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09 June 2023
sur GeoSolutions: GeoSolutions at WAGIS 2023 in Tacoma, WA 14-15 June

Publié: 9 June 2023, 5:48pm CEST

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sur America's Pink Migration Banana

Publié: 9 June 2023, 10:41am CEST par Keir Clarke

The San Francisco Chronicle has published a fascinating map which visualizes net migration in US counties. On this map counties which have seen a net loss in migration are shown in pink and those that have seen a net gain are shown in blue. The map therefore provides a great overview of where Americans are moving to and from.The Where People are Moving map reveals a pink banana running down the

sur gvSIG Team: Plataforma de información geográfica del Estado de Tocantins, Brasil

Publié: 9 June 2023, 7:56am CEST

Os traemos la presentación de otro interesante proyecto de implantación de gvSIG Online, en este caso en el Estado de Tocantins (Brasil) y que ha permitido publicar numerosas capas de información geográfica, estructurada en diversos geoportales.

De este proyecto, además, destacamos el desarrollo de herramientas en gvSIG Online para la generación de dashboards o cuadros de mandos.
08 June 2023
sur Lutra consulting: Virtual Point Clouds (VPC)

Publié: 8 June 2023, 4:00pm CEST
As a part of our crowdfunding campaign we have introduced a new method to handle a large number of point cloud files. In this article, we delve into the technical details of the new format, rationale behind our choice and how you can create, view and process virtual point cloud files.
Rationale
Lidar surveys of larger areas are often multi-terabyte datasets with many billions of points. Having such large datasets represented as a single point cloud file is not practical due to the difficulties of storage, transfer, display and analysis. Point cloud data are therefore typically stored and distributed split into square tiles (e.g. 1km x 1km), each tile having a more manageable file size (e.g. ~200 MB when compressed).

Tiling of data solves the problems with size of data, but it introduces issues when processing or viewing an area of interest that does not fit entirely into a single tile. Users need to develop workflows that take into account multiple tiles and special care needs to be taken to deal with data near edges of tiles to avoid unwanted artefacts in outputs. Similarly, when viewing point cloud data, it becomes cumbersome to load many individual files and apply the same symbology.

Here is an example of several point cloud tiles loaded in QGIS. Each tile is styled based on min/max Z values of the tile, creating visible artefacts on tile edges. The styling has to be adjusted for each layer separately:

Virtual Point Clouds
In the GIS world, many users are familiar with the concept of virtual rasters. A virtual raster is a file that simply references other raster files with actual data. In this way, GIS software then treats the whole dataset comprising many files as a single raster layer, making the display and analysis of all the rasters listed in the virtual file much easier.

Borrowing the concept of virtual rasters from GDAL, we have introduced a new file format that references other point cloud files - and we started to call it virtual point cloud (VPC). Software supporting virtual point clouds handles the whole tiled dataset as a single data source.

At the core, a virtual point cloud file is a simple JSON file with .vpc extension, containing references to actual data files (e.g. LAS/LAZ or COPC files) and additional metadata extracted from the files. Even though it is possible to write VPC files by hand, it is strongly recommended to create them using an automated tool as described later in this post.

On a more technical level, a virtual point cloud file is based on the increasingly popular STAC specification (the whole file is a STAC API ItemCollection). For more details, please refer to the VPC specification that also contains best practices and optional extensions (such as overviews).
Virtual Point Clouds in QGIS
We have added support for virtual point clouds in QGIS 3.32 (released in June 2023) thanks to the many organisations and individuals who contributed to our last year’s joint crowdfunding with North Road and Hobu. The support in QGIS consists of three parts:
1. Create virtual point clouds from a list of individual files
2. Load virtual point clouds as a single map layer
3. Run processing algorithms using virtual point clouds
Those who prefer using command line tools, PDAL wrench includes a build_vpc command to create virtual point clouds, and all the other PDAL wrench commands support virtual point clouds as the input.
Using Virtual Point Clouds
In this tutorial, we are going to generate a VPC using the new Processing algorithm, load it in QGIS and then generate a DTM from terrain class. You will need QGIS 3.32 or later for this. For the purpose of this example, we are using the LiDAR data provided by the IGN France data hub.

In QGIS, open the Processing toolbox panel, search for the Build virtual point cloud (VPC) algorithm ((located in the Point cloud data management group):

VPC algorithm in the Processing toolbox
In the algorithm’s window, you can add point cloud layers already loaded in QGIS or alternatively point it to a folder containing your LAZ/LAS files. It is recommended to also check the optional parameters:
- Calculate boundary polygons - QGIS will be able to show the exact boundaries of data (rather than just rectangular extent)
- Calculate statistics - will help QGIS to understand ranges of values of various attributes
- Build overview point cloud - will also generate a single “thinned” point cloud of all your input data (using only every 1000th point from original data). The overview point cloud will be created next to the VPC file - for example, for mydata.vpc, the overview point cloud would be named mydata-overview.copc.laz
VPC algorithm inputs, outputs and options
After you set the output file and start the process, you should end up with a single VPC file referencing all your data. If you leave the optional parameters unchecked, the VPC file will be built very quickly as the algorithm will only read metadata of input files. With any of the optional parameters set, the algorithm will read all points which can take some time.

Now you can load the VPC file in QGIS as any other layer - using QGIS browser, Data sources dialog in QGIS or by doing drag&drop from a file browser. After loading a VPC in QGIS, the 2D canvas will show boundaries of individual files - and as you zoom in, the actual point cloud data will be shown. Here, a VPC loaded together with the overview point cloud:

Virtual point cloud (thinned version) generated by the VPC algorithm
Zooming in QGIS in 2D map with elevation shading - initially showing just the overview point, later replaced by the actual dense point cloud:

VPC output on 2D: displaying details when zooming in
In addition to 2D maps, you can view the VPC in a 3D map windows too:

If the input files for VPCs are not COPC files, QGIS will currently only show their boundaries in 2D and 3D views, but processing algorithms will work fine. It is however possible to use the Create COPC algorithm to batch convert LAS/LAZ files to COPC files, and then load VPC with COPC files.

It is also worth noting that VPCs also work with input data that is not tiled - for example, in some cases the data are distributed as flightlines (with lots of overlaps between files). While this is handled fine by QGIS, for the best performance it is generally recommended to first tile such datasets (using the Tile algorithm) before doing further display and analysis.
Processing Data with Virtual Point Clouds
Now that we have the VPC generated, we can run other processing algorithms. For this example, we are going to convert the ground class of the point cloud to a digital terrain model (DTM) raster. In the QGIS Processing toolbox, search for Export to raster algorithm (in the Point cloud conversion group):

VPC layer can be used as an input to the point cloud processing algorithm
This will use the Z values from the VPC layer and generate a terrain raster based on a user defined resolution. The algorithm will process the tiles in parallel, taking care of edge artefacts (at the edges, it will read data also from the neighbouring tiles). The output of this algorithm will look like this:

Converting a VPC layer to a DTM
The output raster contains holes where there were no points classified as ground. If needed for your use case, you can fill the holes using Fill nodata algorithm from GDAL in the Processing toolbox and create a smooth terrain model for your input Virtual Point Cloud layer:

Filling the holes in the DTM
Virtual point clouds can be used also for any other algorithms in the point cloud processing toolbox. For more information about the newly introduced algorithms, please see our previous blog post.

All of the point cloud algorithms also allow setting filtering extent, so even with a very large VPC, it is possible to run algorithms directly on a small region of interest without having to create temporary point cloud files. Our recommendation is to have input data ready in COPC format, as this format provides more efficient access to data when spatial filtering is used.
Streaming Data from Remote Sources with VPCs
One of the very useful features of VPCs is that they work not only with local files, but they can also reference data hosted on remote HTTP servers. Paired with COPCs, point cloud data can be streamed to QGIS for viewing and/or processing - that means QGIS will only download small portions of data of a virtual point cloud, rather than having to download all data before they could be viewed or analysed.

Using IGN’s lidar data provided as COPC files, we have built a small virtual point cloud ign-chambery.vpc referencing 16 km2 of data (nearly 700 million points). This VPC file can be loaded in QGIS and used for 2D/3D visualisation, elevation profiles and processing, with QGIS handling data requests to the server as necessary. Processing algorithms only take a couple of seconds if the selected area of interest is small (make sure to set the “Cropping extent” parameter of algorithms).

All this greatly simplifies data access to point clouds:
- Data producers can use very simple infrastructure - a server hosting static COPC files together with a single VPC file referencing those COPC files.
- Users can use QGIS to view and process point cloud data as a single map layer, with no need to download large amounts of data, QGIS (and PDAL) taking care of streaming data as needed.
We are very excited about the opportunities that virtual point clouds are bringing to users, especially when combined with COPC format and access from remote servers!

Thanks again to all contributors to our crowdfunding campaign - without their generous support, this work would not have been possible.

Contact us if you would like to add more features in QGIS to handle, analyse or visualise lidar data.

sur Dr. Jeff de La Beaujardiere receives OGC Lifetime Achievement Award

Publié: 8 June 2023, 3:00pm CEST par Simon Chester

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is excited to announce that Dr. Jeff de La Beaujardiere has been selected as the latest recipient of the OGC Lifetime Achievement Award. The announcement was made last night during the Executive Dinner in the U.S. Space & Rocket Center at the 126th OGC Member Meeting in GeoHuntsville, AL.

Jeff has been selected for the award due to his long standing leadership, commitment, and support for the advancement and uptake of standards used for the dissemination of Earth Science information.

“I’m so happy that Jeff has been selected to receive the OGC Lifetime Achievement Award,” said OGC CEO, Dr. Nadine Alameh. “Jeff is more than a champion for standards, more than an OGC Gardels award winner, and more than the WMS editor and promoter: Jeff is a role model for many of us in geospatial circles, and has directly and indirectly influenced generations of interoperability enthusiasts to collaborate, to innovate, and to solve critical problems related to our Earth. From OGC and myself, I offer our congratulations and thank Jeff for his technical work – and for being such an inspiration to so many!”

For more than 25 years, Jeff’s support of open standards and OGC’s FAIR mission has improved access to Earth science information for countless users and decision-makers around the globe. Since 1995, Jeff has focused on improving public access to scientific data by pushing for it to be discoverable, accessible, documented, interoperable, citable, curated for long-term preservation, and reusable by the broader scientific community, external users, and decision-makers.

In the OGC community, Jeff is best known as the Editor of the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) Specification: a joint OGC/ISO Standard that now supports access to millions of datasets worldwide. OGC WMS was the first in the OGC Web Services suite of Standards and is the most downloaded Standard from OGC. But most importantly, the OGC WMS Standard truly revolutionized how geospatial data is shared and accessed over the web.

