Teacher and student

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Suzanne

The 4th session of Feather Boot Camp got underway on Monday. It’s going well — and with the switch to a new shopping cart, my life got about a bazillion times easier. The switch automates a huge chunk of what I was doing before, and while there have been a few glitches, and there is still room for me to screw things up, ultimately, this has been about 1000% less stressful than previous class launches.

The first week of class is typically pretty quiet, but so far so good.

I continue to find it ironic that I have turned into a teacher. I was going to be a music teacher, but decided after my freshman year at Ithaca College that I didn’t really have any interest in teaching. Maybe it was more that I didn’t have any interest in teaching people under the age of 20.

Here I am, though, teaching machine quilting classes, writing instructional books for machine quilting, and supporting the people who use the MQResource forums, teaching them how to use it.

I’m teaching myself a bunch of new stuff lately, too. Well, not new stuff, just trying to be a little more official about some things: I fake my way through a lot of the website stuff I have gotten myself in to. I’m not afraid of software and of figuring things out, but I have been painfully aware that I was only scratching the surface of the technologies that I have been using. So, I’m working on officially learning things like HTML/CSS/PHP/ and a bazillion more acronyms plus all of the programs that web designers use to do their jobs. It has meant getting reinterested in using Photoshop, and the other day I saw that Angela was taking a class from my favorite scrapbooking teacher, Jessica Sprague. Turns out the class is the next step in her progression of digital scrapbooking classes, and on a whim I signed up for it. She assumes a lot with this class, that you can figure out how to do some things on your own, so I kept having to stop and drag things out of the recesses of my brain.

This is what I did this morning, using photos of the boys from our Christmas time photo shoot:

The papers and elements were all provided in class, and I pretty much followed her recipe, but there were several times that made me say out loud “THAT IS SO COOL,” so hopefully I can remember them again when I need them. It’s not so much that I want to spend a lot of time digi-scrapping, but I thought that things I can learn from her will be useful for the web design stuff that I am learning in other ways.

One cool thing is the stripe generator — http://www.stripegenerator.com — used to make the stripes for the circles in the background. I like me some stripes. And polka dots.

This also serves as warning that I will probably occasionally babble about web design/development kinds of things here. I’ll try to keep the technobabble to a minimum.

Christmas journal so far

Posted on December 4, 2010 by Suzanne

I’ve taken some pics of the physical journal in progress and uploaded them to Flickr. I had purchased a “Christmas Art Journal” from Evalicious (which are sold out, but you can still see them at that link), so a lot of the paper I’m using is from that. I’m using some overlays designed by Ali Edwards, which I’m printing on matte photo paper. The library card that I’m using for journaling is a freebie that I found here, I modified it in Photoshop to add the red December “stamp.”

A lot of my photos are either going to be taken with the Hipstamatic app on my iPhone, or I’m using my “real” camera (which I found…) and using some kind of an action to “age” them — the photos for the 4th are modified using the Seventies action from The Pioneer Woman.

I’m trying not to be too precious about this project — not agonizing over choices, just picking things up and doing. Now that I have figured out what I’m doing, and have done some prep, I can take as little or as long as I like with each day.

Some of the “topics” for each day are from the Journal Your Christmas class by Shimelle. Once you have paid for the class, you are in it forever, and she keeps updating and changing it every year. There is a lot of inspiration. Some of the prompts aren’t interesting to me or don’t apply or whatever — so those days, I’m just doing whatever I want, in this case…the treadmill just got set up, so this seemed like a good day to talk about our early Christmas presents…

And yes, I asked for a treadmill for Christmas. But dang!! You have to be coordinated and concentrate when you are on that. I hope I don’t hurt myself….

Learning more new things

Posted on September 6, 2009 by Suzanne

Thursday night was Open House at the school, and the band director aka director of the musical handed me the piano and vocal scores for this year’s musical. I’m sure that 2 years ago when I got the score for Grease I was freaking out as much as I am now (Holy Heck, What Have I Gotten Myself Into??), but that turned out OK, so this will, too. I hope. 10 weeks from now, we’ll know.

Friday at noon, I got a phone call from the school nurse. Will had been pushed into a fence and had a scraped up wrist. I think it’s pretty nasty looking, but then, I’m a wimp. It didn’t need stitches or anything, but he had tried to go eat lunch and started to feel sick to his stomach, and when I got there, he was pretty pale and sweaty-looking. Kinda shocky. I wasn’t at all surprised by the identity of the young man that had pushed Will. He’s on their football team and Mark said this young man thinks it’s funny to just randomly push his teammates.

Learn something new every day

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Suzanne

An online class that I signed up for last September, but never finished. When you sign up for one of Shimelle‘s classes, you are in it for life, and I had forgotten that until I started getting the prompts. I’m going to try this again, as a different take on the daily photo project which I don’t seem to be able to keep up with.

Edited later to add: digital scrapbooking elements, including the page template, from the Life 365 collection at Weeds and Wildflowers. I use Adobe Photoshop CS3 and the fonts are Helvetica and my own handwriting font.

Disco, disco, duck

Posted on January 2, 2009 by Suzanne

finally found what I was looking for, though not in the place i was expecting it. i had seen this photo frame on a blog sometime in the last…month or so…which meant it was really easy to find.

not.

finally found it on the website of the digital scrapbooking site where i could actually buy the set of frames (and it was pure dumb luck that i actually ended up there).

yes, i was going to go to bed, but i just really wanted to find these frames.

i don’t “do” new year’s resolutions, but i’m going to try this daily photo thing again.

we’ll see how it goes.

(the photo is actually quite terrible, but i still like it. i never figured out why will never got dressed today. or why joe doesn’t have socks on. all 3 (the third kid is their cousin ben) have basketballs, but you can’t even see the blur that is joe’s ball…they were doing a silly Disco Dribbling thing, which is why Joe is pointing — dribble with one hand, point with the other, then switch hands (sort of a staying alive disco move…))

and now, i am truly going to go to bed. when i get lazy and don’t bother capitalizing, it usually means it’s time to quit.

p.s. you are welcome for the ear worm in the post title. that’s something else i’m going to try to continue into the new year, the whole song title and/or lyrics as post titles. i wonder how many people i’ll be able to annoy with them.

tomorrow’s daily photo might actually be one taken by mark, as he is going to take all 3 boys skiing tomorrow…we should probably ask his sister for a letter stating that he has permission to seek medical assistance for her son…just in case…