Camera is reved up

For my birthday, which was terrific, I asked Steve to help me sort out a place to take good pictures. I received two clamp lights and light bulbs that will even out the lighting. We still have to set everything up, but baby steps, baby steps. We have a big storm coming tonight, so maybe the city will close down and we can work on it.

Alex modeled this in an earlier post.

I finished this shirt for Phoebe, making a cool toggle to close it up. I will mail it to her next week. I still wish it fit me, but I've figured out how to em-biggen it so that I can sew up another for myself.

The only photograph of Steve's latest shirt while in progress. Maybe the next shirt I'll remember to do some 'in progress' shots. But, this too, is finished.

This time all the parts work, nothing really screwed up and he likes it.

The waiter that served us at my birthday dinner liked the details on the shirt. He thought it was pretty cool. Good for me.

 Two sleeves of a sweater I had hoped to have done by early December. Hahaha. Why do I do these things to myself. Expectations, deadlines and more expectations.... lead to (you know the answer) premeditated disappointments.

The bottom of the sweater that needs to ripped back to the lacey bit because I read the instructions wrong (again). I have decided to watch more TV at night instead of traveling through blogs I read, because I can't knit when on the computer. There is no way this will be ready for the winter, but certainly by next winter. I hope.

I am doing a quick study on traveling threads. Two blogs Murgatroyd Hoots (here) and Woman with Wings (here) have been fooling around with the idea of paths of threads that travel across a textile for long distances. Murgatroyd and Bean calls her exploration 'Taking a Thread for a Walk'. I love that notion. I have only one or two images to inspire me from her blogs of 2015. It is a course that she taught in Britain. Too bad for me, that I couldn't go. Woman with Wings has been posting a thread path every new moon, gradually building up 13 paths for 2015. I can not get my life organized around being ready to sit and stitch on specific days, but I love the build up of the paths over the year. If you like this idea, she has several years of once a month stitching according to a response to a natural event.

I am using yellow-greens and light blues for my paths. Since this photo, I have stitched a few more meandering lines. I am approaching this more as a sampler of stitching ideas that carry a strong line. I will add on a few samples of ornamentation that I've learned from Karen's class. The little green box is pin tucking. Better photos to come once my photography station is built.

Over the holidays, I took a self-directed course from Karen Ruane on Ledgers and how to capture an idea and develop it. It wasn't the course I meant to take, silly me logged onto the wrong link. But this was fun and it consolidated a number to techniques and ideas from previous classes. Sometimes I need that. Lots of ideas float about, I lose some, I fixate on others, and something that should be obvious isn't because it didn't connect well. This course (see Karen's online class offerings for Ledgers here) did a good consolidating of various techniques and methods of developing ideas.


A big storm is predicted for tonight, I need to get things sorted out. Enough candles? check. Enough batteries in flashlights? check. Enough radio power? check. Salt and shovels? check. Bread, milk, eggs and fuel for cooking? check. Enough scotch. Nope. Gotta go.