project 365 {days 21 – 32}

day 21

day 22

We borrowed my father in law’s car to go to Quebec city, and since the roads were terrible, washed the car afterwards. Ok, I supervised, Paul washed!

day 23

A sunny snow day at the office. I work in a college that used to be a nunnery. Oh the ironies in that statement.

day 24

I have this ginormous aloe plant that I inherited from my colleague and it’s so big it reminds me of an octopus. Students frequently comment on it. All that aloe and now burns in sight. Is it wrong that I just want someone to burn themselves so that I can crack off a piece of aloe and come running to the rescue?

day 25

This is what my car window looks like at night, when I get into my car and it’s covered in ice!

day  26

More car views (window covered in ice) and my rear view mirror thingy…

day 27

Fresh snow, through screen

day 28

So I went to a concert by a Slovenian music trio, Eroika, and they are the Slovenian version of Il Divo. It was fun. Different, but fun.

day 29

Mayla, the cat, waiting for Paul to free up his lap so she could cuddle

day 30

 

Mayla, the cat, waiting for me to stop taking pictures, so she could cuddle!

day 31

View from our bedroom

day 32

More work scenes!

I’m sure you’re just thrilled with my play by play photo narrative, aren’t you?

project 365 - {days 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20}

Ok, so I’ve totally fallen behind in sharing my project 365 photos!!!! Are you ready to be overwhelmed? :P

{day 13}

This is my favourite mug! I love owls, so when I saw this at Pier 1, I wheedled my hubby into buying it, even though we didn’t need it because honestly, a girl can never have too many owl mugs can she???

{day 14}

One of the few perks of these cold Montreal winters is that it allows me to make the most of my love of candles. Cozy living rooms with candles = heart! Add a glass of wine (or 2, or more….) and c’est magnifique!

{day 15}

Some girls’ partners buy them flowers. And to be fair, mine does too, but mostly the flowers in our home are purchased by me.

Once upon a time in my life, my mom told me when I was feeling down, that I should treat myself to flowers. Even if I felt like I couldn’t afford the luxury (I was a starving student at the time), I should take $5 and buy myself a simple bouquet (this of course was in BC, where flowers are WAY cheaper than they are here)! She told me that sometimes just taking time to do the little things, the little treats for yourself, go a long way in brightening your day and making things seem lighter. And she was right.

So my husband can thank her for my little luxuries!  :P  Thanks Mom!

{day 16}

Like I said, I love me the candles!

{day 17}

I don’t know about the rest of you out there, but here in Quebec our Dollarama’s are amazing and sell the most surprising things (which is bad from an ethical consumer perspective but I can’t help myself… I’m working on it). Recently they’ve gotten on the wall decal bandwagon and have started selling $2 wall art. This picture is of one of the wall stickers I purchased for my craft room. I love a bargain, especially a beautiful one!

{day 18}

Adventures in bookbinding: combining origami and bookbinding to create mini books for my etsy shop (this is the trial, which I’m using right now to test out the durability… pretty good so far)!

{day 19}

My art supplies continue to grow. I can’t help myself….

{day 20}

Photo of me and my craft room. Like I said, my art supplies are out of control… and this is only half of my room!

project 365 — days {13, 14, 15, 16}

A sample of my life over the past 4 days….

day {13}

My cat, annoyed with being the star of yet another daily photograph, shoots me the evil eye!

day {14}

Paw prints in the snow. Mayla, the wonder cat see above, hates the snow. In fact, when we let her out, she will go out of her way to avoid touching the snow. And when she enters the house, she spends a few moments shaking said snow off her paws, licking them clean, and then going to her food bowl. It’s her ritual and it’s extremely funny, if a bit annoying! (mostly because she meows to get out only to want back in right away, comes in, and wants to go back out again in 5 minutes).

day {15}

 

I’ve been sick. Which means that I’ve spent a lot of time with my favourite owl mug in hand. Filled with chai tea. I’ve drank so much chai tea lately I actually had to go out and buy more milk just so that I could have more. So sad… :(

day {16}

Again with the sick… and liquids. My world has shrunk down to quality cat time and liquids. So very, very sad… and extremely uninteresting!

sick day — project 365 {12}

This is what my day is going to look like today. Feet up, hot tea (yummy chai!), and maybe some candles for some soothing ambience.

