Serendipity

According to Wikipedia, serendipity is when someone finds something that they weren't expecting to find. It's one of those small pleasures that can just make your day a little brighter.

My serendipitous moment this week came in the form of an article in my Facebook news feed titled "Margaret Atwood on Knitting a Great Auk in the Arctic." As an English major, librarian, birdwatcher, and knitter, you know I had to read the article just because of the juxtaposition of such unlikely terms.

It turns out that Margaret Atwood is an avid believer in the preservation of bird species and had been asked to contribute an artwork to an exhibit highlighting birds that have become extinct. Most of the hundred plus artists contributing to the exhibit did their art in paintings, drawings, and prints. Since she is also an avid knitter, she wanted to use wool as her art medium. And there, buried in the middle of the article was the method she used to get a graph of the auk she needed to craft her knitted piece. Just a tiny little mention of a tiny little program available free online to turn your image into a graph suitable for knitting or cross stitching. Whoa! That snapped me to attention!

And here's why:

I'd knit a table runner or wall hanging canvas (I hadn't yet decided which) a couple of years ago. A friend had provided me with a photograph of a lighthouse that I wanted to turn into a graph and stitch onto the canvas I'd knit. But I needed to find a good way to do that. I didn't want to buy an expensive program to do it. I tried various options that seemed possibilities but none really did the job I wanted it to do, so I put the project aside and moved on to other things.

The free online Web2.0 app she used for her graph is Knitpro and I found it with a simple Google search. There are a few easily adjustable settings for you to get the size and direction you want for your graph.

This is the lighthouse I needed to get a graph of for my planned project:




This is a screenshot of the graph generated by Knitpro that I saved as a jpeg and cropped so I could show you what Knitpro did with the image. What Knitpro generates for your use is a pdf that you can then print. What's great about it is that the lines on the graph are numbered to make it easy to follow.



And this is the blank canvas I knit with the plan to stitch a lighthouse on it, painted with stitches, so to speak.




Now thanks to the serendipitous discovery of this little gem of a program, I am now prepared to finish my own artwork using cotton yarn on my knitted canvas.

My Interests Graphically Depicted

I thought it would be interesting to use Wordle to compare my delicious cloud tag with what I've been blogging about lately.

Here's the Wordle of my delicious tag cloud:



Compare it to my blog rss feed here:



It shows in a very graphic way that while I've been continuing to look for useful web tools to include in our upcoming More Things on a Stick, my personal interests lately have been focused on photography, photos, sharing and enjoying them. It's pretty clear from looking at my blog recently that graphics, in one form or another, have been occcupying my interest.

Thing 6

Exploring all the graphic tools and image generators could be a real easy way to get sidetracked. One thing just leads to another. Big Huge Labs has so many really easy apps and is very intuitive to use. I did discover one quirk when creating a slide show with photos from the web. If I exported it to my blog with their tools, when the slideshow played there was one photo which I had not put into the show which came with it. So I finally decided to just put the link in a list as when I did that only the photos I had included played. Just a little digital quirk apparently. I made a license plate with Image Chef and put it in the sidebar of my blog. For those who don't know, Yoopers refer to those living "below the bridge" in the Lower Peninsula as trolls (yes, the reference is from the folk tale).

My trading card also got posted in the sidebar earlier. And I had to play with Spell with Flickr again to figure out how I got the image to show up so I could help out another blogger. I liked the way the word turned out, so I left it in my blog.

Another person wanted to manipulate her image so I looked for a way to do it and found a possibility that I have to try out myself later.

Just for fun, I went to Findr and searching on the tag snowman viewed a really neat collection of pictures of (mostly) snowmen which was fun...only one photo seemed out of place..but I think I figured out how it got there. (There's more than one kind of snowman, apparently.) I did the same thing with Splashr: My Presentation


These tools which are freely available online are a great resource that cash strapped libraries can tap to give promotional materials a professional look without spending a lot of time doing it. Spending time exploring them is well worth the time and their use is only limited by your imagination.