A little Spring, which is brightening my day:

I was playing with my aperture settings. I think I’ll try again at a different setting.

I didn’t feel like saying much in my last post, but I do want to sincerely thank you all for the kind words about Reggie. I know that all pet owners know how bad this sucks, and it helps to know that I’m not the only one who has ever had to go through this. It’s been hard, because I realized that I had been grieving for the dog he once was for a long time, and I hated seeing him slowing down like he did. It’s part of life, though, and it makes me appreciate the good times all the more. And this little punk is really helping:

I tried to work his fur into a faux-hawk, but it wasn’t cooperating this morning. I never mentioned that I went to a Pet Photography workshop at the San Diego Humane Society a few weeks ago. It was taught by this lady, who takes some great animal photos. I learned a few things about taking pictures of animals, although I wish we had had a little longer, I think there is so much to know! Here is another animal (and people) photographer I’ve been enjoying lately.

In other news, I had a bit of a cold earlier this week, and stayed home from work. While I did sleep for many hours, I started feeling better in the late afternoon and decided that I needed to knit. I went to work on my Hanami stole, started oh so long ago, but it seems that my snot-addled brain just could not handle the lace and I made yet another mistake. Actually, snot-addled or not, my brain is just having a hard time with it. I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time with this pattern, but it
is seriously the most challenging knitting project I have ever
attempted. I’m not giving up, but I need a few more days to work myself up to un-knit to find out where I went wrong. So I went foraging in my yarn basket, and on Knitty, and decided that a nice Spring scarf was in order. So I cast on the Lace Ribbon Scarf from the latest issue, and I’m really liking it. I’m using Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock yarn in the colorway Glenwood (that’s the most accurate photo I could find). I actually like it better in this multicolor yarn than I thought I would, but I’d still like to have one in a solid color, maybe in a nice, drape-y linen yarn.

Now this lace I can handle, although it is going to need some serious blocking.

I was nearly done with Lady Eleanor v2 when I had to drop it and make quilts instead. Now that I’ve had a few free evenings, I managed to get it all finished.


I’m still not crazy about this color way, but I don’t hate it, either. It will get a lot of use, too, as my office has been freezing the past couple weeks.

Bear and Winston were helping me out with my knitting photo shoot.


Winston is even worse than Bear. He always has to be Right Next to Me, as illustrated here:

Despite the sadness this past week, there’s been some fun stuff too, what with my birthday and a trip to Petco Park for a baseball game. I was quite lucky and got a new zoom lens for my camera, and tried it out at the game.


Action shot! I’m not much of a baseball fan, but it’s always fun to go to the game, and it was lots of fun with my camera. 

Sheesh, I finally did it. I sewed the darn pocket on.

I was hoping it would look like a tulip. It sort of does, right? I’m okay with it, I think.

I’m getting pretty good at sewing binding to things. Here’s my helpful hint for seam binding: if you’re going to be going around curves, make sure you use bias binding. Sure, it’s more of a pain to cut out, but there’s no way I could have used straight binding to do this.

Another project I’ve been working on is up and running. This one is a collaboration with my sister. We both have new cameras and new-(ish) versions of Photoshop that we want to learn how to use, so we decided to share the process with everyone. Each week we’ll exchange pictures and then play with them in Photoshop-she has Elements, and I have CS2, so there should be something for everyone. We’ll also share links and resources and other fun stuff relating to photography and Photoshop. I thought it would be kind of cool to have a site for those of us who don’t really know what we’re doing, but want to learn. We’re posting step-by-step what we do, so you can follow along at home. And of course, participation in the comments section is highly encouraged. So please visit, and spread the word!

And lastly, if you need a song for your Valentine on Thursday, I must admit to being partial to this one. You can buy it on Cary’s Myspace page.

I’m used to green (and yellow) Christmases.

Here’s another picture from today that I really like:


I hope your day was merry, whether it was green or white or cloudy and grey!

I decided to join the Project 365 group on Flickr, in hopes that forcing myself to take at least one photo every day will improve my skills. Here are days one and two:




I’m pretty sure that animals will often be featured. I can’t help myself, they’re so darn cute.
If I don’t have a chance to post again before Tuesday, Merry Christmas! Thank you so much for stopping by and for leaving all the nice comments. If you only knew how very exciting it is that people actually take the time to say nice things, and you’re not even all related to me, well, just Wow!

I had to stay home this morning to wait for the plumber, and there was lots of sunshine, so I took more pictures. I’m still in auto mode, but I’m watching my Nikon School DVD, and reading my user manual, so eventually I’ll actually change a setting and see what happens. There are a lot of buttons and dials, so it may take me awhile just to learn what they all do. Typepad reduces the image size quite a bit, so I added these pictures to my Flickr account too, if you’d like to look at them a little bigger.

The cats love the new bathroom almost as much as I do. Lucy sits and looks at the spout on the tub, until I turn it on for her, so she can get a drink.

I got a pretty good close-up of our Christmas tree. You can see a couple of my glittery nests, and a pair of wings.

I finished up my gift-wrapping while waiting for the plumber this morning too. This idea I blantently stole from Kathleen. I’ve had the same Amy Butler paper for quite a while, and this was a very good use for some of it.

My sister and Mr. P will be in town for New Year’s, and she’ll be bringing her camera along, so we can go on some photo adventures out and about in San Diego. Fun!