Happy Halloween!

I carved two pumpkins again this year; Eric made "gourmet" pumpkin seeds. On with the photos! (All photos link back to my Flickr account, where you can find more pumpkin photos in this set)



I knew from the beginning of the season that I wanted to make an NY Giants pumpkin for Eric's fam. I checked out all of the different logos they use but in the end thought a simply one would be best and most easily readable from their porch. Apparently the last time they had a NY pumpkin the Giants won the superbowl. If that happens again... well... I see a lot of Giants pumpkins in my future.



Eric took the seeds from that pumpkin, did some magic and came up with fancy pumpkin seeds. They definitely have cinnamon on them, probably oil, maybe a bit of sugar, and I'm not sure what else. They smelled delicious.

His pumpkin only took an afternoon to clean out and carve, even with scraping an outline in addition to the carving. I wanted something more complicated, something challenging, but also something nerdy and preferably kind of creepy or scary for mine. I'm not quite up to carving a Jack Sparrow or Starry Nights pumpkin yet (those are my goals), but still wanted to push my limits and get more in the Halloween spirit.

Then I saw it. My preciousss.



I'm not a huge Lord of the Rings fan--it took me forever to get through the books and even after reading them I had some trouble following the movies--but I still think it's an amazing literary piece and movie and have a lot of respect for them (Tolkien created how many languages for those books??). Gollum, a corrupted and decrepit hobbit, was exactly what I was looking for. It's a free pattern I found it on The Pumpkin Wizard site and took hours to carve. At one point, I had a spent a lot of time on this without seeing results and was ready to give up. Boy am I glad I stuck with it.



Happy Halloween, indeed.

Flickr and Photoshop Levels

First, as if I needed another place on the internet to regularly not update, I got a Flickr account: click me. Facebook doesn't seem like a good place to put my good photos, deviantArt doesn't seem like a good place to put non-art photos, and Ravelry isn't a good place for photos not based on yarn, so I needed a good place for all of the above.

I went apple picking with a couple friends last weekend and while there weren't m

any apples, there were lots of trees and a gorgeous blue sky. Photos from this trip made up my first Flickr set are saved in Hillview Farms, including...*

Also featured in this set is my newest love: Photoshop's levels feature. I'm thoroughly addicted to manually editing levels--especially the individual RGB channels. Don't get me wrong, I love my Canon PowerShot SD550, but is ultimately is a point-and-shoot with a small lens and small sensor and can use a little tweaking.

Ok, so there was a lot of tweaking. I'm probably overdoing it (just learned today about alt + white/black point to see what might be cut out when adjusting the point), but the colors are so vivid. I don't know how long I've stared at this progression in wonder so far. The first image is after noise reduction, sharpening, and cropping (to straighten it; it still looks crooked to me though), but no levels/contrast/color/etc. adjustments; the second is after applying a levels layer to the whole photo; the third is after applying a levels layer to just the sky, with the ground and trees masked out. Vivid!

Expect many more of these. Eric can only stand to watch me hide and show a levels layer so many times so this obsession needs an out somewhere. Hello, Internet.

* Click on the photos to go to their respective Flickr pages.

Origami- Contest and Mini Photo Album

Contest
Craft: Origami

Hosted by: DeviantArt's Artisan Crafts club

Deadline: when the 1500th member joins (they're at about 1350 now)

Prizes include features on dA, dA subscriptions (for premium membership), deviant dollars, and a cell charm

For ALL details (requirements, prizes, etc.) CLICK HERE

To quickly summarize...

• The theme is Origami, but "You can be as creative as you like to incorporate this theme."
• You need to be a member of Artisan Craft (how to join), which also means you need to be a member of dA (membership form). Both are completely free to join and don't spam your email.
• You can submit up to 3 entries.
• You can use a tutorial so long as you reference it in the deviation description.
• They're taking experience into account so if you've never done origami before, don't worry--you're not exactly going up against people who have been doing this for years.

My Entry

I found this tutorial for a mini origami photo album shortly before I read about this contest. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to make it. It was just too good to pass up.

I hadn't done origami in years and even then I was only doing simple stuff and following directions exactly, but I was so excited for this (and rushed since the deadline is "open") that I quickly made a prototype with regular, white paper, dug up an origami kit from years ago, picked out the four designs that least clashed, and came up with an album of my own--all within an hour or two!

Ok so the colors/designs kind of clash, but it's the best I got right now.

Not long after putting this together, I kidnapped the boyfriend for a quick photo shoot. He's been working out, eating right, and just generally losing weight (you can check on his progress here /shameless, un-asked for promotion) which is probably why he was surprisingly quick to agree to a shoot. Doesn't look like he minded...

I cropped and desaturated them a bit, printed them out on nice photo paper, and put them in this order in the album, starting with the red frame and ending with the blue. It made quite a nice no-reason gift for him and now lives on his nightstand. My only regret was that I didn't get a picture of the photos in the frames, but I was too excited to give it to him to wait. It'd probably be a good Photoshop exercise to put them in digitally, but I'll save that for another day.

I'm not "in it to win it"; the contest theme coincided with plans I had already made and the deadline--especially the vagueness of it--gave me the motivation I needed to get it done within a reasonable time period. I know there's much more complicated things even a beginner can do but this is what I wanted to do and the results--though by no means perfect or professional--are quite satisfactory for the circumstances.

If/when I do this again, I'd like better coordinating paper and maybe try to push the corners of the frame back a bit so more of the photo is exposed and the paper doesn't meet at the middle of each side (more like a traditional photo album I guess). Some day. As usual there's so much to do and so little time.