Jeff was also a major contributor to other OGC Standards, including the OGC Web Services Architecture, the OGC Web Map Context, OGC Web Terrain Service, and OGC Web Services Common.

Jeff’s journey with Standards – and his engagement with OGC – started back in 1998 when NASA was leading the effort to implement the Digital Earth program. At that time, Jeff championed interoperability standards as fundamental to realizing the Digital Earth vision. As part of his journey, he has provided leadership to the Geospatial Applications and Interoperability (GAI) Working Group of the U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee and to the OGC Technical Committee.

In 2002 and 2003, Jeff served as Portal Manager for Geospatial One-Stop, a federal electronic government initiative. He led a team of experts in defining the requirements, architecture, and competitive solicitation for a Portal based on open standards and led an OGC interoperability initiative in developing and demonstrating a working implementation. This was a fast-paced, high-stakes effort involving many companies and agencies building on what today is the OGC Collaborative Solution & Innovation Program.

Jeff has received several awards for his leadership and impact in the many communities that he has participated in throughout his career, including the 2013 OGC Kenneth D. Gardels Award, the 2023 ESIP President’s Award, and the 2003 Falkenberg Award at AGU which honors “a scientist under 45 years of age who has contributed to the quality of life, economic opportunities, and stewardship of the planet through the use of Earth science information and to the public awareness of the importance of understanding our planet.”

With this lifetime achievement award, OGC recognizes and celebrates Jeff’s lifetime of service, and his steadfast support of FAIR geospatial information for the benefit of open science, and society.

The post Dr. Jeff de La Beaujardiere receives OGC Lifetime Achievement Award appeared first on Open Geospatial Consortium.

sur QGIS Blog: Plugin Update May 2023

Publié: 8 June 2023, 9:35am CEST

In May 22 new plugins that have been published in the QGIS plugin repository.

Here’s the quick overview in reverse chronological order. If any of the names or short descriptions piques your interest, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below the screenshot.

Station Offset

This plugin computes the station and offset of points along polylines and exports those values to csv for other applications

MGP Connect

Enable Maxar SecureWatch customers to stream imagery more effectively in QGIS.

Triple2Layer

this plugin imports data

DiscordRPC Plugin for QGIS

QGIS plugin that enables displaying a Rich Presence in Discord

ERS

This plugin determines calculated polluant concentrations around sensible sites’s perimeters

IPP

This plugin calculates IPP

Road Vectorisation

This plugin is designed to vectorize roads on satellite images

Image vectorisator

Plugin for image vectorisation

H-RISK with noisemodelling

Sound levels and Health risks of environmental noise

Non_electrical_vehicle

This plugins calculates number of non electrical vehicles

HOT Templates and Symbology Manager

QGIS plugin for managing HOT map templates and symbology

Transparency Setter

Apply the specified transparency value to both vector and raster layers, as well as layers within the selected groups in the Layer Panel

DBGI

Creates geopackages that match the requirements for the DBGI project

StyleLoadSave

Load or Save active vector layer style

PixelCalculator

Interactively calculate the mean value of selected pixels of a raster layer.

GISTDA sphere basemap

A plugin for adding base map layers from GISTDA sphere platform ( [https:]] ).

Adjust Style

Adjust the style of a map with a few clicks instead of altering every single symbol (and symbol layer) for many layers, categories or a number of label rules. A quick way to adjust the symbology of all layers (or selected layers) consistantly, to check out how different colors / stroke widths / fonts work for a project, and to save and load styles of all layers – or even to apply styles to another project. With one click, it allows to: adjust color of all symbols (including color ramps and any number of symbol layers) and labels using the HSV color model (rotate hue, change saturation and value); change line thickness (i.e. stroke width of all symbols / symbol borders); change font size of all labels; replace a font family used in labels with another font family; save / load the styles of all layers at once into/from a given folder.

APLS

This plugin performs Average Path Length Similarity

qaequilibrae

Transportation modeling toolbox for QGIS

QGPT Agent

QGPT Agent is LLM Assistant that uses openai GPT model to automate QGIS processes

FuzzyJoinTables

Join tables using min Damerau-Levenshtein distance

Chandrayaan-2 IIRS

Generates reflectance from Radiance data of Imaging Infrared Spectrometer sensor of Chandrayaan 2

sur The Privatisation of East Germany

Publié: 8 June 2023, 9:16am CEST par Keir Clarke

After the reunification of Germany in 1990 the German Democratic Republic established an agency in order to privatise East German enterprises. The Treuhandanstalt (Trust Institution) was tasked with overseeing the sale of over 8,500 state-owned companies. Under communism nearly half of all East Germans worked for the state or for state-run companies. Privatising all East German enterprises

sur gvSIG Team: GeoETL de la plataforma gvSIG Online: Automatizar transformaciones de datos

Publié: 8 June 2023, 7:59am CEST

Una mejora considerable de gvSIG Online respecto a otros productos del mercado es su ETL. Gracias a su ETL, gvSIG Online podrá realizar integraciones con otras fuentes de datos de forma ágil y sin necesidad de desarrollo.

ETL es un plugin que se utiliza para automatizar tareas de transformaciones de datos, ya sean repetitivas o no, de manera que no sea necesario la manipulación de los datos a través de código. De esta manera, cualquier usuario es capaz de hacer una manipulación de los datos (geométricamente o no) o una homogeneización de datos que provengan de diferentes orígenes y formatos.

Esto es posible gracias a un canvas que representará gráficamente el proceso de transformación de los datos de una manera fácil e intuitiva.

Si queréis conocer todo el potencia de GeoETL, no os perdáis el vídeo:

07 June 2023
sur Wildfires & Smoke Pollution

Publié: 7 June 2023, 8:42am CEST par Keir Clarke

Wildfires in Quebec and Nova Scotia are causing high levels of unhealthy air conditions across much of eastern Canada and the northeastern United States. Over 400 fires were reported to be burning in Canada on Tuesday evening resulting in smoke pollution and dangerous levels of particulate matter 2.5 over large areas.FireSmoke Canada has an interactive smoke forecast map which provides

sur gvSIG Team: Conociendo gvSIG Mapps

Publié: 7 June 2023, 8:02am CEST

Todo el mundo conoce gvSIG Desktop, el origen de el catálogo de soluciones que denominamos Suite gvSIG. Cada vez más organizaciones de todo el mundo están implantando gvSIG Online como su plataforma de gestión de datos espaciales y geoportales. Y, aunque menos conocido, crece el número de entidades que usan gvSIG Mapps… bien como app para toma de datos en campo, bien como apps desarrolladas con su framework.

¿Queréis saber más? Os contamos qué es realmente gvSIG Mapps:

30 April 2022
sur A GIS Degree

Publié: 30 April 2022, 10:59pm CEST par dovecaramelphobos94903

My son decided to change majors from biodesign to GIS. I had a short moment when I almost told him not to bring all this on himself but then thought differently. I could use my years of experience to help him get the perfect degree in GIS and get a great job and still do what he wants.

He’s one semester into the program so he really hasn’t taken too many classes. There has been the typical Esri, SPSS and Google Maps discussion, but nothing getting into the weeds. Plus he’s taking Geography courses as well so he’s got that going for him. Since he’s at Arizona State University, he’s going through the same program as I did, but it’s a bit different. When I was at ASU, Planning was in the Architectural College. Now it’s tied with Geography in a new School of Geographical Sciences & Urban Planning.

I have to be honest, this is smart, I started my GIS career working for a planning department at a large city. The other thing I noticed is a ton of my professors are still teaching. I mean how awesome is that? I suddenly don’t feel so old anymore.

I’ve stayed out of his classes for the past semester in hopes that he can form his own thoughts on GIS and its applicability. I probably will continue to help him focus on where to spend his electives (more Computer Science and less History of the German Empire 1894-1910). He’s such a smart kid, I know he’s going to do a great job and he was one who spent time in that Esri UC Kids Fair back when I used to go to the User Conference. Now he could be getting paid to use Esri software or whatever tool best accomplishes his goals.

I plan to show him the Safe FME Minecraft Reader/Writer.
sur A GIS Degree

Publié: 30 April 2022, 10:59pm CEST par James

My son decided to change majors from biodesign to GIS. I had a short moment when I almost told him not to bring all this on himself but then thought differently. I could use my years of experience to help him get the perfect degree in GIS and get a great job and still do what he wants.

He’s one semester into the program so he really hasn’t taken too many classes. There has been the typical Esri, SPSS and Google Maps discussion, but nothing getting into the weeds. Plus he’s taking Geography courses as well so he’s got that going for him. Since he’s at Arizona State University, he’s going through the same program as I did, but it’s a bit different. When I was at ASU, Planning was in the Architectural College. Now it’s tied with Geography in a new School of Geographical Sciences & Urban Planning.

I have to be honest, this is smart, I started my GIS career working for a planning department at a large city. The other thing I noticed is a ton of my professors are still teaching. I mean how awesome is that? I suddenly don’t feel so old anymore.

I’ve stayed out of his classes for the past semester in hopes that he can form his own thoughts on GIS and its applicability. I probably will continue to help him focus on where to spend his electives (more Computer Science and less History of the German Empire 1894-1910). He’s such a smart kid, I know he’s going to do a great job and he was one who spent time in that Esri UC Kids Fair back when I used to go to the User Conference. Now he could be getting paid to use Esri software or whatever tool best accomplishes his goals.

I plan to show him the Safe FME Minecraft Reader/Writer.
25 October 2021
sur GIS and Monitors

Publié: 25 October 2021, 7:15pm CEST par dovecaramelphobos94903

If there is one constant in my GIS career, it is my interest in the monitor I’m using. Since the days of being happy for a “flat screen” Trinitron monitor to now with curved flat screens, so much has changed. My first GIS Analyst position probably had the worst monitor in the history of monitors. I can’t recall the name but it had a refresh rate that was probably comparable what was seen in the 1960s. It didn’t have great color balance either, so I ended up printing out a color swatch pattern from ArcInfo and taped it on my wall so I could know what color was what.
I stared for years at this monitor. No wonder I need reading glasses now!
Eventually I moved up in the world where I no longer got hand-me-down hardware and I started to get my first new equipment. The company I worked for at the time shifted between Dell and HP for hardware, but generally it was dual 21″ Trinitron CRTs. For those who are too young to remember, they were the size of a small car and put off enough heat and radiation to probably shorten my life by 10 year. Yet, I could finally count on them being color corrected by hardware/software and not feel like I was color blind.
It wasn’t sexy but it had a cool look to it. You could drop it flat to write on it like a table.
Over 11 years ago, I was given a Wacom DTU-2231 to test. You can read more about it on that link but it was quite the monitor. I guess the biggest change between now and then is how little that technology took off. I guess if you asked me right after you read that post in 2010 what we’d be using in 2020, I would have said such technology would be everywhere. Yet we don’t see stylus based monitor much at all.

