DIY: Design and make your own bag revisited

Gucci, Light Soho leather hobo

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Possibly you can save thousands on a designer handbag. For example this Gucci Soho leather hobo has a price tag of $1,980.  I know, I know...it's the status of carrying around a pricey bag with a well known brand.  But one can always step out of that game into the game of being a creator.  Maybe even charge thousands for your own creations.  Even design your own brand--but that's another story.

A diverse collection of do-it-yourself purses/handbags/bags can be found at craftgawker. Here's one for a reversible purse from Martha Stewart; her site is a wealth of other types of DIY projects, as well.

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Reversible purse, Martha Stewart

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Nicole at You SEW Girl! offers patterns in PDF format for sale. She also has a couple of books out, one titled The Better Bag Maker. A business idea, maybe?

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Laptop bag, You Sew Girl!, Nicole Mallalieu Design

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For those of you challenged by sewing machines (I learned to lean into it or be stuck with the same old off-the-rack clothes or no new clothes at all), here's a no-sew project by Handimania, a channel on YouTube. One thing about this design that troubles me is the possibility that putting any weight in the bag will cause it to eventually lose the items. It seems a good idea to seal the bottom with washable fabric glue or tape. You can find some at Amazon. (Aleene's Fabric Fusion Tape seems to be popular.)

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Another rich resource for free bag patterns is It's Sew Easy by Maebh Walsh.

Tote bags and simple handbags are an excellent first projects for beginners.


 -- Marge

DIY: Digital trash

Lamprecht & Moderegger sign for digital dump, New Scientist

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Most of us have had to clean files off that overloaded hard drive eventually: at least this was true before the days of terabyte drives. But inventory in an MMORPG or a virtual world like Second Life is a different story. In-game inventory space disappears fast; in Second Life carrying around 14,000 items (at last count) can slow you down. And abandoned builds can be pretty unsightly.

There are archeologists that sift through digital trash to learn about the players, according to the New Scientist. It's a fascinating article, well worth the read. One observation that struck me is

Eventually, Lamprecht and Moderegger hit on the idea of getting the rubbish to decay... 

Suddenly the [digital] dump took on a new light. “It was hard to see things disappear; it was like living with daily loss,” says Lamprecht. Some objects were intricate, things people had put care into making. Many were no more than a few months old. “When is a digital object ready to die?” she asks. “It doesn’t look chipped, it doesn’t become spoiled, it doesn’t start to smell bad.”

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Dumpster Drive logo

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Taking the idea of digital trash dumps a step further, there's Dumpster Drive: Exchange Your Digital Trash with Strangers, which operates on the premise that one person's trash may be another person's treasure. Currently it's only available for Mac OSX 10.6+; you can learn more about the application and download it at the Dumpster Drive site. There are some thoughtful comments about it at PCWorld.

If you're really serious about cleaning up your machine, here are 5 tactics for dumping digital trash, proposed by a study at Johns Hopkins University. The study itself is in PDF format and can be found at the Cornell University Library e-print archive. As an aside, I'll bet Google and other portals like Flickr and Tumblr have a lot of digital trash to deal with.


-- Marge

DIY: Playing with LED lights

The term "led lights" brings up a mix of results on Google. Then the questions arise: do I mean those stick on lights/lamps, or those small electronic components, or string lights, and how do I get the search results I want? Best answer: keep trying until you see something useful.

With the idea of using LED lights for projects, maybe Christmas projects, I found 3 different approaches.

First, there's sparkleballs using strings lights, plastic cups, and zip ties. You can find some instructions at instructables.

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Sparkleballs, instructables

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Another approach is to buy ready-made single LED lights, often called stick on, and devise new ways to use them. For an example of a not-a-string light project, take a look at Loew Cornell's LED lantern. Loew Cornell has a line of mason jar, aka Ball jar, craft items call Transform Mason. You can find some at Jo-Ann and Amazon.

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LED lantern project, Loew-Cornell

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Another approach is wiring LEDs. This can get complicated, so here's a progression of articles on working with LEDs. From eHow there's How to Design a Simple LED Circuit. ElectroSchematics has a wealth of LED projects and circuits. Instructables has a section on LEDs. I've bought LEDs from Super Bright LEDs and they're good to deal with; they have a section on LED Lights For Artistic Projects.

