Home Again

Welcome all to my first post for the new year of 2013.   I can remember when I was younger thinking the year 2000 was unattainable but here were are 13 years after that and still around.

I spent a month away at the farm on some R and R.  Had been getting over  a chest cold, so it was nice to get some fresh country air.

The lovely birds all came to visit, they love the birdbath. I miss all my lovely coloured friends.

blue wren and honeyeater

King Parrot

Pink and grey Galahs

Double bar finches look like little owls

Then there were the wallabies.    In the morning we had an influx for breakfast, and a mother even bought in her joey.   Shorty the resident wallaby always makes himself at home too.

I laugh every time I see the wallabies sitting on their tails.  They look like old men waiting for someone to have a chat with.  I think they must feel very safe there because they dont run away so quickly when they see us.

Sunrise in the country is always lovely.  I was up early enough to catch this.  The sun was actually bright red but did not come out as such in the photo.

Not many flowers were blooming but I I took this crepe myrtle after an early morning shower.  When I was little we had one of these shrubs in our yard and I thought the flowers were fairy dresses.

 

We were given this plant which we were told was a racehorse tree because it grew so fast.  Over the years it never flowered though, but this year it has so had to get a photo.  It has grown into a large tree, and will be wonderful for shade as its boughs spread.

My stephanotis and the day lillies also put on a show for my visit

The stephanotis is a flower that brides had in their bouquets "in the olden days", and the men wore them in their buttonholes.

The day Lillies were stunning and gave a lovely show

I have yearned to return to the farm since I moved here, but I think this visit has changed my mind.  There is just too much work to keep it up to standard for people our age......and the spiders are still there.  I did my best to do a few chores, and try to do some tidying in the garden, but old age has caught up.  Unfortunately "himself" is a stubborn old mule and wont sell and move to somewhere smaller.  He is 80 this year and thinks he is 50......

Had another scare with my heart and ended up in emergency the night before I was due to leave for "the farm".  My heart was racing at 150bpm so it was pretty scary. The cardiologist said the sinus node in my heart is detiorating and has put me onto new medication.    I am feeling ok, but the extreme heat conditions we are having is making me feel tired.  

My cough has not completely gone either, so am a bit of an old wreck.  One thing I have always found though is there is always someone worse off than yourself.

The poor people who have been affected by the dreadful fires raging in the country are the ones who are really in need.

Sorry folks that this is so long.   Will try to be better this year and post more regularly.

Hope 2013 is a wonderful year for all my friends and new visitors to my blog.

 

Patterns and more patterns

Just thought I would squeeze in this last blog post before I go away.  Spent the day yesterday, (in between playing with the Gimp programme) on housework, so everything is squeaky clean and fresh in readiness for my departure.
 

We are up to week 5 of the Gimp classes, can't believe there is only one week  left.  I wont be able to do the last one until I return, so I will have to fill my time with other things, like perhaps stitching.

Wish I were 50 years younger, I know I would not choose shorthand and typing for a career.  I am sure I could have gone into graphics and textile design. I know one thing for sure I would have mixed with a lot more interesting people than the boring old politicians and solicitors who I worked for in those days.

pattern from using the magic wand on the petals to create the design

random patterns

This week the lessons were based on patterns.   We could download them, or make our own which is what Sharon taught us.   Patterns.....I have patterns coming out of my ears. But have had so much fun.  I am just going to put the before and after photos up. No room to go into the details here.

Here are some more collages of the patterns I have made.

Different patterns by altering the silk ribbon embroidery

Patterns from the original two black and white brushes

This pattern was made from tiny circles which I then "made seamless" It appears to be a tiny checkered pattern.

Patterns from part of the photo of the ranuculas

The Toowoomba Quilters  had their xmas party last week, and each year have a secret santa.  This year, although I was unable to go due to being struck down with the dreaded lurgi, I did make this little bag, which I filled with some goodies for the new owner.  

In return I received a lovely gift of some beautiful stationery embossed with quilt designs, a hand towel and some scented soaps.  No photos though, the camera is packed.