These days my primary monitor is a LG UltraFine 24″ 4k. I pair it with another 24″ 4K monitor that I’ve had for years. Off to the other side is a generic Dell 24″ monitor my company provided. I find this setup works well for me, gone are the days where I had ArcCatalog and ArcMap open in two different monitors. Alas two of the monitors are devoted to Outlook and WebEx Teams, just a sign of my current work load.

I’ve always felt that GIS people care more about monitors than most. A developer might be more interested in a Spotify plugin for their IDE, but a GIS Analyst care most about the biggest, brightest and crispest monitor they can get their hands on. I don’t always use FME Workbench these days, but when I do, it is full screen on the most beautiful monitor I can have. Seems perfect to me.
sur GIS and Monitors

Publié: 25 October 2021, 7:15pm CEST par James

If there is one constant in my GIS career, it is my interest in the monitor I’m using. Since the days of being happy for a “flat screen” Trinitron monitor to now with curved flat screens, so much has changed. My first GIS Analyst position probably had the worst monitor in the history of monitors. I can’t recall the name but it had a refresh rate that was probably comparable what was seen in the 1960s. It didn’t have great color balance either, so I ended up printing out a color swatch pattern from ArcInfo and taped it on my wall so I could know what color was what.
I stared for years at this monitor. No wonder I need reading glasses now!
Eventually I moved up in the world where I no longer got hand-me-down hardware and I started to get my first new equipment. The company I worked for at the time shifted between Dell and HP for hardware, but generally it was dual 21″ Trinitron CRTs. For those who are too young to remember, they were the size of a small car and put off enough heat and radiation to probably shorten my life by 10 year. Yet, I could finally count on them being color corrected by hardware/software and not feel like I was color blind.
It wasn’t sexy but it had a cool look to it. You could drop it flat to write on it like a table.
Over 11 years ago, I was given a Wacom DTU-2231 to test. You can read more about it on that link but it was quite the monitor. I guess the biggest change between now and then is how little that technology took off. I guess if you asked me right after you read that post in 2010 what we’d be using in 2020, I would have said such technology would be everywhere. Yet we don’t see stylus based monitor much at all.

These days my primary monitor is a LG UltraFine 24″ 4k. I pair it with another 24″ 4K monitor that I’ve had for years. Off to the other side is a generic Dell 24″ monitor my company provided. I find this setup works well for me, gone are the days where I had ArcCatalog and ArcMap open in two different monitors. Alas two of the monitors are devoted to Outlook and WebEx Teams, just a sign of my current work load.

I’ve always felt that GIS people care more about monitors than most. A developer might be more interested in a Spotify plugin for their IDE, but a GIS Analyst care most about the biggest, brightest and crispest monitor they can get their hands on. I don’t always use FME Workbench these days, but when I do, it is full screen on the most beautiful monitor I can have. Seems perfect to me.
13 July 2021
sur Are Conferences Important Anymore?

Publié: 13 July 2021, 5:00pm CEST par dovecaramelphobos94903

Hey SOTM is going on, didn’t even know. The last SOTM I went to was in 2013 which was a blast. But I have to be honest, not only did this slip my mind, none of my feeds highlighted it to me. Not only that, apparently Esri is having a conference soon. (wait for me to go ask Google when it is) OK, they are having it next week. I used to be the person who went to as much as I could, either through attending or invited to keynote. The last Esri UC I went to was in 2015, 6 years ago. As I said SOTM was in 2013. FOSS4G, 2011. I had to look up, the last conference that had any GIS in it was the 2018 Barcelona Smart City Expo.

So with the world opening back up, or maybe not given whatever greek letter variant we are dealing with right now, I’ve started to think about what I might want to attend and the subject matter. At the end of the day, I feel like I got more value out of the conversations outside the convention center than inside. So probably where I see a good subset of smart people hanging out. That’s why those old GeoWeb conferences that Ron Lake put on were so amazing. Meeting a ton of smart people and enjoying the conversations, rather than reading Powerpoint slides in a darkly lit room.

Hopefully we can get back to that, just need to keep my eye out.
sur Are Conferences Important Anymore?

Publié: 13 July 2021, 5:00pm CEST par James

Hey SOTM is going on, didn’t even know. The last SOTM I went to was in 2013 which was a blast. But I have to be honest, not only did this slip my mind, none of my feeds highlighted it to me. Not only that, apparently Esri is having a conference soon. (wait for me to go ask Google when it is) OK, they are having it next week. I used to be the person who went to as much as I could, either through attending or invited to keynote. The last Esri UC I went to was in 2015, 6 years ago. As I said SOTM was in 2013. FOSS4G, 2011. I had to look up, the last conference that had any GIS in it was the 2018 Barcelona Smart City Expo.

So with the world opening back up, or maybe not given whatever greek letter variant we are dealing with right now, I’ve started to think about what I might want to attend and the subject matter. At the end of the day, I feel like I got more value out of the conversations outside the convention center than inside. So probably where I see a good subset of smart people hanging out. That’s why those old GeoWeb conferences that Ron Lake put on were so amazing. Meeting a ton of smart people and enjoying the conversations, rather than reading Powerpoint slides in a darkly lit room.

Hopefully we can get back to that, just need to keep my eye out.
12 April 2021
sur Unreal and Unity are the new Browsers

Publié: 12 April 2021, 5:57pm CEST par dovecaramelphobos94903

Someone asked me why I hadn’t commented on Cesium and Unreal getting together. Honestly , no reason. This is big news honestly. HERE, where I work, is teaming up with Unity to bring the Unity SDK and the HERE SDK to automotive applications. I talk about how we used Mapbox Unity SDK at Cityzenith (though I have no clue if they still are). Google and Esri have them too. In fact both Unreal and Unity marketplaces are littered with data sources you can plug in.
HERE Maps with Unity
This is getting at the core of what these two platforms could be. Back in the day we had two browsers, Firefox and Internet Explorer 6. Inside each we had many choices of mapping platforms to use. From Google and Bing to Mapquest and Esri. In the end that competition to make the best API/SDK for a mapping environment drove a ton of innovation. What Google Maps looks like and does in 2021 vs 2005 is amazing.

This brings up the key as to what I see happening here. We’ll see the mapping companies (or companies that have mapping APIs) deliver key updates to these SDK (which today are pretty limited in scope) because they have to stay relevant. Not that web mapping is going away at any point, but true 3D world and true Digital Twins require power that browsers cannot provide even in 2021. So this rush to become the Google Maps of 3D engines is real and will be fun to watch.

Interesting in that Google is an also-ran in the 3D engine space, so there is so much opportunity for the players who have invested and continue to invest in these markets without Google throwing unlimited R&D dollars against it. Of course it only takes on press release to change all that so don’t bet against Google.
sur Unreal and Unity are the new Browsers

Publié: 12 April 2021, 5:57pm CEST par James

Someone asked me why I hadn’t commented on Cesium and Unreal getting together. Honestly , no reason. This is big news honestly. HERE, where I work, is teaming up with Unity to bring the Unity SDK and the HERE SDK to automotive applications. I talk about how we used Mapbox Unity SDK at Cityzenith (though I have no clue if they still are). Google and Esri have them too. In fact both Unreal and Unity marketplaces are littered with data sources you can plug in.
HERE Maps with Unity
This is getting at the core of what these two platforms could be. Back in the day we had two browsers, Firefox and Internet Explorer 6. Inside each we had many choices of mapping platforms to use. From Google and Bing to Mapquest and Esri. In the end that competition to make the best API/SDK for a mapping environment drove a ton of innovation. What Google Maps looks like and does in 2021 vs 2005 is amazing.

This brings up the key as to what I see happening here. We’ll see the mapping companies (or companies that have mapping APIs) deliver key updates to these SDK (which today are pretty limited in scope) because they have to stay relevant. Not that web mapping is going away at any point, but true 3D world and true Digital Twins require power that browsers cannot provide even in 2021. So this rush to become the Google Maps of 3D engines is real and will be fun to watch.

Interesting in that Google is an also-ran in the 3D engine space, so there is so much opportunity for the players who have invested and continue to invest in these markets without Google throwing unlimited R&D dollars against it. Of course it only takes on press release to change all that so don’t bet against Google.
06 April 2021
sur Arrays in GeoJSON

Publié: 6 April 2021, 1:00pm CEST par dovecaramelphobos94903

So my last post was very positive. I figured out how to relate the teams that share a stadium with the stadium itself. This was important because I wanted to eliminate the redundant points that were on top of each other. For those who don’t recall, I have an example in this gist:

Now I mentioned that there were issues displaying this in GIS applications and was promptly told I was doing this incorrectly:

An array of <any data type> is not the same as a JSON object consisting of an array of JSON objects. If it would have been the first, I'd have pointed you (again) to QGIS and this widget trick [https:]] .
— Stefan Keller (@sfkeller) April 4, 2021

If you click on that tweet you’ll see basically that you can’t do it the way I want and I have to go back to the way I was doing it before:

Unfortunately, the beat way is to denormalise. Redundant location in many team points.
— Alex Leith (@alexgleith) April 4, 2021

I had a conversation with Bill Dollins about it and he sums it up susinctly:

I get it, but “Do it this way because that’s what the software can handle” is an unsatisfying answer.

So I’m stuck, I honestly don’t care if QGIS can read the data, because it can. It just isn’t optimal. What I do care about is an organized dataset in GeoJSON. So my question that I can’t get a definitive answer, “is the array I have above valid GeoJSON code?”. From what I’ve seen, yes. But nobody wants to go on record as saying absolutely. I could say, hell with it I’m moving forward but I don’t want to go down a dead end road.
sur Arrays in GeoJSON

Publié: 6 April 2021, 1:00pm CEST par James

So my last post was very positive. I figured out how to relate the teams that share a stadium with the stadium itself. This was important because I wanted to eliminate the redundant points that were on top of each other. For those who don’t recall, I have an example in this gist:

Now I mentioned that there were issues displaying this in GIS applications and was promptly told I was doing this incorrectly:

An array of <any data type> is not the same as a JSON object consisting of an array of JSON objects. If it would have been the first, I'd have pointed you (again) to QGIS and this widget trick [https:]] .
— Stefan Keller (@sfkeller) April 4, 2021

If you click on that tweet you’ll see basically that you can’t do it the way I want and I have to go back to the way I was doing it before:

Unfortunately, the beat way is to denormalise. Redundant location in many team points.
— Alex Leith (@alexgleith) April 4, 2021

I had a conversation with Bill Dollins about it and he sums it up susinctly:

I get it, but “Do it this way because that’s what the software can handle” is an unsatisfying answer.