Because I got fixated on finding a good LED-music sync project, here are 3 that look interesting, all from instructables: How to Make an LED Ambient Mood Light: A Beginner Tutorial, Arduino RGB LED Music Lights, and Beat Sync (fairly complex).

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elevenbytes, LED mood light, instructables

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Thanks to Brit & Co for some leads on LED projects.


-- Marge

DIY: using Notan for composition, part 2

Jan Maklak, Digital Photography School

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Uh-oh, looks like I've painted myself into a corner--again. There's not a lot of information on the web about using Notan in photography and what's there is very old. I could approach it as post-processing, but many photographers feel that that's cheating. To them a true photo is a capture of the moment. And I can't say I disagree.

Previously I talked about Notan--what it is and how it's used by artists. Here, in part 2, I planned to look at how it can be applied to photography. Granted, balancing light and dark values, as well as framing the picture, while capturing the image can be daunting, especially when you're starting out at photography.

So here's what information I did capture that photographers may find useful.

Available as a free ebook, Arthur Hammond's Pictorial Composition in Photography (American Photographic Publishing Company, 1920) is a small book with some big ideas. He prefaces his book by saying,

To tell a photographer how to compose his pictures is like telling a musician how to compose music, an author how to write a novel or an actor how to act a part. Such things can only grow out of the fulness and experience of life.

Another book relating Notan and photography, one that was elusive, is The Command to Look: A Formula for Picture Success (Camera Craft Publishing Company, 1937) by William Mortensen. This link is to a PDF file with photos of the book, somehow very fitting.

As for framing your shots, you can look at these articles, but it seems to me the information in the 2 books above is more useful. Article 1: Framing Your Shots – Photography Composition Technique. Article 2: 25 Images Using Framing in Composition – Weekly Inspiration. While article number 2 takes the word framing quite literally, not putting boundaries on your photo works too.

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M.Farkas Fowler, On the way to Dillingham

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For an idea of the workflow involved in digital post-processing, take a look at some of the articles on this photo.net page.

-- Marge

DIY: Maintaining a Blogger blog

Stamp, France, 1937, Rene Descartes, postbit
"Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)"

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It seems that posts over 3 years old deteriorate. Looking through posts published in 2012, I see that many have images and videos missing. What to do?

My solution is to back up the blog as it exists now by browsing to the dashboard and selecting settings/other/Blog Tools/Export blog. From there the usual download window appears (if you have 'ask' selected in your browser settings). Look through the downloaded .xml  file to see if you got the information you wanted. Be aware: the code is dense and difficult to parse. Mainly you want to know that you can find the images posted, or at least the references to their source, and what you wrote. This information is material for future posts. Google has a page about export or import your blog.

Next, once more at the dashboard, I selected Posts/Published and set all posts published in 2012 to "revert to draft." Once they're reverted, you can find them under Posts/All.

The image at the top refers to a question I ask myself fairly often: why blog? In part the answer is I'm driven by an inquiring mind. Also I dislike wasting anything, including research, and like to entertain in a subdued way. Sometimes the posts serve as notes for something I'm working on.

-- Marge

DIY: Halloween 2015

Trio of minion costumes, Instructables

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It's time again to troll the web for Halloween ideas. And there are some good ones. Group costumes appear to be big this year.

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Mario Kart (Image Imgur, ShadowmanJack), Mashable

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Here are links to 3 lists with images: 35 Fun Group Halloween Costumes for You and Your Friends; 20 Genius Halloween Costume Ideas You Can Whip Up Last Minute; and 11 Halloween Costumes No One Else Will Have. The slides in this last list also serve as comments on current social trends and perceptions; one of the slides--Unemployed Dov Charney--links to a background article about the former CEO of American Apparel.

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Costume: Unemployed Dov Charney, refinery29

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There 20,000 ideas at Coolest Homemade Costumes.