I should be at work. I should be immersed in the hoards of returning college students. I should be. But I’m not because I’ve been nursing the same bloody cold since just after Christmas (and I’m not talking about Orthodox Ukrainian Christmas here). This morning I woke up with a bark that would put a dog to shame.  

So I think it’s time that I officially concede defeat and start popping the meds. Up until now I’ve avoided the cough medicines, the nasal decongestants, & various other drugs. But enough is enough. Cold, you win. I’m done and now it’s time to take a sick day in order to wage a full scale attack!

I’m off to the pharmacy. See you on the other side!

project 365 — days {9, 10, 11}

 

day {9}

day {10}

day {11}

evolution of a photo — shallow depth of field - project 365 {8}

At the moment I’m working on 2 projects: sorting through/editing my huge file of photos and on learning shallow depth of field and thought I’d share one of my experiments with you:

The original photo

Shallow depth of field (S-DOF) focuses in on the item closest to the camera and leaves the background soft and blurry. You can achieve this through setting your aperture opening to a higher setting, which causes the shutter to open and close quickly. I’m not sure, but I also believe it means that less light gets into the frame (which might explain why my normally blue wall looks cream in these photos!).

You can see (at the very front, bottom) the stand that the Buddha head was on, so the first thing I needed to do was crop the image.

First edit: Cropping. I tried to keep the Rule of Thirds in mind when taking the photo, so I didn’t have a lot of room to crop the photo without losing the intended placement of the objects.

Next up, softening the colours to enhance the soft dreamy look I was trying to get:

Obviously this is probably the most pronounced alteration to the photo and changes the photo’s mood rather drastically. Part of me is still torn between the vibrant colours and the soft gold glow.

But soft glow won out:

This is a minor change but I added a bit of fill light to give it a softer feel

And then, finally:

Altering the color temperature in order to regain the blue backdrop!

Ok, it wasn’t really only for the blue backdrop! I’m working on trying to recreate that 70s washed out dreamy photo look that I see so often.

What do you think? Any suggestions? Alterations?

35 by 35 - project 365 {7}

So today I turn 34! I can hardly believe it. Honestly. How the hell did that happen?
I remember, a long time ago my mom saying at the ripe old age of 40, that she still felt like a 17 year old. And it was a life altering moment for me to realize that my mom felt so young and vulnerable despite her “old age!”
As I approach my mid 30s (cause at 34 I can still round down!), I find myself thinking about this moment a lot because on some level I still feel much younger than my years (not that I’m particularly old, unless you ask someone who is quite young!).  I might not feel 17 anymore. But 26, sure. Hell, let’s be honest, some days I still feel 7!
The last years of my life have been rich and full of blessings. They’ve also been hard and full of transition. I grew apart from one of my best friends, I got married, I became a quasi “mother” for my baby brother, started building a crafty business, amongst many other things..
While I’ve accomplished so many things that I set out to do in my life, there are still many more things that I hope to do in the near future. With that in mind, I’ve given myself a new goal:

35 things to do before my 35th birthday (Jan 12, 2012)

1. Complete the One Little Word project
2. Learn how to use Photoshop Elements
3. Get better at shallow Depth of Field photography
4. Sort through my digital photos & edit/store them better (at least those up to Jan 2011)
5. Learn to bake bread
6. Make my own incense
7. Learn 5 new origami folds for my ornaments
8. Learn how to make 3 new origami card products
9. Expand my etsy shop
10. Build a crafty partnership with a friend
11. Watch my middle brother get married
12. Travel to Sweden to visit with my lovely exchange student sister, Camilla (because it’s LONG overdue that I visit her)
13. Nurture creativity in my artsy-crafty friends (this is sort of unmeasurable, I know, but I mean just to keep encouraging them and bolstering by being attentive and support of their creative leaps of faith).
14. Get back into shape (work on knee injury and return to Nia or Yoga)
15. Make my own soap for 2012 (meaning make enough, cure it, and have enough of it ready for 2012)
16. Work on art journaling (try to create 1 art journal page/week)
17. Make my own organic vanilla extract from organic vanilla beans and organic vodka
18. Discover 12 new musicians I love (1 a month?)—I’m open to suggestions here people!
19. Read 12 non post colonial literary novels! No pulp. Nothing about India. (Ok, I can read those too, but they are above and beyond the 12 non po-co novels)
20. Read the news at least once a week. It’s shameful that I don’t and I can’t let my irritation of current affairs continue to be an excuse for wilful ignorance!
21. Visit the Montreal art museums as least 3 times in the upcoming year
22. See at least 5 live shows (small, big, music, comedy, theatre… doesn’t matter)
23. Drag my butt out to at least 1 Moth inspired Montreal storytelling slam!
24. Go on 1 shopping trip to the states for fabric. Yes, you read that right!
25. Buy & learn a new tarot deck
26. Finish our wedding scrapbook
27. Learn how to make my own veggie Vietnamese spring rolls and peanut sauce
28. List all the table linens Viv and I made in my etsy shop
29. Do something special to celebrate 5 years with my partner
30. Read Anna Karenina
31. Learn to cook 3 Indian & 3 2 Ethiopian dishes: 1=Ethiopian Spicy Tomato Lentil Stew
32. Finish painting my very first large painting/canvas
33. Learn how to paint with a palette knife
34. Go cross country skiing
35. Remember to make more time for my husband, my marriage, and enjoying the every day moments of our life together

project 365 {6}

Ok, so I’m thinking that you’re all going to get sick of my kazillion photos, every day!  And on top of which, I don’t always have time to post every day. So I think that I might just do a weekly recap? What do you think?

I’m currently revamping my craft room at the moment (prompted by an Ikea trip with a friend on Sat). I’m excited, but a little overwhelmed by the mess I created to build my new desk space.

Oh, and I heard this recently on my iPhone during my daily commute and just had to share. Seriously. I. LOVE. THIS. SONG!

Currently on my iPhone, making my morning commute brighter!

project 365 {5}

From my office. I love this photo. It’s so calm! Students always notice it.

project 365 {4}

Always one to take on way too many projects at once (will I ever learn?), I signed up for Ali Edwards’ One Little Word project for the year.

The idea behind it is to pick one word as your “theme” for the year. Forget new year’s resolutions. This is about making one word your mantra for the year in order to bring that word/idea/theme into your world for that year.

I love the idea and thought that it seemed like a manageable form of scrapbooking/documenting a goal for 2011.

The above picture is my intro picture for the album!

project 365 {3}

 

cherry blossom lights

one of the joys of winter: snow

ok, today I have 2 pictures because I took 2 today and I liked them equally!

project 365 days in photos {1}

Ok, so I’ve always been intrigued but daunted by the idea of 365 days of photos. I mean, it’s awesome but huge. Right?

But I think I’m going to give it a go. I might not get around to posting them all. Hell, I might not take them all (and that’s ok, I give myself permission to miss days – hell I’m already missing 4 days!) but I’m going to try to use my new Instagram ap to document pieces of my day

• here are my instax photos
• this is the project 365 photo log

So bear with me, as I’m sure that the initial flurry of photo taking might be a bit overwhelming at times!

Without further ado, the view from my office window today:

I’m lucky, I have a pretty sweet view out my window. I just need to remember to look outside and appreciate it a little more often!

cabin adventures, scrapbooked

It’s been a while since I’ve scrapbooked, but lately, I’ve had the urge to create some new pages. Normally I try to use photos with people in them, but I loved this nature shots that I just had to create a page using them! I kept things simple because I didn’t want to distract from the actual photos.

I wanted to combine my current love of paint, so you’ll see that I’ve added some acrylic paint to both pages.  Originally I wanted to create  a purple and green page with circles, but it just didn’t work out so I had to start a new page and strategically save my pics by adding flowers (from where there was glue leftover from the circles).

I’m happy with the simplicity of the first page (Cabin Views) but am still mixed about the 2nd page. I purposely crumpled the background, but as always when I attempt shabby chic, I always end up feeling like it doesn’t work for me….but I’m trying!

playing with my iPhone

Can I just mention, for a moment please, how much I love my new iPhone? Seriously. And the Hipstamatic Ap? ROCKS!!! Wanna see? I know you do!


Even the most dull traffic jam becomes fun and interesting with my new phone!
Who knew that traffic could be so artsy?
















Europe? No. Ste-Anne de Bellevue!


But doesn’t it look impressive? Yeah, I thought you’d agree!


All of a sudden, even the simplest of breakfast adventures turns into photography fun!

  
Need more proof? Happy to oblige! See ho my early morning west island breakfast became an artsy adventure?

photography: white balance

The other day I was playing with my camera, adjusting the white balance feature and was amused by how different a simple feature could make my picture appear:

The biggest irony of all? Not one of these photos actually captures the real colour of my walls!

Edit: For the curious, the colour is more like this: