Standing desk

About a fortnight ago three articles about standing desks all hit my Twitter feed from different directions. Since the article a few months ago about how sitting for more than three hours a day shortens your lifespan the idea of a standing desk has been lurking at the back of my mind. The appearence of these articles was the final push to give it a try.

The next day I was working from home so I took the opportunity to try out a makeshift standing desk. Here’s the mark one desk:

OK, so it’s a bit hacky. I didn’t really have an idea of the optimum height of things so the keyboard and mouse started out on top of two boxfiles and I added hardbacks to the pile until the height felt comfortable. Another layer of books went on the pile after I took the picture above.

Standing to work was more comfortable on my legs than I would have expected. The only aggravation that I had was to my wrist. The initial setup had the mouse too low which put my wrist at an odd angle. The later setup was an improvement, but the damage had already been done and mid-afternoon I was sitting to work again.

That weekend I tried a new setup in the study. The mark two desk:

This one is better. I’ve been working at it for two weekends and I’m typing at it now. It’s pretty comfortable, but not perfect. When we move house I’m going to have handyman husband build me a bespoke one. What I’ve learned from this one is that the keyboard level needs to come up two inches and the screen level eight inches.

The standing desk makes me shift my position an awful lot. And I take more breaks. I feel like all of these things are better for my health and energy levels, but I haven’t been able to quantify the effect it has had on my productivity. I’ve definitely got a lot done over the past couple of weekends, but would I have done less sitting down – I don’t know. However I am going to carry on with the experiment, at leat until we move.

Birthdays

I am older now. My 28th birthday came and went last week. I celebrated with friends, flowers, wine, and oysters. It’s good to be a little older and hopefully wiser, saner, and stabler.

The other milestone that occurred last week was that, had he still been alive, it would have been my Grampi’s 100th birthday. My Grampi, my father’s father, died when I was 11. He was my favourite grandparent. I celebrated his birthday quietly and thoughtfully, and reflected on the following facts:

• Many of the characteristics that I am proud of in myself come from him: sense and style of humour, storytelling tendencies, smarts. Though there are some characteristics from that side of the family that I’m not so happy with  – short, hot temper and migraines, mainly.
• When Grampi was my age, the Second World War was starting. The world has changed so much since then, in good ways and in bad.  I find it very hard to imagine the world that he grew up in.
• That I really wish I’d had the chance to know my Grampi when I was an adult. We really adored each other when I was a child. I wonder what he would have made of me as an adult. He was great fun to play around with when I was a child. I know he was a really great person for an adult to sit down and have a laugh with. But I never got to have that experience.  I am really thankful for what I do have. A good relationship and good times had and still to have with my Dad and my aunt, and all the other members of the family. When we get together it’s easy to see those bit of Grampi in all of us, in the way we laugh together and the stories we tell. He’s in a lot of those stories – my Grampi was kind of legendary.

House decluttering and apocalypse planning

Due to Dan’s job move in the London direction, we are putting our house in Eastleigh on the market. Despite the fact that this is really Dan’s house which I moved into later, I’ve been able to put my stamp on it in certain places and I’ve really come to love it as a home. But everything has its season and the end of my season in Hampshire is in sight.

To get back to the point, we are putting the house on the market and in order to make it look more attractive and salable all received wisdom says that we should make it look uncluttered and anonymous. Last week I went through a frenzy of tidying, throwing, and giving things away. This reached his peak when Emmaus arrived at the same time that I had an estate agent over to value the place and I gave Emmaus the sofa that the estate agent was sitting on from under him.

Every room but one has had this treatment. The remaining room is the study, aka Kat’s den of books and craft supplies.This poses a problem, because I love to hoard. I love to declutter too. A lot of my life is finding a balance between that momentary high of getting rid of clutter followed by the less momentary but still quite short-lived happiness of having a tidy room, and the warm glow of satisfaction I get when I can put my hand on exactly what I need at the time I need it because I have stored said thing for just this occasion. (I apologise to those reader patiently waiting for the apocalypse promised in the title – I do keep getting sidetracked. Rest assured the apocalypse is coming.)

