Saturday Link Round-Up 9
If you’re in the least bit close to me online you’ll probably know that I’m working on the muslin for a shirt, Simplicity 3777 to be exact. I have everything but the back skirt and sleeves cut out, this is the first time I’ve ever attempted anything without my mother standing by supervising (and usually taking over). Needless to say I’m pretty proud of myself so far, and yes I do realise that someday I’m going to look back on this moment and cringe with embarrassment, and I can’t wait until the muslin is finished so I can go ahead and cut into the good fabric.
Since I’m a such a large busted gal I have to do an FBA on pretty much everything that goes over my chest. Thank you pattern makers that draft for a B and don’t include anything for anyone larger than that (or at the most a D). My first attempt at an FBA, using the method detailed here for vertical darts, didn’t work out so well. The FBA completely distorted the shape of the pattern and added too much where I didn’t need it. What’s a girl to do? Call her mother and ask her if just lengthening the bodice was a good idea. Then have her mother help her do it. And supervise. I’m going to hand baste the shirt together and when I’m done I’ll probably take a picture. Until then, enjoy this weeks round-up :)
Food
Daring Bakers’ Nut and Chocolate Gateau – This cake was like a little Christmas in July and I am glad there were outside forces helping me wrap my mind and time around making it. That’s what I like about being a Daring Baker, that “may the making force be with you” attitude that make us dive in into big pools of butter, flour, sugar and/or chocolate at any given month!
10 Strategies to Masterful Food Preparation in Minimal Time – Many people feel swamped with the immensity of their daily tasks, and often cooking is seen as a ‘luxury!’ The good news is that sitting down to a home cooked meal even on the busiest of days, isn’t impossible. With a little planning, you and your family can maintain a healthy diet while keeping your active schedule.
42 compound butter recipes – Compound butter is simply butter with an added flavor or two mixed in. It’s not just like buttering an item and then adding a sprinkle of the flavor – compound butter becomes a unique flavor unto itself. One of the simplest examples will be familiar to most of my readers in the Southeastern US: honey butter, a simple blend of honey with butter, whipped together and served immediately. These butters are a very easy way to look like you went to a lot of trouble.
Choc-alot – I like chocolate. A lot. I’m not a big fan of milk chocolate but I don’t think I’ve ever met a good semi-sweet or high percentage dark chocolate that I didn’t like. A rich, indulgent slice of chocolate cake paired with a glass of port is my choice dessert.
34 Handy Kitchen Measurement Hacks & Tidbits – Do you find yourself always scrambling to find out how much one stick of butter is? Or how many eggs you need to make a cup? Do you know how much 1 cup of uncooked rice makes?
Hazelnuts and Praline, Some of My Favorite Things – When asked to name my very favorite things in pastry, I often feel like a mother being asked which of her children she likes best. How to choose between chocolate and strawberries, puff pastry and pâte sucrée? How to weigh the merits of a lemon tart versus a crème brûlée versus a buttery shortbread cookie? Of course, you also have Pierre Hermé‘s Ispahan, smiling smugly in the corner, realizing mommy will never admit it he’s her favorite but knowing she has a special soft spot just for him.
Using vinegar in baking – Vinegar is a surprisingly common ingredient in baked goods, considering that it has such a sharp flavor. But as an acid, vinegar is often included in cake and cookie batters to react with baking soda and start the chemical reaction needed to produce carbon dioxide and give those batters a lift as they bake.
Clean the Grill With an Onion? – It seems that rubbing a hot grill with half a cut onion (cut side down) will loosen up baked on grit and grime and basically take it all right off the grill.
Cheesy Garlic Bread – My husband isn’t a big bread eater. In fact, if we are out to eat, you can usually just stick the bread basket in front of me, because I could eat the whole thing while my husband will usually pass on it. But he loved this bread, and definitely ate his fair share of it. That says a lot! It is supposedly a knock off from the cheesy bread they serve at Black Angus. I’ve never been to Black Angus before, so I can’t compare them, but I do know I’m a fan of this bread!
Swedish-Pancake Morn – Yesterday it was cooooold outside, and today, again, there is a cloudy layer of icy fog on the yard. Naturally, very strong coffee and thin, hot, eggy pancakes beg to be made on such mornings.
Baker’s One Bowl Brownies – Brownie recipes come in all shapes and sizes. Some are cakey, some are chewy and some have all different kinds of add-ins that make them extra-special. Usually, if I wanted to make spur-of-the-moment brownies I was always lacking in some essential ingredient but, with these one bowl brownies, as long as you have the basics, you can eat brownies.
