Happy decorative gourd season, ghosts and ghouls!

I wish I had a nice, polished, finished Thing to show off for you today (goodness knows I've started plenty of projects lately) but summer turned out to be a season of flops, misdirects, slow bakes, and/or life-related stuff that's pretty far removed from my, ahem, "niche content pillars".¹ Few of these efforts really lent themselves to the type of video I'm keen on making (or equipped to make well ²) right now, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in sharing a little something about them, so here's what I've been banging away at:

Shoemaking

Last year I made a pair of custom lasts and only managed to get around to completing a single pair of mockup ballet flats on them before they got rudely shoved aside to make room on the workbench for other, more urgent, projects. But this summer I found myself in dire need of a pair of simple sandals for a family holiday by the beach, and for some reason absolutely nothing motivates me quite like a travel-based deadline. So, with a month on the countdown (a perfectly reasonable lead-time, I think, for what should have been a quick weekend project), I pulled out the lasts and realized that the first pair of low-cut ballet flats had failed to reveal a major deficit in the height of the instep... exactly where I needed these sandals to fit. So the "quick and easy" project ballooned into weeks of indecision, experimentation, and mess as I glued up and carved down patches of veg-tan leather to fill in the missing height and volume. I... do not really have the correct tools for this and it turns out I was not very good at it on the first try! But I eventually coaxed them into acceptably not-quite-identical shapes with ample room for my foot in an easy slip-on beach slide.

On top of filling a gap in my wardrobe, I was excited to road-test a couple of new-to-me materials and techniques: I finally got my hands on some Texon insole board, which I really liked working with; I've also been looking for a good locally available alternative to Barge cement (which has sadly become tough to find near me in anything less than comical volumes and costs a mint to ship) and so far I'm really impressed with how well the hardware store LePage contact cement has held these soles on. As every daring action hero must, I hit my deadline with practically no time to spare. Was the adhesive solvent still off-gassing when they went into my carry-on? Look, that is a private matter between me and my designated airport security professional. (I jest; it was fine. Probably.)

The sandals themselves are nothing fancy to look at and I made a few hasty construction choices I wouldn't recommend for longevity's sake, but they turned out comfy as hell despite being decidedly roomy. After the beach gathering with one side of the family, we transitioned straight into over a week of multi-city sightseeing with more family who were visiting Canada for the first time, and I logged several days of 15-30k steps in a wide variety of environments in these slides with zero footwear-related complaints.

I got video of most of the process but I haven't had time since returning from the trip to review it and see if there's any There there. If I do end up making a video about this, pretend this is all new information, ok?

Knitting machine tinkering

i.

In the middle of editing my last video, in which I discussed at some length the challenges of my circular sock machine's cam design, I indulged in a bit of a side-quest, wherein I attempted to settle something that's been rattling around the back of my mind for ages: could I retrofit my CSM with more sophisticated cams and avoid some of those tedious workarounds?

This seemed like a good opportunity to explore a few topics that I think are transferable to the flat-bed knitting machine project, too, including: digging into someone else's code in OpenSCAD; designing to fit the constraints of an existing system; the nuances of cam design; and testing out ideas for compliant spring mechanisms. I made a pile of prototypes and came tantalizingly close to getting something useful, but eventually I had to admit that I couldn't quite bridge the gap in a defensible time frame, and had to force myself to set it aside so I could finish the thing I was actually meant to be working on (which was itself an elaborate procrastination ploy). I do plan to return to this in some form, but it needs some time to marinate. In the meantime, I'll write up the... yeah, sure, let's call it "progress"... I've made so far in a separate post for those who are interested.

ii.

I've been trying (and trying, and trying) to put together a live-ish demo of creating a from-scratch mid-to-bulky gauge layout for the flatbed knitting machine. The idea is that, by starting from a blank page with a new set of needle measurements, 1) I can provide a little more detail about how to approach changes to this part of the machine (or what to think about if you're designing one of your own) that I couldn't squeeze into the original design video; AND 2) it's an opportunity to abstract out some "rules" that could eventually lead to making this part of the code more parametric, or at least a little bit friendlier to changes. (Plus, I've been wanting to expand my options with some less-scripted video formats, and this seemed like a well-scoped task where I could chatter to the camera without too much risk of rambling.)

