Music round the Tree!

This frenzy of Christmas card making has surely gone to my head! Had to go searching for yesterdays newspaper to check what day it was, I was sure it was Wednesday today. Kinda earned an extra day crafting then, if you know what I mean! Onto my card, one for a man I think, always find them a challenge, usually tailored for that person so great satisfaction with the end result.

BoBunny Noel

Link to a YouTube Comment

If you happen to find a YouTube comment that's really interesting and you want to share it with other people, mouse over the comment, click on the "Share" button and copy the link.


Each YouTube comment has a permalink, but it's not easy to notice that the comment is displayed below the video in a special section titled "Linked Comment".


You could also use this feature to annotate a video before sharing it with your friends. Post a comment, copy the link and use it to highlight your comment.

the sewing haven

Last week I finished re-finishing a family sewing cabinet.  It was made for my mom by my dad 35+ years ago.  It is the most wonderful sewing cabinet you can imagine- it folds up so you can easily hide projects when you are in the middle of them, and has the perfect cabinet space for storing patterns and material. 


 
As I was sanding and taking the cabinet pieces apart to re-finish, I couldn't get over how ingenious the cabinetry was and how sturdy my dad made it.  He was quite a craftsman!  When I asked my mom how he was able to make things like the grooves for the sliding cabinet doors, or the ingenious pop-up thread spool cupboard, or the wiring for an outlet within the cupboard, she said it was when they were young, newly married, they had just finished up Med school (or in the middle of?), and they were asked to housesit at a castle-like residence in San Francisco.  The place had a spectacular woodshop and my dad delved into the tools and made my mom this dream sewing cupboard.

Here are some "before and after pictures"

 
I wanted to give it a light-look, so I refinished it in a creamy white paint. 

I switched out the knobs for some antique-looking glass knobs. 
 
And added some trim to the top and sides (thanks James for sawing!)


We stuck the cabinet in the guest room, and now it is my favorite room in the house!  If anyone wants a sewing retreat vacation- you can come visit me ;)

Google Earth 6: Better Street View and 3D Trees

Google Earth 6 doesn't have too many new features. You can now use Street View just like in Google Maps by dragging the pegman icon. "To view street-level imagery for a specific location, zoom into an area at an altitude of approximately 500km. You will see a pegman icon appear at the top right below the navigation controls. Click and drag the icon across the 3D viewer. A blue border will appear around roads that have street-level imagery available," explains Google.

Another new feature is the "3D Trees" layer that can be enabled from the "3D Buildings" section. Google Earth includes 3D models for city parks (San Francisco, Chicago, Tokio, Athens) and remote forests (Amazon Forest).

Historical imagery is now more accessible: just click on the date of the oldest imagery in the status bar and you'll be able to see all the historical images that are available for the same location.

Google Earth 6 also adds ground-level navigation that lets you explore 3D buildings and 3D trees, 3D measurements for heights and widths of buildings and a much better Tour Recorder that improves motion fidelity.

baby's 1st christmas

Morning folks, a card using the LOTV squares,quick make, keeps the mojo cruising along, think we all need a helping hand sometimes, thought I had made heaps of Christmas cards, must of been all in the mind as no where near finished yet. Made the backing paper using Hero Arts Small dots and Large Plaid Pattern, embossed using TH distressing inks and embossing powder.

would like to enter LOTV

Ladybug Sketch Challenge

Afternoon folks, seems to of been ages since I posted a card! Not been idle, just haven't had much time, where does it go? Been crafting on and off all weekend, nothing else for it so much snow here. My card is for the Ladybug Crafts Ink challenge this week. Bought this stamp at the SECC where I seen Debbi colouring this cutie with promarkers. Me, I used my Prismas, still haven't got round to

Google Maps Will No Longer Support Mapplets

Three years ago, Google introduced mapplets, a special flavor of gadgets that added new features to Google Maps. "Mapplets are Google Gadgets that are made especially so that they can be loaded by a user on maps.google.com, and have access to the main shared map. Users can load multiple Mapplets simultaneously for a quick and easy way to mashup content from multiple sources."

In May, Google announced the deprecation of mapplets, but only developers cared about that. Users could still go to the "My Maps" section from Google Maps and add a mapplet from the directory. Unfortunately, Google Geo Developers Blog informs us that the directory will be closed and all the links to mapplets will be removed.

As part of the deprecation plan for Mapplets we will shortly be switching from rendering Mapplets within Google Maps, to rendering them on a dedicated Mapplets page. (...) Bookmarks for existing Mapplets will continue to work. They will be automatically redirected to the new Mapplets page for the relevant Mapplet. (...) However because the Mapplets page is not part of the Google Maps application, Mapplets will no longer have access to Google Maps user profiles. (...) The above changes will be made on or shortly after Wednesday December 8th 2010.

Google Maps Directory includes 1550 mapplets that show crime information, weather data, information about population density, earthquakes, airports, hotels, golf courses and much more.

If you've added one or more mapplets to the "My Maps" section from Google Maps and you want to use them even after the links are removed, find them in the Google Maps Directory, convert their URLs and bookmark them. For example, replace:

http://maps.google.com/gadgets/directory?synd=mpl&url=http://www.google.com/mapfiles/mapplets/distance/distance.xml

with:

http://maps.google.com/maps/mapplets?moduleurl=http://www.google.com/mapfiles/mapplets/distance/distance.xml