Embroidery, sewing, and schedules

I signed up to attend an online photography seminar on Friday morning, which prevented me from my regular blog update.  It turned out to be more informative than I thought it would be, but I couldn't spend the entire day sitting at my desk for the live broadcast so I ended up buying the download so that I can watch it on my own schedule in bits and pieces.  So the study of photography continues, though my editing progress is still on hold.  Within this seminar, Art Wolfe talked about how he sometimes develops books over the course of years, gathering a large body of work and then finding a common thread throughout his work to turn into a book (as opposed to going out into the field specifically with one subject in mind until a book is done.)  This sounds like the "photograph everything and put it together later" philosophy that keeps me going out in the field with ALL the lenses so that I can take advantage of ALL the opportunities.  I realize this is the approach I take with my calendars, and that if I go back through my history of images I can apply that same approach to putting more books together in the future.  This would also give me the opportunity to re-edit past images using the new tools I have at my disposal without necessarily feeling the need to re-edit ALL the images from the past (just the ones I intend to print).

Once again this week, the photos I have to share are poor quality snaps from my phone.

We experienced one of those "emergency" sewing projects earlier this month when the original puppet created for G's school play turned out to be far too small.  G and her friend had hand-sewn the original, and were under a tight deadline to come up with a replacement, so I volunteered to take their pattern and sew it on my machine at home.  It took me less than an hour, and saved them several hours.  The puppet was top-heavy, so after the next rehearsal I helped to reinforce the head/front arms with a combination of a wire hanger and pipe cleaners (one tends to get inventive with little time and zero budget), G put it on a platform that matched the stage floor, and through the magic of theater lighting, made the puppet "crawl" on stage without revealing that it was basically on a giant spatula.

I managed to finish a decent amount of embroidery this week, with all the time I spent sitting and waiting for G during her drama and sports events at school.

Though they are the same birds, the patterns are unique in the feet and a little different in the wings.  I haven't looked to see if they are printed differently, or if the patterns just didn't transfer completely, but my philosophy is that each bird within a species is unique anyway, so the goldfinches do not need to match exactly.

In health news - as the weather warms I've been injecting walks on the days where I don't go to the gym.  I have a new pair of trail shoes for hiking, so I've been breaking them in with short (30-40 min) walks through the woods near my house.  Last week I encountered a couple of deer in the forest.

When it is pouring down rain, or trail conditions look too poor, I'm sticking with yoga indoors, which I've increased from just sun salutations to standing strength routines.

The weather was sloppy and wet over the weekend, which kept me indoors and gave me the opportunity to make headway on my ephemera albums.  I felt a great sense of satisfaction to finally pull out stickers that I'd purchased nearly 13 years ago to use for the scrapbook pages of a specific event.  I also discovered that the way I've sorted my embellishments is frustrating - the boxes are all solid and deep, so I end up opening up 7 different kinds of boxes and laying them out on the floor to dig through.  I don't even know all the things I have because most of this stuff came from Mom, and since I didn't choose to buy it I don't have a memory of picking it out.  To that end, I've purchased a bunch of clear containers that should fit inside the cubby system currently in the art room, so that I can re-sort things and label the containers as I did my stamps.  Having wider, shallow boxes should make it easier to paw through all the embellishments, and it will also get rid of a stack of shoe-size boxes that I've had to shove in a corner of the room.

This week has events I need to attend every night, which means my craft time will largely be distributed throughout my "waiting for G" times.  I'm looking forward to less overlapping and a more steady schedule beginning next week.