So I love to hoard. Especially books. You never know when you’ll need them or want to reread them. Dealing with my book clutter was a challenge. I rolled up my sleeves and set to work sorting into three piles: give away, pack away, leave out. The line between pack away and leave out was a hard one to manage. We don’t know how long it will take to sell our house. What if I pack away too many books and am left with nothing to read? I’m already (less than 12 hours later) regretting having packed away some of my reference books that I now want to refer to. I should have thought about it harder at the time, but I was on a roll and they fit the spaces in the box perfectly.

The ‘give away’ pile ended up larger than I expected. Dan and I negotiated back and forth over quite a few books. The argument for getting rid of a lot of the reference books was – ‘We just look that stuff up on the internet anyway’. The discard pile grew. “But what about when the zombie apocalypse comes and there is no internet” I objected. That put things in a slightly different light. Which books did we need to keep in order to refer to when running for our lives or rebuilding society?

• ‘Guide to knife throwing’ – extremely useful in the case of zombie apocalypse. We’d need to be proficient in all methods of zombie extermination. Plus, ‘I still have the throwing knives and target’. Verdict: Keep.
• “Alan Titchmarsh’s How to be a gardener” – useful for when all the supermarkets have been raided and we have to grow our own food to survive. Even with all the resources of the internet and our books, we can’t keep plants alive. Last years crop consisted of mostly chillies, a couple of tomatoes, three strawberries, and the one radish that the slugs didn’t get. If an apocalypse comes which requires us to grow our own food, our only option might be to kidnap Alan Titchmarsh himself and make him grow food for us. Or eat our books. Verdict: Give away.
• ‘Encyclopedia of Magic’ – useful if the zombies possess childlike awe and fascination for the art of magic. One of us could make shiny coins disappear as a distraction while the rest of the party make good their escape from the zombies. As I’ve never seen this scenario play out in a zombie movie, I’d estimate its chances of success are limited. Verdict Give away.

OK, that last one was a reach, but lists look prettier in odd numbers.

The upshot is that I’ll be bringing a pile of books into IBM Hursley on Monday to give away. So if you’re interested in cooking, gardening, Garfield, choose your own adventures, or Tom Clancy and his spin-offs there might be something for you.

2011 Goals

So I’m back on the blog and it’s been a while.

I thought I’d start off this new year by talking about my New Year’s Resolutions and what I’m going to do to keep them. My resolutions can be boiled down to three key words: Writing, Happiness and Wellness.

In each of my three categories I’ve picked three things to track in order to keep my focus on these goals throughout the year. For each category I have two quantitative measures and one qualitative/catchall category.

Writing

My original goal for this year was to get a paid, in-print publish. Of course to do that I need to get things written, and more importantly rewritten and edited. Getting from first draft to second feels harder for me than getting from blank page to first draft. So far this year I’m managing to write fairly consistently two days out of every three. I’d like to increase that to every day.

My three metrics for writing are:

• Fiction words per day
• Other words per day (including blogging, articles, and plotting and planning)
• What writing related activities I have done that day

 

Happiness

I like being happy, and I would like to happy for more of the time. It seems to come very easily to a lot of people. I’ve seen a number of internet articles that indicate that how happy you are on average is a fixed quantity and doesn’t change very much throughout your life. Some people are just upbeat and full of the bright side; others are anxiety-ridden worrywarts. (I put myself in the latter category). Well screw that – I’m going to work hard at being happy this year, and see if I can’t change my average happiness.  I’m hoping that working towards my other goals will rub off in the happiness department. Other than that I’ve not got any clear ideas right now about the things I can do to make myself more happy.

My three metrics for happiness are:

• Average happiness in the day (0-100%, with 50% an average day)
• Peak daily happiness (0-100% again)
• What made me happy today

 

Wellness

In this category I’m mostly going to concentrate on physical wellness. The Happiness category should take care of psychological wellness. My goals here are to be more active, eat less and more healthily, drink more water, and get the right amount of sleep. I find it hard to keep all of these good habits, but I know that I feel orders of magnitude better in body and in mind on the days where I get three out of four of those things done.

My three metrics for wellness are:

• Number of steps taken in the day
• Waistline measurement (I’m not expecting this to change very quickly, but I’m hoping to see a two or three inches change in the year)
• What exercise did I do today

 

You know what they say about good intentions, but I’m hoping to stick with these goals throughout the year.

Wedding dress

Now the big day has come and gone I can post about my wedding dress without worrying about spoiling the surprise for Dan.

