Because, you know, I like to do things the easy way.

The first challenge was finding silk dupioni yardage that would price out cheaper than buying a finished cover. Enter my new buddy, Silk Baron! I can’t say enough wonderful things about Silk Baron. Their prices are significantly lower than anything else I found (and trust me, I looked), their service is prompt, their silk is of excellent quality, and the colors! More blues than you can shake a stick at. I ordered ten swatches. I think they have other colors, too, that are not blue. (I was a woman on a mission.)

The second challenge was narrowing my choices down to two swatches. I wanted a reversible cover, two shades of blue. Tough choice, but in the end I selected Vineyard Haven and Curacao. Silk Baron (who are so hip they even have a Facebook page) got my yardage here in record time. Yay!

I used Brett Bara’s excellent instructions on Design Sponge to sew the duvet cover. Her tips for sewing French seams were especially helpful, because dupioni frays like you would not believe. Every seam had to be finished or it would have fretted itself to pieces in a week, I’m sure of it. I made two pillow cases from each color, too.

Doesn't it look lovely?

In the photo, the top color is Vineyard Haven, and the lighter blue is Curacao. You can see the second duvet (covered in a white Ikea cover) underneath the one covered in the silk. I love how it turned out. It’s like waking up in the Caribbean every day. Marvelous!

When the Tiger Smiles
by Sonja Stone

By the time 16-year-old Emma Riley realizes her life is in peril, she’s at the bottom of a canyon 2,000 miles from home.

Like any self-respecting overachiever, Emma is thrilled when she’s invited to attend a small private school a few weeks into her junior year. Recently dumped by her boyfriend (for her ex-best friend), she’s ready for a change. However, the recruiter from Desert Mountain Academy fails to mention one pertinent detail: her new school is a training facility for future spies. She’s briefed on arrival and, despite the intimidating curriculum, she’s determined to make the most of her opportunity. But when her classmates learn that a double agent has infiltrated the student body, her situation takes a deadly turn.

As it turns out, the girl Emma replaced didn’t die in a car accident—she was murdered. The administration quietly suspects Emma—she is the new transfer. Evidence against her begins to accumulate, and her gorgeous new boyfriend can’t ignore it forever.

Emma’s being framed, and she’s desperate to clear her name. Meanwhile, the real double agent will stop at nothing to protect his or her identity—including an attempt on Emma’s life.

Tell me you’re not hooked! Can’t wait to read it, can you? Well, good news! You can get it right now for your Kindle on Amazon or your Nook onBarnes & Noble, and print copies will be available on Amazon on August 1!

Want to know more about Sonja Stone? Rumor has it she’s already hard at work on a sequel.

Take a look and pass the word, especially to any young adult readers you may know. You’ll be glad you did. Plus, every time someone buys the book, God kills a vampire.

Since I’m barely managing to keep one blog alive, I didn’t think it would be wise to try to manage two. Instead, I created a Posterous account to collect bits and pieces about using digital tools in visual practice. Then I pointed digitalfacilitation.net to my Posterous page.

You did what now?
Posterous is a neat little tool that makes it really easy to collect information from different places and gather it all together. Images, short posts, long posts, videos, things I make, things other people made that I like — I can fling all of it at Posterous, in lots of different ways, and it all gets posted. It’s sort of like a patchwork blog.

I can write an email and send it to a certain address at Posterous, and it becomes a post on my page because it came from my email address. I can upload images and other media from my Posterous dashboard. I can post from my phone, from Twitter, or by clicking a button in my web browser to create a post that links to the page I’m looking at. It just doesn’t get any easier than that!

And this is related to your new domain how?
My new domain was empty except for a placeholder page that Fred put there for me. Rather than set up a new blog or website, ’cause who has that kind of time, I went into the settings on my hosting service and pointed the domain at my Posterous page. (Actually, first I tried to do this from the Posterous side, but since I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing it went into a kind of infinite loop where they were forwarding to each other forever. Bummer.)

Now when you go to digitalfacilitation.net, it really loads ninmah.posterous.com, although it looks like you’re on digitalfacilitation.net. But if you check the permalink for any post, you’ll see it’s really Posterous.

What’ll be on digitalfacilitation.net?
I’m planning to collect stuff related to digital visual facilitation over there, and keep posting actual blog posts over here. We’ll see how that goes. Meanwhile, thanks, Fred!

The Hearts of #Quilttalk

The quilt’s history is a lot older than that, though. The blocks are more than a decade old. Back then, I was part of an online quilting guild (yes, way back in 1998). These hip mamas met on an IRC channel called #quilttalk. Remember IRC? Yeah. A cursory web search reveals that #quiltchat is now the channel of choice, but back in the day, it was #quilttalk.

The blocks in this quilt were made by the #quilttalk quilters. Once in a while, we’d hold a swap, where you make six identical blocks and mail five of them to the swap hostess. She sends back five different blocks from other quilters, and they each get one of yours. Multiply that by the number of sets you’re crazy enough to make, and you can get a whole quilt’s worth. So some of the blocks are mine, and some are swapped. I held on to the blocks for years while I didn’t quilt, and then for a few years after I picked up the hobby again, wondering how on earth to set them — they are so different from one another! The guidelines for swaps vary; this one specified the finished block size and that the block had to contain a heart, but that was it.

border detail

Normally I don’t go in for pink, but I thought it might pull together the different colors in the blocks if I set them with pink sashing (that’s the strips between the blocks) and borders. I like the effect. This is the first full-size quilt that I’ve kept for myself instead of giving away, and I really like cozying up under it. It’s riddled with flaws but I like it anyway.

