The Technicolor Basket of Sunshine

A few weekends ago, our original weekend plans were to enjoy a nice quiet one yet it was everything but that.  This being that at around the same time the hubs discovered his truck had been broken into the night before, we also found out that one of his teenage cousins was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.  So as he waited for the cops to arrived, I scurried up to Wildcard for some "Get Well Soon" gifts.  I returned home with a container of colorful magnets (every teen needs magnets for their school locker) and two crochet critters by Alicia Kachmar (a Smore and a Deviled Egg).  Upon visiting lil cous "H"... her and all the girls in the ward's sunroom were in love with the crochet critters.  And after telling them that the lady who makes them began crocheting in the hospital when she was ill, that made them more excited about learning to make these lil cutsies.  =)  So I told H that if she wanted to learn to crochet, I get her all the essentials to start...

And that's just what I did...  "H" if you happen to find this post before I give you your treat, don't read.  =)




I purchased a few of the patterns she liked...  The vegetables as she thought the Olive was the cutest and hats for your safety cones.

Then I made a trip to Michael's with my Xmas gift cards and had an initial idea in my head of a few skeins of yarn, a crochet kit that contained a book and hook along with some embroidery floss that soon turned into a huge basket.

A bountiful basket to make any crochet lover giggle in delight...  

Diaper pins for keeping her work from unraveling when she's in between crochet moments plus tons of yarn and stuffing to make all the critters her heart desires.

All the little tools and bobbles she'll need to master amigurumi (the art of making crochet critters).

Kitties and Yarn...

Dunno why but kitties love yarn.  But ours get all wide eyed any time I pull a ball out near them.  =)

My Valentine[s]

So in our house,  I have 7 valentines...  the 4 cats, the 2 ferrets and of course the hubs!  While they all have their moments that annoy me to death (some of the cats pin me down in my sleep while others whine until they get wet food, the ferrets shake their cage and Josh sometimes snores like an old man), I couldn't see life without them.  When I'm at my worst, their undying love and affection makes me smile.  That is unless I'm queen PMS then it takes a good dose of chocolate.  ;)  So here's to my Valentines and the affection they bring me.

In the above photo: Josh and Alice (our youngest and only girl kitty...  she's a feisty female princess kitten and she knows it) sharing a kitty hug as she won't let you hold her but shows her love with a head bump!

The reason for the above short and sweet post is the lovely paper mama and her photo contests.  I'm using those as a reason to write more.  Plus I just love her photo skills!



And as always...  the photo above is unedited and uncropped as this lil grad student doesn't have the time to edit plus is attempting to master her SLR before depending on photoshop to fix things.   lol.  =)

Birthday Wants...

So seeing as this year is one of those milestone years (I'm turning the big "3" "0" on the last day of March),  I've decided to compose a list of things I want that I will indeed use.  Oddly enough, they all have something to do with my SLR.  ;)

The first is an Epiphanie camera bag.

I've been pining over these bags for almost a year now since I saw one online last spring.  Originally I fell for the Ginger but now am leaning more towards a Lola as turning 30 has me wanting to attempt a lil trendiness before I get too old and wrinkled...  ;)  Plus as I love to take my camera everywhere but don't want to scream to the random thug on the street that I'm strapping a several hundred dollar SLR, a discrete yet protective bag is key.  =)

The second thing I desire is a remote for my camera.  This way I can start perfecting self and staged portraits.  An added bonus is that when the hubs and I play with sparklers outside, we don't have to take a dozen photos where half are me running back as it shoots of 10 in a row.  

And the last thing I want (that I'm more likely to save up for than to expect as a gift) is a fisheye lens called the Scout from lensbaby.  I love that their lenses are affordable and the bodies can be used with different lens inserts or the funky aperture kit.  Plus eventually I'll get around to getting one of their bundles that comes with a swivel lens.

So what are all of you hoping to save up for in celebration of a milestone birthday?

Eeep... another photo contest!

As it turns out I happened upon Paper Mama's site on the last day of a photo challenge that didn't require your children (furry or fleshy being) present in the photo... This being that this weeks challenge is a self portrait!

http://thepapermama.blogspot.com

The self portrait I've chosen is one of the many I took after the hubs and I returned from getting his 30th birthday present...  Cheesecake style pin-up photos of moi.  (For those of you unfamiliar with this style of retro pin-up, it's that of the 40's and 50's where the women were still sexy and beautiful without having to be naked.   Showing a little garter & stocking with a smirk was all the rage.)  At any rate... as hubs and I are big fans of the photography, I searched high and low for a classy place that gave superb results as it originally was going to be a surprise for his second tour in Iraq.  (Luckily he was medically discharged before then and it turned into a 30th B-day present).  We traveled out to Baltimore to the home of Atomic Cheesecake Studios where the wonderful Action Girl (aka Stacey B) did the most amazing job on hair, makeup and photography.  I couldn't stop smiling as the whole experience made me feel empowered and beautiful.  (Not that the hubs doesn't tell me I'm a beauty every day but looking flawless and seeing his jaw drop in new ways was even more empowering than usual!)  After getting home I felt I couldn't just wash the makeup off without getting a few photographs of my own.  The best one is the following self portrait in the bathroom mirror.