If the minions in Despicable Me have caught your fancy, here's how a number of people have adapted them to costumes: 21 DIY Minion Costumes from Despicable Me for Halloween. If you have the time and patience, this article will explain how to build a costume true to the original minion form: Trio of Minion Costumes (Despicable Me). The instructions are fairly complicated, but the description walks you through them well.

Instructables is sponsoring a Halloween Costume Contest (the minion costumes above are an entry). There are 33 days left to submit an entry and the prizes are described thus:

Ready your sewing machines, fire up the glue guns, and charge your battery packs, it's Halloween again! Enter your DIY masterpieces in the Halloween Costume Contest for a chance to win some awesome prizes including an iPad Mini, a Petcube Camera, a Leatherman multitool, Samsung digital camera, and more, provided by HalloweenCostumes.com and Petcube!

-- Marge

DIY: Build your own tiny house

Sunset House, Tiny House Swoon

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According to Wikipedia's entry on the Small House Movement,

In the United States the average size of new single family homes grew from 1,780 square feet (165 m2) in 1978 to 2,479 square feet (230.3 m2) in 2007, and to 2,662 square feet (247.3 m2) in 2013, despite a decrease in the size of the average family. Reasons for this include increased material wealth and prestige.

The small house movement is a return to houses of less than 1,000 square feet (93 m2).

Sometimes there is a distinction made between small--less than 1000 sq.ft.--and tiny--less than 400 sq.ft. A resource for information on the tiny house is The Tiny Life, a site with a lot of information about living tiny. 11 Tiny Houses looks a number of different approaches to building a tiny house. Some of these builds remind me of living off the grid. Note that many tiny houses are built on wheels, making them sort of home-made RVs.

For more background on tiny houses, take a look at Time Magazine's Tiny Houses With Big Ambitions. Also, there's a documentary on Vimeo titled Living Small.

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The $8000 tiny house, Loving Tiny Life

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TinyHouseBuild reports on a tiny house you can build for $8000. One article worth note is The Incredible $8,000 Tiny House: Serious Saving Strategies While You Build. The builders of this house have a site, Loving Tiny Life, that talks about their experiences.

Two photo essays about small houses are These tiny homes are full of big ideas and 44 of the Most Impressive Tiny Houses You've Ever Seen.

Stock house plans can be found at sites like America's Best and Jacobsen Homes. But the prices can range from several hundreds to thousands of dollars. It's best to do some research at a site like Home Style Choices first.

If you're wondering what living in a tiny house might feel like, check out this video.

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-- Marge

DIY: walking for power vs. power-walking

Sustainable Dance Floor, Sustainable Dance Club

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Studies conducted in 2007 revealed that longer legs and upright walking, compared to a chimp's shorter stride and crouched gait, may have given humans a leg-up in evolution. Walking upright is more energy-efficient.

Now scientists and innovators are working on converting what energy we do expend to power our cell phones and other devices. Engineer Patrick Chapman at Illinois University gives some basics on using bodily motion for power in From power walking to walking for power: Harnessing human motion to power electronics (2009). An interesting article with tables giving energy expended for various activities is Kinetic energy harvesting: Everyday human activity could power the internet of things. Columbia University's project is called EnHANTs.

Currently being reported as possible transformers of human energy are flexible cloth, body heat, and piezoelectric conversion of stress to electricity (fiber nanogenerator).

For more info and info that's up-to-date, there's a site called Wearable Technologies. One of the products found at the site is Ampy--also on Kickstarter (a video is below).

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Googling "energy harvesting products" returns a host of sites offering devices like energy harvesters; actuators and sensors; haptic feedback actuators; and cooling (these are all piezo; example taken from Mide Technology). Use them to develop your own harvester.

Then there are buildings and surfaces that harvest the energy of the people that use them, such as the Sustainable Dance Floor.

-- Marge

DIY: plastic bottles repurposed

Lisa Be/Project Vortex, Hurricane Sandy Bottle Caps, Bored Panda

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According to Pristine Planet, "at least 50 million plastic bottles are thrown away" each day in the U.S. Here are some ways to recycle some of them.

DesignRulz offers 45 Ideas of How To Recycle Plastic Bottles. The article mentions work done by Michele Brand; she often works with the bases of plastic drink bottles. Here's a sample.

