Thing-a-day.com

From the makers of 26 things, a day in the life project for 29 February. What a neat coincidence. The aim:

do something you’ve never done before and/or always wanted to do - and photograph it! One photo an hour for as long as you’re awake during this leap day

I’m on vacation in Chicago, and I stayed at home. I documented it all in the full flickr set. Summary:

• 0800 - woke up to snow
• 0900 - conference call with work
• 1000 - mmm tea and Tim Tams
• 1100 - Joxer at the window
• 1200 - pasta lunch
• 1300 - snow shoveling, before
• 1400 - snow shoveling, after
• 1500 - relax with a good book
• 1600 - beautiful scenery
• 1700 - preparing dinner
• 1800 - pasta dinner
• 1900 - should I have some strawberries or not
• 2000 - Joxer and the pot
• 2100 - calling mm
• 2200 - work on the set

Dear Blog,
Today was a pretty good day.

I made these earrings by cutting up a cd, putting it in the microwave for a few seconds, then baking the crackly bits in the oven for a few minutes.  Drilled holes when they cooled down.

Also, my brother and I made a subversive gingerbread house for Cale’s birthday:
<– Happy house eats happy gingerbread man. Has third eye.
<–Ben was in charge of the candy kill side.
<– My side may be a little more traditional…
<– Yep.

Also, the amaryllis is getting huge!

AND I made my first sale on etsy today! Huzzah!

AND I started an alternate blog, to keep going with this thing-a-day stuff. I suspect it’ll be like a cross between thing-a-day and a photo journal. Whatever form it takes, it’ll be: colorful, illustrated, full of flash photography and a little bit tacky.
If you liked what I did this month, come check it out

http://molliefabric.wordpress.com

I’ve had a great time “getting to know you” through your crafts, you guys, and I do hope to keep in touch with some of you, and keep up with the wonderful things you are making!
Such an amazing body of work here, really.

Cheers to all, see you next year!

Daily Photo:

I’d like to say that I made some amazing mixed-media piece to end this little challenge with a big finish. But I didn’t. I baked a humble loaf of white bread. Simple and somewhat Zen.

Bye everyone! It’s been great creating with you!

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):

yesterday	today

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:

• re-learn illustrator
• make tshirts from illustrator and/other designs—try iron-on transfers or diy silkscreening
• needle felting
• re-learn crochet
• crochet hyperbolic planes and sea slugs
• knit squares for a blanket
• make more stuffed animals/creatures

i’ll probably keep documenting my projects on my blog (probably not every day though) and look forward to next year!

I’ve been in a blogging funk.  How do you know you’re in a funk?  When an earthquake cannot get you to blog about anything, you know you’ve temporarily lost your creative spirit.  What’s with February that just gets me half paralyzed?

Anyway, my last thing-a-day has to be a shitty photo I took with my new camera.  I’m ashamed of putting it up here but I’m in such a black mood that I don’t even care much now.

and do something CREATIVE everyday! 

I had a moment today when I was filled with gratitude to be where I am today.

I love my beautiful Emerald City, where I have grown up spiritually.

One day remains to do the thing. I am going to miss it.

Today, if I wasn’t at work I was at the hospital. My dad was in surgery for 4 hours. (L-R) My sister laying on the hospital bed, my sister in law Dacia in the chair, my brother under the tv, my mom asleep (it was a loooong day) under the blanket, my boyfriend looking my way.

-robyn 

I got home this evening, barely in one piece, but my unwavering commitment to TAD continues to be unwaver-y. I just finished making a pretty vacation book using Blurb. I think the book is a pretty fly way to commemorate my adventures with my mother and wee-one. As usual, I also took another bajillion pictures today. Here is a picture from out landing during sunset at JFK.

It needs some work, but then again I am totally unknowledgeable about photo-editing software. Next on my creative agenda will be to take a Photoshop class.

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:

before	after

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.

Thing-a-day #27 (belated by about 12 hours)…

- I did yoga. That’s always fun and sort of feels creative, even though you’re just doing what the instructor says. But, hey, doesn’t that fall under “Follow instructions”?

- The other day, when my husband got the car I mentioned in previous post, we had to get the check for the loan cashed. So of course, we ran to the house to shoot some rap video stills.

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.

Daily Photo:

Funky Drugstore Glasses

I gave in and got some magnifying glasses for my recently-less-than-perfect eyesight. I can’t read the lyrics printed on most CD’s anymore. And so it begins. Orthopedic shoes aren’t far off; I can feel it.

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…

before	after

next i composited a pink cocktail umbrella into a photo that was taken of a friend of mine:

before	after

he just loves pink. i might even add a cherry/pineapple to the drink if i have time…

Oh my goodness, I love being in Miami. I made another hair clip in my hotel room this evening. I used part of Bryan Brutherford’s eames a day image.

Thanks B.B. I think this will look way cuter as a pendant on a slightly tough chain. I will take that project on in March.

It is at this point that I must thank my most splendiforous, genorsity-havingest, mother for a wonderful time in Miami, for photographing my hair clips and for lending me her super-sweet underwater Minox underwater digital camera so I could take self-portraits of myself in the pool. I got in touch with my inner-mermaid. Here is one; let us call it Bubbles.

Back to checking out what is around.

This church was recently unraveled from under walls and bricks. It now sit right oustide (one of) my (temporary) windows.

Size matters, even to the dead.

As mentioned in an earlier post, here’s the photo taken on February 21.

What a friggin’ day. I will save complaining about my day for some other venue. After a margarita and a switch into pjs, I used my suite’s kitchen to make shrinky-dink hair clips using Bryan Brutherford’s, BUGS,BUGS,BUGS,BUGS,BUGS,BUGS. I wish I had traveled with better hair clips, but I think they came out pretty cute.

I actually think this particular image would look better larger as a pendant. Maybe I will try that at home.

I also took a bunch of photos from my hotel balcony.