Making my own wedding dress was something I was set on from the start. I can sew, so why pay stupid amounts of money for a dress you are only going to wear once. Not to mention that all the dresses in the one bridal shop I cruised through were fugly – every one of them in a ruched/gathered style and in the kind of off-white colour I had previously only experienced adorning the walls of student accommodation. Plus they all cost between three and four figures. While I’m not exactly sure, because my awesome Mum insisted on paying for the fabric, I’m pretty confident that pattern, notions, and fabric for my dress cost less than £100.

The dress is very simple. I opted for this partly because it’s my style, and partly to avoid making things difficult for myself in what were soon to become some very stressful months. The wedding was on grass, which could have been mud had the weather been inclement, so no train. The requirement for simplicity and lack of train meant that I pretty much had the pick of prom dress patterns. I went for a princess-seamed, halterneck style. The pattern was simple enough that it would do for both wedding dress and bridesmaid dress, so the plan was hatched to make identical dresses for me and Frances, but in mirrored colours. For me: white with a blue ribbon; for her: blue with a white ribbon. This tactic had the additional advantage of allowing us to effectively have a practice run of cutting out the bridal dress, in cutting out the bridesmaid dress.

Mum came down to help me with the cutting out and getting me started on the sewing by fitting the bodice for me, I had some fun with time lapse creating a video of us doing that. Once that was done I took the white fabric and she the blue and we got sewing. Mum made all of Frances’s dress and hemmed and finished off mine. She pretty much rocks.

The only hitch in the process, apart from the self-inflicted stress and angst, came early in the project – when out of nowhere a greasy black blob (only a mm or two across) appeared on the bodice fabric. Thankfully it was on the inside and not visible through the fabric, but it certainly put the wind up me.

Cravats

Cravats are a very wedding-specific thing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone wearing one in real life.

When Dan and I first got engaged and were talking about wedding colours, I happened to be in C&H Fabrics browsing the remnants table and saw a shiny bit of lightweight satin in one of the colours that we had talked about. (That same piece of fabric had its debut on this blog in the Blue Roses post – as a synthetic fabric rose).

I had a Google around for free cravat patterns, but had no luck. Though I did find a random forum post, which I am unable to rediscover for the purposes of linking to, that gave some measurements and instructions from which I could fairly easily devise a pattern.

A cravat is basically a long rectangle of fabric, with a point at one end and pleats in the middle. Out came the greaseproof papaer and the metre long metal ruler. 15 minutes later I had a pattern I was pretty chuffed with. My first one from scratch. I whipped up a quick cravat in a sexy lime green remnant of a similar weight of fabric. Job’s a good ‘un.

Four cravats later, and the total cost to me was 73p per cravat. When I think that Tie Rack sells them for £20 a pop, I can’t help but feel a little smug.

Stuffed baby blocks

Stuffed baby blocks

Originally uploaded by Kat Shann

I know I’m supposed to be getting on with sewing my wedding dress, but I’m easily distracted.
A couple of weekends ago we went to a Welcoming party for Dan’s newest nephew. True to our slightly disorganised form we found ourselves in the week beforehand with no present and no ideas for a present.
One lightbulb moment and a visit to the fabric stash later and I was on my way to making these blocks.
While it looks like it would be a lot of fiddly sewing, they were actually fairly easy. Each face is 7 x 7 cm. I cut four long strips of 9cm wide fabric in the gingham and the turquoise. These I sewed together at the long edges in alternating colours. As you can tell from some basic maths I did the stitching with a 1 cm seam allowance, mostly because the squares on the gingham were 1cm along the side and following the lines made the sewing easier and quicker.
So far so easy, now I had a long strip of fabric that I could take a 9 cm wide slice off of for each block. The next bit was slightly longer winded.
I had 18 white cotton squares that needed painting. I used Dylon iron-to-fix fabric paint, pinned the squares over black on white drawings of the letters, and traced the letters with paint. (On the back of each block is a number between 1 and 9).
Constructing the individual blocks was slightly fiddly, but easy to achieve on the sewing machine. On each block I left one side open, in order to turn the block through and stuff it. This side I sealed up with handstitching.

The blocks were well received, and I now have the task of filling in the rest of Alexander’s name in time for his birthday.

