a walk in the woods

I finally got round to compiling the pictures from last weekend into a post-worthy form. I am so obsessed with my new camera! I know these shots are far from good, but it is not easy to concentrage on complicated menues and capturing life animals at the same time. please be patient, my next post will be about fiber again. Promised! Click on the pictures for enlarged versions.

The first one is a dead snail and a few bugs busy eating it. This one saw no editing exept shrinking and sharpening. With Gimp, you usually have to sharpen the pics after shrinking them.

The next one is a crayfish, my mum is holding it into the camera. It is not very big but very “pregnant”, the stuff under the tail is eggs. Of course we let her go again after taking the pic. It was shrunk, sharpened and somewhat brightened.

The next one is the best imho. I think this little fish is called bullhead in Englich (German: Groppe). It is about as long as a thump. It was somewhat cropped abd heaviely edited to make the fish more visible because I couldn’t get so near, and there are ugly reflections from the water. I didn’t want to drag a fish out of the water just for a picture, so I had to wait until it came out under the stones and take a picture through the water.

The last one is ugly on so many levels. It is a bad photograph, because obviously it is hard to take pictures from something in the water, and quite far away. The turtle it shows is an American species that has no business swimming in the ponds here, eating all the fish and frogs. Some dumpass has dropped their turtle there after it got too big. Or it is already a descendant of such animals. It is sure not the turtle’s fault, but it is bad anyway.

A painting

So I got round to something halfway creative this weekend either. I worked a bit on this acrylic picture. It is supposed to be something halfway between a water swirl and an abstract spiral. I started it as an experiment about working with little glass beads and mirror shards embedded in acrylic gel. It took ages because I had to add the embedded stuff in multible sessions to avoid accidentally ruining my own work again and it always took long to dry. I’m not entirely shure if I’ll leave it as is or give it some finishing toughes.

New digital Camera – and a museum visit

Sorry you didn’t hear from me for a long time. I feel kinda uncreative these days. I finally made a decision and treated myself with a digital camera – this one. Time will tell if the decision to spend that much money on a compact camera was good, but right now I’m in love with it.

Yesterday I saw this exhibition about the table silver of the Russian Tsars and used the opportunity to try out the “museum mode” of the camera. The Exhibition itself was interesting because it had loads of history, but most of the silver shown was too baroque for my taste. I’m showing one shot and a detail of the same. The shot is technically a failure, seems I moved the camera too early after pressing the button – it has 4 seconds max time for a shot, and flashlight was not allowed in the museum. But it still shows the details of that silver plate niceky and I like it’s athmosphere. Anyway, it is amazing you can take pictures there at all, with bad light and through glass. My long-dead analog camera wasn’t able to do that. please click on the pictures to enlarge.

tif 5 – stuff I’m going to use

Well, I have been thinking about tif 5 some more. This is some stuff I’m going to use. The yarn colours are the ones Pam Kellogg suggests. Then there is the pulled thread tulip and that crocheted doily.
It is made from simple polyester sewing thread. Unfortunately I’m out of that special thread and the motif is nowhere near complete. The center was from a commercial source the rest was made up as I went. I think it was the very same thread I used for my very first lace crochet exercises after Grandma had given me an appropriate crochet hook. I started this about 5 years ago when I was lovesick. Just don’t ask, lol. I’m not sure if I will finish it using a similar thread or just use it as is. I guess this also counts as Ufo finishing/stash using.
The fabric is pure linen and was horrribly expensive. I saw it at the shop where I bought the floss and fell in love.

The picture will increase in size when you click it.

sketch for TIF 5

I did a quick sketch about ideas for my tif 5 Project. The thing on the left is my pulled thread tulip, which is done by now. The thing on the right is a crocheted doilie I’m planning to use because it is pink. Sadly, I don’t have as much time for craft as I used to have, and I like to be outdoors in this nice spring weather, so I have to bore you with such sketches to have anything to show at all.

By the way, the ladder hem on my tif 3 sampler is finished. Slow cloth like this and the tulip make my blog stats go down the drain because they look boring for a long time while being a lot of work. Maybe I am too blog stats obsessed.

Have you seen that my blog has two new pages? I’m trying to get more organized. On the project index page I will list posts belonging to one project,so you cann follow the progress of something you like easier. On the tutorials and how-tos opage I will list tutorials in the widest sense, so they won’t disappear in the archives.

Thoughts of TIF 5

The topic of this month’s take it further challenge is “What do you call yourself? (related to what we do). Artist or Craftsperson?

Basically, that’s the old art versus craft debate taken to a personal level. My first thought was “Why, I’m just a dabbler anyway”. But I guess that answer would be the easy way out.

I dabble in acrylic paint and watercolour, so I can well call myself an artist. But on the other hand, where is the line between art and craft in paintings? Are paintings in the style of the home decor TV shows art? In fiber, I do a few original things. But I also love doing crafty things like knitting, crochet and mindless embroidery. I think I never really defined myself beyond “dabbler in xyz”, replace xyz with my current subject of study. Maybe it’s high time I think about such things a bit.

I don’t really know yet what I’m going to do about that topic, but I think it screams for another sampler, showing the artsy and the crafty sides of me.

The colour scheme is another interesting case. The official me hates it but I think my inner child loves it.

To add a bit of eye candy, here is another progress shot of the pulled thread tulip. If I really do a sampler this will be part of it. Sometimes things just fall into place like this. This ttime, the picture is not clickable, I’ll upload a really big one when it’s finished.

some more work on the pulled thread sample

I have been working on that wild tulip a bit more. This is so against my good intentions for this year – I didn’t want to start anything not TIF related. But at least I will try to finish it so I can put it into the bits an pieces box without bad conscience. This time you can click on the picture for a bigger version.

I finally had some ideas and a piece of fabric for the april TIF, but now April is over. Maybe I’ll do it anyway maybe not. I will need some time to think about the new one, get threads and so on for some time anyway, so maybe next weekend…