"Say Cheesecake!"

ps.  Be sure to check out Retro Lovely.  It's a new retro pin-up magazine and one of the sexy scientist photos from my shoot was used in issue #2  =)

Christmas Claws

So there's this blog called paper mama, by a gal named Chelsey, that is just the cutest.  She takes some wicked amazing photos and also seems to illustrate how you can take a not so fab photo and enhance it so it looks fab.  Such that if you have bad lighting or colors, ways to adapt it so it looks like to planned to make it look the way it does.  Or at least I think she has some posts of how she does the manipulation.  I sorta got distracted when I saw she was running photo contests.  And I suppose I'm rambling now.  Long story short... I just found her blog and am slowly investigating it when I get the free time (aka sometime in April when I'm not doing DNA quantifications in the AM and RNA extractions in the PM.).

And now to the photo contest aspect...  Each week she does a challenge and this is the current one.




This weeks challenge: Holiday colors.
The challenge: The challenge will be based around your children. Take or find a photo of your baby (or kid... or puppy... or kitty) wearing red and green... blue and white... or, whatever colors make you think of the upcoming holidays. Feel free to play around with photo editing programs! Have fun!

As we lack kids, furballs are our babies...  I went on a hunt for a kitty photo from last year.  Sadly all of our Alice playing elf were a blur.  What can I say but the little white one hates costumes. =(

So I dug further and found this photo from Christmas day (Either taken by myself or my hubs as when I'm not running a muck with the camera I hand it to him to document every moment).  It's Christmas Claws!  Her name is Zoey and she belongs to my stepmom who every year sticks the poor cat in some kind of Christmas garb.  Amazingly enough Zoey has learned to remain composed while any of our 4 cats would be chewing the darn thing off.  ;)  

Also while digging for photos, I found this gem of last year's Christmas Twig that is still tied to our wall.  The story behind the twig is that we lack the room for a full tree but wanted a tree anyway.  Our friend who owns a local shop called Wildcard has used lighted twigs in the past as store decor so we went out in the snowy trail to find a good Twig.  And hence our yearly tradition has begun of decorating the twig.  Last year was beach themed flower lights...  This year, you'll just have to wait and see.  =)

Be sure to check out Chelsey's blog, and the contest, and if this post lack coherent organization, forgive the mess as I've spent 9hrs in lab today where 7-8 straight was spending doing brain numbing work.  ;)

Christmas Cards in less than an hour!

For me to craft anything in less than an hour is a miracle as I'm a constant over thinker.  But at 2am in the morning and running on nothing, I managed to pull off a Christmas miracle.  =)

See for the past few weeks I've seen others pointing out sites they want to get photo Christmas cards from and yet others have been asking for my addy for one.  In all this, I've decided that it would be awesome to send out cards as I now have a reason to send them...  I'm no longer a single soul sharing christmas joy but a married one.  So the cards go out as a joint tiding of joy!  Woot!

I began my hunt on Shutterfly.com as we have a gift card from the wedding there.  But as all the flat cards I looked at were a minimum of 70 cents for the designs I liked.  And they were enveloped!  I wanted postcards...not regular cards.  I don't care if it gets marked or tainted by the mail process.  It gives it more flavor that way and cuts the postage down.

So I went back to my favorite friend gotprint.com.  You download their photoshop template and work within the lines to ensure you fill the bleed areas but not with important items.  It took me 30 minutes to go through our wedding photos (all 771 of them) and pick out my favorites for the card.  I resized the images (1 for front and 1 for back), copied it into the template, added text (another 15 minutes of which font looks best) and then uploaded to the site.  Well, uploaded after hubby approved of my work.  ;)  In all it took an hour and I made only 1 mistake on the final copy that might take you a bit to notice...  let me know if you find it.  ;)

The front!

And it's behind!

What do you think?  I'm betting it's gonna look great with a glossy front and 2 sides in color!

Arsenal in Autumn

While aimlessly meandering around the world of blogs, I came across a fall photo contest by a military wife's on her blog titled GI Joe's Wife.

Sarah is currently living in Hawaii as her hubs is stationed there and wishing that she could enjoy more seasons than just 1 season of constant summer.  As I take plenty of photos and had just recently taken some of my retired military hubs playing like a kid in the fall leaves, I decided I'd share some of my favs with all of you and the best one with Sarah!  So here goes our Saturday adventure in Arsenal Park (Early on it was the site of the historic Allegheny Aresenal).

