Waskely Wabbit Holes

When I find myself distracted by a single thought that turns into an lengthy adventure (be it virtual, or in real life) I call it running down a rabbit hole.  In spite of our return to a regulated school schedule (or perhaps because of?) I found myself meandering down more than one rabbit hole in the past few weeks.

Project updates:

I have not taken as many notes as I thought I would on my garden this year, but I have drawn the general conclusion that I should stick with small variety tomatoes, and summer squash, and call it good.  I would rather have enough vegetables ripe at once to make a meal than one tomato, a tiny squash, and the beginning nubs of an eggplant.

Plus, if I stick to the basics of two plants, I have more space to try varieties and still have enough standards.  This is an indigo apple tomato, the vine only produced a few, but they were quite colorful to grow.

Rabbit Hole 1:  Missing Scissors

Having realized that there are situations where I could really use a project in my hands to make use of the time I'm spending when I'm somewhere I would rather not be, or someplace with a lot of waiting time on my hands... I decided to pull out a few ornament embroidery projects.  What should have been a quick 5 minute grab-and-pack turned into an hours long (not all at once, but stretched over a few days) search, because although I had two pair of embroidery scissors in my large tote, I wanted my blue handled embroidery scissors to carry in my purse with my portable projects.  I *just* reorganized my craft room last year, and it was really frustrating me to have "misplaced" my favorite and oldest embroidery scissors.  It was when I realized that my entire mini-sewing kit was missing that I had my breakthrough... clearly I left the mini sewing kit - with the scissors - with a recent project.

Another half an hour of searching finally revealed the sewing kit in my Zentangle drawer, which didn't make sense until I remembered that I had been embroidering Zentangle patterns on towels two years ago, and I packed the project in the tangle drawer instead of the sewing area.

Rabbit Hole #2:

G very innocently said to me one night "Hey mom, do you have that video of my first dance recital?"

It only took me about 10 minutes to find the low-quality versions of the videos backed up on my old external hard drive, then another 10 minutes to find the DVD's of all the dance recitals, but that lead me to thinking about the original tapes.  I still have our old camcorder in the closet so that I can "someday" do a digital backup of our tapes.  I decided to look at the tapes in the camcorder case, that's when I realized they were not *in* the camcorder case.  (the memory I had of tapes in the case were of the blank tapes I used to keep with the camera when we used it for recording)    After searching all our movie storage areas I made myself a cup of tea and sat down, and thought... where did I used to keep the Hi8 tapes?  On the shelf with the CD's... we don't have the CD's out anymore because we use digital streaming for music... so the CD's are in those clear boxes in the attic... which is where the tapes were as well!  That portion of the rabbit hole was a relatively short journey...

...but then I spent some time researching how to transfer the tapes to my computer.  I took this photo of the camcorder plugs for a discussion with a friend, who was able to point me in the directly of an inexpensive video capture device, which I now own, and have tested, and it works.

Not that I have time to transfer my movies to digital at the moment, but at least I have the technology.  Hopefully I'll get around to getting this done before the technology changes again.

Rabbit Hole #3

Halloween Costume.  

I needed some brown fabric from my fabric stash, which lead to me realizing that my fat quarters and felt were split among too many boxes of fabric, and I had also held onto some baby flannel for more than 16 years without using it, and if I ever make another baby quilt I'm likely to buy fresh fabric anyway...

...so I spent some time over last weekend sorting and purging my fabric stash, and getting it down to the point where it fits in my existing boxes, with a little room to spare.

In between the rabbit holes, I pulled my big tote out and set back to work on my bird quilt.  My 4 bluebird squares are done, I'm now working on the intricate Bobwhites.

A teeny tiny preview of my Halloween costume.  I have made great progress on the design and most of the cutting was completed last night.  

I will do a full write up of the process with photos of the end result once it is complete.

Rabbit Hole #4

Film photography.

