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!

Nostepindes and Resourcefulness

I'm getting ready for an exciting project (more details later). The person I'm knitting it for wants yarn that's already in my stash, I'm just not sure if I'll have enough. While I wait for her to let me know length, width, etc., I needed to find out how many yards I actually do have on hand.

My desk drawers are mostly opened with knobs, two of which are spaced exactly two feet apart, so I used those to measure out the yarn on the slightly used skeins. Since the knob is at the end of a skinny post, I wrapped a spare shoelace around each until the post was about the same width as the knob so I could wrap the yarn around them and be able to pull it right off when done.

I wrapped the yarn around the knobs 50 times, tied it off into a hank (without actually cutting the yarn, of course), and repeated until done. Then it was just a matter of some simple math to figure out the total yardage: # wraps * 4 ft per wrap / 3 ft in a yd. [I used this same method to figure out how much yarn I need by measuring, then ripping out a swatch and counting the yards used. It ended up being 1 yd per sq. in. of knit fabric--how convenient is that?]

From there, I took the hanks and wound them into balls ...with an empty roll of toliet paper nostepinde! I followed the instructions at http://www.hatchtown.com/nostdir.html. I'm quite pleased with the results; even the first one looks much better than any other ball I've wound:

Intarsia Wins Seed Stitch Match

Lesson learned: the 'purl bump' is actually created from the st in the previous row, not the st currently being purled. It's the top of the loop of that st.

This makes it physically impossible to introduce a new color with a purl bump of that color. When knitting in a new color, on the other hand, the top of the loop of the old color st lands on the WS of the fabric, giving the appearance that the new color really does start there.

So my red seed st heart on black St st background is impossible to knit in the way I planned it. I don't think altering the placement of the 'seeds' will be a good work around for this--already on both sides of the heart are many places where the first/last red st are knit... which would make them purls if I altered the seeding and then I'd be in the same predicament.

I think it may be plausible to introduce the red in the row below and then purl with it to get a red bump, but I'm not 100% sure that will work out the way I picture it.

Either way, I've decided to knit the entire chart in St st. This wasn't supposed to be a very challenging project, just a way of getting familiar with the very basics of intarsia.

Lauren v. Intarsia: Round 1 - Seed St

I want to make a pair of arm warmers for a friend. She'd like cables on a contrasting background, i.e., via intarsia.

I've never done any sort of stranded knitting before, merely horizontal stripes. The latter nearly drove me crazy by the end of a 7" x 9" illusion-knit block so I couldn't imagine that dealing with multiple colors (and tangling strands) would be much easier. Of course, I was the one who suggested one-colored cables on a different-colored background, knowing full-well I'd need intarsia (moreover, at that time I'd planned on doing them up in the round; I've since given up on that idea and am most grateful that the pattern is already written for back-and-forth knitting).

I like pushing my limits, but I'm not one to begin on the hardest difficulty setting without first testing out the skills required--especially when someone else is the intended recipient so I'm striving for perfection more than normal. After the initial sighting, I've seen a few "monthly necessities" bags and decided to make one of those with a simple heart pattern on the front in a CC.

Shortly after beginning it entirely in stockinette, I frogged it and made 3 rows if seed st as the base to keep it from curling as much. From there, I thought, "it'd also seem prudent to knit the closing flap in seed st to stabalize that as well," which took me down a slippery slope to, "so long as I have that much seed st on the back, why not include some in the front, too? I'll do the heart in seed st!"

So now I'm faced with making my first-ever intarsia st as a purl on a knit background. My usual resources fails me ...well, they don't fail me completely (new mantra: "old over new") but they don't hold my hand through non-stockinette intarsia. As much as I hate to admit it, that's kind of what I need right now.

The best I've found from Google so far is this post on garter intarsia. It doesn't have anything about purls, of course, but it was encouraging to see the process someone else used to get creative with this method. She (He?) had to deal with strands being on opposite sides, which is kind of close to my predicament.

I've already tried a few times and either get the MC mixed with the CC or no purl bump, but I'm still determined to do this. Once I get that purl bump cleanly on the RS (and get it to stay there unlike that time it mysteriously disappeared after switching back to MC) I'm not going to be too picky about whether the strands were properly linked. It's one st and immediately going back to MC after that so any hole really wouldn't be that noticeable. In fact, it may even be remedied while weaving in the ends.

For now, I've frogged and ranted enough for one night. Tomorrow's another day.

Elbac is officially frogged

I took a photo before ripping it out last night:

It just wasn't fun for me. I was cabling too tightly making it difficult to knit, and I kept losing my place.

Don't get me wrong--I think reversible cables are awesome and I want to use them whenever the wrong side might show, but after learning the magic behind the trick this scarf wasn't as interesting.

I'll come back to reversible cables another day with a new project and nicer yarn.

Digital + Film

Wouldn't it be really neat (if really expensive) to combine film and digital into one camera? You'd have the best of both worlds immediately available at your fingertips. My favorite application for this: practicing in digital, then flipping a switch capture the moment with the already-confirmed-the-looks-good settings on film. I love film and I love developing it myself, but it's frustrating to spend so much on it + developing and then discovering that it's just a bit off from what you were going for.

Happy Halloween!

It's been years since I carved a pumpkin but this year I was so excited for this that I carved two.

Both patterns are from www.pumpkinglow.com. I highly recommend this site--excellent patterns (and they're free!). The only downside is that they're specifically not themed for Halloween.

Now on with the goods!

My panther pumpkin:

A dragon pumpkin I bought and carved on a whim for Eric:
Technically this pumpkin is supposed to be a lot brighter, but once he saw it like this he wouldn't let me punch out the rest of the pieces. I'll admit the whole outline this is pretty cool (and it saved me the trouble of poking out the more complicated pieces around the face).

And photos of them not lit:

Both carvings include scraping the skin (my choice, the patterns weren't actually designed that way). It was my first year scraping and I scraped too much. Everything on Eric's pumpkin that isn't an outline is actually scraped, it's just so thin that it looks about as bright as if I'd just cut through. Doesn't make much of a difference for his anyway since the parts that were supposed to be brighter stayed in the pumpkin for an outline effect anyway.

My panther pumpkin shows off the shading a bit better, but this pumpkin was older and drier after sitting out on the porch for a couple weeks. It was much harder to scrape than the other pumpkin so I ended up poking holes in it while trying to scrape.

Live 'n' learn.

I still love my pumpkins anyway.

...so much so, I was even allowed my picture to be taken while carving one:

Have a safe & happy Halloween!

Fire photos

...are available on dA:

• Blues and Curls
• Blue flames
• Vivid Colors

Someday I'll put more thought into the titles.