Innsbruck, Austria

I'm still in California, but I enjoyed working with this photo from Innsbruck, Austria this last week.

We were given a choice of a few photos to work from for our latest Photoshop assignment. The original I chose is shown here: http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/181026. I didn't alter this photo much at all. Mostly, I only enhanced what was already there. I selected the foreground, midground, and background separately so I could adjust the levels of each separately. And I changed the bright green shirt in the bottom corner to a dull yellow to better fit the color scheme in the rest of the scene.

Old Things are New Again & Dorothy’s New Dress

Our last Photoshop project required less imagination, but taught us just how powerful adjusting the tonal range and color balance can be. We needed to start with an old photo scanned into digital format. I picked one from 1967 of my husband and his family picnicking at the Hood Canal in Washington State.


The original had a lot of scratches and spots which I was able to remove digitally. For our final project we needed to remove an object, and change the color of an object. The two boats on the left are now gone, and my mother-in-law now has a new digital dress and sweater combo. I will keep a version without the boat removal and dress change for the family album.

Loose Plans for a Bed Quilt

At the CQFA meeting last weekend, we had a time scheduled to work on individual projects. A few years ago, I started a bed quilt with a very loose plan sketched out on the computer, and had made about 60 blocks. I grabbed it to work on at the meeting, since I didn’t have any newer projects in progress. I made a handful of blocks on Saturday, and made another few today. It’s a great project to play with color and value, and doesn’t require any planning. I plan to get out my bag of green and orange strips and small scraps occasionally and make a few more squares. After I have made about a hundred more, I will see how I can fit them together. I figure in about 20 years, maybe I will have a quilt to show.

I also got the sleeve put on my “Whisper Challenge” quilt today, and now I have a bright new quilt hanging above my sewing machine. Still can’t show the full quilt yet for a few months. Maybe if I get ambitious, I will make a hanging slat which is the right size.

Tea with a Chipmunk

Would you believe that my daughter is only about six inches tall? Or that a buffalo and a chipmunk followed us home from Yellowstone this summer to have tea with her in the Hayward hills? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. I did however have fun playing with scale in my latest Photoshop assignment. And Camilla had fun helping me act out the scene which I had imagined.