One of my favorite features is the pieced stripe along the back. When I trimmed the borders, I had a couple of inches left over, and I had to piece the back of the quilt (sew two large lengths of fabric together longways) so I set the pieced strip in between them. It’s off-center on the back and gives the reverse side a little whimsy. It’s very satisfying to have it finished!

a terrible photo of the pieced stripe on the back

It’s called The Hearts of #Quilttalk in honor of my friends from so long ago. I quilted it on my little tiny Bernina Bernette, and it was very frustrating trying to squeeze the rolled-up quilt under the short little arm. Luckily, I’m saving up for a solution to that problem right now!

The magic is enabled by a $10 app called AirDisplay that runs on the iPad, along with its free desktop companion that runs on the Mac (or PC). I found out about it from a post on Practical Practice, a blog by Tim Tyson, where you’ll find very clear and detailed instructions for setting this up yourself if you want to. Essentially, the app on your iPad talks to the application on your computer, provided both machines are on the same wifi network (or a private network that originates from the computer). You can use a projector instead of an external monitor to turn your iPad into an interactive whiteboard, and you can connect several iPads and use them in turn, like in a classroom setting.

So far, I’ve only experimented enough to have first impressions: I used SketchbookPro instead of trying Ink2Go as Dr. Tyson recommends, and I found it a little difficult but promising. I used the wifi hookup and haven’t yet tried the private network. I’d like to try that, and maybe Ink2Go, and I’d like to test it over WebEx to see how it might look in a virtual meeting setting. (Any volunteers to attend and give me some feedback?) If it’s workable, it means that you could visually record a web meeting even without owning a graphics tablet, if you have an iPad. And no wires!

More on this later, after more experimentation. Meanwhile, take a look at Dr. Tyson’s post for more details on how he did it and what he used it for.

It has been very hard not to tell people about it, because Xobni is one of those tools that I just love. Today the NDA was lifted and I’m free to blog from the rooftops — or whatever — about how awesome Xobni is. It’s really easy to set up, and then there it is in Gmail, just like it was in Outlook, organizing all my contacts and giving me instant information about them at the click of a mouse. Yay! When I click on an email from someone, the Xobni window opens on the right with a picture of them, their contact information, a graph of my contact frequency with them, information from their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter profiles or streams, and a helpful list of all the emails we’ve exchanged. Way cool.

Even in the midst of all the Xobni love, there are a few things I would change. (And hey, it’s beta, so I’ll let them know and maybe they’ll change them.) My list of suggestions/observations:

• In Gmail’s threaded view, it’s only possible to see the contact info for whoever happens to be the most recent on a thread. It would be nice to have some way to switch when you click another message in the thread.
• The Xobni pane covers up some Gmail controls that I use (Expand All, Remove Highlighting, that sort of thing) and I don’t know how to get to them now.
• I miss the list of attached documents when looking at a contact’s details.
• I’d like a way to indicate which contacts are me. I’m always my top “top contact” and don’t really need to be :-)
• Twitter and Facebook updates listed in the contact pane sometimes seem pretty old — not the most current ones.
• If there are several photos available for a contact, I’d like to be able to pick the one Xobni uses.

Mostly I’m just so darn tickled to have Xobni back. And best of all, YOU can try it too! Xobni for Gmail is now in beta. Take a look!

Update: Hrm. Link fixed, now you really can try it!

Here’s a terrible picture of me making squiggly lines so that you can see the bristles fan out:

drawing (well, markmaking) with the Nomad Brush

Click the photo for a closer view of the bristles. Neat, eh?

For those who aren’t familiar with The Grove, it is a San Francisco-based company headquartered in the lovely Presidio, offering products and services related to visual practice and team development. It’s also where I first learned about visual practice. Grove President David Sibbet facilitated the first NMC Board Retreat that I attended, after I’d been with NMC only a few months, and I was just blown away by the dynamic nature of the process. He generously shared his time one afternoon to tell me about visual practice, and I was hooked. I had lots of opportunities to develop those skills with NMC and I’m very excited to be moving into a space where I can continue to learn, practice, and grow in those areas.

As wonderful as it is to move toward new and exciting things, it’s always difficult to move away from those that are well-loved and familiar, and it’s with more than a little sadness that I say goodbye to the New Media Consortium — but not to all my friends and colleagues, thanks to the miracle of social networking. I’ve learned so much over the past six and a half years, and education continues to be a passion of mine. I am deeply touched to have been named the first Vice President Emeritus of NMC and I’m proud to have been part of such an outstanding organization.

They have certainly made me feel very welcome at The Grove! This hand-lettered sign greeted me from the wall above my desk on my first day at work. I’ve admired the work that they do for a long time and I’m really honored to be joining such an excellent and talented team!

I discovered this a couple of weeks ago when the update came out, but forgot to blog it at the time. Fingers crossed they keep up the good work!

…IF the panel is selected. As you know if you are a SXSW veteran, the community has a 30% say in the selection of panels. All you have to do to vote is create an account on SXSW’s PanelPicker, which right there gets you some solid geek cred, and then you can vote for mine or any other panel that you like, whether or not you’re able to go to the conference. (If you can’t go, pick the ones you want to read about afterward, ’cause they will be all over the blogosphere.)

Oh oh oh AND there’s this neat little tool that links your Twitter account to your panel choices. Check it out! It’s called FriendsPanels, and it lets you tag panels you’re on as well as panels you like. It doesn’t automatically “like” panels you vote on (yay), so your votes are still cast in confidence, but you can specifically “like” a panel if you want to call attention to it. Nifty!

Um, what are you still doing here? Go vote for my panel! (Please.)