Sock Humor

Posted on April 4, 2011 by Suzanne

Will: Do you have a hole in your sock?
Will’s teacher: No, I don’t think so.
Will: Of course you do! How else do you get it on your foot?

(edited to add: sock and pattern are from the 2011 Rockin Sock Club March kit — the yarn is Socks That Rock Lightweight, colorway: Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Pattern is called Intrepid Traveler, but the original is cuff down. I’m using the stitch pattern from the Intrepid Traveler pattern, but did it toe-up and used Cat Bordhi’s Riverbed Architecture for the “shape” of the sock. Sock club is not inexpensive, and if you want just this particular yarn or pattern, you’ll have to wait until next year…. https://sockclub.bluemoonfiberarts.com/)

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.

Making Lists and Checking the Score

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Suzanne

Hey Look! It’s Joe with a dirty look on his face. And yes, that’s Katie in the background perched in “her” spot.

Joe was working on his Christmas Wish List. I gave him permission to give me an annoyed look, I figured I was going to get one anyway, might as well roll with it.

I love how you can see Will’s hand in motion in this one. (In case you are wondering, the t-shirt he is wearing has a picture of a Twinkie on it.)

They were informed that no more than 30% of their list could be video games. I should have specified that no more than 10% could be toy weaponry. They want Nerf Guns and these AirSoft pellet gun-thingies. My family has no interest in hunting, they just like things that go boom and explode and make loud noises. One of their favorite things to shoot with BB guns? Apples. Apparently they explode in a gratifying manner.

They are also aware that they really aren’t getting much more from Mom and Dad for Christmas, since they have already gotten the PS3. This list is more for relatives, and no, they aren’t writing to Santa this year. Santa will still deliver their stockings, but that’s it. When I was growing up, I had younger siblings, so I got to continue to help keep the secret for a number of years, I was told by rotten older kids when I was 7. It makes me a little bit sad that they officially figured it out, but at the same time, I can’t but think that as smart and skeptical as they are, they maybe ought to have figured it out sooner…of course, they probably did, they just didn’t want to admit it, worried that they’d cut themselves off from a good thing.

Last year, though, Joe started dropping a lot of snarky comments, and finally we just had it out. It has taken a lot of the anticipation out of the season — there’s not a whole lot to “count down to” around here, but I don’t think it has really taken the joy out of the season. THe boys still need to work on the whole “grateful for what they’ve been given” thing, though, which is surely a failure on my part. This parenting things is HARD.

I just love the looks I get from all of my boys when I try to take their pictures. Mark was listening to his iPod and checking the Cyclone basketball score in real time on some website. I have to say that at time of night (about 8:50PM), it’s a miracle he was actually awake. Usually when he’s on the couch or in the big comfy chair, he’s out like a light.

Because of the low light situation, I used the Seventies action from The Pioneer Woman on the photos again. The pictures are not great, and I figured that rather than not use them at all, I would continue to just “go with” the graininess and grunginess of the pictures. I’d rather have the nice clear photos, but I’m apparently unable to actually take any of those lately. I’d like to blame my tools, but I know that’s not appropriate. Taking pictures in daylight would help. Figuring out how to set my camera up would also help, too.

I need to be making my own lists, I have gifts to buy, quilts to quilt, bookkeeping to do, a dozen orange fleece hats to make by Saturday. It’s always something, isn’t it?

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….

Christmas Cards

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Suzanne

The *last* time we sent Christmas cards was in…2007, the last time I did a Christmas journal. We did a whole photo shoot in front of the tree and it was painful, but I managed to get this really hilarious photo, which is what I used on the front of our cards that year.

Just look at those sweet faces. And those eyes.

Sigh.

Today, I tried to take their pictures. I was hampered by camera problems (uh, not being able to find your camera is a problem, right?), so I was playing with the Hipstamatic app again on my iPhone again, and most of what I took was complete and utter crap. (Not because of the subject matter. Well, not completely…). If it was hard taking their picture 3 years ago, it has become near impossible to do so without being made crazy. They don’t seem to understand that if they would just hold still and give me something approximating a decent smile, I would go away and leave them alone sooner.

I haven’t decided if I’m actually going to send anything in the mail, or if this is what I would send, or if I’ll torture the 3 of us some more and take more pictures (now that I have found my “real” camera).

Maybe I should use this one of Will, instead: