Where did April Go?

Here in Minnesota, we went from Winter to Spring to Winter to Fall to Spring again in April!  Sheesh! One doesn't know what to wear from one day to the next!

I've still been working on Ice Drops - nothing fancy, only two variations.  I love this one though:

This one was made with thread that my coworker brought to me from India.  It's fun with a little metallic twist and a somewhat "mirrored" gem.

Over the weekend, my two daughters and I had an "Artsy-Fartsy" afternoon making some signs at a "Brushes and Boards" event.  This type of event is pretty popular around here - making signs, painting on canvas, planting terrariums, etc.  Fun to get out and make something with a group - even if I don't need anymore crafty decor!

I also went to a little "Intro to Nature Photography" class at a local Nature Center.  I'm not really a "beginner" but I always think you can get some tips from other photographers, no matter how experienced you might be!  We also had a chance to get out and take some photos of some spring budding going on.

And then there's that crazy Snapchat app so many are talking about.  One daughter and I have been sending eachother crazy pictures on there, testing out all the newest possibilities.  Such a waste of time, but, boy - do we laugh!

Oh dear.  I like some pictures better than others - ha ha!

HAPPY SPRING!

Tatting and Other Hobbies

Our Twin Cities Tatters group met this morning, and this is ALL I accomplished.  And then I goofed up at the end there and got going the wrong way!  Must've either been talking too much or concentrating too hard.  Hhmmpphh.  I will have to find time to start again, because it IS an easy, sturdy pattern, and I'm just making a towel edging.  It is, however, also one of those old written patterns that is easy to lose your place on.  Obviously.  I think I'll diagram it for myself before I start again.

I haven't been tatting much, but I have been participating in a couple of photography challenges. The 52-week challenge has me taking a photograph a week, with a certain theme as a guideline.  Week 7 was to be a faceless portrait, so this was my photo:

I have yet to finish that doily, but I thought a photo might inspire me to get back to it!

And last week some friends were doing a 7-Day Nature Photo Challenge on Facebook, so I thought I'd share the photos I posted daily for that challenge.  I'm sure I've probably posted these here before, but these are 7 of my all time favorites:

And, I'm continuing with the Zentangle drawing as well - pretty much daily!  It's fun to have some new things to explore and practice for a change, though I really don't need ANOTHER hobby. But, what the heck?  A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do :) 

January is Done? What?

I thought I should at least try to post SOMETHING for January!  Holy moly - the month has flown and here we are, ready to get on with February.  I have done plenty, but haven't blogged about anything, so here's a summary:

* Still working the body AND the mind at the YMCA after work;

* Doing a little adult coloring; 

* Got through another 30th birthday celebration and quilt (did I mention I'm feeling OLD?); 

* Took a Zentangle class and have been practicing (a lot!) ;

* And I'm keeping up on my 52-week photography challenge so far. This week's challenge was to find a landscape with good contrast for a black & white photo. I love this challenge, as it forces me to think about what I want to photograph rather than just randomly taking pictures. This is strictly a personal goal and challenge - I plan to make a Shutterfly book of my 52 photos with the challenge descriptions at the end. Hopefully I can stay on course for another 47 weeks!

I made it to our Twin Cities Tatters gathering last Saturday too, but have not accomplished enough tatting to take any photos of THAT :)

On with February!

Ms. Sunshine

This is Ruby this morning.  Like every other weekend morning, she follows this spot of sun around the living room to bask in as much of it as she can.  These photos are from my iPad - the best ones are from my camera but I'm too lazy to upload them :)

She has done this since she was quite young, and I am always taking pictures of her when she does it.  It's fun to play with the shadows, and I've gotten some beautiful shots of her.  Unfortunately, photos are on not only on my camera, but my phone and my iPad too.  I've been thinking about creating a PowerPoint show of all the pictures I can find of her enjoying the sun - just haven't done it yet. Soon.

Ruby does get a little annoyed with me and my camera laying on the floor and snapping away. Sometimes she gives me a look that seems to say, "Really?  Must you? Right Now?"

Other times she just turns and looks the other way, bored with the whole session. 

It's a weekend ritual for me to try to get another 'perfect' shot of her as she follows that spot around.  I think I find it funny because she only gets a tiny little piece of the sunshine.  This is what it looks like from my spot on the couch:

And here's the little window that one, small spot of sunshine comes from:

Such goofs, aren't we?

Pinterest, Shutterfly and Mod Podge

. . . oh my!

Sometimes I love a quick craft. Not something that looks cheap or homemade, but something quick and easy that actually looks pretty nice.  

