These instructions will work in Adobe Illustrator from CS–CS5.

How to create a quarter-circle (or quarter-ellipse) in Illustrator

1. Select the arc tool. (Click and hold the straight-line–segment tool to bring up the sub-menu of additional line-segment tools)
2. Use the arc tool to make your quarter-circle:

   A. Freehand method

   Before drawing a freehand quarter-circle for the first time, you must use the exact-size method to enable closed-shape drawing. If you do not, you will only get the curved line, not the whole the shape.
   Quarter-circle: Hold down the shift key on your keyboard, click and drag to draw a quarter-circle of the desired size.
   Quarter-elipse: Click and drag to draw a quarter-elipse of the desired size.

   B. Exact-size method

   Click once anywhere on your artboard to open the arc tool options dialogue.

   

   Type in your desired dimensions for the radius of your quarter-circle, and select Closed from the Type drop-down. If your y-axis and x-values are equal, you will be drawing a quarter-circle, but if they differ, you will draw a quarter-ellipse.

   Click ok.

3. Success. You now have a quarter circle. You can change the fill, size, stroke, etc as with any other shape.
   
   

If you are running your sites on an Apache server with the rewrite module, scheduling a temporary redirect to a maintenance page is pretty simple:

# MAINTENANCE REDIRECT
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{TIME} >20120118000001 [NC]
RewriteCond %{TIME} <20120118235959 [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.html$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /maintenance.html [R=307,L]

To explain the code:

Line 2: RewriteEngine on

Turns on the RewriteEngine, if it isn’t already.

Line 3: RewriteCond %{TIME} >20120118000001 [NC]

Checks to see if the date is greater than a specific time. In this case 2012-01-18 00:00:01.

Line 4: RewriteCond %{TIME} <20120118235959 [NC]

Checks to see if the date is less than a specific time. In this case 2012-01-18 23:59:59.

Line 5: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.html$ [NC]

Checks to be sure that you’re not trying to access the maintenance page itself, otherwise we’d end up in a redirect loop.

Line 6: RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /maintenance.html [R=307,L]

If all of the above conditions are true, it does a temporary (307) redirect to your maintenance page.

Here’s the code again, with the variables you need to modify italicized.

# MAINTENANCE REDIRECT
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{TIME} >20120118000001 [NC]
RewriteCond %{TIME} <20120118235959 [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.html$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /maintenance.html [R=307,L]

Drop it in your .htaccess file, and you should be good to go.

What time value should I use?

We’re talking server time, so your time will be based on what your server setting is. Mine is set to EST, although it gets funky about Daylight Savings Time sometimes, so it might be off by an hour. If you know your server is running 3 hours slower than your timezone, adjust your times by 3 hours.

Then, figure out your date and time in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS and remove anything that isn’t a number: YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.

Why are you doing a redirect instead of rewrite?

I like to make it very clear to search engines that we’re on a new page and it is only temporary, so no caching should happen. If a search engine hits my homepage and I’ve rewritten the URI, the search engine thinks that my maintenance content should be indexed, which I definitely do not want to happen. Instead, it knows that there was a redirect.

You want the redirect to be temporary (307) so that the search engines know to continue to request the original URI in the future, and not the maintenance page.

What is this SOPA and PIPA stuff?

The American legislative bodies are both currently considering bills that will allow easy censorship on the Web in the name of protecting copyright and intellectual property. A good analogy is that the bills are kind of like trying to kill a squirrel with an atomic bomb. As someone who is both a Web developer and creative professional, I strongly believe that this bill will hinder creative and economic progress as well as the dissemination of information.

If you’re reading this on Jan 17, or any day after Jan 18, you can learn more on Wikipedia, but it will be blacked out on Jan 18. Of course, your favorite search engine will surely return plenty of hits as well.

Book 1 of the All Souls Trilogy

Viking Adult, 2011

Rating: 5/5

Maybe the fact that I’ve been reading little else but trashy romance novels lately has cleansed my witchy reading palette (or reduced my reading IQ to the point where I like anything with a decent, well-written plot), but A Discovery of Witches is a refreshing take on the witch/vampire/daemon mythos.

Diana Bishop, a hereditary witch from an old family doesn’t use her powers (except in extreme circumstances, such as her washing machine overflowing). One day, while researching alchemy (her field as a historian) in Oxford’s Bodleian library, she manages to call up the long-lost Ashmole 782, a bewitched alchemical manuscript that hasn’t been seen in over 150 years. Suddenly, she is hunted by witches, vampires and daemons who all want access to the manuscript. The only problem is, Diana sent it back, and it refuses to appear again.

With the aid of gorgeous, mysterious 1,500 year old vampire Matthew Clairmont, Diana is forced to learn more about the world of the Creatures, their history, and her own magic. Their partnership in itself begins to draw attention from the most powerful of Creatures based on an agreement for voluntary segregation agreed upon during the Crusades.

We learn that Ashmole 782 is a magical palimpsest that may hold the key to the creation of all three species of Creatures as well as humans, and explain why they may be dying out. Diana and Matthew seem to be the only ones able to decipher the manuscript—that is if they can get ahold of it again.

The book itself is full of interesting references to alchemy, history, religion, and wine—and the de rigueur debunking of common vampiric myths by the vampires in the story. It is written with the clear expression of someone who is immensely excited and knowledgeable about the information within—as one would expect of a history professor, which Harkness is. Bishop and Clairmont have an intense, complicated relationship, but If you’re looking for sex, look elsewhere (though I expect it’ll come in later books). This story isn’t focused on romance, but on discovery of self, community and knowledge. We’ve all heard of the Philosopher’s Stone and the goal of turning lead into gold, but Harkness inspires you to discover what alchemy really is and to explore the thin line between science and magic that we continue to research to this very day.

A bit of interesting trivia, the Bishop’s farm is in the town of Madison, NY, located about 30 minutes SW of me (and well-known locally for its many antique shops). There is indeed an inspiration for the farm itself, but it isn’t located in Madison—according to the author, it is located in Pelham, MA. She decided to use Madison as the setting after living in nearby Hamilton.

I haven’t been able to find out details about the final two books in the trilogy, aside from the fact that there will be two more according to Harkness (in another tweet). But I’ll be waiting. Not to provide spoilers, but the last paragraph of the book carries much foreshadowing—my belief is of the positive kind.

Form your own opinion: Buy from Amazon

Preview it online: Google Books

This book was acquired with my own resources. No money or goods were exchanged for this review—it is my personal opinion, not that of the author, publisher or any other entity.

A good philosophy for tracking is: if new information is shown in the browser, at an address owned by you, it is a pageview. Everything else is an event.

Tracking link clicks

The short answer: tracking a link is tracking an event.

For instance, clicking on an outbound link does not result in a pageview for your website. Viewers are not looking at content on your site. Thus, an outbound link click is an event.

Clicking on a related link—such as to another similar blog post—is not a pageview, it is an event. The pageview itself will be tracked when the new page loads, but if you want to track the actual link click, you should register an event. Otherwise, you’ll be double tracking pageviews or tracking pageviews for a single page under multiple paths. Neither is ideal or desirable in an intelligent tracking schema.

Clicking a link that triggers a popup is covered in:

Tracking pop-up, modal, or ajax-inserted content

Are you tracking this based on link clicks? Why?

When tracking a popup, you should add tracking code to the popup file. The new window is a pageview. There’s no reason to track the link click as the pageview when you can add basic code to the popup and let Google handle it all.

For modal or ajax-inserted content, proper tracking means triggering a pageview when the content is shown. This is different from when the triggering link is clicked. Most plugins that allow modal dialogs or on-screen popups have an API that features some sort of onShow or afterRendering hook. This is the best place to put your pageview tracking. And yes, this is a pageview, because it is showing new content.

There are some cases where the link should be tracked, and those should be tracked as events. For instance, if you have a modal or popup contact form, you’ll want to track a pageview when the form is displayed, and an event to track which page the form is on or which link is used to display the form. Two different types of tracking that happen at two different (but very close together) points in the interaction.

The tricky case of PDF documents

PDF documents are one case where I entertain either option, but that is because there are two possible ways that PDFs extend the website: as downloadable content or as browser-viewable content. Older browsers and the default installation of Firefox treat PDFs as downloads. They are not displayed in-browser. Thus, under my definition of a pageview, clicking on a PDF link is an event. Think of it this way: we know that the user clicked the link, but we can’t be sure that the user actually downloaded or opened the document, so there’s no empirical evidence that there was a pageview.

However, modern browsers like Safari and Chrome, and certain mobile platforms will open PDF files seamlessly. In that case, for most intents and purposes, clicking a link results in a definite pageview.

Example cases:

Server forces PDF download, will not serve in browser

Event. There is no possibility the page is viewed in the browser. Any content is downloadable, not viewable.

