Light Snacks

Have a look. It's chopped spinach and onions mixed up with sour cream. By the time you're done chewing you've burned as many calories as this has in it.

Next item is spinach, tomatoes and cucumber mixed in sour cream.

knitting socks

Something I've always wanted to do. Someone gave me three balls of red wool yarn, which I had thought was a bit useless since it was lighter than worsted, and it sat around a while. Then I got reading sock patterns on the internet. They said following a sock pattern is an act of faith. You have to trust that this idiocy is going to produce a sock. Okay, so finally I did it!
Knitting on double-pointed needles isn't so bad either, if you remember to knit snugly. We're taught to practice keeping the yarn loose on the needles. If you do that the dpns fall out. But if you knit snugly they don't. In fact it's easy once you practice a little.
And look what I have now, nice wool socks.
The pattern I used was called Joan's Socks. Yep I know the toes are ugly. Between then and now I've practiced Kitchener Stitch so the toes will look better next time.
I had no idea how wonderful wool socks were until I walked in them a while. All day long, warm and cushiony. MUCH better than store-bought socks at least the kind I've always bought :-)
Now I wouldn't sell them for fifty bucks.
I'm making some for the boys out of cotton, mostly to practice. See, I've made two (2) socks and I think I'm an expert, and don't have to use patterns, and I'm inventing my own way of doing things which will have to go on my page. So far it's working out! One sock is done and the boys can't agree on whose sock it will be. I might have to make another pair before anybody gets anything.

messing with website

Boy I am so relaxed between classes. I really do love doing college online, but the time crunch is so hard! I just can't keep everything up. Something has to be let go. I had forgotten what having a couple hours to myself feels like.

I've been fiddling around with my website to show off my class results (Media 111 and Media 204) and then somebody gave me the idea of Google Adsense... just for fun I submitted my site. They turned it down because they only accept finished websites. What was keeping it from being finished was mostly a state of mind and the "under construction" text on the front page. I removed the offending text, resubmitted it and they accepted it within an hour.

Then I messed with page layouts, changed all the graphics, etc... eventually just added a white content box, cleaned up the dust again and put ads beneath.


Mainly I just wanted to show you the banners I was working on. They're very pretty, so was the layout. But I went back to the Russian Flowers theme again because it's familiar and feels like home.







The biggest problem I was having with that was trying to think of what text to use!

If I get into web design my ideal client will be the type of person who knows pretty much what she wants her website to look like and I just have to accomplish it. I'm not all that creative / original designer type. I'm a problem solver! Tell me what you want, I make it happen.

To Have and To Hold

I was so impressed with this story!  Easily THE most romantic novel I've ever read, that appealed to me the most. It was the bestseller of 1900. You already knew I was out of date, right?

Just happened across this cover. I don't necessarily like it, it's not what I had imagined at all. The first time the two characters meet each other, she's an aristocrat disguised as a puritan maiden, and the hero, though also a nobleman, is wearing buckskins: after he meets her, he is impressed enough to stop and scrape the mud off his boots with his knife.

It's all dramatic gestures and reading between the lines, and pirates and Indians and thrilling escapes.  Did you know about the Indian uprising against Jamestown, in which a quarter of all the whites in America were slaughtered? 

Read about it here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_massacre_of_1622

And read the book for free here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2807

Photoshop Class!

My next class is a Photoshop class. The only project to be posted on the board this week is "anything", that's right, just photoshop something and share it with the group. So I sat down yesterday and had way more fun than I usually do. Usually if I started just playing with Photoshop guilt would get to me and I'd have to go do laundry or do something with the kids. But wait, this IS what I'm supposed to be doing!

The palette made me crazy. This isn't exactly what I wanted to do; I wanted to blend the other colored images (all from the Adobe Samples folder of safe, non-offensive images-- after all, I'm sure the teacher didn't really mean anything...) with the original paint blobs to make it look like glossy blobs of these images, but I'm not good enough with Photoshop yet to make it happen, so I settled for this.

 

The boat and lake image is the one provided for an example in the assignment, so I couldn't resist doing something else with that.

A collage for spring!
 

Book Cover Using Layer Masks

Assignment:  combine images into a cover for a book or CD.  I picked Way of An Eagle by Ethel Dell, which I had just read, and been very impressed with.  Things were so different back then!  It's fun to read a story written when things we consider unusual now, like having servants, were common, and things we take for granted, like a car ride, were worth featuring in the story. 

About the novel: 

The Way of an Eagle was published in 1912 and by 1915 it had gone through thirty printings. The Way of an Eagle is very characteristic of Ethel M. Dell's novels. There is a very feminine woman, an alpha male, a setting in India, passion galore liberally mixed with some surprisingly shocking violence and religious sentiments sprinkled throughout. A modern day critic, Nicola Beauman, says: "Most modern readers will greatly enjoy The Way of an Eagle, for it remains the best kind of read for anyone wishing to curl up in an armchair...and wallow unashamedly in a book that is entirely timeless...I love to imagine my mother and grandmother sobbing over books like this."

It's an old-fashioned love story with some wonderful messages.  If you'd like to wallow too, you can read Way of an Eagle free here, at Gutenberg.

 The lady is Gladys Cooper, an actress in the 1910s. I bet she'd make a great Muriel.

 

Using Clone Brush to Remove an Object

I'm especially pleased with the slide picture. I used the pen tool to make a new shape of shadow to match the railing, and airbrushed some of the surface. 

This one was an assignment. Non-optional. Take this guy's beautiful skin and ruin it with a tattoo. Okay: let's at least make it a good one! 

 

Assignment: Create a print ad with layers, selections, and masks.  

Example of what we were supposed to produce. 

I picked pianos for my project because "it's easy to sell a product if it's something you really like".
I used the pen tool for all the outlines. Pen tool makes superior outlines!  It's a huge improvement over the way I was doing things before.
Please note there's no reflection of legs in the original, but I added them.  I had to do each leg separately.   

And another product, with another great reflection  :-) 

 

There are the elements, here's my finished result:

 

I'm in!

Flipping through the Chadwicks catalog that arrived this week I see a lot of dresses I'd actually wear. What do you know, "me" must be the style this year!
These are so cool I might order them, if I had money and if they were made in America.

No, Colemak!

Dvorak is yesterday's news. The future is here:

http://colemak.com/FAQ

This is great! It's a layout specially designed for computers. The most frequently used keys are on the home row and the shortcut keys are preserved! It is so, so, so much more comfortable than Qwerty.

My post in the forum (long and ongoing):

http://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php?pid=2406