Over the course of several attempts at this, I've utterly failed to generate usable footage that captures all the key information I'm hoping to convey without also being heartbreakingly boring, but I plan to have another crack at it this week. On the plus side, I'm trying to switch to Inkscape (from Illustrator) and all my flops gave me lots of time to kick the tires on a new UI. Do I remember any of it after weeks away? Keep your fingers crossed for me!

iii.

I have a huge backlog of knitting machine project To-Dos that I'm planning to tackle before the end of the year, ideally with a couple of key improvements ready to go public in time for Crafty Gift-giving Season. I'm hesitant to make any specific promises about which features will get the spotlight, especially given how seldom I've managed to push anything across the finish line so far this year, but let's say I'm feeling ambitious.

In other knitting

Since completing the gusset socks on the machine, I've been on a bit of a hand-knitting binge. I always like to have a lil something on the needles when I fly, but honestly? Usually my travel knitting ends up being more of a fidget outlet rather than a guaranteed path to a finished object, let alone a pair of them. I started early to give myself time to practice a few techniques that I wanted to incorporate...

...and now I have a whole new summer sock wardrobe??

I think am now firmly Team Gusset, and I finally understand all the hype for the Chiaogoo circular needles. After juggling, dropping, losing, and finally snapping (at the very beginning of a five-hour train ride!) a dwindling set of wooden DPNs, I think a metal magic loop is the only way to knit on the go from now on.

I also completed a couple of hybrid pairs to give as gifts at the end of the trip, where I cranked some tubes on the sock machine (at literally the last possible moment before getting on a plane, which is... sort of becoming a theme) so that I could add afterthought heels, toes, and ribbing by hand while riding the various planes, trains and buses on my upcoming itinerary. As I mentioned in reply to a comment recently, this isn't my preferred method for socks because I get stressed out by having to pick up all those stitches, but it was hella convenient in this case as it allowed me to defer the fiddly parts while still taking advantage of the machine's speed while it was still available. (Is this something folks would like a video about? Let me know!)

Sewing

When I get the urge to drop everything to sew a garment, it often comes with the rationalization that, like, surely this is the missing item that will finally Fix Me and make me excited to wear clothes again. This is, of course, almost never the case. Almost.

About halfway through the summer I made a batch of bamboo-rayon boxer briefs and I'm only mildly exaggerating when I say they have been life-changing. No more thigh chafing in the humidity? And I can wear short skirts while maintaining the sitting posture of a bisexual goblin with ADHD?? LIFE. CHANGING.

(I made my own pattern based on a pair of worn out cotton leggings, with modifications to include a lined front panel/gusset, shifting the inseam slightly toward the back for comfort, and reducing the overall width to account for the difference in fabric stretch. I don't plan on making a tutorial about this process, but if it's something that interests you, @youmeandmargot has recent a video about making a really similar style based on a store-bought pair.)

Anyway, in the wake of this revelation, I whipped up a mini pencil skirt (yes, with pockets) out of about a half-meter of leftover denim, and chased that with a charcoal leopard-print version. They are basically my uniform now. My new personality is Pocket Skort.

Things I enjoyed

• "the art of the selfie" (aka "painting a self-portrait to help me feel better about myself"): @beigeflannel is a new-to-me channel and (for better or worse) I'm not normally quick to click on an hour-plus video by some rando based solely on a title and thumbnail ³, but in this case I'm really glad I did. It feels rare to find someone taking the digital selfie seriously as an artistic medium, and I appreciated the critique interludes as well as watching the painted portrait unfold.

• Another new face, what are the odds! But it's extremely novel to stumble across fresh shoemaking eyecandy, especially something with a thumbnail this dramatique and drag-coded, so there was zero hesitation and zero regret for clicking on this Made By Meredith video about her handmade thigh-high platform boots. The channel seems pretty new and maybe still finding its voice(?), so it remains to be seen whether it'll become a staple in my rotation, but if you're a fellow shoe nerd, this one seems worth keeping an eye on.

If you're still here, first of all: I appreciate you. And second: I hope it goes without saying that any and all em-dashes—indeed, every punctuation mark and all the words around them!—were painstakingly chosen by me, the authentically flawed person who took way too long to write this. But here I am, saying it anyway, because we live in Hell and attempting anything creative online these days feels like a non-consensual Turing Test. Anyway, thanks for hanging in; I'll have more to show you soon.

Until next time,

xoxo Sparks