PDF is provided because resources/desire/ability to convert to Web are not available, but is considered Web content

Pageview. There is a possibility that the page will be viewed in the browser, and that is the intended functionality anyway.

File is of a form or tutorial intended for printing

Event. The intent is not to view the content, but to provide a format for printing and interacting with outside of the Web. This is not pageview content.

In most situations where I’ve implemented tracking for PDFs, their use has fallen under the event philosophy, but I do see instances where a pageview does make sense.

How do you make decisions about pageviews or events? How do you use the resulting data?

This post follows How to Check if Google Analytics Click Tracking is Triggered, a post about debugging your events and pageview code. I hope to follow this with a tutorial about implementing JavaScript for this tracking.

Enable the Net tab

If you don’t already have Firebug installed in Firefox, get it, because you need it for this.

Once it’s installed, enable the Net panel.

Load the page you want to test. Once you do, you’ll see a lot of stuff pop up in the Firebug Net panel. One of my posts looks something like:

Look for the PageView

Once you have enabled the Net panel, you can see if your Google code triggers the initial pageview. Look through the requests for one that starts with _utm.gif?. Expand it by clicking on the arrow to the left of it.

Looking at the params tab (it defaults to headers), you can see the information being passed to Google. The first line is your unique tracking ID. You’ll also see your page title, the domain, and most importantly, the URL being passed.

If you don’t find the _utm.gif? entry, something is wrong with your basic GA tracking code and no data is being sent to Google.

Trigger your event or new pageview and find the tracking info

After verifying that the GA code is tracking the pageview, you can see if your click event code is working. To do so, trigger an event that you’ve attached tracking code to. In my screenshot, I open an external link, which I’ve coded to trigger a GA event. It’s important that if you are triggering a link to a new page that you open it in a new tab or window so that your Firebug Net panel still tracks the original page.

A new _utm.gif? line should show up in the Net panel. Expand this new tab. If you triggered another pageview, the params will look similar to those mentioned earlier. Events look a bit different.

Click to view larger version

The important field here is utme, which shows the information you passed in the _trackEvent call. The arguments you passed to _trackEvent are separated by asterisks. Mine reads Outbound Link*us.php.net/strtotime*Why is date() returning 12/31/1969. This is because I track my outbound links under the category Outbound Link, with the external URL as the action and the h1 text on the page the call was triggered from as the label.

Yours will likely differ depending on your schema for event tracking.

Again, if you don’t find this new _utm.gif? call in the Net panel, your click event code isn’t running, or the GA _trackEvent/_trackPageview code is set up incorrectly. You’ll need to debug it, then check again.

Now you know how to check if your code is working. What do you use Google Event or Pageview tracking for?

raevenfea.com

For those of you who don’t follow my stitchery adventures, nothing has changed in your world.

For those of you who subscribe to the Omnibus RSS feed and do like reading about my sewing stuff, unfortunately you’re going to have to add another feed to your reader for the time being: raevenfea.com/feed/.

I hope to somehow integrate the two back together in the future, but no ETA on that any time soon.

Sartorial Stitchery was not only misnamed, but had outgrown this shared space, so it was time to give it its own home (I already owned the domain, with nothing on it).

The design is still rough, and a few more articles need to be moved over, but it’ll be growing over the next few months!

Sunday, we were at our local Barnes and Noble, which normally doesn’t have any fashion books at all, and not only did I get a chance to flip through 100 Dresses (henceforth filed under “nice to have, but won’t spend my own money on it”), I found Fashion: A History from the 18th Century to the 20th Century from the Kyoto Costume Institute for $20 in the bargain section. Gorgeous photos of even more gorgeous extant garments and decent essays.

On Monday, my copy of Linda Sparks’ The Basics of Corset Building arrived in the mail. I ordered it mostly just to have a quick reference book on construction. I heard mixed reviews, but thought I’d give it a chance. So far it looks like a decent book.

Tuesday, the book for my next “Sew you want to quilt” class came: Dancing with Thread. I’ve only thumbed through it so far, but I really wish I had it when I was squaring the bargello quilt. It has a great section on that. The next class is focusing on applique and using free-motion quilting to add visual interest. I’m very excited.

That same shipment also had a bunch of bobbins, so I don’t have to choose between unwinding or not sewing any time soon.

Christian Dior, Wedding Ensemble: Dress, Crinoline and Headpiece, 1954
Collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Photo from mwpai.org, copyright Cincinnati Art Museum

Speaking of books, I’ve had my eye on Wedded Perfection: Two Centuries of Wedding Gowns for a couple of months now. To my great surprise, I found out that I can actually see the exhibit!

Wedded Perfection is coming to the Munson Williams Proctor Arts Institute (MWPAI) here in Utica, NY! And, it opens the day after my birthday, so I am considering it a birthday present to me. Hey, don’t knock my ego.

If you’re from the Utica area or are traveling, go see it June 19–September 18, 2011. MWPAI is a free museum (donations appreciated, of course).

On the project front, I have one side of binding left to stitch on the Bargello, so look for a post on that and final photos this weekend. I started cutting out pieces for my next project last night. I don’t know how much I’ll be posting on it while I work on it, because it’s a present for someone who occasionally reads this blog.

I’m also working on making a copy of a friend’s favorite vest for them, so do stay tuned for updates and information about that project soon!

What are you working on right now?

See, most of my life, I’ve despised sewing by hand. The thread tangles up into a ball of uselessness, it knots itself and pretty soon I just want to scream and run away. Not to mention my hand cramps up, I poke myself accidentally and I start getting needle indentations on the pads of my fingers. Often, when something ended up in my unfinished projects pile, it was because there’s just a little bit of hand sewing that needed doing and I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to a wonderful new (where by “new” I mean “has been in use for this for hundreds of years but somehow nobody ever told me about it until now”) product called beeswax. If you drag your thread over the wax, it miraculously coats it just enough to keep it from tangling and knotting up, but not leaving any icky residue on your fabric and what not.

So, while I’m not willing to say I like hand sewing (there’s still the issue of cramping and poking), I certainly no longer despise it. We’ve formed an amicable acquaintanceship. But, at least it no longer causes a ton of UFPs!

You can pick it up in most quilting notions aisles (or here on Amazon) in a neat little plastic holder with slots to drag the thread through. It’s quite possibly the cheapest, most vital notion for hand sewing after the needles and thread themselves.

Frugal tip: before I scrounged up a Joann coupon (or maybe waited for a quilting notions sale, I don’t remember), I used a chunk of white soy-based wax from a candle I had lying around the house. It worked pretty well, although it’s a slight bit softer, thicker and more residue-y than the beeswax. But hey, work with what you’ve got, I say. Any candle wax that is white or natural-colored should work okay in a pinch.

Have you known about waxing thread for ages? What other tips do you have? Are you partial to a specific brand of wax?

Who says piecing is only for the front of quilts?

Well, if someone did, I’ll have to politely disagree with them. You can do fun things with the back too, if you’re so inclined. It’s a great chance to use up extra blocks from the front, or fabric leftovers. Of course, it’s a creative process so I can’t really do a tutorial on how you should piece a back, but here’s what I did.

Color-run inspiration

After finishing the front of my quilt, I still had some of one color run left; by the time I got to the central strips, the two color runs had converged into the same exact order, so I chose to exhaust one completely by cutting the remaining strips from it, leaving a good 8″ left on the second.

I also had a whole pile of little 3.5″ wide slices that I’d removed from all the rows for purple-block insertion, and a spare 1 1/2″ strip that I cut because I thought I’d lost the first one I cut (I’d actually sewn it to another strip in the wrong section).

I decided to use the extra color run, strips and pieces on the back, filling in the remainder with the teal batik.

Labeling

Labeling is one of those things that is easily overlooked because it’s not vital to the quilt-making process. But, because I am giving this quilt as a late wedding gift to my cousin (the wedding quilt is in the long-term UFP pile), I thought a label recognizing their marriage is important.

The way I decided to incorporate a label actually became part of my back piecing. Deciding to stay far away from embroidery, I chose to give printable fabric a try. I picked up June Taylor Colorfast Printable Fabric from JoAnn Fabrics (with a 40% off coupon, of course). I hope to review it soon, but for now, suffice it to say that it seems to be somewhat color fast and printed just fine in my Canon PIXMA iP4300 (which is going on 4 years old now). I purchased white printable fabric, although you can also get cream. I figured white would allow a wider range of options in the future, since I’d have a lot left over. So, I printed a cream background to my label (which has faded a bit, hence the “somewhat” color fast). Having a border-less printer is really helpful here, as you either have to waste the printable fabric so that you can cut it down or have a printer that can do less than a 1/4″ margin on all sides of the label so that the white edges are hidden in seam allowances. My border-less printing settings weren’t behaving, but the print margins were < 1/4", so all was well.