So I’m stuck, I honestly don’t care if QGIS can read the data, because it can. It just isn’t optimal. What I do care about is an organized dataset in GeoJSON. So my question that I can’t get a definitive answer, “is the array I have above valid GeoJSON code?”. From what I’ve seen, yes. But nobody wants to go on record as saying absolutely. I could say, hell with it I’m moving forward but I don’t want to go down a dead end road.
02 April 2021
sur GeoJSON Ballparks as JSON

Publié: 2 April 2021, 9:42pm CEST par dovecaramelphobos94903
In a way it is good that Sean Gillies doesn’t follow me anymore. Because I can hear his voice in my head as I was trying to do something really stupid with the project. But Sheldon helps frame what I should be doing with what I was doing:

tables? what the? add , teams:[{name:"the name", otherprop: …}, {name:…}] to each item in the ballparks array and get that relational db BS out of your brain
— Sheldon (@tooshel) April 2, 2021

Exactly! What the hell? Why was I trying to do something so stupid when the while point of this project is baseball ballparks in GeoJSON. Here is the problem in a nutshell and how I solved it. First off, let us simply the problem down to just one ballpark. Salt River Fields at Talking Stick is the Spring Training facility for both the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Colorado Rockies. Not only that, but there are Fall League and Rookie League teams playing there. Probably even more that I still haven’t researched. Anyway, GeoJSON Ballparks looks like this today when you just want to see that one stadium.
Let’s just say I backed myself in this corner by starting by only having MLB ballparks, none of which at the time of the project were shared between teams.
It’s a mess right? Overlapping points, so many opportunities to screw up names. So my old school thought was just create a one-to-many relationship between the GeoJSON points and some external table. Madness! Seriously, what was I thinking? Sheldon is right, I should be doing a JSON array for the teams. Look how much nicer it all looks when I do this!
Look how nice that all is? So easy to read and it keeps the focus on the ballparks.
As I said in the earlier blog post.

The problem now is so many teams, especially in spring training, minor leagues and fall ball, share stadiums, that in GeoJSON-Ballparks, you end up with multiple dots on top of each other. No one-to-many relationship that should happen.”

The project had pivoted in a way I hadn’t anticipated back in 2014 and it was a sure a mess to maintain. So now I can focus on fixing the project with the Minor League Baseball realignment that went on this year and get an updated dataset in Github very soon.

One outcome of doing this nested array is that many GIS tools don’t understand how to display the data. Take a look at geojson.io:

geojson.io compresses the array into one big JSON-formatted string. QGIS and Github do this also. It’s an issue that I’m willing to live with. Bill Dollins shared the GeoJSON spec with me to prove the way I’m doing is correct:
```
3.2.  Feature Object
   A Feature object represents a spatially bounded thing.  Every Feature
   object is a GeoJSON object no matter where it occurs in a GeoJSON
   text.
   o  A Feature object has a "type" member with the value
      "Feature".
   o  A Feature object has a member with the name 
      "geometry".  The value of the geometry member SHALL
      be either a Geometry object as defined above or, in 
      the case that the Feature is unlocated, a JSON 
      null value.
   o  A Feature object has a member with the name 
      "properties".  The value of the properties member is
      an object (any JSON object or a JSON null value).
```
ANY JSON OBJECT! So formatting the files this way is correct and the way it should be done. I’m going to push forward on cleaning up GeoJSON Ballparks and let the GIS tools try and catch up.
07 March 2021
sur GeoJSON Ballparks and MLB Minor League Realignment

Publié: 7 March 2021, 10:15pm CET par dovecaramelphobos94903

**UPDATE** – See the plan.

Boy, where to start? First, for those who haven’t been following, this happened over the winter.

Major League Baseball announced on Friday (February 12, 2021) a new plan for affiliated baseball, with 120 Minor League clubs officially agreeing to join the new Professional Development League (PDL). A full list of Major League teams and their new affiliates, one for each level of full-season ball, along with a complex league (Gulf Coast and Arizona) team, can be found below.
Minor League Baseball
What does that mean? Well for GeoJSON Ballparks basically every minor league team is having a modification to it. At a minimum, the old minor league names have changed. Take the Pacific Coast League that existed for over 118 years is now part of Triple-A West which couldn’t be a more boring name. All up and down the minor leagues, the names now just reflect the level of minor league the teams are. And some teams have moved from AAA to Single A and all around.

I usually wait until Spring Training is just about over to update the minor league teams but this year it almost makes zero sense. I’ve sort of backed myself into a spatial problem, unintended when I started. Basically, the project initially was just MLB teams and their ballparks. The key to that is that the teams drove the dataset, not the ballparks even though the title of the project clearly said it was. As long as nobody shared a ballpark, this worked out great. The problem now is so many teams, especially in spring training, minor leagues and fall ball, share stadiums, that in GeoJSON-Ballparks, you end up with multiple dots on top of each other. No one-to-many relationship that should happen.

So, I’m going to use this minor league realignment to fix what I should have fixed years ago. There will be two files in this dataset moving forward. One GeoJSON file of the locations of a ballpark and then a CSV (or other format) file containing the teams. Then we’ll just do the old fashioned relate between the two and the world is better again.

I’m going to fork GeoJSON-Ballparks into a new project and right the wrongs I have done against good spatial data management. I’m finally ready to play centerfield!
22 February 2021
sur I’m Here at HERE

Publié: 22 February 2021, 5:46pm CET par dovecaramelphobos94903

Pièce jointe: [télécharger]

Last Tuesday I started at HERE Technologies with the Professional Services group in the Americas. I’ve probably used HERE and their legacy companies data and services for most of my career so this is a really cool opportunity to work with a mobile data company.

I’m really excited about working with some of their latest data products including Premier 3D Cities (I can’t escape Digital Twins).
Digital Twins at HERE
17 November 2020
sur Digital Twins and Unreal Engine

Publié: 17 November 2020, 6:36pm CET par dovecaramelphobos94903

I’ve had a ton of experience with Unity and Digital Twins but I have been paying attention to Unreal Engine. I think the open nature of Unity is probably more suited for the current Digital Twin market, but competition is so important for innovation. This project where Unreal Engine was used to create a digital clone of Adelaide is striking but the article just leaves me wanting for so much more.

A huge city environment results in a hefty 3D model. Having strategies in place to ease the load on your workstation is essential. “Twinmotion does not currently support dynamic loading of the level of detail, so in the case of Adelaide, we used high-resolution 3D model tiles over the CBD and merged them together,” says Marre. “We then merged a ring of low-resolution tiles around the CBD and used the lower level of detail tiles the further away we are from the CBD.”

Well, that’s how we did it at Cityzenith. Tiles are the only way to have the detail one needs in these 3D worlds and one that geospatial practitioners are very used to dealing with their slippy maps. The eye-candy that one sees in that Adelaide project is amazing. Of course, scaling one city out is hard enough but doing so across a country or the globe is another. Still, this is an amazing start.

Seeing Epic take Twinmotion and scale it out this way is very exciting because as you can see from that video above, it really does look photorealistic.

But this gets at the core of where Digital Twins have failed. It is so very easy to do the above, crate an amazing looking model of a city, and drape imagery across it. It is a very different beast to actually create a Digital Twin where these buildings are not only linked up to external IoT devices and services but they should import BIM models and generalize as needed. They do so some rudimentary analysis of shadows which is somewhat interesting, but this kind of stuff is so easy to do and there are so many tools to do it that all this effort to create a photorealistic city seems wasted.

I think users would trade photorealistic cities for detailed IoT services integration but I will watch Aerometrex continue to develop this out. Digital Twins are still stuck in sharing videos on Vimeo and YouTube, trying to create some amazing realistic city when all people want is visualization and analysis of IoT data. That said, Aerometrex has done an amazing job building this view.
10 November 2020
sur Moving Towards a Digital Twin Ecosystem

Publié: 10 November 2020, 9:01pm CET par dovecaramelphobos94903

Smart Cities really start to become valuable when they integrate with Digital Twins. Smart Cities do really well with transportation networks and adjusting when things happen. Take, for example, construction on an important Interstate highway that connects the city core with the suburbs causes backups and a smart city can adjust traffic lights, rail, and other modes of transportation to help adjudicate the problems. This works really well because the transportation system talk to each other and decisions can be made to refocus commutes toward other modes of transportation or other routes. But unfortunately, Digital Twins don’t do a great job talking to Smart Cities.
Photo by Victor Garcia on Unsplash
A few months ago I talked about Digital Twins and messaging. The idea that:

Digital twins require connectivity to work. A digital twin without messaging is just a hollow shell, it might as well be a PDF or a JPG. But connecting all the infrastructure of the real world up to a digital twin replicates the real world in a virtual environment. Networks collect data and store it in databases all over the place, sometimes these are SQL-based such as Postgres or Oracle, and other times they are simple as SQLite or flat-file text files. But data should be treated as messages back and forth between clients.

This was in the context of a Digital Twin talking to services that might not be hardware-based, but the idea stands up for how and why a Digital Twin should be messaging the Smart City at large. Whatever benefits a Digital Twin gains from an ecosystem that collects and analyzes data for decision-making those benefits become multiplied when those systems connect to other Digital Twins. But think outside a group of Digital Twins and the benefit of the Smart City when all these buildings are talking to each other and the city to make better decisions about energy use, transportation, and other shared infrastructure across the city or even the region (where multiple Smart Cities talk to each other).
When all these buildings talk to each other, they can help a city plan, grow and evolve into a clean city.
What we don’t have is a common data environment (CDE) that cities can use. We have seen data sharing on a small scale in developments but not on a city-wide or regional scale. To do this we need to agree on model standards that allow not only Digital Twins to talk to each other (Something open like Bentley’s iTwin.js) and share ontologies. Then we need that Smart City CDE where data is shared, stored, and analyzed at a large scale.

One great outcome of this CDE is all this data can be combined with City ordinances to give tools like Delve from Sidewalk Labs even more data to create their generative design options. Buildings are not a bubble in a city and their impacts on the city extend out beyond the boundaries of the parcel they are built on. That’s what so exciting about this opportunity, manage assets in a Digital Twin on a micro-scale, but share generalized data about those decisions to the city at large which then can share them with other Digital Twins.

