365 Photo Challenge - February

February's subject was Fabric and like January, there was no shortage of subjects in my own home. No accident this, the weather was as cold and wet as expected. The only challenge was to find as wide a variety of fabric as possible.

In the end, I made quite a few sentimental choices:

My favorite necktie (remember when women were wearing men's vests and neckties?)

My football scarf

My needlework

My March subject is Stone, which is going along quite nicely. But I must admit I am looking forward to April and Foliage as spring in the Northwest will give me loads of opportunities....outside.

365 Photo Challenge - January

The stitch plate of a vintage sewing machine showing patent information...
in case you were wondering.

Being one of those people with more time than sense - my mother used to speak of people with more money than sense but that obviously isn't me - I decided I needed a photo challenge to keep me busy this year. It would also, I told myself, help me hone my lighting and macro skills. At this point, I rather doubt it will do either, but I am having a lot of fun with it anyway. The plan is to take a photo, edit it, and then upload to Flickr every day.

To keep myself interested, I decided to have a different theme each month and I'm trying to concentrate on textures and patterns. Taking into account what would be largely indoor and outdoor themes, I came up with this schedule:
   
    January - Metals...done & dusted
    February - Fabric...going well
    March - Stone...you'd be surprised how many rocks I have in my house, just in case it snows
    April - Foliage...piece of cake in the spring
    May - Flora...good excuse to visit the lovely gardens in the Pacific Northwest
    June - Sky...about the only month we have actual clouds instead of 'shades of gray'
    July - Food...well, plenty of that around here!
    August - Ceramic...china, tile, pottery
    September - Fur, Feather & Fuzz...some of my favorite things
    October - Wood...from tree trunks to table tops
    November - Liquid...this is the only one I am worried about
    December - Paper...I could do a month of paper in any one room of my house

January is now past and there was no lack of metal inspiration, it spite of the cold weather keeping me indoors much of the time. Two thirds of the way through February and the same could be said of fabric - no surprise to anyone who has been in my studio. Here is a mosaic of some of my favorites from January.

 And for good measure...one from outdoors

And one from a friend's home...

I'll keep you posted as the year goes by.

Social Media I: Shortcut to Self Esteem

Let's get the disclaimers out of the way right here at the beginning. I am on Twitter - I check it about twice a week or if something important is going on in the world and I Tweet about once a month. I am on Facebook - I only check it when someone contacts me direct which is rare and I never post anything but the odd birthday greetings.  I spend a great deal of time on Flickr - it is so much more than a place to park your pics! And my latest time-waster is Pinterest.

This post is not intended to be an advertisement for Pinterest, I will just say it is addictive as well as functional. However a recent experience on Pinterest is what brought me here, so I will give a brief idea of how it functions for the uninitiated. One can pull photos from almost anywhere on the web and post them on your own 'bulletin boards' (such as recipes, craft patterns, color schemes, travel ideas). The brilliant part is that when you - or anyone else - click on that photo, it takes you to the original website. In short, it does away with the massive list of 'favorites' that are pretty much wasted by those who surf a great deal.

In addition to finding treasures on the web, there is an enormous amount of pinned material to sift through should you so choose. The challenge is to find people and boards with similar tastes and interests and follow their boards - thus ensuring a steady supply of treasures mined by other like minds. And now to the story...

Last night I was scrolling through Pinterest and found a pin of a work by Beryl Taylor, an extremely talented  mixed media artist I have been tracking for at least five years. As I traced back through the pinnings, I came to the artist herself. She was on Pinterest and it goes without saying that I loved practically all of her pinnings and was pleased to find that she had pinned some of the same things I had. Of course, I opted to follow all of her boards.

The next day, when I glanced through the regular email I receive from Pinterest showing repinnings of your items, I found this sentence..."Beryl Taylor started following all of your pinboards". I was so excited I called my daughter to tell her that THE Beryl Taylor was following ME!

And that is why people have hundreds of Facebook friends that they haven't spoken to in real life for twenty years or more, why Stephen Fry has 3,821,365 Twitter followers, and why there is a Flickr group called 'Dogs on Roofs' that has 1,540 members who have posted a total of 821 pictures of - you guessed it - dogs on roofs.

For every sad, lonely person who has locked themselves away in a room and lurks around the edges of forums and special interest sites, there is someone who is making a connection with someone else that was simply not possible before the internet. I am happy to say, that sometimes that person is me. Last week, someone on Pinterest pinned one of my Flickr photos onto her board for miniatures. Foolish though it may seem, I was thrilled.

I think a case could be made that ebay was the first of the mega-successful social media. I remember when ebay first took off, I shopped early and often. Payments were usually made by check through the mails, which necessitated a personal interaction of sorts and your feedback was an important element. One day, after a hard and personally depressing day at work, I logged onto ebay and read through my feedback.  There I discovered I was "an A++++ buyer", a "valued buyer", I was "friendly and great to deal with". Ha! Take that Michelle! (All these years later, I still remember what a bitch she was - I'm sure Beryl Taylor wouldn't follow her anywhere!)

Flickr Mosaics - Winchester

I do love making photo mosaics on Flickr, I do mine on bighugelabs.com  Here are several I recently made from photos of my visit to Winchester, Hampshire in 2007.  We spent a week in Winchester, a really lovely small city with loads of history, architectural gems, lush gardens, and a cathedral.  It was June and everything was in bloom.



High Street, the photo in the center, is so beautifully preserved that you can't tell if it's 2007 or 1907 if it wasn't for the omnipresent trashcans...Winchester is very big on trashcans,



Even in a week there was not enough time to begin to capture all the lovely details.



These photos are from Queen Eleanor's Garden at the castle (home of King Arthur's supposed Round Table).  It was just coming into bloom, but was so lush and green and amazingly full of ideas for such a small garden.



All cathedrals are wonderful in their own way, but Winchester Cathedral has to be one of my favorites.

Bollards in the heart of the town were painted in the style of famous artists, it felt like a treasure hunt as wandered around town and stumbled on on of them.  It also felt like a pop quiz as the three of us sometimes struggled to identify the artist.

Looking back at these mosaics, several things come to mind that aren't represented here, but deserve to be mentioned in any conversation about Winchester.  I'll save them for a later post...maybe even tomorrow.