OK, I'm too cheap to buy wall art too.  And I love many ideas I find on Pinterest.  Oh, and I love taking photos too - I just don't always know what to do with them.  Shutterfly.com has allowed me to put my photos in books, on mugs, and make cards.  So I put all that together and made a piece of wall art for the walls in my freshly painted home office with a photo I took a couple of years ago in Gamla Stan, Sweden.

I just love this picture of a door in the old historic town.  I just think it's a cool old door.  (Funny to see the Operation ID sticker on the window - I thought that was a U.S. thing.) 

I cropped the door from this original photo:

The idea on Pinterest was to mod podge a photo to a canvas.  Hhhmmm.  I received an email from Shutterfly offering a FREE 16x20 print.  JoAnn's had their canvases on sale for 50% off.  Already have the mod-podge.  Hhhhmmmm.  Ordered the print for about $6 shipping, bought an 18x24 canvas, and . . .

I painted the outer edges of the canvas black with some acrylic paint, sponged on a layer of mod-podge and adhered the print to the canvas.  (This is where you need to press and position the print, as well as make sure there are no bubbles.)  Easy peasy.  Two coats of mod-podge over the top of the whole thing, and ta da!  An 18 x 20 piece of wall art in about one hour that easily cost less than $20.

 It looks even better in person - my coworkers were impressed, and there are now several photos and ideas spinning.  I have a couple more photos of my favorite canines that could work . . .

A Lazy Sunday Afternoon

Need I say more?

My Children, the Dogs

Well, that last post certainly didn’t show off any photography skills with my new camera, did it?  Oopsie.  I guess I was anxious to get the Scarf to Clutch project documented and done, and wasn’t worried about photographic quality.

I tend to love very close-up shots, but I’m not combining the adjustable lens and the auto-focusing capability of this camera quite right yet.  It’s wonderful to control the zoom on the lens, yet difficult to just allow the auto-macro/focus to work.   Hhhhmmm.  Control freak?  Still learning.

My greatest camera practice opportunities are on my dogs, as they are always close to me.  [I’m pretty sure they think I’m their mother.]  

Ruby, the brindle boxer, doesn’t always like the camera much.  She sometimes gets disgusted with me and looks the other way.  When I can capture her, I think she is beautiful.  Maybe I do it too often for her taste – she is a little bit of a spoiled fuss-pot.

Seriously?  You are pointing that thing at me AGAIN?

Taffy, the white Pug-Poodle, has always loved being a star.  I honestly think she used to pose every year on the kids’ first day of school.  The girls would be all ready for the annual photo before they trotted off to school, and Taffy would magically appear and promptly sit by their feet at full attention. I'm going to have to dig in old photos and see  how many of those I can find.

This is Taffy - now 14-1/2 years old: 

Do you like my new haircut?

She doesn’t see much other than a shadow here and there, and doesn’t hear a thing.  She’s still as happy as can be, sometimes bouncing around like a puppy, but most of the time she runs into things before she realizes there’s something there.  It amazes me how she gets around by memory though – if you didn’t know her, you might not realize how blind she is.

It’s quite the comedy to let her in and out of the house.  I let Taffy outside from upstairs on the deck, and she doesn’t reappear to come back in.  So, I run downstairs to the patio door where she is waiting [ever-so-patiently] to be let back in.  By the time I get to the door, she’s on her way back to the deck stairs.  Mind you, she can’t hear me holler at her to come back, and doesn’t see me waving my arms to get her attention.  At this point, I race back upstairs to let her in up there.  Most of the time I get there fast enough, but once in awhile she’s on her way back downstairs again.  Who needs a gym?!  We nearly trip on her daily, and we’ve noticed many little changes in her as she seems to be aging very quickly.  

She wants to be in the same room as someone in the house now – she never used to care as long as she had the most comfortable chair in the house!  This is probably due to being shut in the laundry room by accident.  We startle her easily because she doesn’t see or hear anything, but in her younger days she was aware of absolutely everything that came within 50 feet of the entire house.  [Annoyingly aware when the yard was full of fluttering leaves. . . ]  She would retrieve a Frisbee for us to throw again and again as many times as we would throw it.  In fact, we had to teach her to “take a break” or she’d keep going until we thought she’d collapse. 

Now we just love her up and keep an eye on her so she doesn’t get lost. Or shut in a closet somewhere. 

A Love for Taking Photos

I went and did it.  I probably shouldn't have, but I did it anyway since we have a summer full of short trips to areas full of wildlife and flowers ahead of us.  I got a new toy.