And lastly, individual Smart Cities aren’t bubbles either. They have huge impacts on the region or even the country that they are in. If we can figure out how to create a national CDE, one that covers a country as diverse as the United States, we can have something that can even benefit the world at large. Clean cities are the future and thinking about them on a small scale will only result in the gentrification of affluent areas and leave less well areas behind. I don’t want my children to grow up in a world like that and we have the processes in place to ensure that they have a better place than use to grow up in.

14 December 2014
sur Quilting "Golden Light"

Publié: 14 December 2014, 2:45am CET par Aluminum Loaf

After the success of the first experiment with printing one of my mom's photographs on fabric and quilting it last July (see Quilting Fuchsia), we selected seven more images and had those printed at Spoonflower's largest possible size (about 27 x 40 inches without distorting the image). I've since shipped and carried those pieces of fabric all around the United States and even into Canada, twice. Two weeks ago, I finally managed to find the time to sit down and start to quilt again—truly one of my very favourite/favorite activities.

This is the resulting quilt that I created from the photograph "Golden Light" by Elizabeth Root Blackmer (you can see the original image in the middle of her Frozen gallery at BrootPhoto.com). The image is bubbles of air trapped in the ice of a frozen pond.

First of all, I had to find a fabric store. I was staying at my house in Nova Scotia when I finally found the time to quilt, and although I have spent extended periods of time here at the house over the past seven years (I took over the family home), I had never tried to find a place to source fabric here. I mentioned to my farming neighbour/neighbor that I need to ask his wife about a place to get fabric, and he looked at me like I was utterly obtuse. He said something along the lines of: "Everyone goes to Avonport Discount Fabric Centre over in Avonport, up behind the school—how do you not know that?" LOL.
So I asked a few more people over the next few days as I finished up my stack of work-work, and every single person (male and female) said the same thing: go there! So I did. Well, it doesn't look like much from the outside, and it shares a big dirt parking lot with the used auto parts store next door, so I was reasonably skeptical, but oh, what an epic pleasure this place is. Fantastic materials, ample supplies, helpful staff, great prices, and generally, like so many places here in Nova Scotia, a meeting place for friends and family. I've been back quite a number of times since; it's just down the road from my house—not ten minutes away!

Anyway, I found the most perfect backing fabric and thread for my project at this lovely store, and had a few wonderful quilting-related conversations with the ladies there while I wandered around looking at everything.

For some odd reason, I decided to use the dining table as my quilting space (but it's just me here this time, so I'm not in anyone's way). It might seem odd, given that I made myself a quilting area in another room, but this space is always warm, and that space doesn't need to be heated, so I ended up out here. By the time this quilt was done, five of the six chairs had been moved away from the table to give me access to all sides of the quilt.

And here is the original printed image.

I started by quilting the ice bubbles with gold thread and used a twisty stitch-line within each circle to make them stand out as separate elements. You can see the backing fabric here as well, a delicious mottled teal.

Then I quilted the darker section in the upper-right quadrant with a brown top thread. I used the diagonal line that runs through the image as the dividing line between the two sections of parallel stitching, and eyeballed the entire quilt from that one line. Teal thread was used for every stitch on the back of the quilt.

I used a variegated thread for the rest of the straight lines. Again, with teal thread on the back.

Quilting so many straight lines was exhausting, but I found my rhythm after a while.

You can really see how the variegated thread looks on the binding. I used three lines of it on the binding to make this element really stand out.

I had to go back to the fabric store to find a suitable edge fabric to use for the binding, but then I found a bias tape that was the perfect colour/color, so I used that.

And here's what the back looks like.

And here it is on the bed in one of the guest rooms ... I go in and visit it often, as I take stretch breaks from work-work and think about which image I'll quilt next ...

I only had one major blooper that I had to reëngineer with this quilt. Oh, and what a drag it was! My camera apparently couldn't register so much teal, so it displayed it as greyish/grayish, but even so, there's the epic snaggle of thread. Ugh.

And here are the test scraps that I used during this project. I can't imagine throwing them out unless I have a record of what they look like. It's that, or staple them into my diary, and that gets cumbersome.
12 July 2014
sur Quilting My Mom's Fuchsia Photograph

Publié: 12 July 2014, 1:12pm CEST par Aluminum Loaf

My mom is an amazing photographer. She captured this image called Fuchsia:

And this is what I recently turned it into: a quilt!

That's my mom there, Elizabeth Root Blackmer, holding the finished product.

She's printed on paper, glass, silk, and aluminum over the years, each with amazing results. The aluminum prints immediately below are absolutely stunning in person, and the silks below that were beyond ethereal.

She recently had a show at a photography gallery that included seventy of her various prints. You can view more of her work on her website: BrootPhoto.com.

It seemed time to combine our interests and print one of her images on quilting fabric. Neither of us was completely satisfied with the saturation of the print on the fabric, but for a prototype, it provided us with what we needed to know for the next time.

Here's what I started with: the image printed on a yard of fabric, a yard of solid fuchsia for the backing, and seven colors of thread.

For those who might wonder, the fabric was printed by Spoonflower. We've since put in another order and are hoping for more accurate saturation of the colors.

Here's what the original printed fabric looked like just after it had been washed and ironed. The printed image measured 25 by 40 inches, and by extension, the quilt came out measuring just shy of that.

It was difficult to know where to start quilting as I didn't have a plan and was just winging it. I figured that I'd begin with the small white bits and sewed them directly onto scraps of batting so that they were tamped down to something (if not, washing the quilt in the future could make a huge mess of things when the batting wads up).

Also, I wanted the white bits—which were mostly droplets—to have a slightly 3D feel to them. Here's what the back looked like with the bits of quilted batting; I then cut carefully around the shapes.

As an example of how the white islands look on the final product, here's a preview:

Then I placed a whole piece of batting on the back and started quilting the darkest color on the fabric with my darkest purple thread. This time it was the printed fabric and the batting, but still without the final fabric backing (you'll understand why when you read about my topo lines below).

Some of the light and bright green also needed this pre-backing treatment as there were islands of those colors within the fabric that needed to be captured before the more prolific colors got quilted. In the following image, the purples had also been quilted, but you can see where the greens existed as islands—unreachable from any edge.

Once the colors that existed as islands were quilted to the batting, I layered the fuchsia backing fabric to the sandwich of printed fabric and batting, and started quilting the larger swaths of color that ran from the edges all the way in and then back out again.

I'm not sure how many of you know this, but in my real life, I'm a cartographer. I love me some topo lines, so I quilted this such that the back looks like a topo map. Plus, I freaking loathe tying the hundreds of knots in the back of a quilt (I always think they look messy and I know that they will eventually come loose and unravel). As such, I quilted from one edge into the image and back out again, avoiding the need to tie knots—instead, I backstitched the heck out of each thread's beginning and ending. This is what the back of the completed quilt looks like because of this method. Dude: topo map!

So, that's why I quilted this quilt the way I did, first to bits of batting, then to a whole piece of batting, and then with the fabric backing. Also, I quilted around the bubbles as best as I could while going in and out, and used the various thread colors to create the visual texture of the piece.

Maybe you can imagine the maddening forethought it took to freehand each of these lines so that they didn't overlap at any point but so that enough of the complete layers of the quilt were actually stitched together.

Once all the quilting was done, to ensure that none of my backstitched threads were ever going to release, I double stitched around the whole edge of the image and then I cut everything away except for about a quarter-inch of white around the remaining image.

I had originally planned to add a traditional border to the quilt, but decided against it. Instead, I sacrificed a small percentage of the image all the way around to create a border by carefully double-folding the edges of the quilt all around and stitching them into place.

And once again, I'll mention how annoying I find it to tie knots, so I very carefully stitched all the way around and created all the quadruple (at least) stitching on all the corners using one freaking thread. Epic win!

So really, except for the one blasted thread that broke during quilting and that I had to repair with a knot, there is only one other visible knot in this entire quilt!

Oh, and this is where this quilt was made—in Tenants Harbor, Maine:

I've been visiting my parents for a few months and as a Mother's Day gift I painted out this room for my mom—it went from yellow and white to a light grey on all walls and ceiling, and with fresh bright white trim throughout. Before I moved her back into the room, I took it over as an office and quilting space. The light in here is awesome and her photography will look amazing in here. Or maybe some quilts ...
17 May 2014
sur Badger Afloat Again (2014 Edition)

Publié: 17 May 2014, 9:56pm CEST par Aluminum Loaf

Hard to believe, but it's already been two weeks since I dropped my husband off at his ship and said farewell to him for the summer and beyond. He's off again aboard the US Coast Guard Cutter HEALY—north into the seas and oceans around Alaska. This is the last picture I took of the cutter, as I stood on a beach in Washington in the pouring rain. She was sailing north and out of Puget Sound ...

I've been tracking the ship since, which is one of the very cool things you can do with this particular Coast Guard cutter (a truly appreciated rarity). She left Dutch Harbor, Alaska just a few days ago on her first mission, and it looks like she is now entering the Chukchi Sea. You can track their progress from this link:

[icefloe.net]

This first research mission—which runs through late June—is to study the under-ice bloom. It's fascinating stuff if you're interested in plants or ice or biology:

[www.nasa.gov]

The two other missions this year will study "Moorings" and "Oil Spill Technologies." Those are the main topics, but many other scientists are aboard as well, doing other very interesting research.

They are already in the ice as one of the recent images from the hourly camera feed from the top of the HEALY shows us. You can track the photos here:

http://icefloe.net/Aloftcon_Photos/index.php?album=2014

This blog post is really just an update for those of you who want to track the HEALY and her progress in 2014. We have a whole list of other posts we are supposed to have done already (some of which we will yet do, we promise), but the past few months have been especially busy with work and also filled with trying to pack in as many adventures as we could together before he sailed away again ...

As a teaser, here's one of the images that Badger took of himself with the HEALY last year during Ice Liberty somewhere in the Arctic Ocean:

___

Here's the post on (roughly) the same topic that I wrote about a year ago when they deployed. It includes some additional details about the ship and about my sweet husband:

http://aluminumloaf.com/2013/08/badgerafloat.html
27 February 2014
sur Alice's beads, repurposed … again!

Publié: 27 February 2014, 6:12pm CET par Aluminum Loaf

A few years ago, my Beloved Aunt Alice (my father's older sister) parted ways with the living. She was an amazing woman on so many different levels, and she touched each of us in special and unique ways; leaving every one of us believing that we had her absolute attention (and maybe rightfully so, as she had a huge heart and so much to give). We miss you Alice.

A few months after her passing, a number of us received packages in the mail that included an item of jewelry from her collection. The piece I received was a necklace that I wouldn't myself wear—I don't really wear gold-colored stuff—but after just a few minutes of looking at it, I knew what to do, and I sent an email with a photo of it to my very favorite jeweler: Jen Burrall in Portland, Maine. She replied that the red beads did look like carnelian and agreed to do a closer inspection of the piece to see what she could do with it for me. I figured that if I could wear the beads in some way, that I would be honoring Alice, but if the necklace sat in the back of a drawer for the rest of my life, that it would be sad and pointless.