Till the New Year in 2013.

Week 4 Gimp and Christmas wishes

Week 4 of the workshop turned out to be really interesting and a lot of fun once more.   I wish I had been able to do this class when I first became interested in this programme. The pictures in the collage above could be a good way of making zentangles or has this idea already been thought of.

This week we began with the drawing tools, brush, pencil, paintbrush, airbrush, paint bucket, eraser (yessssss!!!!) and Ink.   Some I liked better than others.  The airbrush did not seem to grab me, but maybe in the right situation it could be different.   Looooved the brushes and working with gradients.   Everything is so much more interesting when you are taught correctly.

Sharon Boggon is the brilliant mind behind this course and if anyone is interested go to Sharons page and investigate where you can put your name down for one of her courses.

Now I have learned to make "brushes" properly, and I must add here it does pay to read EVERY word in the instructions.....I am loving them.

When working with the previous lessons, my brain tended to work towards painting pictures, but after this lesson I think I have begun to now lean towards texture design.    There is so much scope .....not that I am young enough to go into that field, but it is fun to do.

So here are more pictures of this week's efforts. Not quite in the right order, but hopefully if you click on the picture it will enlarge.

Now I guess everyone is wondering how I was able to get all the photos together in one area.  Here is a link to a site with the instructions on how to make a collage in the Gimp programme.  There are more choices if you google collage from Gimp as well.   I am happy happy happy!    Next time I will try to frame the collages......little steps.

I am going away next weekend on and extended visit to the wallabies and birds, and will be back in the new year.   I will still be able to receive comments through my phone.

A very merry Christmas and a Happy and prosperous New Year to all my friends and followers for 2013.  See you all in January.

More Gimp lessons

Week 3 has been a real learning curve....we are really getting into the nitty gritty now.   After starting the first part of the lesson I almost threw in the towel, but today have persevered with it.

We are still working through the tools, but have worked a little more with them and added, the colour picker, scissors, scale and sheer tools and the eraser

We also learned how to use some of the filters, artistic, and edge detect.

I am having a lot of fun playing with all the elements of the lessons.  Hope I can remember them.....but there are always the worksheets to go back to.

artistic/cartoon

Edge detect/edge

 Wish we could have as comprehensive workshop in arranging photos with blogger,

Gimp Class -

Warning, long post with pretty pictures coming up.

For those who do not know, Gimp is an open source (free) photo editing programme.   I have had it for some time now, but after an earlier try at learning it, gave up and have mainly  been using it for cropping and scaling photos.  For some time I have wanted to take Sharon's Class.

When I saw the size of the first lesson I thought I would never get through it, but those 41 pages were so full of information and is so interesting it makes me want to just keep going.  By the time I revised lesson 1 and got to lesson 2 I found myself clapping my hands every time I got something right.....even if I had been over and over it 20 times without success.

Now I am loving it and cant wait for Thursdays when the next lesson comes out.

I am very fortunate that when I made a foray into Gimp some time ago, it was set up for me by my big son, who is in the IT business, and subsequently tweeked by my darling Anthony who lives locally and who is amazing when it comes to fixing computers.

For a time before I moved here I belonged to a computer group, and gained a lot of knowledge from those members as well.     So I consider myself fortunate that I am able to have this programme set up without having any problems.

We went through the basic cropping, colouring exercises before getting down to some creative stuff 

 I achieved a couple of results I like with very simple colour manipulation. 

Then we went on with some more really clever stuff. (well to me is is brilliantly clever)

Misty and Nana

Brad, me and Nath

I made two nice photos of me with grandchildren.

Then we went onto cutting and pasting.   Something I learned from this was that I can do it better, but these are the lesson photographs.

Dad on a fishing trip

With the photo above of my Dad I took a pic of one of my reef paintings and was able to copy and past the photo of Dad plus cut out bits around his picture as well.   (Great clapping of hands when I did this)

Mum as a little girl

The little girl is my mother dressed in her finery.  It was an old black and white photo which I was able to use the lasso tool to remove her image (a huge feat with my shaky hands) and impost it onto a piece of my embroidery.  

I did have problems with the photo could not get it to colour and that is when I discovered  what my problems were ....(a) I was not focusing on what I was reading (b) I was not reading every line, but glossing over bits which always turned out to be the important bits. Changed the old photo to RGB and it worked.  (more great clapping of hands for myself)

Then we got to frames and gradients and I really realised the importance of "layers".  We made some notepaper, andhere I made a collage of the four pages I did.

collage of my notepaper pages

The final part of the lesson was a challenge to go through the various elements, take some pictures and work with them and design a quilt.  Not being a quilter my efforts at that were not good, but I worked on the principal of working with shapes.   Although I am convinced that damn lasso is like fly paper ....sticks to the curser and wont go away until you click on something else.

Here my quilt designs......not perfect but I still gave myself lots of clapping of hands. Learned a lot about "layers" with this and also that you must name each layer as you go. 

My earlier efforts with this programme are on my other blog here

Back from the Wedding.

Am back home again, and boy is it good to be back .   I really value the little unit I call home after all the travelling about during the year.

Dont have any good photos of the bride and groom yet, am waiting for DIL to send me a disk of photos from her super dupa  camera.   I am such an amateur when it comes to photography.

The wedding was a lot of fun, and there were quite a few tears of happiness shed for Brent and Claire.  

After the ceremony everyone released their butterfly which came in a little packet.  The children were fascinated with them.

 

I discovered that I am getting a new great grandchild in February, so had to have a photo with the mum and baby.

Havent seen these two grandsons for a while, and they always seem to be getting taller....or am I getting shorter.

No event in my life would be complete without some sort of mishap and this was no exception.   Remember those blingy shoes....well even though I wore them round the house beforehand to get used to them, after 10 minutes they had to come off and that was before I left for the wedding.....my feet were already killing me in them. 

Then when I got dressed, I said to everyone..."gee I must have been fat when I bought this outfit this skirt is pretty big...hope it doesn't fall down"  This of course sent the groom and his mates into hysterics and lots of teasing.  Then after they left daughter and I were putting the finishing touches to our hair and faces, and would you believe it.......the skirt fell down!!!!! the elastic just broke!!!!  I have only worn it once before to the Dunk Island wedding of my eldest son....nothing is made to last these days.

Panic all round but no where could we find a needle and thread so the only option was to tuck the top of the skirt into the top of my stepins and hope to goodness that it held......which it did by the way.....they were pretty tight too!

We did manage to get to the venue before the bride thank goodness.

I am now concentrating on my Gimp course and loving every bit of it.  Just a few problems focusing my brain.    Will have to stop myself from only half reading the lesson and I might get somewhere.   ha ha. 

Can hear the thunder of an impending storm so time to batten down the hatches.

All Glammed Up for Melbourne Cup Day

Just a quick post before I take off for the Wedding.   Tuesday was the day of Australia's famous horse race, The Melbourne Cup.   It is a tradition for lots of MC parties to be held, and the quilt group was no exception.

We had a great Day, lovely friends, yummy  food.   Didn't win any of the sweeps...my nags are still running I think.  Even wore a hat. Sorry the photo is not very clear.   I was told later that my fascinator should have been worn on the other side.   Had to crop the photo because I was standing with my legs askew and it looked very unelegant......good for a laugh though. Wish I had remembered to take my camera.....

Had a lovely surprise on Sunday, Rach and Paul and the boys called in on their way up for her brothers wedding on Saturday.   The boys were so funny, but in my excitement forgot to take photo. Might have to begin wearing my camera round my neck.

Their mother Kim informed me today that the other brother, Tom has been diagnosed with a huge clot in his leg from his calf to above his knee.    Might have to give him a  "nana lecture" about listening to the Doctor's instructions and adhering to them.

Am almost packed.  The only trouble with being organised is that I end up with lots of spare time!

Will be able to study the first Gimp class tomorrow, and maybe get something done before I leave.