Nikon 1 J1

Digital cameras are nothing new - we've had a few.  And they have been good!  But I wanted something just a little more than a small point and shoot. Some frustrations with my camera's focusing ability pushed me into something new.

My high school graduation present from my parents was a super nice 35mm camera - the latest and greatest Minolta that I picked out myself.  I really wanted to go into advertising/magazine photography.  That didn't quite happen, but my love of taking photos has never stopped.  Everything I see would be a "great photo!" My photos don't always come out the way I see them in my head, but I try. [Sometimes a hundred times or more to the dismay of my ever-so-patient family.]

We switched to a digital camera in about 2004.  We took a trip to the Black Hills, South Dakota, and I brought both the 35mm and the digital cameras.  I didn't quite trust that digital camera yet, so I took pictures with both.  I was really disappointed in my 35mm when I had the film developed, and that was the end of that.  Digital was unbelievable!  [Especially for someone who takes a million-and-a-half photos to get that one shot . . .]

I never wanted to go back to carrying around a great big camera bag and various lenses, but when I saw this little camera with interchangeable lenses . . . well, that was it.  This is kind of an in-between camera - not a P&S, but not a professional DSLR either.  A good in-between (both size- and functionality-wise) for me, and my second Nikon. 

I will now apologize for the various photos I may or may not post in the future :)

Yep, it was a hot, humid day on Saturday.
I believe the brown one was posing just for me.

Home-Ecky Becky

Yep.  I was recently dubbed Home-Ecky Becky.  With good reason, I guess :) 

I've only managed to eek out just this little bit of tatting.  Another "Flowers" bookmark from the Tatted Bookmarks book from Handy Hands. - one that I've tatted many times to keep on hand.

And it's still not finished - due to my Home-Eckiness. 

I've been trying to make items for a brunch-boutique my mom and I are planning for friends & family.  We'll have brunch and handmade items for sale, so I've been trying to come up with a few things I can make. 

I've made a few types of jam/jelly:

Am forever playing with photo programs and creating cards:



And have sewn a few towel-toppers.  Still finishing these:



Mom has been working on table toppers, aprons and bags.  I still have many things I want to do, but sometimes I just can't do it after work - my eyes will not cooperate.  (Or maybe it's my brain?)  Or maybe it's the visits from out-of-town friends, a wedding, an office move, and the usual laundry, cooking and cleaning that is slowing me down.   OK, maybe not the cleaning part so much . . .

And we stopped everything yesterday to go out for our 28th Wedding Anniversary dinner. Wow.  Doesn't seem like 28 years since that exciting day.  And we even still like eachother!

Back to my Home-Eckiness now.  Lasagna roll-ups for the whole gang this evening. 

  

An Historic Weekend

While heading to a state park in western Minnesota this weekend, we stopped in a small town in search of a cafe to get some lunch.  Sometimes small towns only have one cafe, so we ended up in an antique store to look around, and also inquire about restaurants. When I asked about tatting shuttles and antique needlework, the owner pulled out a bag of shuttles he had just gotten and hadn't put out yet.  I spied this:

An antique sterling shuttle!  I have only seen these a couple of times in antique stores, and for about $100 or so.  The store owner wasn't too sure about how to price it, so I waited for him to decide what to charge.  


Let's just say I still can't contain myself.  It's mine :)  Oh yeah - we did get directions to a cafe for lunch too.


On to the state park.  Both of us have pretty much lived in Minnesota all our lives, but neither of us have been to this western part of the state.  Lac Qui Parle State Park is about 50 miles from the South Dakota border, and is more prairie and grassland than where we live.  We've never gone this direction because we thought the land would be boring, flat and just grass and cornfields.  Well, most of the way it is just that, but the park was a pleasant surprise with beautiful views like this:

  

Even though it was chilly, we enjoyed hiking around and learning a bit about the history of the area.  Lac Qui Parle Lake is actually part of the Minnesota River that is created by a dam built to control flooding.  This is an area full of Native American history as well.  This replica of the mission that was here was interesting to hike around and read about the attempts to teach the Dakota tribe English and convert them to Christianity.  While walking, we could just imagine the Native Americans and fur traders walking the same land.

 We hiked to "the" Cottonwood tree - the most massive tree I have ever seen.  Supposedly, this is the largest cottonwood in the state.  The picture doesn't really show the sheer magnitude of this tree!

The sunset and sunrise were beautiful, the stars and the milky way were awesome, the owl hooting and the geese squawking were pleasant sounds of nature.  Once again, we enjoyed a much needed relaxing, peaceful weekend.  And, once again, I took a million photos.