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Michele Brand, plastic bottle art, Design Rulz

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At Bored Panda there's 23 Creative Ways To Reuse Old Plastic Bottles. This lamp, designed by Yaroslav Olenev, is made of a large bluish plastic bottle and plastic spoons. There's an informative post about Olenev at Link Camp.

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Yaroslav Olenev, Spoon Lamp, Bored Panda

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Distractify in 26 Creative Ways To Repurpose A Plastic Bottle has some really useful ideas for those empty bottles; among them, a birdfeeder; a wasp/fly trap; and a protective lens case. BTW, Distractify says "approximately 100 million plastic bottles are used--and discarded--every day."

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Instructables, protective lens case, Distractify

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And Mudfooted also has an Artistic section, where there's this.

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Veronika Richterová, plastic bottle plants, Mudfooted

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-- Marge

Beauty and the beast: behind the scenes

Dubi Preger (by LoraShalkar), Make-up Artist, Israel, Wikipedia

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Theatrical makeup can make an actor more beautiful, fit the role better, or look extremely repulsive. In the movies, sometimes a live actor isn't present at all. (No, not talking about CGI here.) For examples of cases where no actor was present, take a look at Movie makeup artists at work. IMDB has a list, last updated 30 Mar 2013, of The most Talented Special Makeup Visual Effects Artists of Movies.

A fun list is Zimbio's Many Faces - Actors Who've Worn Prosthetic Makeup.

If the beauty part of makeup is what interests you, check out Mr. Billy B's site. Some other celebrity makeup artists are Monika Blunder, Charlie Green, and Tom Pecheux. Here's a sample of  Billy B's work, found at his site.

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Usually when you start out in theater, you have to apply your own makeup. You might find these pointers from this wikiHow tutorial useful.

-- Marge

DIY: smartphone holograms and other holographic effects

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If you're fascinated by holographic images--the ones that seem to hang in the air--you've come to the right place.

Hot on the web right now is how to turn your smartphone into a 3d hologram projector. The video below will tell you how to make the setup needed. After that, google "hologram video" for images to put on your smartphone.

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There is other holographic magic going on, as well. The Celluon Magic Cube will project a usable keyboard onto a flat surface. The cube connects with your computer via "infrared layer combined with an optical sensor." A video is available on YouTube.

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Celluon Magic Cube

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The Daily Mail reports Star Wars-style moving holograms, saying

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have cracked a major technological hurdle to make low-cost, high quality holographic videos a reality.

Until now, the video hologram has generally been confined to science fiction, the most famous example being the projected image of Princess Leia in the first Star Wars film.

Is the model in the photo reading backward?

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3D holographic video, Daily Mail

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Perhaps most amazing is this interactive live holography by RealView Imaging.

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In case you didn't know, lasers are used to produce holograms. Here's How holograms work.

-- Marge

DIY: the Fool emerges--again

00 the Fool, Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, Wikipedia

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The image of the Fool stepping off a cliff got stuck in my mind again today. In an effort to find out what was brewing there under the surface, I first looked at the fool archetype, then archetypes in general, then Jung's archetypes, specifically. There's a lot of substance in Jung's ideas about archetypes, but little about what they mean to an individual. Putting one's self into a labelled box is somewhat self-defeating.

After accumulating all these lovely references, I began looking for something more associated with life meaning. And found Mark Manson's 7 Strange questions that help you find your life purpose. His strange and oddly beautiful questions are quoted below.

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Jan Matejko, Stańczyk(Jester), Wikipedia

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First, there's the Fool. Wikipedia has an article about the wise fool. Fallen Angel at StOttilien has an article titled Crazy Wisdom – the Archetype of the Fool, the Clown, the Jester and the Trickster. Myths-Dreams-Symbols describes Jung's Trickster Archetype thus

The trickster is a very important archetype in the history of man. He is a god, yet he is not. He is the wise-fool. It is he, through his creations that destroy, points out the flaws in carefully constructed societies of man. He rebels against authority, pokes fun at the overly serious, creates convaluted [sic] schemes - that may or may not work - plays with the Laws of the Universe and is sometimes his own worst enemy. He exists to question, to cause us to question & not accept things blindly. He appears when a way of thinking becomes outmoded needs to be torn down built anew. He is the Destroyer of Worlds at the same time the savior of us all.

