When I get back from the wedding, there will be more pictures – in colour, so you can see how beautiful the silk is – and everything you ever wanted to know about how the dress was made.
Tag: photos
Making progress on a wedding dress.
I hope this isn’t giving too much away – I just wanted to show a little snapshot of what I’m working on at the moment.
A snapshot of 2008.
One of my resolutions for 2009 is to get outside every single day. Even if it’s freezing cold, like it is today, or tipping it down with rain, I want to try and get outdoors.
A good incentive is to take my camera with me, and look for tiny little things that I might not otherwise have seen.
This afternoon I went to post a letter, and spotted these outrageously pink berries.
If I hadn’t had my camera with me, it might never even have occurred to me to look around, and then I would have missed them completely!
When I was uploading the photos and having a look at them in Photoshop, I realised that I’ve actually taken more photos than I’d thought this year.
Most of them weren’t taken at a high enough resolution to be printed on their own, so I made a little montage of half a dozen images that I particularly liked.
This image is A4, and I’ve sent off for a print from Photobox.
I’d like to hang these images on the wall in my Shed. Hopefully they’ll remind me that although it might be very cold right now, it won’t be long until there are daffodils and rhododendrons blooming again.
This is what I’ve been up to:
I hope this doesn’t spoil a surprise for anybody whose gift hasn’t arrived in the post yet, but this is why I’ve been a little bit busy and stressed out over the past few weeks.
There’s only one item missing from the photo call, and that’s a hat that I knitted for Paul, mostly in the middle of the night. I ended up resorting to knitting it inside a carrier bag, when he arrived home earlier than I’d expected from his work leaving do! (Thankfully he was slightly drunk and far too tired to wonder what on earth I was doing.)
Most of these are gifts that I gave, but a few were things that I made to be given as gifts by other people.
Oh, and I did finish Bryan’s second sock, but I forgot to take a picture of the pair before I wrapped them up!
Squirrel & Pigeon
These were both taken on my walk back from the local Post Office this morning.
I had my little camera (a Pentax Optio A30) on its maximum zoom capacity, so I was able to take both of these from a distance, while I was being eyed suspiciously from the top of a tree!
I’ve been using this camera for just over a year, and I continue to be thrilled to bits with it.
Baby, it’s cold outside…
Snow! In October!
Usual for many parts of the world, I’m sure, but quite unusual in my little corner.
I spent an hour first thing this morning walking around with the camera, trying to catch the atmosphere of such a crisp, cold, icy morning in the middle of what ought to be Autumn.
I walked through the woods, which had no snow at all, but everything was bathed in the most glorious morning sunshine.
The colours were simply stunning. All of the yellows and golds of the fallen leaves, covered with a light dusting of frozen snow just starting to melt.
I’m very tempted to have some of these images made up into greetings cards, to sell at the next Art Market.
Inspired by Soule Mama, I’m also considering the idea of making a calendar of seasonal pictures. I think mine would have to be a little desk calendar though, rather than a big sumptuous wall planner. Because I only ever use my photos online, my camera’s set to a relatively low resolution.
Time to change the settings, or hijack Paul’s fancy SLR, perhaps?
Freshly eaten, or newly hatched?
Paul and I went for a little walk in the field closest to our house, so that Paul could take some photographs of me wearing the skirt that I drafted and made today.
Just as we were going home again, he pointed out this little white egg.
Scanning Things In.
Today I have been mostly Scanning Things In.
I promised Rob that I’d send him a pile of photographs of Things We Did Together. As he’s still very much paper-based and all of my recent photos are online, it made sense that I’d scan the photos in and send the originals to him.
I was a bit nervous about this at first. My photos! But as soon as I started to see the results of the scanning, I was more than happy to keep my old photographs in digital form. At 300 dpi, you can see a lot more detail than you can at 6 x 4″.
These two are from Exeter Cathedral (1998) and Cardiff Castle (2001), respectively.
I’ve scanned in almost 200 photos so far, and there are still more to go through. Most of them are set to “private” on Flickr at the moment, as I haven’t yet checked with Rob whether or not he’s happy for them to be shared.