Jen's jewelry has an extra-special place in my heart as my husband has been giving me pieces of hers since long before we were married. Also, she made my engagement ring, our wedding rings, and the special pins that we gave out to the twenty or so guests who attended our wedding. And each year, my collection grows ... and grows ... and grows ... (but that's another post).
So, I sent the necklace off to Maine (we were living in Seattle at the time), and Jen harvested the carnelian and disposed of the garish gold balls. All that remained of the original necklace were the smaller round beads, but that was enough for her to work with. She sent me a few ideas via email and I chose one. Here's her sketch:

Not long after that, the most amazing necklace arrived in the mail. Here's the picture that I immediately took and posted to my various social media worlds:

She did it! Jen turned something basically unusable into something absolutely spectacular. And honestly, I wear this necklace quite a lot, and just about every time I do, someone asks me about it or mentions how gorgeous it is. Alice continues to be honored on a regular basis. Thank you Jen!

So ... the point of this blog post is actually not about that necklace from years ago, nor about Sweet Alice. It's about the fact that my Dear Cousin Lex turned fifty this past year. Happy Birthday Sweetie! Lex was another one of us who had that extra-special bond with Alice—a bond that is just about impossible to break. It will always be there. Forever! And when we get together, we always talk about Alice and our memories of her.

When Jen sent me her completed masterpiece all those years ago, she also returned the remaining beads from the original necklace, and I've been saving them since. Waiting for a reason to somehow use them.

Lex has seen my necklace and stated her love for it. And we each sniffed a tear or two when I told her where the beads had come from and how Jen had brilliantly repurposed them for me. (From what I remember, I think she received a set of odd earrings from the estate?). So it seemed only natural that I would have Jen make a set of three necklaces with the remaining beads: one for Lex's fiftieth, one for her sister (also known as my Awesome Cousin Clare, who will also eventually turn fifty), and one for my mom, who was an integral part of Alice's life, especially in the years since moving to Maine.

So, off I sent the beads to Jen. And oh look what came back! A set of three astonishing necklaces that are clearly part of a set, but that each stand on their own.

Lex's is the one in the middle, Clare's is the rectangular one in the front, and the faceted one in the back is for my mom.

Again, it's only the round carnelian beads that are from the original necklace, but look how perfectly Jen matched them with a few other faceted carnelian beads ...

I adore Jen's twirly bits ...

And just look at those gorgeous pendants. Here they are up close:

Each of the necklaces uses a different mix of chain and hammered circles ... and yet they all so clearly belong together as a set, too.

I love Jen's hammered circles!

And those hooks!

They are stunning, Jen! Thank you so much for making yet more memories for me and my family.

Happy Birthday Lex! Cheers!
25 January 2014
sur Catching Up ...

Publié: 25 January 2014, 2:13am CET par Aluminum Loaf

Oof ... I cannot believe how quickly the past few months have flown by—2013 is long since gone now, and 2014 is already in full swing. And although we have done an enormous amount in that time on both personal and professional levels, as usual, I am running behind on getting out our annual New Year's Notes. For the record, it usually takes me at least the first third of each year to write all the personal bits in them and decorate the 225+ envelopes, but I really had thought that this year would be different (as I do every year; so who am I kidding?). Anyway, I am working on them today. No, really I am. I think I have finally even frozen the design (yeah, right!).

I had three different clients slip scheduled project deliveries to me today, which means that I'll be working all day and night on Sunday, but it also means that because I had blocked most of the day today to work on those particular jobs, I instead found myself with a few precious hours of unassigned time. WHA? I could have picked up one of the [literally 20] other, more-flexible-deadline projects, but I just couldn't face yet another client file when my personal piles of stuff are literally falling over with their own weight. Plus, husband is away this week/weekend so I have all those other hours to myself as well. Some would nap or take a bath or read a book ... but me? Nah. I decided to spend the time doing the most important thing to ME on my extensive lists of shit-to-do. For me, that's working on my correspondence—something that has so sadly fallen to the wayside during these insane few months. What I really should be doing is working on writing that masters thesis, but that will have to just hold its horses for one more day. I need a break!

I am sorry, peeps, for not yet responding to your lovely letters. I have a few here from early-2013 that I've been transporting around in my bag for almost a year now—very well-traveled epistles. I'll try to do better in 2014, but the fact is, I already know this will be my most stupid-busy year ever. Sigh.

So, I'm working on them ... and that's what I hope to spend my entire night on—decorating envelopes and thinking about all these beautiful letters sitting here before me from all you beautiful people.

And as I just posted to Instagram: You know it's been way too busy when you have to measure your personal as-of-yet-not-replied-to mail by the inch (this is more than two inches when squashed as tight as possible). I live for the mail but I was a terrible correspondent in those last months of 2013. Sorry guys; I'm on it!
02 November 2013
sur The Other Airstream Bench Seat Gets New Fabric (Finally!)

Publié: 2 November 2013, 6:01am CET par Aluminum Loaf

I've had one last Airstream fabric project hanging over my head for quite some time: covering the bench seat that Badger sits on. I've had the fabric for months and months, but was squeamish about sewing around all those curves and corners. Today, in a period of just over an hour, I did the entire project from start to finish. Months and months of avoidance and it only took me an hour and twelve minutes! That'll teach me to procrastinate (*grumble*).

So ... here's what it looks like now: Awesome!

I had already covered or removed all of the other unfortunate blue-and-white-striped fabric in the Airstream, and replaced the (dare I say awful?) palm-tree curtains with new white ones, but this project eluded me. I dislike that stripey fabric so much that I had even kept a piece of black fabric draped over the seat in question for the past few months just so I didn't need to look at it. But then, because husband is away for many months, somehow various projects got assigned to The Bench where they languished ... but in a fit of cleaning and reörganizing over the past few days, I cleaned them all off and away. Then I could see those blasted stripes again, and the ridiculous blue bolsters. Arrrrgh! So today was the day.

Here's what I started with:

Just pulling the cushion off made me happy. I had previously removed the television that used to be on that wall but didn't want to cut any of the cables, so that's the steampunkish cable hanging down there (it just tucks in behind the cushion).

Managing this huge piece of fabric in limited space was difficult, but I was determined to get this DONE!

And wrapping the cushion was unruly to say the least. Yes, it's all one big thing all stitched together which makes for easier management while snapped into the seat (it isn't always sliding all over the place), but it made a more difficult sewing project for me.

I made it up as I went along, and with each seam I sewed, I refitted the whole thing back over the cushion and replaced it in the space so I didn't make too many mistakes in a row. Corners had to be tucked in and sewn ...

I even cut all five slits for the snaps right the very first time (three above and two anchored below). Yay me! (Very lucky me!)

I couldn't be happier with the result. It will make me smile multiple times every day for probably a month or more.

I hope you enjoy your new seat Badger. I'll show it to Makeshift if he ever gets out of bed, LOL!
20 October 2013
sur Quilted Octopus & Matching Blanket

Publié: 20 October 2013, 1:47am CEST par Aluminum Loaf

When Makeshift and I went to Alaska last month, we met an awesome octopus in Seward at the Alaska SeaLife Center, and we've been octopus-obsessed since. We'd been tentacle-crazy for years, but they were usually Cthulhu-related experiments, not necessarily octopus-centric. However, once we were home again, the infatuation didn't wear off, and one morning last week we got it in our heads to make a quilted octopus, and a bunch of hours later, Makeshift had one of his very own! Granted, it is a temporary ownership in that the octopus is actually a baby gift. But for the nonce—and until I managed to make the matching quilt—Makeshift had a new tentacly companion.

I'd never even considered the idea of how to make a quilted animal before, but it seemed reasonably straightforward. The biggest problem I had was that I only had a single fat quarter of the olive fabric (I later secured more of this fabric) which I wanted to use for the underside of the tentacles, and I had a very limited amount of the onion fabric (and that was the very end of it after I reserved the piece I needed for the matching baby quilt that I planned on making), so I needed to use every possible inch and not mess up. I was only going to get one shot at this.

I extended the fat quarter by a few inches on both ends of the olive fabric to match the size of the onion fabric I had, which was easy because I knew that the selvage would be hidden inside of the head. I sketched out a head shape and reproduced it on a piece of printer paper.

Then I copied the reverse of that onto the other end of the fat quarter and drew in four tentacles coming out of either head—they all twisted in and around one another to use up as much of the fabric as possible.

Then I made a sandwich of batting and the two fabrics (good sides facing).

And I cut them out.

I then took each half-topus and pinned it up so it wouldn't move around as I carefully sewed the three layers together.

And sewed them up. Here's what the other side looked like.

I had of course left an un-sewn opening so that I could reverse the half-topuses. And I worked on that for a long time ...

Once reversed it looked like this.

I sewed a stitch into all the edges to give the tentacles some additional strength and to flatten them out.

And then I quilted each of the two halves including the heads.

I laid the heads back-to-back and cut off the edges so that they were mirror images.

I had originally planned to use binding to connect the two head pieces which is why I did things the way I did, but in the end I ended up sewing the heads together from the inside, and then reversing them, which made for a much cleaner and easier-to-make product. I could have saved myself a ton of time by sewing the heads differently, and if I ever make another quiltopus, I will know how to save some time; basically though, leave the opening for reversing the tentacles at the top of the head, not within the tentacles, and then don't bother sewing the head up until you are doing it from the inside.

I used some clamp guys to mark where I wanted to stop, and sewed four lines of stitches into the head to make it wicked strong.

Then I reversed the head.

To finish him up, I decided to make a pillow to slide inside the head to give him some extra volume, and to make it removable so that the quiltopus could be easily washed/dried. I'm told that kids barf on stuff, so things should be washable, right?

So I grabbed another piece of the olive fabric—of which I had since secured another 3.5 yards during the week, and washed and dried—and traced out the head shape.

Sewed that up and left a slit for stuffing. In retrospect, I would have left the slit at the top so that the final seam wouldn't be visible when inspecting the underside of the octopus.

Hello extra pillow. Goodbye pillow. Hello awesome stuffing.

And voilà: Octopus brain!

Easy to slip in, and thus presumably easy to slip out for washing needs as well.

And here he is, sitting up, so you can really see how little fabric this project actually took (because the tentacles all sort of fit into one another when not hanging about).

So, I still had that one remaining piece of onion fabric, and now lots of olive fabric (I bought the last of what one local shop had, and found two more yards at another shop), so it was time to make the matching baby quilt.