Carl Jung "understood archetypes as universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct (Wikipedia)." One interpreter of Jung's ideas on archetypes is Carl Golden at SoulCraft. An interesting view of archetypes is presented in 12 Best Character Archetypes For Film: Part 1.

You can find a varied list of articles on the Finding Meaning page at Huffington Post.

But for real self-help take a look at these 7 strange questions posed by Mark Manson.

1. What’s your favorite flavor of shit sandwich and does it come with an olive?
2. What is true about you today that would make your 8-year-old self cry?
3. What makes you forget to eat and poop?
4. How can you better embarrass yourself?
5. How are you going to save the world?
6. Gun to your head, if you had to leave the house all day, every day, where would you go and what would you do?
7. If you knew you were going to die one year from today, what would you do and how would you want to be remembered?

-- Marge

DIY: self-publishing digitally

GraphicNovel, Comicsbeat

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For those who work in digital media--writers, photographers, video producters, musicians, voice actors, artists, animators, musicians, and any combination of these--this is a survey of options available for digital self-publishing. TopTenReviews offers extensive information about the Best Online Book Publishing Companies. Possibly most useful about this TopTenReviews page is the breakdown of factors involved in self-publishing.

But self-publishing isn't limited to books; there are graphic novels, photographic anthologies, videos, music, and games to consider. Since games require extensive user interaction, they're a topic for another day.

Several online portals offer exciting opportunities. Amazon's CreateSpace (free to signup) can be used to publish books, music, and films. KDP, Amazon's Kindle portal, has categories for book genres, comics, and graphic novels. Selling on Amazon is featured.

Lulu offers full services, including assigning an ISBN number free, Print on Demand (POD), reviewing and marketing. Careful with the ISBN number, though. Unless you specifically buy it yourself, Lulu owns it. Here's Lulu's FAQ on the topic.

With Draft2Digital you self through the website. Formatting and distribution are free; Draft2Digital takes 10% of the retail price when you sell. It looks like their primary focus is books with manuscripts submitted in .doc, .docx, and .rtf formats. Since Draft2Digital takes care of the distribution, they will format your document to fit the buyer/seller's requirements.

File formats are where things get sticky. Each bookseller has different file format requirements. Best to check each and print out their requirements pages. Google Play Books Partner Center is where you can get started for selling through Google. According to Wikipedia,

... As of now, Google accepts EPUB versions 2.0.1 and 3.0. Both text and image-based PDFs are accepted when the EPUB format is not available, with the preference being for PDFs with a text layer.

For reading on e-readers or third-party apps, ebooks can be downloaded in the EPUB ("flowing text") or PDF ("scanned pages") formats. The advantage of EPUB has over PDF is that it allows the book's text to adjust or 'reflow' automatically to different screen sizes. Books of which only a PDF version is available can be difficult to read on smaller screens.

Kindle file formats are proprietary, so it's best to sell through KDP. File formats accepted are listed on the types of formats page.

Publishing to Apple and selling on the iBooks store requires an iTunes account. Here's a FAQ for Authors & Book Publishers.

My experience with reading and viewing purchased media (and I'll admit my experience is limited) is that there's a big difference between owning the actual device and using a reader app. Pick you market carefully and test your product once it's available. A panel in a graphic novel that's rendered too small to be readable and with no option for enlarging it simply doesn't work.


-- Marge

DIY: the frog dies

Quoting Teddy Wayne quoting E.B. White,

Analyzing humor, as E.B. White famously said, is like dissecting a frog; few people are interested and the frog dies of it. Nonetheless, writing humor is a highly logical exercise — fit idea X into form Y for humorous result Z — and can therefore be broken down in ways that more slippery kinds of prose tend to resist. (Dissecting a Frog: How to Write a Humor Piece)

Teddy could have used some quote marks and I could have written a sentence complete with subject and verb. Heads up, Grammar Nazis. If correcting people's grammar mistakes is your thing, you may enjoy contributing to Grammar Guy.

