Friday Night Fun

What does it say about me that my idea of Friday night fun is sitting in front of the computer, messing around with my photos?  Sad, Melis, just sad.  :)

I've been looking for a few months now for a book to help me create digital artwork.  I'm interested in digital collage and in making art quilts from my photos.  Well, today I scored!  I went to Joann Fabrics to get some fabric dye and of course, since I had a 50% off coupon, I looked through the books.  I found a book called Artistic Photo Quilts:  Create Stunning Quilts With Your Camera, Computer & Cloth.  It has a lot of the information I've been looking for and so I've been playing around all night with some of my photos that I thought would make good graphic images.  I put together a rough collaged quilt in Photoshop but I can't upload the file to my blog, Which is really sad because I really like what I've come up with so far.  Oh, well,  I'll just have to be content to share some of the individual photos that I played with.  Hope you like them!

Playing With My New Camera

I've been having fun this last week, playing with my new Canon 50d dSLR camera. It's got a lot more functions than my old Minolta so I'm still fumbling around trying to learn what it's capable of.  It takes beautiful pictures.  I've been trying to take it with me whenever I leave the house but the weather's been kind of crummy so I haven't gotten many good shots yet.  I did play around last night in Photoshop, trying to get better color out of the photos I took on Wednesday in Kingston and Hansville.  Here are a few of my favorites.

Beautiful old fence in Kingston

Blackberry blossom in the rain

Heuchera plant at Point No Point Lighthouse

Rusty bolt and washer underneath stucco on the lighthouse

Barbed wire fence at the lighthouse

Well I Tried, Honest!

For the last month or so I've been looking online and in stores, trying to find a bedspread or comforter as an inspiration for turning our spare bedroom into a nice restful guest bedroom for company.  As usual, I had no luck in finding anything I loved, or if I did find something I loved, they didn't have it in the right size.  So, when the YaYas got together a few weeks ago for a field trip to a new quilt store, I decided that I would just look for fabric to make a quilt (yikes, why do I do this?  I really don't enjoy quilting!) and my friends encouraged the insanity instead of talking me out of it.  :)

Of course it didn't help that this particular quilt store has the most Melissa fabric I've ever seen in one place.  I was frozen for about the first half hour because there were too many options.  Definitely opposite of my usual quilt store experience.  :)  I finally enlisted the help of Tink, who is a master at randomness and mixing prints, and together we pulled a bunch of stuff and layed it all out on the floor and picked 11 fabrics to work with.  Originally, I was going for something restful and subdued but umm...that's just not me.  What do you think of what I ended up with?

It's definitely not restful but it is beautiful and vibrant and I think the room is going to be quite lovely when it's done.  Now I just have to clean up the studio enough to start sewing.  I wish there was an easy button for making that happen!

Yes, Virginia, There Are Some Things You Should Never Bother Doing...Or Why I'm an Idiot

This

plus

this

equals insanity

It all started with my trip to Arizona in February.  I needed new underwear and didn't have time or fabric to sew them so I bought some to take with me.  Even though I bought the "right" size, they were too big, so after the trip, I washed them and put them aside in the studio.  I figured it would be quick and easy to take the waistband elastic off of them, sew the side seams smaller, cut off an inch at the top and re-attach the elastic.   Ummm....DON'T EVER LET ANYONE TALK YOU INTO DOING SUCH AN IDIOTIC THING! 

Each pair took 40 minutes just to get the elastic off and then another 20 minutes to resew.  10 hours later, I finished my "quick and easy" project.  Even if I only paid myself minimum wage, I still might have been able to buy some really nice undies with the time I spent redoing these.  I think I'm going to have to stop procrastinating on finding some good quality fabric for making lingerie so that I'm never tempted to repeat this particular idiocy.

Just as a side note, I really can't believe I'm blogging about this either!  I think I've gone totally over the edge!

Sneak Peeks

Thought I'd share a few sneak peeks of our almost finished stairway.  I still have a little touch up paint to do and Al needs to get the landing trim and handrails back up.  I think it looks really cool!  Big kudos to Al for the idea for the diamond plate aluminum.  :)

I also have some color on my kitchen walls.  I painted them the same pear green as my laundry room.  I haven't finished with everything yet--I still want to get some turquoise accents in there--but I'm loving the color. 

 

It was so fun to see the kids' reaction when we picked them up Tuesday night.  They both are still commenting on how much they like what we've done.  Trust me, that doesn't happen very often.  :)