I laid out my onions atop the olives and I had my front and back.

I'm still working on that enormous piece of batting that I bought a few months ago. A king-size, all-natural, no glues or resins monster that I picked up for a quarter of what it was worth (sale on top of sale and a coupon equals a happy mushroom!). So, here's the sandwich.

I sketched out some baby tentacles for the edges on the back-side of the onion fabric.

And then cut them out (that's three layers there: batting, olives, and onions).

I sewed all around the edges and left a few tentacles un-sewn so that I could reverse the whole thing. Which once again took forever.

But finally I had it fully reversed and all the tentacles sitting pretty.

Then, exhausted, I went to bed. The next pictures include natural light and coffee!

I sewed up the few tentacles that I had left open for the reversing process.

Then I put a stitch all around the edge to strengthen and flatten—so many twists and turns!

And then tens of thousands of stitches got placed as I quilted from the outside edge all the way to the inside.

And eventually, however many hundreds of turns later, it was done! Here's the oniony front side.

And here's the other—sucker/olive—side.

Here's Quiltopus atop his blanket, blending in just as octopuses are prone to do.

And again ...

May my new small friend enjoy these tentacly, octopus-inspired gifts as much as we enjoyed getting to know our Alaskan octopus buddy, the predominant influence behind them.

And here are three pictures of our enormous Alaskan friend and his super-cute little horns:

Thanks for the show, Thumb! You're awesome!
19 October 2013
sur Friday's Fantastic Fabric Fandango

Publié: 19 October 2013, 5:18am CEST par Aluminum Loaf

You know how when someone you know says something like "Hey, you should check out my vintage fabric collection—I've got kind of a lot of it," you smile and think, Hey, yeah, that's cool, I have a few boxes too. But politely and excitedly say, "Yes, sure, I'd love to check it out. And yes, sure, we can barter the thing you want of mine for a few vintage scraps."

Well, Stacy weren't kidding. I was literally speechless when I walked into her vintage fabric room. Truly awesome!!!

The sheer volume of awesomeness was overwhelming at first, but then I enthusiastically dove in ... only to find that there was even more fabric than I first believed; layer upon layer of incredibleness. I had just been reading about inspiring workspaces in my new issue of Uppercase magazine, and wow, did this space inspire me! I wanted to go get my sewing machine, bookshelves, comfy chair, and quilting/crafting supplies, and move right into the middle of it all!

So, thank you Stacy for the incredible Friday afternoon adventure. And thank you for the inspiration and the awesome barter.

Here are the amazing fabrics that I got out of it:

And here's why I chose each of these delicious prints ...

1. Three vintage Alaska tablecloths. Each full of errors/typos, cultural insensitivities (by today's standards), and stereotypes, but each a representative example of its time. Given that my husband has been in Alaska since July (mostly floating around in the Arctic Ocean), and given that I recently took my first trip to Alaska, my infatuation with the state is deep. These three gems themselves were worth the price of admission—oh wait, that was free. I am a lucky girl! I have no idea what I might do with these, but I can't wait to find out ...

This one is 34 inches by 37 inches:

This one is 31 inches by 33 inches:

This big boy is 50 inches by 47 inches:

2. I love anything with a vegetable on it, and this is the oddest vegetable-related fabric I've ever seen (it's another tablecloth measuring 52 inches square). The Dutch (?) rabbit with the apron is downright sinister, and the truly bizarre collection of quotations is insane—a sampling:

"Cares melt when you kneel in the garden"

"Don't get carrot away"

"24 carrot gold"

"Do you carrot all?"

and, um:

"From caring comes courage —Lao Tzu"

Wait, what? Clearly this must become a quilt, but for whom?

3. How could I pass up the kind-of-creepy fish?

4. I've been octopus-obsessed since my trip to Alaska (and my run-in with the awesome octopus in Seward), and I've been drawing out octopus-inspired quilting designs in my journals since my return. This fabric make me think of the suckers on an octopus' arms, and I already know just what I'm going to do with this black and white scrap of masterpiece!

5. Well, these are mushrooms. How could I pass up a mushroom fabric? Not possible.

6. Given that my husband is in the Coast Guard, and given that because of that we will probably always live very close to the water, we are surrounded by nautical hints at every turn. This fabric will make an excellent quilt or pillows or even curtains at some point ...

7. And this bizarre pattern and color combination will make an amazing accent to a more sedate quilt or scarf.

So, that's my haul ... I can't wait to do the laundry again and get all of this washed up and dried.

Thank you dear Stacy for the fantastic glimpse into your vintage fabric world—it left me inspired and excited to see what comes out of my sewing machine next ...
10 October 2013
sur Scale Model Airstream Quilt for Badger's Birthday

Publié: 10 October 2013, 12:59am CEST par Aluminum Loaf

So, Badger's birthday came around last month while he was still off sailing the Arctic Ocean and stomping around on ice sheets to his heart's content as part of the crew of the US Coast Guard Cutter HEALY. I knew that I would be taking a trip to Alaska to join him for a week soon after his birthday, and I wanted to make him a special quilt. I'd started quilting in June, shortly before he left, and he's missed a few of them since he got underway, so this one had to be extra-special. It took me a few days to figure out what he most loves/misses about being out to sea, but it soon came to me: HE MISSES HIS AIRSTREAM! (Duh.) So I spend a number of weeks in September working on this two-sided, openable, scale model quilt of our Airstream. I gave it to him while we were together in Seward, Alaska a few weeks ago, and he and Makeshift felt right at home beneath it. It has since been installed on the ship where it is having the trip of a lifetime (or rather, the first of what will be many to come).

Here are a few more pictures of what the final reproduction looks like. Our Airstream is 25-feet long and this quilt reaches five feet from tip to tail—a one-fifth scale model. It has flair that is specific to port and starboard sides; logos, lights, awnings, windows, water, refrigeration, furnace, outside shower, electricity hook-ups, outdoor outlets, hot water heater, et cetera ... (even the blue pull-tabs for our gorgeous blue-striped awnings are there if you know where to look). I apologize for the somewhat rumpled look, when we took these pictures the quilt had been in a very tightly-packed travel bag for a number of days.

Badger's rack (bed) on the ship is essentially a twin-size bunk, so I wanted this quilt to be able to both lay there reasonably—decorating his living space—but also have him be able to use it as a blanket to curl up with. He tested out that idea with Makeshift and it seemed to work just fine (I don't think a man has ever been happier to have unfettered access to broadband Internet before; that's his freshly loaded-up iPad mini in the townhouse I rented for us during our week together in Seward).

So, it all began as many projects do with me: a journal entry (or ten) outlining the pros and cons, problems, concerns, issues, and any other sort of drivel that comes into my mind. Hey, it gets me where I need to be—we each have our own process. And I should mention, I actually completed this quilt long before I had even had the notion for the Cthulhu quilt that came after it, and for once I managed to keep a secret from my husband (something I am notoriously terrible at!) and didn't tell him about it. [It didn't hurt that we had very limited communication pathways during the weeks that I worked on it—I surely would have blown it otherwise.]

Choosing the fabrics was easy, the swirly silver waves on the simple gray cotton was the obvious starting point for the quilt, and many of the smaller bits I even had on hand from earlier quilting projects: the blue was from Mom's Scrabble quilt, the red was from Tania's elephant quilt, the black flower fabric was used in Kasia's pink-hair quilt, and the orange was purchased for my brother's quilt (which continues to languish at the moment, unstarted) but was also used to make the eyes on Dad's Cthulhu quilt. So really, of the six quilts I've now made, only the Ripley quilt isn't represented here in one way or another.

Then, I spent a few hours outside one evening with a ruler and tape measure, carefully collecting all the dimensions and doing calculations. Exhausting work for my brain, but I rewarded myself with a glass of wine, so all was well. And only one neighbor actually stopped square in their tracks and asked what the heck I was doing this time! LOL. I love that Martha! She's a crack-up.

I input the calculations into Adobe Illustrator (my map workhorse and very close companion of mine for more than a decade) and created all the attachable pieces. I cut them out one by one by one by one by one by one ... it went on forever! But in the end I had all the bits cut out, fused, re-cut, and bonded—and all onto the correct bits of ironed fabric.

Windows in the making for the curb side.

And all the darker gray bits for the curb side ... (see my note in the Intermission below and you'll understand why all these pieces are together: re-do!).

Lights! Orange lights in the making for the front of the Airstream! And then the red ones were created for the back. And then all over again for the other side.

Here are some of the bits for the street side of the quilt.

Here's one especially awesome thing about this quilt and our couch (gaucho): The quilt fit perfectly on the only surface (besides the floor I suppose) that would hold it. Here's what it looked like when I had all the pieces placed atop, before anything was actually sewn on.

I'm jumping ahead, but again, check out how once things were actually attached to the two sides, they fit perfectly—two-pieces-across—on the privacy curtain bar between the living space and the bedroom. This quilt was made to be made in this Airstream!

So, returning to our regularly scheduled program ...

Then I had to figure out how to best attach all those bits. I decided on an awesome stitch that looked like it would cover up the edges completely so they wouldn't fray in the wash, as well as hold strong for many years to come. And so began the sewing-on of bits ...

It took SO LONG to sew on all those windows using that thick, complicated stitch, but I love how they came out.

There was so much more measuring and math ...

I added a darker grey stripe along the bottom of the trailer just like it really has, and added the wheel wells, too.

And then the "chrome" strip that runs between the aluminum above and the grey below needed to be created and attached. I even sewed it to match the horizontal grooves in the real-world strip.

Then I decided to make the riveted door frame out of a piece of binding. I thought I could use what I call the Asterix stitch—cuz he put up with Obelix—to adorn it. Natch!

I needed a bit more bite so I added a long scrap of paper to the mix. All the better for the feed dogs to grab.

My theory worked and the paper tore away easily enough, leaving me with a long piece of "riveted" binding.

Getting the curve just right and sewing it on took a miracle, but it worked! Here's what came out of the experiment that night: Success!

I also used that same Asterix stitch to create the (curved) lines of rivets that run top-to-bottom and end-to-end along the Airstream.

Then, I took a break from the main parts of the quilt and figured out how to make the awnings! Always with using up every scrap! This batting remnant from the eggplant quilt got cut down to be used inside the awnings.

The smaller awning arms for the two sides (different lengths for each of course) were easy enough, but the awnings that run the whole span of the Airstream were almost five feet long on this quilt; that took some careful maneuvering.

But I got it. And look at the cunning little blue pull-tab. :)

So, much later (after the quilting was completed) I attached the awnings, but since I'm discussing them here, I'll add the relevant pictures to this section.

