recent projects

Happy Friday, everyone! Do you realize that Christmas is exactly 2 weeks from today? I just noticed. There are so many things I need to do: self-imposed assignments like finishing up little creative projects and sending out cards! I still haven't finished those stockings that I mentioned making... but here's a peek:


Yeah, those are green strawberries. I like doing crafts with whatever I have on hand, and this seemed to be the only white-ish material that looked festive enough for the top of the stockings! It's an old feedsack print, so it gets historical points as well. Boy, I guess it's lucky that I also happened to have normal fabric for the rest of the project, or these might look particularly silly.

Hello, real camera.

In the sad news department, I sent my digital camera off to be repaired this week. I had a hard time boxing it up- I had to stop and take a few last pictures with it and then take pictures of it with my other camera... all sorts of parental things like that! Hopefully it will come back soon working better than ever.

The upside to all this is that I finally pulled out my regular old 35mm camera! I was slow to start taking pictures with it; all of the manual settings made me quite nervous. A few years ago I had the f/stops memorized and knew exactly what settings to use for certain lighting conditions, but I've had to relearn a lot of that this week. I've also had to relearn how to use the giant, external flash. It's so much fun to play with! I think with digital photography the main satisfaction is being able to automatically see your pictures and retake them if you're not happy. You can't do that with film, but you get the satisfaction of learning and understanding exactly what each component of the camera does*. It's a neat feeling!

*Not that you can't do that with a digital camera.. but digital makes it easier to go all-automatic and not worry about apertures and shutter speeds!