If you fancy a bit of amusement though, there are two galleries full of beer-fuelled shennanigans over on Facebook, in the form of lots of parties at the Hobgoblin. My photos are from 1995 to 2001, although I’m sure I’m still missing a box somewhere. The galleries are here and here. I don’t think you need to be signed in to Facebook or me on my Friends list to see them. Let me know if that’s not the case?
What I’m wondering now is what on earth am I going to do with all my photos?! I’ve got absolutely hundreds of the damn things, all stored away in boxes, and I never look at them.
I think my first challenge is to get them all scanned in, and all backed up onto CDs. That way I have two digital versions of them, as well as the paper ones that I’m still keeping. I’d quite like to do more with the paper ones than just shove them back in a box though. I recently inherited lots of family photos from my two Grandmas, so it would be quite nice to put together some new albums with those pictures shuffled into the chronological order.
I took all my photos out of their albums many years ago, as I was using those self-adhesive ones, and was worried about the photos being damaged. I have some lovely new albums, old-fashioned ones with black pages, but I haven’t got around to doing anything with them.
As always, I think this is something I’m going to have to work on in my Spare Time. I have plenty of access to the scanner this week though, so at least I can get a move on with that part.
Knitting and photography.
I’ve just been updating my projects on Ravelry, and apparently I have completed 40 projects since I started knitting in 2005. Does that seem like a lot? And that doesn’t even include all the things I’ve unravelled, or the things I’m knitting right now!
Here are my two most recent knitting photographs:
The jacket on the left is Murmur, from Rowan’s The Next Big Thing book. Sadly it’s another one of those unfortunate incidents you often find when knitting or sewing – you spend lots of time, money and effort making a thing, only to discover when it’s finished that you don’t like it, or it doesn’t suit you.
So, it fits chest 36-40″, and it’s for sale! £40, or I’ll happily trade for 6 balls of Colinette Point 5. Any colourway, I’m not fussy. 😉
The purple scarf on the right is The Yarn Harlot’s One Row Handspun Scarf. It will shortly be going up on Etsy for $30/£15, unless anyone really wants to grab it first?
I appreciate that it’s not really scarf weather, which is why I also took some photos of my most recent little felted bag. It’s in the same colourway as the jacket above, but I could not for the life of me get a good photograph of it.
Paul’s gone off to America with work, and he didn’t want to take his SLR with him, so I’ve lent him my little compact camera for the week. To begin with I was quite excited about playing around with Paul’s Canon EOS 350D. And then I tried to use it. Ugh, what a pain!
For a start off, it weighs a ton, which is not very useful when you’ve got a sore wrist. Then I discovered that Paul had left the 70 mm macro lens attached, which is no use at all when you’re trying to take a picture of a whole jumper! I managed to change the lens to a 55-200 mm one, and discovered that I still had to stand approximately eighty-seven miles away from the jumper if I wanted it to be in focus. I also have a headache from squinting through the viewfinder.
I think the only thing I liked about using this camera was the short depth of field you get from these particular lenses. I can only achieve that with my camera when it’s on the macro or super-macro settings, and then it won’t focus if you’re more than 20-100 mm away from the subject.
Obviously my little Pentax Optio A30 has its limitations. It’s fiddly to focus it manually, you can’t change the lens, and it doesn’t shoot in RAW format if you want to fiddle with your photos in an artistic manner after you’ve taken them. But I love the large screen instead of a viewfinder, I love that you can choose to use all of the settings manually if you want to, and the super-macro setting is very good. (The “face recognition” software is rubbish though.)
Paul and I went for another walk round the lake yesterday, and Paul took some more lovely photos of birds. I was feeling quite envious of his camera and photography skills, and went back through some of my old pictures to find ones that I’d taken with the film SLR. There were some lovely ones in there, but I think I’ve taken some much nicer photos with my little Optio than I ever did with my old SLR.
In fact, my old Olympus OM10 (Quartz) has been sitting under the bed, mostly unused in the last ten years. Perhaps it’s time to dig it out and sell it on.
Wonderful Wilderness Walk.
This afternoon, after we’d become bored with scraping the dirt off the house, Paul and I went for a walk in The Wilderness. It’s part of the University campus, and somewhere I spent quite a lot of time when I was a student.
Paul took photographs, and I talked to geese. 🙂