So, as an aside—or maybe by means of an Intermission if you are actually reading this—someone I know said that I should add more "screw-ups" to my quilting blog posts. Well, here's one: I thought I was going to be able to use the reverse side of the grey fabric (which was a nice solid grey, not some faded number), and had made all the original grey pieces in that fabric, but check out how it just disappeared into the sparkly fabric, not effectively showing off the particular component. I tore them out and went on the hunt for a darker grey. Believe it or not, grey is not a particularly popular color and it is actually incredibly difficult to match.

I worked and worked on the first side until all of the little bits were added and then I cut the shape out. Then, I had to start all over again with the other side (which is arranged in a completely different way, but thankfully, is lacking a [very difficult to sew] door).

After both sides were fully decorated with their accoutrements, I had to quilt them. Another set of almost-disasters occurred during this phase, but all the major ones were somehow averted.

The first sandwich began.

With something this big I knew I had to quilt top-to-bottom (a million times) and start from the middle. It was a major concern that the layers of the quilt sandwich didn't shift because I was working with less than a half-inch of wiggle room. Wiggle wiggle woo!

Even so, it barely fit rolled up in the crook of my machine. And I was very careful to quilt around every one of the elements, which meant I had to go back with different thread colors and quilt into those separately; all the black and dark grey bits got their own attention ... it felt downright Sisyphean.

I wanted to include all of the pieces that attach to the outside of the Airstream, so I had to create the logos. The tiny little logos. Crazy-town! Ours is an Ocean Breeze model, so it has an extra palm tree logo in blue and silver by the door (under the traditional International logo): Nailed it!

And the International logo sits by itself on the street side.

Two quick things I should mention that I realized about our aluminum home simply by making this quilt that I hadn't known before: (1) there's an International logo on the street side (cool), and (2) there's a grounded power outlet right next to my chair outside, where I have literally been sitting and said to myself (or maybe written in my journal), I wish there was an outlet out here! Well, there is! (Badger will have know this all along [duh!] and will laugh at me when he reads this clear lapse in aging brain power; he'll make an excuse for me though, and say that it must have looked like Cracker Barrel sign, lol.)

So, the binding. SO MUCH BINDING! I needed more than 30 feet of it! And in two colors: silvery-grey for the body and the darker grey for the base. I was so glad that I had invested in a new iron before taking on this quilt.

Ooops, not quite enough clips for the first side ... maybe I'll make another small investment in these useful grabby guys.

The "sunglasses" which wrap around the front of the Airstream were easy enough to add, but I had to put them on after the binding was secured so that they would show the illusion of "wrapping" around the silver shell, also, I gave them depth by adding some padding, just like they have in real life.

And then I had to devise a final solution: a fabric hinge to attach the two pieces of the quilt. I came very close to messing this up about a hundred times, and almost quilted the whole thing together in reverse—that's one of the main problems with too many exceptionally late nights in a row while on deadline: brain-rot.

But in the end, it all came out just fine. I decided not to attach the wheels as they seemed somehow dwarfed by the rest of the structure, even though I remeasured a number of times. I thought about making larger ones but they wouldn't sit right, so I just left them off—and now that just looks normal to me.

And so you have managed to make it to the end of this blog post (wow—thanks for reading/scrolling!). Here are two more views of the finished quilt: curb side and street side. These images may make the quilt look small, but really, for a badger, he has a significant wing-span.

Also, if you've seen the Cthulhu quilt post and the picture of my Dad peeking out from on top of it, this isn't a meme; Badger did the same peeking thing with this quilt before Dad even received Cthulhu (he was in the mail, winging it from Alaska to Maine at the time), and the two haven't seen one another's pictures (Dad will when this gets posted of course, and Badger will when he gets some good Internet again).

Happy Birthday my love ... I hope your makeshift Aluminum Loaf is keeping you comfy.

Can't wait to see you again.

Hugs, Mushroom
05 October 2013
sur Cthulhu Quilt [Hat/Helmet] for Dad's 70th Birthday

Publié: 5 October 2013, 7:10am CEST par Aluminum Loaf

Happy Birthday Dad!

My Dad is a very difficult man to buy presents for. He'd say he isn't because he has an Amazon Wish List, but he's going to buy that stuff for himself in the end anyway (if he still wants it). I did very well last year with the Mystic Order of the Elder Gods fez; it's a thing of beauty and a tribute to American craftsmanship, and he wears it very well!

But this year is his 70th birthday ... so something significant needed to be designed/developed/created. My Dad isn't really a quilt person—it takes an act of magic to keep a darn napkin on the man's lap (if we do end up giving him one, he inevitably stands up and dumps it on the floor anyway, so we mostly don't bother unless fancy company is around who might notice that a setting is lacking a face wipe). But he does love to watch his obscure episodes and movies, and often I think he might want company or might possibly be chilly in the 50-degree room where his monitor is (we don't have a TV, we have a "monitor" that plays DVDs and streams video). So, for a month I was trying to imagine a quilt-like thing that I could make him; something fun and yet maybe useful.

Finally, on the first page of a new journal, on the day before his actual birthday, it came to me and I drew it out: a Cthulhu Quilt! A lap blanket (a cotton codpiece if you will) that might keep him warm (or at least the popcorn bowl better balanced), and provide a smattering of company.

Within the hour I had the fabric ironed and was cutting out tentacles! Luckily, I already had all the fabric I needed in my fabric box and it had previously been washed and dried. I had purchased all of the remaining three-plus yards of this incredible onion print fabric from a nice lady at a tiny quilt shop in Port Townsend, Washington a few months ago with a quilt for my brother's new baby in mind, but I hadn't gotten around to making it yet. And I had two types of orange fabric that were also originally destined for two other quilt ideas, but that also hadn't yet been used, and I even had the green and orange thread that I'd need, and the batting. This quilt was magical from the start!

This is only the sixth quilt I've ever made, and I've never done one that was more fabric-art than blanket-type-thing. So I was totally winging it.

I started out by making a sandwich of fabric and batting for the tentacles.

Then I cut out curvy strips that I imagined would make good tentacles.

One of the two green spools of thread I had on hand was from my first quilt—the RIPLEY quilt—which used a bizarre gradated green thread. I still had quite a lot left so I used it to sew the thousands of inside tentacle stitches.

To make the tentacles, I took the fabric that was on the bottom of the sandwich and put it on the top, front-to-front, with the batting beneath.

The I sewed the three layers together.

Reversing the tentacles was much more time-consuming than you ever might have imagined. If the tentacles were wide, it wasn't so bad, but if narrow, they took forever and a certain amount of swearing was expressed. (Makeshift, cover your ears!)

The two most useful tools I had during this phase were a bone burnisher and the pen for my drawing tablet. With the burnisher on the inside and the pen helping to guide the sleeve from the outside, I managed to get the tentacles reversed one after the other.

It did rather feel like I spent my entire afternoon skinning hagfish (aka slime eels), but it was worth it as the door to the Airstream became progressively covered in tentacles ...

Then I switched to a darker green thread and added a stitch all the along the outside of each of the tentacles, helping to give them some additional strength and uniformity as well as a bit less floppiness.

And then, by the end of a the first very long day, I had completed the tentacles. They took at least twice as long as I ever might have imagined, but they looked awesome!

Oh wait, then I couldn't sleep, so I started playing with ideas for the eyes. A while later I had constructed these lovelies. Completely winging it once again ...

Makeshift was especially pleased.

I should also mention that I broke my first needle! Crunch and Snap! Quite the surprise when it happened. And a rite of passage I suppose. Lesson learned: No matter how awesome those metal clips are, you must remember that one end is longer than the other, and the longer end should be on the TOP of whatever you are sewing. Otherwise, your sewing machine needle will hit one and snap apart in a blaze of terrifying glory. Thankfully, I had 100 spare needles waiting. Turns out, sewing machine needles are incredibly cheap when purchased in bulk (I paid $16 for 100 on Amazon—those are cunning little pouches of 10 each).

The next day I started working on the two sides of the head. Somehow, overnight, I had gotten in my head that this quilt should be able to be worn as a HAT. Don't ask my why, it was just very clear to me that this needed to happen ... (Bad Makeshift!!!)

A sandwich of fabrics and batting began the back side. I chose an orange fabric to line the inside of the head.

Smaller tentacles were cut out of the sandwich.

The fabrics were re-sandwiched and prepared for sewing.

Note how all of the clasping-pins are long side ON TOP this time.

Tentacles sewed.

Ends snipped away and edges also cut down a bit to make for easier reversing.

And then, much later, the tentacles had been reversed. Note to self: Long thin tentacles are almost impossible to reverse successfully. And one of them got completely buggered up. But in fact, the anemic little deformed tentacle might even be my favorite. So Cthulhu!

I was much smarter about the front of the head—the tentacles are much wider.

So I sewed the head tentacles, reversed them, added a stitch all around the outside and then started attaching the long tentacles. Again, long sides UP with the metal monsters.

Also, I attached on the eyes ...

More tentacles added ... seventeen in all ...

Makeshift was totally enthralled with Cthulhu ... it was a bit of a love affair for a few days.

The back and front of the head were quilted ...

Then, Makeshift demanded that Cthulhu have wings. So I made some ...

Makeshift spent quite a lot of time that day trying to fly ...

Wings were attached.

The two sides of Cthulhu's head were shaped and cut, and then sewn together with some binding.

Makeshift pleaded to keep Cthulhu ... but alas, their friendship will have to exist via the Interwebs.

At that point, I was rushing to get out the door to start my trip to Alaska—planning to meet up with our large-sized Badger in Seward when his ship pulled into port—so Makeshift and I ended up in a hotel room in Seattle for the night. The room had two large beds, so they took over one of them while I attended to some well-deserved beers at the bar.

And then we were in Alaska with our beloved Badger!

We made him wear Cthulhu as a hat in a sweet church-cum-cafe in Seward that we frequented quite a lot during our week together. As usual, he was a very good sport about it.

And we made him model it, too (I laughed for WAY too long):

Cthulhu Video

Then Cthulhu got mailed from Seward, Alaska to rural Midcoast Maine. I knew he'd probably fuck up the works, but I had no idea he'd shut down the government nor that he would take two extra days to arrive (the Express Mail money-back guarantee meant I collected my refund with no trouble, so although the government is still askew, I have my $40 back in my pocket = essentially free shipping and money for another QUILT!).

But then he did finally arrive in Maine!!!

(The following pictures—as well as the two at the very top of this post—were taken by my mom of my dad with Cthulhu; delayed but unharmed.)

Happy Birthday Dad! May Cthulhu keep you warm and amused for decades to come.

Love,

Kate

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