Title: Might as well JUMP
Description: Ecard of encouragement and best wishes for your future creative endeavors
Inspirations: Today is Leap Year Day and the conclusion of Thing-A-Day for 2008
today i copied craftykeg and made a haramaki/tummy warmer:
mine is very simple, not like hers with the cute pattern, but i like it still and am going to wear it today. i didn’t follow the instructions to the tutorial closely and chose to make mine single layered instead of double (basically, i just sewed 2 pieces of jersey together on each side)—i liked craftykeg’s idea of tapering for the waist and did the same. i like to layer my tshirts, so i think of this as an extra tshirt layer that i can interchange easily. i want to make more—with patterns and designs, i also think it’d be cute to add lace or a lettuce/rolled edge using a serger. i also might want to add long sleeve arms to a short sleeve tee following the same idea.
i also wasn’t entirely happy with my results from yesterday, so i re-worked one of them (the first one):
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i tried to make the vignette softer, but i didn’t really notice until afterwards that i probably could have softened it even more and made it lighter. i also backed off on the cyan/blue color tinting because i thought it was too heavy handed yesterday. similarly for the second photo, i took out the color tinting effect entirely.
i have really enjoyed participating in thing.a.day and am sad that today is the last day. there are some projects that i’d hope to do/do more of this past month that i didn’t get to, so i’ll try to do them in the near future:
i’ll probably keep documenting my projects on my blog (probably not every day though) and look forward to next year!
today i copied invisible.co’s earlier post and followed the same tutorial to give a film-like effect to a photo. my photoshop version didn’t seem to have all of the adjustment layers/filters that the tutorial called for (exposure and lens blur) but i approximated the best that i could and tried the effect on two of my photos:
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the vignetting effect on the top photo is too prominent/hard, i was going to add black bars to crop to cinemascope or re-do the vignette. i also saved non-cyan/blue tinted images that can be viewed here.
today i was super-busy. work was long and very active, and then i went to see Hairspray, which was kind of unexpectedly a breath of fresh air. the subway took a while to get me home and now i present my montage. enjoy!
all by itself. i decided to document it as it lay there, stranded and alone.
today i practiced some more in photoshop… first i tried the gold tutorial that i tried earlier this month on a photo that i took last week. the gold doesn’t look so much like gold, but the matte edge looks better than my first golden egg attempt. also, i think i like the original photo better, but that’s ok…
* i have edited the gold look from earlier today based on feedback and the fact that i didn’t like what i made earlier… i think it definitely works better but still doesn’t look quite gold-like…
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next i composited a pink cocktail umbrella into a photo that was taken of a friend of mine:
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he just loves pink. i might even add a cherry/pineapple to the drink if i have time…
It may seem pretty arrogant for a city like Colorado Springs to promote Pike’s Peak as “America’s Mountain” - but it makes a whole lot more sense when you understand it is ”America’s” Mountain. (still, my apologies to those Americans not from the United States of)
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
I was inspired by this note from Katharine Lee Bates about her trip to the mountain in 1893:
“One day some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.”
I have been waiting for a really clear morning to try to capture some of that feeling of expanse, possibilities, and joy — This comes pretty close for me - I hope it works some for you too
The house of God isn’t doing so well up in Oakland y’all. But the liquor store a few doors over is full.
http://www.molliefabric.etsy.com
Woo hoo
Offerings are meager, as I just opened it up about an hour ago, but expect more items in the near future!!
For now it’s mustaches galore, but soon it will be: cards, prints, journals, shrinky dink jewelry… pretty
much anything I can draw on :-)
So it’ll be worth it to check back soon!
Also, here’s a photo of the lovely amaryllis my mom gave me at christmas- finally blooming!
My window garden has grown too large for the window and is now overflowing onto the kitchen counters…table… chair…
Good news is it’s suddenly spring so I can start putting em outside soon.
Also, thank you guys for all the kind words! It really made my day!
originally, i wanted to make a crochet hyperbolic plane for today, but i attempted to do some crochet and found that i need to re-learn it a little better before tackling something more ambitious. i ended up taking a photo of a pig lighter that was given to me as a gift (yes, the flames shoot out of the piggie’s nose):
and also made a mii of george washington for this week’s nintendo mii contest:
i tried out the same tutorial that annie_22 posted about and tried yesterday:
there are some issues—like the fact that the border is jagged and there is a hard black edge. i would’ve worked on it more, but it’s late, and i need to get some sleep. i might try to tweak it some more later though… i learned some p-shop tricks that i didn’t know either, so that was cool… thanks for the tutorial, annie_22!
Day 18 Thing: A dry-run set up of the table for my first craft fair. (It goes along with the student fashion show at the local UC.) It turned out quite nicely, but rather than show those pics, I am including a much more inspiring one of the buttons I just picked up at Thrift Town for my cuffs/headbands:
Day 19 Thing: A handwritten note to my dear friend. Another favorite thrift store of mine supports the local SPCA and has a great collection of old/vintage greeting cards. This one is a (not-vintage) hilarious, slightly fuzzy, photo of a groundhog (?) glued to a card.
To a very loud night at Astoria 2 with the Crystal Castles and The Horrors. It was somewhat amazing to see more than a few dozen camera/phone screens lit up in the crowd during sets. It’s as if they have replaced the flicker of what once used to be lighters.
i took some photos with my friends’ leica m8 camera today:
the camera is amazing… so impressive. i’d never used a rangefinder camera before—it takes some getting used to, but you get incredible sharpness and optics… the photos were taken at a farmer’s market, and yes, those are the real colors of the cauliflower. cool, huh? i don’t know what ‘bacon avocado’ are either—if they are meant to be eaten with bacon or if they have been somehow engineered to taste like bacon or what…
I took these photos last night. It was wonderful to see the changes during the eclipse.