Über Yarn Pr0n Available Now on Ravelry

[2009.08.05] UPDATE: You can check out the winners here!

Well, yarn pr0n has always been available on Ravelry (click here* to start drooling), but this is just insane. I'm not usually swayed by the yarn page nearly as much as the pages for patterns or finished projects, so to say that I'm glued to the screen is a big deal. What's got me in a tizzie?

It's Sock Summit's Dye for Glory contest! They have a dozen categories with so many beautifully dyed yarns in each. The catch? You can only vote for one in each category. If you're already a Ravelrer go vote now! If you're not but are a knitter, crocheter, dyer, or just yarn appreciator sign up and vote now!

* As of this writing, access to pages within Ravelry is still members only, but it's free to sign up and they really don't spam your email address.

Cleaning House

Tomorrow's Independence Day here in the U.S. To celebrate, I was hoping to paint my nails. Nothing fancy or time-consuming (like the flowers, hearts, etc. I'd paint on my nails years ago) but still keeping with the red-white-blue theme of the day. I dug out my many bottles of nail polish only to find that I don't have a good red anymore--the two I used to use are too congealed from heat and lack of use. It was kind of eye-opening to realize how little I've painted my nails in the past few years. I should work on this, starting with a trip to a drug store to pick up some red (and probably another color or two in the process, lol).

Even if that falls through, I'm hoping the day won't entirely lack art/creativity. I've got a blank SD card and a borrowed mini-tripod ready to go to capture fireworks. This'll be my first time trying to seriously photograph them.

Speaking of photographs, I actually documented something yarn-related recently:

This pile of Red Heart was donated to a lady who worked in the same school as my boyfriend (I think the fifth-grade school around here) in early May. There were a few other smaller, stray balls but this is the bulk of it. Some of them (e.g., the watercolor colorway in the middle) I was rather attached to but honestly I didn't have any projects in mind for them. I've been slowly moving away from Red Heart Super Saver; I don't like the feel of it for garments and lately have been knitting things designed to be placed next to skin. I also want to move away from worsted weight for a bit and try other other weights. I did keep a few very tiny balls that I wasn't sure she'd want; they make good stitch markers, lifelines, etc.

I'm learning to let go of things I haven't/won't use. This is good.

Back on Task

I started making arm warmer for a friend. I already made a green and purple entrelac scarf for her (ravelry) and had some yarn left over so I thought I'd make arm warmers out of it. This was the second of three entrelac scarves I completed in a row, so I've been pretty entrelacked out lately. I thought a simple stripe pattern loosely based on Knitty's Voodoo would be cool and quick. It was neither.

First, the colors still bother me a bit (they don't even photograph right--all these photos were adjusted to try to get the real life colors). The purple's a bit too blue and the green just doesn't have enough pop to match what I saw in my head (of course in the store it looked perfect ...just like clothes shopping!).

Then there's the fit. That's my left arm modeling the warmer. My friends arm, however, isn't long and lanky. This comes within an inch or so of her elbow (a good place for the glove) meaning they'll be about 8 stripes total. I pictured a lot more. I already ripped it out once to make each stripe two rounds shorter.

Speaking of color-changing in the round...

I got mixed results. The picture pretty much says it all, but allow me to add that this is no reflection on the TECHknitting article I used to learn how to make traveling jogless stripes [for future reference: while looking for the link for this article, I found this one which looks like it would have been a better idea for this project to eliminate the jogs around the purl valleys]. My favorite part: all joins are back joins so I don't have to weave ends in after (Russian joins, while lovely, are also not in my near future after using them exclusively in all three aforementiong entrelac scarves. Yes, I am crazy, why do you ask?).

So as I said, I ripped it out once after a couple stripes, started again and got this far, and then didn't touch it for weeks. I'm trying to be as monogamus as possible to reduce clutter, so this means I didn't knit for weeks. Completely unacceptable. It's now tucked away in a drawer and I have a new arm warmer on the needles. Let's hope this one gets completed (as well as its mate, of course!).

Healing nicely

Shortly after finding my dpn's two weeks ago, I developed a pain in my right wrist. It wasn't a dull, short-lived, maybe-I-had-too-much-to-knit pain; it was a serious, sharper pain occasionally coupled with a prickly feeling in my hand. I freaked and didn't touch yarn for a week but it still hurt. So I picked up a snazzy wrist brace, wore it most of last weekend, then just slept with it on every night since then and I'm feeling much better! I don't have any more pain at all and I'm feeling confident I can knit tonight at my weekly, two-person S&B without worry.

Of course, I couldn't go two whole weeks without touching yarn. The second week I broke down, but didn't knit. Instead, I dug up many of my partially used skeins of various Caron Simply Soft colors, measured them out (I'm starting to doubt the measurements, but more on that later), and wound them up with my makeshift nostepinde.

The seven yarns outlined in red are all new to my Ravely page this week (yes, a Cascade Venezia also snuck in there; again, more on that later). I'd still say it was a productive week, but I'll admit I am longing for my needles.

Also to compensate, I broke out my camera for slightly more artistic uses than merely documenting my new obsession with measuring yarn. I bring you, the Leaning Tower of Yarn:

Ok, not all that impressive yet, but at least it's not another straight-on, one-skein, one-color shot. (Ok, you caught me, now I'm actively trying to include more hypenated phrases in this post =P)

Still, can't wait to start actually knitting again!

Found!

I finally found my dpn's! Apparently the third time you search through every place they could be really is the charm. Now I can start even more projects that I won't finish!