Waistcoats

You know what they say about people from Yorkshire – they don’t like to part with their money. The thing I love to hate when it comes to weddings is the cost. It’s the happiest day of your life and everyone is out to make you pay through the nose for it. So a big saving that we could make is on garments. I have a sewing machine and I know how to use it. The DIY approach also means that you get closer to the thing that you want than if you try to find it pre-made. And the participants get to keep the waistcoats afterwards.

If I made waistcoats and cravats for the key gentlemen (groom, best man, and father-of-the-bride) and asked them to wear their own suits we could save a packet.

I found a simple waistcoat pattern online: McCalls 4321. Dan and I chose the fabric. Apply the one to the other and you get…

They’ve all turned out really well. I’m pretty happy with the three I’ve made so far. And the best part is that I have enough fabric left to make a fourth waistcoat for our newly promoted usher/musicmonger.

Covered

Dan recently bought himself a new gadget: an Acer Aspire. As usual I set about making a cover for it. As his first act was to remove the Windows 7 installation that it came with and install the latest Ubuntu netbook image I thought that a design based around the Ubuntu logo would be most appreciated.

Once I had decided to use the Ubuntu logo the inspiration to use one of the outer circles as a fastening was almost instant. A quick trip to C&H for the necessary fabrics and a big orange button and I was ready to go. The cover is a simple lined envelope, with craft vilene, to give structure, and wadding, to cushion the laptop.

On a roll, I used the same method, and some fabrics I had left over from previous projects, to make a similar case for my own laptop.

In search of blue roses

Blue roses... by {platinum}

I’m getting married this year, and the colour for the wedding is a deep blue. This poses a problem for bouquets as blue flowers are less common. While cornflowers would be available they would be coming to the end of their season and are not assured to be good quality. A florist suggested blue thistles – I love the look of thistles, but I don’t know what message I would be sending if I turned up at the altar with an armful of spikyness. After looking around online I saw, and fell in love with, blue roses.

According to wikipedia blue roses convey inner feelings of love at first sight, being enchanted by something or someone.

When I say blue roses I don’t mean the bred strains of lavender coloured roses that they call ‘blue’, I mean deep blue dyed roses.  The commercial blue roses are created by cultivating the roses in a blue dye solution.

Local florists

I visited two local florists yesterday for a ballpark quote for flowers. One shop would not do dyed flowers, the other had very recently put together a bouquet of 12 blue roses for another customer. Both place quoted me a base figure of £65 per bouquet (without blue roses, which would increase the materials price). Judging from the size of the basic bouquets, and the size and price of other, non-wedding bouquets I can only judge that the cost of skills, time and raw materials for a small, hand-tied bouquet is about £40 max and the additional cost is ‘wedding tax’.

I’m trying to do this wedding on a low budget and indulging arbitrary markup for a non-essential item isn’t on the cards.

Internet

The only place that I can see that does blue roses for delivery on the internet is InterRose. Yes – their website is terrible to look at, but they do lovely roses (check out the happy roses). They’ll do 12 blue roses for £60. From 12 roses and some cheaper additional white flowers I can make the 2 bouquets and 3 buttonholes that I need at less than two thirds the price that the florist would charge for 2 bouquets without blue roses. If I’m going to pay for expensive flowers it will probably be through this mechanism.

Dyeing my own

Everyone knows the old trick of dyeing carnations by feeding them water with food colouring in. This tactic also works for roses. I bought a cheap bunch of white roses at Sainsbury’s and put them in strongly coloured water. After 3 days the results are below:

Disappointing. Only the tips have coloured and the colour is more turquoise than deep blue.

Making fabric flowers

I have a bag of remnant fabric in the blue that I wanted. I followed the instructions at http://duhbe.com/blog/?p=807 to make a synthetic fabric rose. The only step I didn’t follow was the advice not to have drafts in the room when melting the edges of the fabric, I instead opted to open the window and work in a well ventilated area.

Prototype rose:

I tried a similar method with a white cotton fabric. Because I used a cotton I couldn’t seal the edges with flame, but instead zigzag stitched along the edge. The plan was to use ultramarine Brusho to dye the edges of the petals and get a two tone effect. Unfortunately the Brusho ran a bit too much and the white was lost.

I’m experimenting with other methods of colouring the tips of the petal.

My search for a blue rose continues.