Thing-a-day.com

I put together a slideshow on my blog after figuring out how to use my new remote. Here’s the slideshow - http://carolbrowne.com/index.php?itemid=1932

That’s all I’ve got for the month. I had a few other crafty things planned, but didn’t get to them. Also, I’m so focussed on photography these days, my posts were mainly about that. I am going to get paid for photography some day, I just know it.

I attended a work-related event today at a very cool venue - The Trev Deeley Exhibition Museum in Burnaby, BC. They have a showroom of old motorcycles and I liked these ones a lot. I’m not sure if they are replicas or the real thing. I only had a few minutes to take the photos and then when I got home, I photoshopped them to look a bit brighter and then added a light green vignette. I sure do love photoshop. I feel really technical whenever I use it. Totally.

My evening craft went very badly last night. What I wanted was to make these beautiful rings, but ended up with 2 broken Shrinky Dink pieces and a few tiny butterflies that I can’t use for anything. But I will not give up. I’ll try again this weekend. I’m determined to make those pretty rings!

I went to the local food drive in Vancouver, BC Canada and took photos of the sculptures made of cans. It was a cool display and there wasn’t anyone there, so I had the run of the place to take photos. That was very nice. Here’s my set of photos from the event.

For Oscar dinner tonight, I busted out the crockpot and made some soup. I also made some soda bread & apple crisp. I blogged all about it here. The recipes are on my blog as well.

I’ve been really dragging my butt around these last few days, so I’ll head to be early tonight to see if I can get caught up.

I have to say I enjoyed the Oscars tonight. Jon Stewart is excellent. I was really rooting for Juno to win best picture, but, best screenplay is not too shabby.

I got one nice shot of the lunar eclipse. I like that it included a star tracer in the photo as well. I used a long ISO and a wide open aperture. It was cold and a bit cloudy, where I was, but just a few minutes into the eclipse, the cloud cover vanished and I was able to see the whole thing. Then at 7:53 or so, the cloud cover returned, just like it was planned for us! My location is Burnaby, BC Canada and my photos were taken between 7:00 and 7:52 pm Pacific Time. It was great practice with my settings and I learned the a few extra goodies like, continuous shooting and the self-timer.

Thanks to facebook, I was made aware that there’s going to be a lunar eclipse tomorrow night from 7:01pm to 7:50pm Pacific Time. In preparation for that, I took some shots tonight using different settings. It looks like it’s going to rain tomorrow night, but I’ll try to get some shots with my tripod under an umbrella. DARNIT! Let’s hope for the best. And I’ll post the pictures tomorrow here as well.

Still not impressive, but slowly making my way with this. I’ll post more when I get a bit further along with the knitted chicken. I’m a slow knitter.

I think this is another cheater’s post by me. Who knew it would be so difficult for me to make time for an hour long start-to-finish product? Seriously my time management skills are not very good.

Okay, this is not an impressive amount of knitting in an hour. I agree. Unfortunately, I had to teach myself how to kfb (that’s knit front back - creating two stitches out of one stitch) and I had to frog it twice due to twisting in the round. Now, I’m on a roll. Instead of using wool and felting this chicken, I decided to knit it with tiny needles (for sock knitting) and fingerling cotton yarn. The chicken will be a mixture of orange, blue and brown and will have a lovely orange beak and orange feet. Just like a real chicken, right?

Will post my progress on this as I’m determined to make this chicken, despite knitting with toothpick sized needles. I am on a mission. A chicken mission!

***Pattern in this month’s Craft Magazine. The best craft magazine there is.

This was dinner tonight as I was too lazy to leave the house to buy any groceries and decided to use what I had on hand. Lucky for me we had some multi-grain tortilla chips left over from the Super Bowl last month and some frozen ground beef. I used spinach instead of lettuce and topped it up with an old can of refried beans in the cupboard, some cheese, sour cream and some salsa.

I swear the spinach is under there. It really is. Not a bad dinner at all. Very hearty and tasty.

Grasping at straws to stay in the thing-a-day game, I have to submit this blog post that I wrote to my mom thanking her for the Valentine with the rat on it. I’ve been preoccupied with Chinese New Year this year, which was on February 7th, and my mom found this cute rodent Valentine for us. My mom, she’s very thoughtful that way.

