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April, 2008 To Blog or not to Blog. I still love to bead, but I do find that art and crafting use only certain parts of my brain and the rest becomes stagnant. I could relearn some of my math skills. Ben occasionally makes fun of me for my lack of such skills. I swear I used to be able to do calculus in imaginary space. Now it is all forgotten in the depths of time. A class to relearn it would take way too much time, and relearning it on my own would probably not work as I would ignore it after a while. I figure blogging would be a good brain challenge. I usually don't write much. Sometimes it is agony putting words to paper. So I've decided to start a gardening blog - I have to write about something, and I do love my garden. It is called Daphne's Dandelions.
Now physically I'm always doing something new. How many things have I been into? Can I remember them all? Hiking, backpacking, running, orienteering, biking, rafting, kayaking, martial arts, yoga, aerobics, ballroom dance, German long sword. Now I'm trying belly dancing and my son is slowly trying to teach me poi (poi=fire spinning, though I do it without fire). I’m not sure which one would be more amusing to watch; a middle aged woman trying to be graceful, or me hitting myself with my poi as I try to make the patterns work.
June, 2002 On the creation of www.DaphnesDesigns.com
After Wysdom shut our office down in 2001, I figured I would stay home through the summer of 2002. I loved programming and loved working, but the one think I missed was spending summer with the kids. Well I'm not very good at sitting home doing nothing. So after we visited Arisia - a science fiction convention, I decided we needed costumes. My mother-in-law had given me a sewing machine years ago, but I hadn't really used it much and didn't know much about sewing.
My first project wasn't too hard. I made a druid's costume using an ancient Irish dress as a pattern. The dress is sage green and the underskirt is dark green. The chemise is white. The sewing wasn't too hard. And even though I changed the pattern a little it came out great. I decided it needed to have vines going up the front and down the back. I appliquéd leaves of dark green and white going up and sewed on a vine of dark green cord. The leaves needed something more to them so I beaded around the outside. The beading took forever to do, but I had a great time doing it.
My second project was a fantasy fighter's costume. It included a velvet cape. Well sewing isn't too hard when you use cotton, but velvet is a pain to sew. The fabric is slippery and keeps moving no matter how many pins you put in to keep it in place. It turned out ok, just a little off kilter. I decided it too needed beadwork. So I added a fancy pattern to the collar of the cape.
Once I was done making my costumes and helping the kids make their own costumes, I wanted more to bead. I loved beading. I researched it on the web and started learning how to bead jewelry. I bought more beads and just kept beading. After a while it became obvious that I should be selling it. I made a website, to help me sell my work - websites are what I know well after all. And I am now looking for more avenues to market my work.
October, 2001
Well I graduated (once again) in 1999. I have my Certificate of Applied Sciences in Software Engineering from the Harvard Extension School. I started looking for a job after we were done with our vacations for the summer. It didn't take long despite needing a "mommy job", one that could be flexible about my arrangements and one that was part time. On July 19th, 1999 I started working for Origins Software. It was a small start up whos product writes code for the web. In 2000 our company was merged with Wysdom, a Canadian company. They proceeded to shut us down in October of 2001.
If you want to read a silly story about my life go to my Website Development
Homework#2, in which
we were required to use all sorts of HTML tags.
You can contact Daphne at daphne@alum.mit.edu.
This web page (http://www.gouldhome.com/index.html) was last updated on April 29, 2008.
For any comments or suggestions about the site contact Daphne Gould.
Contents copyright © 1999-2003 by Joel and Daphne Gould.
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