In the spirit of not altering any of my photos, these are all orginal, out of the camera, unphotoshopped pictures.  =)

Bug's View of Arsenal

Where's Squirreldo?

The Vibrant Tree

Last Posey of the Season

Shades of Fall

Eternal Youth

My personal fave is this one of the hubs running towards me through the pile of leaves...   On the first take, he ran so fast that I got a picture of just leaves flying in my face (leaves + mold = not good for the allergic to nature aka me).  

I also managed to get this great shot of the flag in the park flapping in the wind.  It's one of my favs too.

For all the photos we took that day feel free to visit my flickr album
---> http://www.flickr.com/photos/violet6533/sets/72157625418973176/with/5187782784/


ps.  It's our two month wedding anni and soon (when I have the time) I'll start some recaps as I got our wedding photos yesterday!

Pretty Posies

Not many brides, if any, can say that they picked their bouquet flowers the day before their wedding.  But in my case... my very non traditional case...  I can!

Near to exactly a day before our wedding I stopped by Mildred's Daughters Urban Farm (the only farm zoned land in the city proper of Pittsburgh) to cut the flowers for the maids bouquets along with a few to use in mine.  I would have picked the flowers the night before but seeing as how it had rained and cutting flowers wet leads to reduced vase life, we decided to follow Randa's (the farm co-owner) advice and go friday midday.  I met with Joan, who does the garden's flower arrangements, around noon and we went to work cutting the Zinnias.  She cut, I de-leafed and the chickens attempted to eat the leaves.  Yep...  Mildred's has their very own farm chickens.  =)  In the end we cut 60 flowers and a handful of other flowers filling over 1 tidy cat plastic container of water.

At that point, I went home and set off on making the bouquets.  I soon found that I liked the simple look of 6 Zinnias and sorted them into colors sets.  I put together 4 different colors for each of my 4 maids.

Then after our rehearsal/dinner... my little sister and I set forth to make my massive Sunflower bouquet.  Despite it being 11pm, she sat there and held the flowers in place as I wrapped them in tons of wire, floral tape, and brown satin ribbon.  In less than 30 minutes we had my bouquet finished.  Sadly I have no pre-wedding pictures...  yet.  I myself (yes.. I know that I'm usually a photo freak but I lacked the time and was so busy that night...) did not take any pre-wedding but I'm sure others did.  ;)

Teasers

The beginning of this week tried it's hardest to sour my spirit but amazingly enough I managed to remain calm and optimistic.  See our wedding photographer/friend had a huge mishap on Sunday.  As she was editing photos in lightroom, the program crashed and all the photos in it were deleted.  Because lightroom doesn't create copies of the originals, it deleted the originals she was working on when it crashed... aka all of our wedding photos.  And it didn't send them to the trash bin where they could easily be recovered.  It bypassed the bin all together and sent them to the void.  Kelly was in a panic as she had just emptied her memory card for a wedding and two family shoots that weekend so she had no copies.  She also didn't back them up in any other fashion as she doesn't have the funds for an external hard drive nor did she have a spool of DVDs on hand (which I have promptly remedied by getting her a spool of 50 for a gift from Best HEll...um I mean Best Buy... this past weekend).

She was preparing for the worst while I was convincing her it would be ok.  Yes this bride wasn't panicking but being scientific.  It wasn't her computer that crashed but a program.  So the hard drive should have been perfectly fine and she would just need software to recover the deleted files.  Sure enough, after 6 hours of scanning we recovered 4 folders of thousands of JPEGs and transferred them onto one of my external drives.  Recovered photos included our wedding, the other wedding, other shoots & any (and I mean ANY) picture that she happened to view on the net.  From her early estimates, Kelly thinks that around 85% have been recovered but she won't know until she goes through all of them.  And from what we saw, it appears that a variety of pictures from the entire day are still there.  The few that were damaged can be cropped to hide the grey boxes and the ones deleted forever shouldn't be missed as she got several shots of each photo.  =)

All in all, a possible disaster has been reversed and serves as an almost awful lesson for a new photographer that copies of originals are key.  Which was one of the things I tried to remind Kelly as she kept fretting about the pictures.  Amazingly enough I wasn't worried at all...  I had the instant of panic and tightness in my chest when she first told me but then remembered the multiple times my labmate's hard drive(s) have died and he's recovered all his files.   So I was quite hopeful that we could do the same with hers.  After talking to my PI about the possibility of recovery, I was assured that we'd get at least some of the photos back so to see we got so many is a true blessing.  Plus it doesn't hurt that we had a bunch of friends sending good vibes and prayers our way.  ;)  So....  in light of all the photographic chaos, I thought I'd share the initial 10 teasers our photographer shared a week back before the mishap.