Sewing Diary with Allure

Hello,

It has been a long time since I last blogged. In this time, I learned few things like sewing, baking, quilling and also tested few diet routines. From the past one year, I am stitching my own  dresses. I always had the wish to share my sewing experiences with you all. In the meanwhile, I did a lot of practice to stitch a decent dress.Here is my first attempt at sharing my sewing ideas.

 Allure from Usha Janome

To make a dress more appealing one needs to give proper final touches like piping, making pleats, adding lace to the frock etc. The pain comes in doing piping neatly in a prefessional way. It's not only time consuming but even a slight disturbance while sewing spoils the whole look. There is an old saying that a lazy man will have more ideas on how to do a work easier. That is where you have foots for sewing machines. Now you may be wondering that what is meant by foot?



A foot is a plate which you attach to the sewing machine. Typically it is attached to the rod near the needle, so that the needle comes in the middle of the plate to give stitches to the cloth.A foot is a handy accessory for the people who aim for perfection. Foots play a major role in stitching. Without the foot we cannot stitch anything in a sewing machine  and it's the place where the two threads join together and gives stitching.Allmost all sewing machines comes with Basic foot along with some accessories.




First few months I tried with basic foot and felt that I need a bit more perfection while doing things like bias binding, piping, pleats and making an applique design.There I felt the need for foots. I purchased foots like piping, 1/4th seam, piping and a few more online.The perfection which comes from the specialised foots makes these foots really worth investing.



As foots make a difference in sewing so as pattern making, Pattern making needs a lot of creativity to imagine how the dress should look like. Before I jump directly into pattern making, I would like to share about some  common foots which I use in sewing. Believe me, it's worth having these foots at home. One foot which I admire more is "All purpose foot".  It  is just awesome, I stitched my son's  torn shoe velcro with the help of this foot.



Here are some of the foots which I am currently using.

                                       

                                   

         

Zig-Zag foot

In my previous post, I had explained about sewing machine foots. Here is my attempt to introduce you to one such foot. Here comes the first one called as All purpose foot.

             

                                    All purpose Foot or Zig -Zag foot or Basic foot
                                                  
Zig-Zag foot - All purpose foot- Basic foot

Here comes the first foot called as All-Purpose foot or zig-zag foot. I prefer to call it as a zig-zag foot. It's called as  All Purpose foot because, you can stitch with this  foot from straight stitch to zig-zag stitch.This foot is used to sew on bulky layers of fabric, to do bulky seams, and it is very useful on stitching textured fabrics like denim, fleece, velvet etc. For beginners do use 1/4 seam foot to do a straight stitch. General settings for All purpose foot depends on the thickness of the material which you are using and the length of the stitch one needed. But for general fabric like cotton I go with stitch length in between 2-3, Pattern selector as A for straight  stitch or C for Zig-Zag stitch in Allure, and Thread tension as 4.

Nannaj (The Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary)

Nannaj

The Romantic couple

The Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary


Nannaj is a village in solapur district of Maharastra, India. The land of Nannaj is semi-arid and drought prone.The climate of this region is very hot summer,dry and mild winter.The forest in this reason is thorn forest and dry grass lands.Rainfall to Nannaj is very less.

Nannaj is famous for wildlife sanctuary and especially for Great Indian Bustards(Ardeotis nigriceps). Hence it is called as Great indian Bustard Scantuary,and it is named as Jawaharlal Nehru Bustard Sanctuary in 1979.Great Indian Bustard in Nannaj was first noticed by MR.B.S.Kulkarni in 1972.Its because of Mr.Kulkarni's extensive efforts to save this endangered species, Dr. Salim Ali visited Nannaj and started research on this project. Great Indian Bustards(GIB) are locally called as Maldhok and it is a endangered big bird.The natural habitant of Great Indian Bustard is short grass plains.GIBs prefere open grass lands.

Here is an account of our trip to Nannaj

After a rainy day I visited Nannaj along with few bird enthusiasts to the Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary.Prior permission to visit this place is must.I spoke with few wild-life research students in the guest house premises and found that one group was doing research on Wolves  and another group was doing research on Blackbucks .A girl in the Wolves research team  explained very clearly about the nature of Wolves. My conversation with the group went on and now it was time for us to see Queen of the Grasslands. we took a guide inside the sanctuary as he is familiar with the surroundings .He asked us to enter into a closed mud hut to watch the GIBs, as the Great Indian Bustards are shy in nature.

The mud hut

We found a  herd of Blackbucks, pack of wolves, pack of Dogs ,after much await we found the Queen of the grassland flying towards us and landed away.To my surprise, I found the GIB to be much larger than what I had imagined .We spotted around 8 Great Indian Bustards.They were there for a period of an hour and then flew off to another grass land on the opposite side.We were still there in the hut to see more GIBs. During this time we saw a pack of Dogs hunting Blackbucks. And on the other side of the land we found a herd of wolves in a playful mood.