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Grammar Guy, memegenerator.net

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It's good to laugh or even to chuckle a little, even though writing humor is not something that comes naturally to many of us. But we writers can try, even practice. Remember to consider your audience. If the supervisor you're writing that email to doesn't expect humor from you, it may be bye-bye job. Here are two more articles about writing humor: Seven Steps to Better Writing Humor and Humor Writing for People Who Aren’t Funny.

Jeff Wysaski at Pleated-Jeans has a page of Images That Prove Grammar and Punctuation Are Important. I like this one.

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Grammar Meme, Pleated-Jeans

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--Marge

DIY: ransomware and how to protect yourself

FBI Ransomware, Trend Micro

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Today my email had a surprise message. Trend Micro, my current antivirus, informed me that I should get an anti-ransomware tool. I thought "Great, another way to separate me from my money." But I still decided to check into it.

Turns out there is ransomware (also a way to separate you from your money) and it's use is growing. Ransomware typically

propagates as a trojan like a conventional computer worm, entering a system through, for example, a downloaded file or a vulnerability in a network service. The program will then run a payload: such as one that will begin to encrypt personal files on the hard drive. More sophisticated ransomware may hybrid-encrypt the victim's plaintext with a random symmetric key and a fixed public key. The malware author is the only party that knows the needed private decryption key. Some ransomware payloads do not use encryption. In these cases, the payload is simply an application designed to restrict interaction with the system, typically by setting the Windows Shell to itself, or even modifying the master boot record and/or partition table (which prevents the operating system from booting at all until it is repaired).(Wikipedia)

One prominent flavor is Cryptolocker which worked differently but still requires payment, usually via Bitcoin or a pre-paid cash voucer and within 3 days. Wikipedia notes that "It was estimated that at least US$3 million was extorted with the malware before the shutdown" in late 2014. More recent versions are CryptoLocker.F, TorrentLocker, and Cryptowall.

More information can be found at Microsoft's Malware Protection Center and Trend Micro's Security News. The site We Live Security gives some very good tips in 11 things you can do to protect against ransomware, including Cryptolocker.

Trend Micro offers a free anti-ransomeware tool for download and instructions for using the tool. And here's more information on how to protect yourself.

About email safety. Never click on a link or attachment unless you're sure who sent it. Look at the sender's address--if it's you (a spoofed address) or someone you've never heard of delete it. If the email looks like it's from your bank or credit card company, but the sender's address doesn't look right, go to company's site (bank or credit card) and look for information on what to do about phishing. Often you will find an email address for forwarding the email to. Let the company deal with the nasty, fraudulent thing. Then be sure to delete the original message.

Never, never, never just click on an attachment that has an *.exe file extension or one that has *.doc or *docx. Detach the document and virus check it before opening. Again, if the sender is unknown, just delete the email first. The only documents I'll open without checking are *.pdf and from a known sender.

On dealing with spam, forget about unsubscribing--you're just letting the spammer know that your email address is live. You can set up filters to keep the spam out. Although I don't filter (except porn and sex-related stuff) because it's fascinating to watch what the most recent hot topics are. It's easy enough to delete the spam after you've reviewed the subject lines.

While I was checking on ransomware, I came across this article at Tom's Hardware (a very useful site)--Report: Security Of U.S. Agencies In Dire State, Employee Logins Widely Leaked.

-- Marge

DIY: dandelion wine

Nancy Klehm, Mellow Yellow, Root Simple

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Making wine is a good exercise in patience; fruit wines require 6 months to a year or more for aging and dandelion wine is considered a fruit wine, though it's made from the flowers. As for the taste, one writer calls it Mellow Yellow. About the benefits of dandelion wine, Nancy Klehm says:

As a beyond-perfect diuretic, dandelion has so much potassium that when you digest the plant, no matter how much fluid you lose, your body actually experiences a net gain of the nutrient. In other words, folks – dandelion wine is one alcohol that actually helps your liver and kidneys! Generous, sweet, overlooked dandelion…

There are many recipes online for the wine. Check out Mother Earth News, wikiHow, Epicurious, Allrecipes, and Crow River Winery, among others. The Epicurious recipe doesn't include yeast and calls for letting the prepared mixture to stand for two weeks, then filter and refrigerate, hence it's not really a wine. The voices that seem to me to have the most authority--Jack Keller, HomeBrewTalk, and Crow River Winery--advise letting the wine age for a minimum of 6 months.