I set up a 3.5"x6" (the width of the strip it was going into by a pretty arbitrary height) document in Illustrator and had fun designing a cool label, complete with a verse, my name, city, the date (Winter 2010/2011) and the name of the quilt. Drumroll please… “Bye-bye Blues… Welcome Verdant Spring.”

The blurry bit under their names is on the photo for privacy. It doesn’t really look like that. It’s their last name and wedding date.

Putting it together

Once I’d created a label, I put it in a strip created from all the extra color run pieces. The strip is mostly in order of the color runs, but begins to skip when I ran out of some colors. I enclosed that strip with two strips cut from the color run leftovers (well, one was that spare one I’d cut accidentally).

I miscalculated the amount of fabric needed for the back, so I was short on the teal batik. I made up the difference using pieces of the other fabrics. Mainly G3 and B4, along with a lot of the black/brown paisley that was the original inspiration fabric and all the other little pieces left over from the front. I tried to use as little of the purple as possible on the back, because the poly is a bit harder to sew through than quilting cotton. One piece made it in as part of that stray slice I’d cut for the front.

The full back, laid out on the living room floor. After sandwiching, I am not quite sure that the strip of piecing on the top of the quilt will actually be on the back. I may have miscalculated overhang by a few extra inches, but no big deal. I can always use it for something else!

The result is a back that is a little more tailored and interesting than a plain back (not that plain backs are boring—they can be amazing to look at the actual quilting of the quilt, but it’s really better to ignore that on one of mine as my quilting skills are very amateur).

Now it’s all sandwiched and waiting for me to quilt it!

What tips do you have for piecing backs? Is it something you do for most quilts, or do you prefer basic backs?

This is the center of the quilt before borders. You can see how uneven the bottom is.

Squaring

My quilt top was badly out of square. It’s kind of demoralizing it’s so badly out of square. Make sure you’re paying attention to how rows are lining up across the quilt, not just within row groups. Had I done that, I think it would have helped a lot. Instead, I was steam ironing the heck out of one section of the quilt trying to square it up a little by stretching it to match other sections. I don’t know if that’s the most advisable way to do it, but it worked relatively well. At least, it made the edges mostly square, but you can see where the row seams do not line up across the quilt.

The top and bottom rows are also not straight, because I had to cut an uneven amount to square up the sides. But, it happens sometimes, and you just have to roll with it.

Top edges. See how the two sides have much different amounts being removed?

The sides were mostly square, but the top and bottom weren’t. To square them up to add the borders, I taped the quilt to the floor, and measured center, then measured the top and bottom and lined up the borders so they were square, meaning that there were different amounts of seam allowance on the quilt top. After sewing the borders on (using the 1/4″ border allowance to guide me), I cut off the excess.

Measuring.

The top and bottom borders pinned on in a mostly square configuration.

Borders

My teacher made one of the quilts from Twist and Turn Bargello Quilts by Eileen Wright. The prescribed border includes a 1/4″ strip much like the one Edie used on the pattern that I’m using.

The catch is, Wright has you cut a 1″ strip, fold it in half, and simply sew one end into the seam, leaving the other loose (similar to a prairie point border). After sewing eight 1/4″ rows in my quilt, I decided that this was the best thing since sliced bread, and used this method rather than piecing together the strips normally.

Wright also has you cut your borders on bias, which my teacher said made a huge difference in attaching them (much easier) and also hid any joins better than normal seams. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough fabric to do borders on the bias, but it is something to consider in the future, for sure. Also, because of my out-of-squareness, I am relying on my non-stretchy borders to help square it up. Bias borders would just bend out of square with the quilt top.

Instead of doing borders with half blue, half green like Edie used (well, blue/brown), I chose to use a blue inner border and green outer border, with brown binding. Edie’s pattern called for a 1/4″ inner border, 3/4″ outer border and 3/4″ binding, which I also modified. Mine are 1/4″ inner, 2 1/4″ outer (technically 2 1/2″, but 1/4″ is covered by the inner border), and 3/4″ binding. I added a wider outer border to infuse a little more color to the quilt. Once I finished the top, I felt that the browns and creams were overwhelming the blues and greens.

Here’s the completed top, including borders. The hanging shot is probably the most color-correct.

What tips do you have for squaring up quilts? What about adding borders?

This is part five in a multi-part series. Keep following along by subscribing to the Sartorial Stitchery RSS feed, or view the related posts. You can also get a downloadable pdf of my pattern changes.