Cookbook Lingo: 101 Cookery Terms & Definitions – N/A
Raspberry Chocolate Bundt Cake – It has been months since I last made a bundt cake, so when the urge to get out my pan and bake one hit this week, I gave in without a fuss. One of the best things about bundt cakes is that they are really no-fuss cakes themselves. You don’t need to worry about layers, fillings, frostings or decorations. The cake will as fancy – or as simple – as the pan that it is baked in, and while adding a drizzle of icing on the top can be an option, it really is never more than just an option.
Geeky
7 Online Tools That Will Make Your Life Easier – Okay, so we all like convenience, right? Most of us aren’t sitting around wondering how we could make our lives just a little more complicated. Well, for us at Arbenting, we’ve found 7 online tools that we use daily to help keep things, and by things I mean us, more organized, focused, and overall on track. To add a little more convenience to your daily dose of online activity simply gaze at our assembled structural saviors.
Some Web Apps Work Better Together – How many new websites can you fit in a Volkswagen Beetle? Sometimes it feels like that’s what we’re trying to do these days – but all these new applications and services don’t have to be crammed into our heads and lives as separate things to try out and remember.
What community should you be active on? – Communities are great for creatives. You get to mingle with people who have the same interests as you, learn from each other, collaborate and it might even lead to opportunities. Another strong point of being on a community is that you’re getting yourself “out there”. Your exposing your work and yourself. This will lead to a stronger brand or name and you’ll start getting traffic to your site.
“TweetParty Does Group Messaging for Twitter”: – To get started, just sign in with your Twitter user name and password and you’re shown the “my groups” page. Enter a name for your group, click the “create” button, and TweetParty will add it to the current page.
7 FireFox Extensions to Explore Page Source Code – SEOs look at the source code of almost every page – I do even when I am not analyzing the page and just browsing. That’s quite natural, I’ve been looking for tools that can represent the information in a better way or allow for more valuable options to experiment with.
The Lifehacker Editors’ Favorite Software and Hardware – Lifehacker readers range from the complete newbie to the most seasoned techie, but where do the Lifehacker editors stand? We polled our own editors for the computer hardware and applications they swear by and we’re breaking it down for you here. This post is categorized into the software each editor uses on a daily basis, the operating systems we live in, the hardware we rely on, the peripherals we utilize on a regular basis, and webapps we need. Then we tell you exactly what kind of user we think we are.
Freebies
Watercolor Roundup: 200+ Beautiful Brushes and Textures – Watercolor effects are a hot trend right now in web design. It seems like we are seeing at least one or two sites featuring this style show up on the design galleries every week. Adding watercolor elements to a design can definitely give it an artistic appearance, and when done well, can make a website look as if it was scanned from a canvas.
Free High-Res Texture Pack: Grungy Watercolor – I know I’ve been on a texture kick recently, but I’m hoping you all don’t mind. These are the textures I created in order to make my most recent set of Photoshop Brushes. I didn’t see a reason to let then collect dust on my hard drive, so I thought I’d share the source files. They look quite different in full color :) You can click on each image to view at Flickr, or download all in a zip at the bottom.
21 Amazing and Free Texture Backgrounds Collections for designers – 21 Amazing and Free Texture Backgrounds Collections for designers – Some days I catch myself browsing random things on the net, and sometimes I find things that really grab my attention. Today is one of those days. I found these texture collections on deviantart.
Resources for Creating Polls – Polls can be a great thing for any number of different websites. They get visitors engaged quickly and so long as they are quick, they are usually pretty fun to participate in. Especially if you can see the results right away. The more you get your audience thinking about and interacting with your site, the more memorable it will be for them.
20 great custom shapes sets for Photoshop hand-picked from DeviantArt – N/A
15 top destinations for freebies – This is a list of websites with free resources that every designer needs: textures, vectors, photoshop brushes, logos and fonts.
45 Excellent Free Web Templates – Free Design Templates don’t have to be ugly, cluttered,and boring, Some web-sites offer high quality templates for free you can use them for your personal and commercial projects without any restrictions. Here Dzine Bog Presents 45 Best Stylish Free web templates Still, before using some of the templates, throw a glance at the license agreements
Miscellaneous
“85 Famous Works of Art ‘Improved’ via Modern Technology”“:http://gizmodo.com/5030518/85-famous-works-of-art-improved-via-modern-technology – For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to put modern technology in famous works of art. I’ve got to be honest, these might be the best results from a Photoshop Contest yet. The wide range of sources makes for an insanely entertaining gallery, and I had a really hard time choosing the top three. But choose I did. Hit the jump for the top three winners followed by one of the best Gallery of Champions to ever grace these fine pages. Nice work, everyone.