Jack Keller gives a variety of recipes for dandelion wine (30!) and explains that

Dandelion wine is typically a light wine lacking body. Thus many recipes use raisins, sultanas or white grape juice (or concentrate) as body-builders, but you could use dates or figs or rhubarb instead. Whatever you use will affect the color, so white or golden raisins or sultanas, or golden figs, are usually used with dandelions (some of these are usually available in bulk at Sun Harvest, Giant Foods, or many other stores).

Many of these recipes call for 3 lbs granulated sugar per gallon of wine -- some even call for 4. Personally, this is too much for me. Whether this much sugar will produce a dry, semi-sweet or sweet wine will depend on whether you attempt to stabilize the wine and on the yeast you use, as those which are tolerant of higher concentrations of alcohol will still result in drier wine unless even more sugar is added. People should make what they like. If you like dry wine with a reasonable (12% alcohol level), use only enough sugar to achieve a starting specific gravity of 1.088. If you like sweet wine, many of the recipes below will produce it providing you don't use a high-alcohol tolerant yeast. Personally, I prefer my dandelion wines dry to semi-sec, with a finished specific gravity of 1.002 to 1.006.

If you omit the body-building ingredient, dandelion wine is light and invigorating and suited perfectly for tossed salad and baked fish (especially trout). If you ferment with a body-enhancer but shave the sugar, the wine will serve well with white-sauced pastas, heavier salads, fish, or fowl. Sweetened, it goes well before or after dinner.

For all recipes the basic ingredients are dandelion flowers, sugar, varying amounts of citrus, water, and yeast. Many of the instructions advise picking the flowers at mid-day, when they're fully open. (Have you ever noticed that dandelions don't open on cloudy days?) And many recipes advise omitting all of the dandelions' green matter; also to be careful not to include the citrus' porous white tissue (or pith).

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John Wright's dandelion wine, theGuardian

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Googling 'wine making supplies' will get you started on what kinds of equipment you need and where to buy. There are kits for making fruit wines. Also Jack Keller has an article on Getting Started with a list of necessary equipment and supplies.

Author Ray Bradbury in his book Dandelion Wine presented the wine as metaphor for summer.

-- Marge

DIY: to sell or not to sell (your artwork)

JennaMartin, Petapixel

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At some point in your evolution as an artist, you reach a stage where it's time to decide whether to share your work with the world. Deciding whether to sell or not to sell can be a difficult decision. I know one fine artist who never made it past that one. Does it come from a fear of rejection, a fear of success, or loving your work so much you can't part with it? Here's an article from Art Business on how not to sell your art. Note that the site considers art a business.

If you decide to try selling, a host of other decisions crop up. Through a gallery? Online? For how much?

In my view galleries are a necessary evil for the professional artist. Unless you are very successful already, you become part of a stable of artists, so a sense of competition enters in. The gallery wants money to cover expenses, sometimes more than what it takes to cover expenses. But people often go to galleries with the express purpose of buying art. Here's a list from Art Bistro of articles about art gallery know-how (and alternate spaces for showing your work). Jenna Martin at Petapixels posted an informative article titled Selling Art in Galleries.

If you've decided to take you heart in your hands and offer work to a gallery, here are some pointers from About.com. If you decide to go the route of selling your work online, here's a list of ways to sell digitally.

So, you're standing in front of the gallery owner with a painting in your hand and s/he wants to know how much to charge. Here are two approaches to pricing your work: Maria Brophy and Amy Wilson at Art Bistro.

Juried competitions are a nice option. It may be a competition, but you end up with an idea of where you fit in the art spectrum. Of course, this depends on who's judging the show. There are a number of sites that offer information about upcoming competitions, such as Artshow, Café, and Artists' Register. Be sure to check with local artists for opportunities nearby as well.

If you decide to sign up for a distant competition, how to ship your artwork becomes something to solve. I'll be writing about this next time.

-- Marge