Fireball in the sky

[altivo]

Wait! What is that bright yellow thing? Is it the end of the world?

Haven't seen the sun here in so long we forgot what it looked like. Only 4 1/2 inches of rain, though. Mostly it was just densely clouded for the past week or more, and the weekend was miserably cold and rainy for September. I was reminded of Ray Bradbury's story about "The Sun Dome" in which interplanetary explorers are caught on a very rainy planet and go mad looking for the shelter that they know is there somewhere. I think if that rain had been snow, we'd still be digging out from under four feet of it. As it is, Chicago and points south of here are still flooded in places, and roads, including interstates are underwater and closed. All this, and we're 1200 miles from the hurricane's landfall.

Loom is fully sleyed and will be ready to weave as soon as I tie down the warp ends. I pulled half the warp through the reed last night, and finished this morning, checking the threading at the same time.

Comments

[flamekist.livejournal.com]

I remember that story! It was one of my favorites when I was a little kid. The planet they were exploring was Venus. I seem to vaguely remember an old b/w movie made, but that could just be my overactive imagination playing tricks on me.

I'd love to get some of that rain from Ike. We're only 700-ish miles from where it made landfall and only last night we got a light rainfall for an hour or two from it. Just enough water so I don't need to worry about watering my newly sprouted grass seed for the next day or two.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yup, in fact it was the movie, which I'd seen on television years ago when I still watched that stuff, that I thought of first. I think the film with the story in it is from the book The Illustrated Man. You're right, it was supposed to be Venus, and of course the perpetual cloud cover on the planet accounts for the torrential rains.

I've been meaning to tell you that I looked at the stuff on your Etsy page and you do some very nice work. Have you ever tried making buttons? With knitting so popular these days, there's quite a market for unique buttons to go on sweaters and such, often just one to three nice buttons in a set. Since handknit sweaters don't get put through the washing machine or dry cleaner as a rule, nicely designed glass buttons would be workable. I imagine techniques similar to those used for paperweights would work pretty well, so you get a smooth surface with a colored design embedded inside?

[flamekist.livejournal.com]

Thank you! If you go to Flickr and search for Flamekist, you'll see a lot more of my work. My partner, Protegeonfire, tends to upload everything for me but everything's under his name. He'll put my name in as a tag.

I've made button-like beads, but not actual buttons. I made these a couple of years back and they sold rather well:

It shouldn't be too hard to tweak the design a little to make buttons.

Let me pick your brain a bit about buttons... What dimensions should the buttons be? (Height, width, and depth). Roughly what price range would people be looking for? Are there particular colors I should stick to? Should there be a single hidden buttonhole in the back, or a double buttonhole showing on the front?

That's about all I can think of just off the top of my head. I think you've just motivated me to go out to the studio tonight instead of working on the hardwood flooring project I'm in the middle of...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oooo... Blue is my favorite color. Those are really pretty. :D

For knitted garments, buttons generally range from a half inch to an inch in diameter. Weight is a consideration, since a heavy button will make the knitted fabric stretch and sag. I guess that means a compromise between durability and weight has to be struck. Thickness to an eighth of an inch is not unusual in buttons, again with weight taken into consideration. I know you could make them much thinner, but I don't know at what point they'd become too fragile.

Flat disk shaped buttons are generally of the two hole variety, with holes pierced through the center of the disk. Smaller hemispheric buttons are also a possibility, though, and those could have a shank on the back with a single hole that runs through it horizontally, parallel to the surface of the fabric.

As far as design elements go, all kinds of color combinations are potentially marketable, but even fairly simple things like these blue ones have a lot of potential if they can be made practical enough. The edges and surface have to be smooth enough to avoid snagging the knitted yarn, though.

I've seen prices as high as $25 or more for a single large fancy button, but I'm guessing that something more like $10 to $15 for two or three simpler ones in a matched set would be quite workable. Now whether that pays off for the effort and materials, I have no idea. I can check with my neighbor who runs a knitting and spinning shop. I know she stocks some fancy handmade buttons, but I haven't paid much attention to pricing.

[cozycabbage.livejournal.com]

Fireball in the skyyyyy
I can fly twice as hiiiiigh.
Take a look
It's in a book--

Wait, that's not it.


It reminds me of a story I read in school sometime:
There was a colony on Venus, and some kids were playing together. The kids had never seen the sun, because it was always raining on Venus. Every hundred years or so, the rain stops, just for a bit, and that day was one of those days. So the kids were playing, and one kid was being picked on (I forget what anyone said in that story), and he ended up being trapped in a closet. Just then, the rain stoped, the sun came out, and the kids were dumbfounded and amazed at the bright yellow thing in the sky. They played in the bright landscape, delighting in the sunlight reflecting off the pools of water. In an hour or two, the clouds swallowed the sun up again, and the kids went back inside. As they passed the closet, they all stopped and realized that the other kid was still trapped inside.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Ugh, what a depressing story. And yeah, it even sounds like something Bradbury himself might have written.

[flamekist.livejournal.com]

Damn, I remember that one as well! Haven't thought about it in ages. I'm fairly certain it's a Bradbury story.

Can ya tell I did a lot of reading as a kid?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a librarian, I can only approve of reading.

I loved some of Bradbury's works, especially Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, but others, like The Martian Chronicles can be really, really depressing.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

If you send some more rain here I'll send you some sun :D

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Too late. You should have asked for that last week, before the deluge. Now there's no rain on the long term forecast here either. Nothing left but slowly subsiding floods and acres of mud.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Ahhh that's no good, we have enough mud here :)