudo dnf install vulkan-devel

     3. Get your spinning cube program.  I'm using Kristian Hogsberg's vkcube:

cd
git clone https://github.com/krh/vkcube.git
cd vkcube
./autogen.sh
make -j4

    4.  Tell your spinning cube where Vulkan is:

export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=/home/[username]/mesa/src/intel/vulkan/dev_icd.json

    5. Run it!!

./vkcube

You should see something like this, a multicolored spinning cube:

Announcing a New Series: Learning Vulkan for Fun Xor Profit

Today was the big unveiling of the new Khronos graphics API Vulkan, the successor to OpenGL. I've decided to do a tutorial series on learning the new API for your reference (and my enjoyment).

I'm going to exclusively use the new Intel open source driver, Anvil, which is part of the Mesa project.  To use Anvil, you need to have an Intel integrated graphics card of generation IvyBridge or later.

To start, git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa and checkout and build the Vulkan branch.

The Salvation Army Top Refashion

Happy New Year!  I recently went to a thrift store to buy paint clothes, and I came away with an impulse buy.  This vintage feed-sack print blouse was originally a size XL standard button-up. Nevertheless, the pin tucking and smocking at the front was difficult to resist.

With some help from one of Renegade Seamstress's tutorials, I turned it into a much more fitted, feminine blouse.  Check it out:

I was really scared of cutting off and then re-setting in the sleeves.  I haven't done sleeves in a long time, and the curve seems so mysterious.  With the help of Merrick's Art's tutorial on designing new sleeves, I was able to get the shape of the sleeve cap to fit the armscye on the first try!  Ok, so maybe I got lucky this time.  Either way, sleeves seem a bit less scary now.

The hardest part was dealing with the sheer polyester fabric.  It was kind of fragile and had a tendency to pucker with the stitches.  I had to lower the pressure of my presser foot to avoid puckering the seams too much.  It wasn't easy, but I think it turned out well enough to wear.

Happy Wednesday!