Predictions from 1930 about fashion in 2000 – This is how designers in 1930 predicted fashion to be like in the year 2000. Not so accurate…
15 Desktop Blogging Tools Reviewed – Desktop blogging tools can benefit designers-bloggers in a number of ways. They provide extra functionality that can significantly speed up the blogging process for both newbies and professionals.
Flickr finds – kitchen corners – N/A
Fifty Percent of Foster Kids Are On Psychiatric Medications – That’s right. The single most best predictor of mental illness— better than family history, better than genetics, better than symptomatology— is being a foster child.
Learn PHP from Scratch: A Training Regimen – Holding the title of “number one”, PHP is the most popular language among developers. Even still, many prefer different languages. Yours truly, for example, is most comfortable when working in the ASP.NET environment. However, because of the enormous success of Wordpress, more and more developers have decided to expand their horizons and learn yet another language.
10 Sites to Waste Your Day – As if we don’t already live in a environment that is filled with enough distractions, that we need yet more things to waste our time. However sometimes on those rare occasions, a need arises and we need to disconnect – unplug from our daily grind and clear our minds. Maybe you have time to kill and want to goof around for a bit. This is not a luxury I personally get to enjoy all that often. I would like to believe that someday I will have more time to goof around. In the meantime I will continue ro bookmark pages so that when that day does comes, I will have plenty of options. Below are 10 sites that you can waste your time with starting today if you like.
Sewing
Using foldover elastic in sewing projects – Foldover elastic is used in place of ribbing to finish sewing projects. It has a nice decorative look, comes in a ton of colors, and doesn’t create any bulk around the edges.
Pants pattern alteration – Since a lot of women develop heavy front thighs due to sport activities like swimming, running etc. which cause the front pants legs to be too snug at the upper thighs…
I’ve Been Duped! – Still trying to figure out the Mystery Fabric, I decided to do a burn test. Now, I“ve never been any good at the burn test, but I figured, Why not give it a shot? I had my tweezers, fabric swatch and a match. You can see the result here.
Web Design
32 Examples of Websites with a Brave colour Scheme – One key element in the design of any website is colour. Here are some great inspirational websites which show that colour can be used in very extraordinary ways.
Getting Inspiration Wrong: Website Rip offs – One sure fire way to lose any respect as a designer is to copy or steal from another site. With so many Web Galleries around these days its easier to find good looking sites to help fuel your inspiration, but unfortunately there are too many people who are using these galleries to steal images, code and layouts frompeople who spent time creating something unique.
Making a bigger impact with your design skills – Recently I featured an interview with James West, the designer behind Fifty Designers’ Current Favourite Typefaces which raised money for UNICEF’s appeal for Burma. James’ idea resonated with a notion I’ve had for a little while now, to investigate what avenues exist for designers to use their skills for the greater good. I’ve compiled a list of resources which I hope will provide some inspiration (let me know if they do).
10 of the Best Color Resources and Tools – Color plays an important role in the way we communicate with each other. Color not only helps give a design visual beauty, but it can also make a person react or feel a certain way. This feeling may be on a subconscious level, but it could affect the way that person thinks about a product or service. That’s why it is so important to choose the right palette when creating a new design. Here are some resources and tools to help you choose that perfect color palette
Wordpress
Hiding Content in Your RSS Feed – I’ve been doing a bit of research lately on creating RSS-only content for my website – that is, content that shows up in my RSS feed and nowhere else. My research has a specific purpose: I’m planning to start a contest on CSSnewbie in the very near future. The contest would by available only to people who subscribe to my RSS feed, meaning I’d need to provide some sort of clue or password in my RSS, but nowhere else.
Wordpress – Clean Up Your Backend – There are lots of posts dedicated to showing you wordpress plugins that enhance your post functionality and add features but not many that focus on helping you clean and maintain a secure and orderly backend. I’ll include a few you may have seen before but also a few new ones to help keep things running smoothly.
Build a Featured Posts Section for Wordpress – WordPress is awesome. Even more awesome is the fact that it can be customized to power any type of site you like! Here, we’ll be learning how to create a featured and “latest posts” section – easily a ‘must-have’ for all good News/Magazine themes. We’ll also go over using the ‘Custom Fields’ to their fullest potential.
The Perfect Hands-Free Database Backup – Most of us are quite lax when it comes to making regular backups of our database. It’s too much hassle, and “what are the chances it will happen to me?”
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Hi I'm Becky, often referred to as The Knitting Hillbilly and Pussybear, owner of this site and general nuisance. I'm a knitter, serial complainer, known whistle blower and I run the ever popular
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