The time when I visited Nannaj, the forest department had cleared all the big trees over a huge area of land to make the grass land GIB friendly and to grow the Great Indian Bustard's population.

Dry Grassland

It was a pleasure to the eyes to see Blackbucks playing and jumping on each other along with Great Indian Bustards in the beautiful grass lands.

Great Indian Bustard and Blackbuck

School children from the local school visited the Sanctuary on the same day and tried spotting birds with one of our friends Spotting scope.

These are the list of species of Birds we saw in Nannaj

1.Red -Wattled Lapwing, Yellow-Wattled Lapwing.

2.Chestnut Bellied Sandgrouse

3.Sykes-Lark

4.Indian Courser

5.Jungle Babbler

6.Jungle Bush Quail

7.Red Necked falcon
8.Short Toed Snake Eagle
9.Eurasian Collared Dove
10.Common Hawk Cuckoo
11.Indian Robin
12.Munias
13.Francolins
13.Spotted Owlet
14.Raptors
15.Indian Silver Bill
16.Pipits
17.Pied Bush Chat
18.House Sparrow
19.Indian Peafowl,Peacock
20.Baya Weavers
21.Small Minivets
22.Black Shouldered Kite
23.Common,Jungle  Myna
24.Jungle,House Crow


Apart from this we also spotted few garden Lizards(which are food for Great Indian Bustards),Red mites and etc..........

Coming to Accommodation one can stay at Forest department guest house which is preferable or can stay at Solapur hotels.The distance from Solapur to Nannaj is approximately 22 kms and the travel time is approximately 30mins.

Muthathi

Muthathi is a settlement situtated on the banks of the river Kaveri near Malavalli, Karnataka, India.

Muthathi is 100Kms from Bangalore.The route is as follows : Bangalore>kanakapura road>Sathanur>Muthathi Anjaneya Swami temple>Muthathi village.

Muthathi is associated with Hindu diety Lord Hanuman called here as Hanumantharaya and Goddess Sita devi .River Kaveri flows along this area, Muthathi is coverd with dense and lush green forests,and comes under the Kaveri Wildlife Sanctuary.You will be excited to see yourself driving in the middle of the forest.

Muthathi is also a good place for Bird Watching.

Swimming at kaveri river is dangerous,its because of whirlpools and strong currents.

Preferred transportation to this place is one's own vehicle or a taxi,its beacuse the bus service to this place is not very regular.

Here is how our day trip to Muthathi went

We reached Muthathi and visted the temple of Lord Hanuman. The view from temple premises is beautiful,we found a small trace of water falls from temple premises.As the temple is in the middle of the forest and there were plenty of trees around the temple,we saw monkeys and aslo a Rufous treepie.

Then we headed back to Muthathi village. To our surprise the place was  totally flooded. people came there in lorry and cars. And the entrance where we find the river was not so clean it is filled totally with feathers of birds,legs,hands and head of goats, yaaaaaak its totally horrible. We went  a bit further to see a clean spot and after our 15min travel we found totally a good place and it was very clean,calm,and beautiful,and importantly nobody was there.

We settled there with all our packages and enjoyed Swimming, birding .We spotted few water birds, bees, butterflies,Wagtails,Cormorants, big fish ,Asian Paradise flycatchers, Orioles, Leaf birds,Monkeys,White cheeked BulBuls ,and more.

Asian Paradise Fly-catcher.

Wagtail

Yellow browed BulBul

Can you spot it. if so leave a comment with the name of this beauty.

We had packed our food from home and enjoyed having lunch beside the river bed.There are no hotels here.

Apart from cleanliness in the entrance of the village everything is nice here.You will feel yourself totally recharged in the middle of the lush green forest everywhere, a calm sky and serene water all around with the calls of birds makes this place even more beautiful.

I captured the calmness of nature in my Cam.

Pied Bushchat

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Butterflies

Fish inside the water

Other Places you can viist after visiting Muthathi are Soligeri hill, Bheemeshwari or Cauvery fishing Camp, Mekedhatu, Sangama ,Galibore fishing camp and Chunchi falls.

Mekedhatu( I call it as Rocky land)

HTC Wildfire

HTC Wildfire is an Android based, entry-level smartphone from HTC
A good handset worth its price.

Specification of HTC Wildfire are

It has CPU Speed of 528MHZ and the platform in which it is built is Android,
The memory of HTC Wildfire is 512 MB ROM and 384 MB RAM,
The display size of Wildire is  8.13cm along with touch sensitive screen, (capacitive)
The dimensions are 10.67 cm (L) x 6.04 cm.(W) x 1.22cm.(T).
IT comes with internal GPS antenna.

Network specifications are:

HSDPA/WCDMA (900/2100 MHz)
GSM/GPRS/EDGE (8050/900/1800/1900 MHz)
Bluetooth 2.1,A2DP,FTP,OPP, and PBAP
Wi-Fi. IEEE 802.11 b/g

Other specifications of HTC Wildfire are

1.Stereo audio jack is 0.35cm
2.It has standard micro-USB.
3.5 megapixel color camera with auto focus and flash and
4. expansion slot (microSD card)
5.Optical track pad
6.Given a charger it also works as a data cable.


Highlights of HTC Wildfire are

It has polite ringtone, it means some phones ring and ring and ring! with HTC Wildfire the ringer volume drops as soon as you pick the phone.

The Stated MRP of HTC Wildfire is Rs.17,490. And I bought it from Flipkart for just 10k.

Samsung phones in the same range dont have flash while HTC Wildfire has flash.

Optical track pad in HTC Wildfire is very useful to navigate up-down-side. And to take a picture from camera you can use this OTP.

Wildfire runs on Android version of 2.2

HP Pavilion G6-1313AX

 HP Pavilion G6-1313AX

Specifications:

Processor-AMD APU Quad Core A6

RAM-4Gb DDR3 RAM

Screen-15.6 Inch.

500 GB Hard drive 

Operating system-Windows 7 Home Basic.

This is a wonderful budjet budget notebook from HP . Carrying this is quite easy as it weighs 2.3kgs. Coming to the looks it has a good look

The dimensions of HP Pavilion G6 is 374 x 245 x36.5 mm 

It has 15.6 inch high-definition bright view LED backlit screen . And the maximum screen resolution is 1366 x 768 pixels.The keyboard is very well laid out.

The biggest advantage of this laptop is that you get a quad core processor from AMD for the same price of an Intel i3 processor which is a dual core processor. Another major advantage is that the A6 processor has an AMD ATI Radeon HD 6520G graphic processor which has 1Gb graphics card in which the processor and graphics card share the same physical space  but operate independently. In an Intel processor, the Graphics processor is integrated but is not dedicated like the AMD A6. It improves life of battery and the laptop. Plus,  the AMD A6 has turbo boost which means it runs slowly normally, when it needs to operate more powerfully/faster its turbo boosts upto 2.4 GHz and it is more for any program to run. 

A better web cam would have been preferred as it now has 0.3 mega pixel which is not satisfactory. Given the price and the other features it is a good compromise. Coming to the battery backup it has 6 cells and the maximum battery backup is 3hrs.HDMI port is in the laptop not in the AMD processor.


Windows Experience rating Index

The individual scores are

Processor: 6.7
Memory(RAM):5.9
Graphics:4.6
Gaming graphics:6.1
Primary hard disk:5.9

If you use Windows Aero, the overall rating of the Laptop is 4.6;

AMD System Monitor

I purchased this laptop from http://www.flipkart.com/

Kerala - God's Own country

Kerala
It is one of the most beautiful places in South India and is also know as God's own country.My friend recently visited Kerala and here are her words about Kerala

                                                   
                                                                 
We enjoyed the beauty of Kerala in all its glory  - from the lush rainforests of Thekkady to the rolling green hills of Munnar. In Kerala we also enjoyed a cruise on the backwaters ,and had a stroll around in the tea plantations to enjoy the bounties of nature in abundance.

Kerala is one of the most enchanting and romantic hill stations of South India. The natural beauty of Kerala attracts thousands of visitors round the year. An exquisite combination of hills, rivers, lakes, dams, flora and fauna makes it an exotic and vibrant hill station within the Western Ghats. One of the most prominent feature which adds to Kerala’s beauty is the vast expanse of tea plantations spread across thousands of acres.The cool weather and the silence in nature makes Kerala a honeymooners paradise.


Kerala's backwaters are a bewildering labyrinth of waterways, lakes, rivers,streams and salty seawater.

Romantic Munnar

Munnar is one of the most favored honeymoon destinations in India. Its cool climate, fresh environment and green waved tea carpeted mountains are the perfect setting for a great holiday.Today most parts of Munnar are carpeted with the breath taking greenery of tea plantations. Before, it was home to tribal communities and many species of wild animals.

Munnar Tea plantations

Eravikulam National Park

Adventures at Thekkady

Thekkady's forests are home to tigers, elephants, sambar and many other endangered species.  The artificial reservoir is part of the Mullaperiyar dam across the river Periyar. Boating in the reservoir gives a chance to see the wild animals in close range which comes to the banks of the reservoir to drink water. adventure activities like trekking, hiking and camping. Being a place where a lot of tourists visit, there are cultural programs conducted in Thekkady, mainly performing arts like the kathakali.

Elephant ride

Cultural shows

So, what are you waiting for? Just pack your bags and head towards this lovely land!