Tes is an amazing woman I met at a Soroptimist meeting on Tuesday night. Not only is she the past president elect of Soroptimist International, but she is the the National President of the Girl Scouts of the Philippines. She recently went to Rwanda and Sierra Leone to help educate the people against female genital mutilation & female circumcision.

I took three photos of her on Tuesday with my 50mm. The auto focus doesn’t work on this lens with my camera, so I have to use the manual focus, and that makes for some time-consuming shots. Luckily, the three I took were in focus and turned out well.

The top photo I did very little to. I just added an vignette filter (darkness around the edges) and I think it looks nice.

This photo I turned to black and white. There were so many options and varieties of “black and white” styles that it took some time to select the right one. But I think I got it with this one:

I took this photo to get more practice creating bokeh-style photos. Just in case you don’t know what bokeh means, it’s kind of like depth of field in that the background is blurry around the focal point. Also, it’s a great with lights. Lights look great all out of focus. For this photo, I was trying to get one orchid in focus and have the others a bit more blurry around it, and didn’t notice the blue sky out the window right away. It was twilight when I took the picture and I noticed how blue the sky looked out the window. I took a few more photos, but the colour faded quickly, and this was the best photo of the cobalt blue sky.

I love taking low light photos, and have decided I must get a good tripod. The one I have is big and clunky and is missing a piece, so I don’t like to use it. I’ll get a good one this week so my photos aren’t blurry in the spots where they are supposed to be sharp. I also want a remote for my camera. I’ll get that soon enough.

The last two days I have been immersed in touching up many photos. On Friday night I went to a nighttime wedding and had to use the flash, so I have many, many red eyes to fix as well as other assorted touch ups and lighting issues to change. On Sunday, I attended the Vancouver Chinese New Year Parade and took another 200+ photos. So that is what I’ve been doing the whole weekend.

Here are the rest of the parade photos - I’m still working on the wedding photos.

Since I’ll be out late tonight at a volunteer group I belong to, I’ll include today’s thing in this post as well. I made myself a smoothie for breakfast:

I rarely take the time to make breakfast, but decided to do so today. My smoothie consisted of some plain yogurt, some frozen strawberries, orange juice, oatmeal and some maple syrup. I blended it up until it was liquid and voila! Easy quick breakfast. I will be doing that more often.

After seeing these hand stitched hearts on ljcfyi, I decided to make my own. I made three hearts so far. If I get around to it, I’ll make a few more. I stitched the smaller heart on the bigger heart with embroidery thread. Easy and cute!

We just got home from Cody & Katie’s wedding and I took some time to adjust, crop and vignette a photo I took at the ceremony.

I have a few other photos to work on and post, but will have to do that tomorrow. I’m bagged.

Again, I missed the midnight deadline, but will use this post for day 8. And day 9? I’m not sure yet. I guess sleeping in doesn’t count.

And I kept with the Chinese New Year theme. It’s a bit bright, but red and gold are lucky colours, so I went with it.

Inside the big box is a rice cooker - and it happens to be red! I have no idea if they like red, but that’s what colour this appliance is. In the little take-out box I put two boxes of Green Tea Pocky.

The happy couple get hitched tomorrow at 4:45. I guess tomorrow will be wedding photos! Yay! I love weddings.

I’ll tell you, getting ready for Chinese New Year is a lot of work. I’ve been spending every free minute cleaning up the house. I’m not Chinese, I just like participating in the rituals. I spent an hour ironing and making the bed. Apparently it will bring good luck in the new year. Since another ritual for the day is NOT to wash your hair, I think I’ll sleep in tomorrow. No shower needed as I don’t want to wash my fortune away. Also, no more cleaning until Monday! Gung Hey Fat Choi to you all! Enjoy the Year of the Rat.

I baked a simple white cake for a get-together tomorrow. I’ll decorate it with icing and fondant. Here’s the recipe I used:

INGREDIENTS:

DIRECTIONS:

[SOURCE] 

I’ve never tried this recipe before, but it smells great. Will decorate it tomorrow. I’m bushed!

I like to work at night on my projects, so here I am at 11:35 Pacific time posting my progress. Although I’m not Chinese, I love celebrating Chinese New Year and this year is the Year of the Rat. I’m not a sculptor at all, but I wanted to make a little rat decoration. This is as far as I got tonight and have plans to finish his little nose and paws tomorrow. I used Sculpey for the body, and glass beads for the eyes. He’s about two inches tall.