We are considering a vacation out of the country, which means I'll probably not want to pack my Graflex due to it's size and weight, which lead me to poke around online for a light weight medium format pinhole camera.  Holga used to make one, but as they are discontinued the cost of a new "collecters" item is outrageous.  I did notice online that some people made mods to convert regular Holgas to pinhole, and I have an extra Holga with a broken shutter, so I briefly considered that option... only to set it aside because that old Holga doesn't have a tripod thread.  So then I looked at my newer Holga to see if it had a tripod thread...

...which is when I discovered I loaded film in it about 5 years ago and haven't finished the roll.  So... another camera to toss in my bag for the next outing.

As to the lightweight pinhole option... I will likely bring the 35mm panoramic pinhole, and I'll see if the new 120 panoramic camera (which is currently in production) might be light enough to carry.  If it feels too heavy for international travel then I might look into the Diana pinhole, or something from the Schlaboratory.  

On film photography...

My E-6 came back slightly underexposed, but still totally usable.  I'm hoping to get another outing in this week that should give me more varied subjects to shoot at a leisurely pace.

Ebey's Landing, Velvia 50, Graflex Pinhole

Post-travel balance

Last week was our much anticipated and planned-for family trip to attend DCI and watch D's performance in his almuni corps..  It was not what I would call a "family vacation", in that D had rehearsals or performances scheduled for the entire week, and as a family we only spent about 24 hours together without a performance schedule.  However, while D was busy with his schedule, G and I filled our time with museums, concerts, Broadway shows, and other tourist attractions.

I dubbed it the "Magical Mid-western Music and Cultural Tour".  G's friends made us t-shirts.  It was awesome.

As with any trip, the time leading up to departure was filled with prep work, which diminished any hope of fun project time.  Throughout the prep and during travel, however, my mind's wheels were ever-turning with new ideas on projects, and perhaps more importantly... organizing my thoughts for the projects I already want to do.

Some are travel related, and I would consider to be extremely long-term projects that I have longed to have come to fruition.  

After contemplating my extensive smashed penny collection (which dates back to my early childhood) I've now come up with a display plan: create a silhouette of a state as a background, mount the pennies from that state on the background, and frame.  (alternately I could paint the state on a canvas and adhere the pennies, but I'm not sure how well they would stick)  

For my pin collection... stamp various travel stamps onto canvas, decoupage/paint over the stamps with sepia-toned paper/paint (to diffuse the sharp stamps and give the canvas an aged look) and pin the pins to the canvas, perhaps grouped by geographical location.

The idea of geographic groupings is beneficial in two ways.  A: it gives the display a sense of how much time or how many visits I've had to a particular location.  B: it makes it easier for me to check the collection over before I go to visit that place again, to avoid duplicates (this is more of an issue with the pennies than the pins, but helps in both cases)

I also have a patch collection, which will likely end up being on some kind of quilted wall hanging, but I don't have a particularly clear vision of how I want to do that, so the wheels are still turning (though I'm making notes)

I've also worked up an idea that is a grand surprise for D and a few of his friends... not that I have a wide audience but I will keep it under wraps until it is complete and presented. But I am incredibly excited about this project and it will probably jump ahead in my project queue.

While the beginning of our trip was packed with activities and events, the latter days had a lot of "hurry up and wait" moments.  I took advantage of these long pauses in activity to begin to organize my thoughts for all these project ideas - including projects I've already started - and I've listed them out in a document that is accessible through my computer and my phone.  I've had too many days where I've had some blocks of time to work on something only to draw a blank as to where to place my energies... and then by the time I go to bed an idea comes to me and I think "Oh shoot, I could have gotten that one thing done!"  I'm hoping an updated list will help avoid those lost opportunities.

I've also implemented lists for household projects... I dub these "need to do's" (as opposed to my projects "want to do's")  I've often found myself so easily consumed by the need to do's that, by the end of the day, I have no time for want to do's, because I feel like if I don't do the need to do's now, I'll forget to do them later.  By writing them out, though, I can read them all over, decide which ones *really* need to be done now, and assign the others to a waiting list... giving me a little more balance with my time to fit in some want to do's.  As I complete my typical post-trip need to do's (laundry, unpacking, etc...) I'm lining myself up to jump right into my want to do's.  Fingers are crossed that this blog will showcase great leaps of activities in the coming weeks.