All posts by KathyW

Web author, programmer and developer; photographer; designer; artist and bird breeder. Interested in all of the above plus underground homes, alternative energy systems, native plants and animals, alpacas, carnivorous plants, dyers plants and organic gardening.
General

Crikey!

It’s been ages since I had the time to post, but it’s raining outside so no after work weeding today. So what’s been happening?
I’ve finished the Red Faced Parrot Finch aviary rebuild and the Red Faced Parrot Finches have been moved into their new home. They love it! And they look so brilliant perched in the bushes when the sun catches them.
Another Gouldian Finch baby got evicted (or fell out) and had to be hand reared. We call him Geronimo after the 4ft fall he took from the nest. Fully feathered now and in with another completely independent hand reared youngster. Geronimo however still prefers hand feeding …
Planted more wind break Lilli Pillies yesterday to fill in the gaps. They’ll be loving the mild, wet weather!
Must try to find time to get some pages up on the Blue Faced Parrot Finches, as well as the Red Faced, and the Gouldians. But this will have to do for today. Geronimo needs his evening feed …

P.S. Dec 29th, 2010: Geronimo is a girl!! Looks like “she” is going to be a red headed normal purple breast.

Arts and Craft

First Tutorial

I scoured the net for clues on how to fold a hexagon – a six sided repeating shape – for a kaleidoscope effect. There were hints and intensely mathematical pages, but very little that was directly applicable to my project. My own first 3 attempts with paper were pretty sad and ended up as fuel for the boiler fire. But the fourth showed promise, then I hit the jackpot! It really IS pretty EASY! So I’ve documented it here with photos and hope it can someday help someone else.

A finished Kaleidoscope.
A finished Kaleidoscope on fabric.

Here’s an inset from a piece of fabric, 44″ high x 36″ wide, that was my first attempt at hand dyeing a kaleidoscope using this folding technique.

The tutorial “Folding a Hexagon” is linked under my Craft pages and can also be found here.

Enjoy!

Web Stuff

Whoo-hooo!!

Time to bring the site back on-line!!!

Finally got a few niggly things sorted, and checked the new blog and site in my least favorite browsers – ie 7 and 8. Found a few more niggly things to fix for ie7, worked fine regardless in ie8. Only kinda works in ie6 but that is no surprise. I’m very much over kludging things for ie6 (any ie6 users out there, do yourself a HUGE favor and install Firefox).

The drop down menus seem to work fine, as does the lightbox – the “niggly” things that threw a spanner in the works of yesterday’s plans to bring the site back.

This is a huge change from the previous site in so many ways, from the visual of the design to the basic underlying philosophy and concept of KathyW.org.  It is past time to move away from the static picture-on-the-screen brochure style approach and grasp the new and engaging interactive options. Ok, so there aren’t any Facebook or Twitter (or fill-in-the-latest-fad) links yet, but they may well come. I’ve only commented out the code in the PHP, not removed it 🙂

Anyway, enough play for now – time to get back to work and setting up some eCommerce content for customers.