Orphans

It’s that time of year again to turn the page. Out with the old, in with the new.

I started my cleaning out early this year. In fact, I started on Christmas morning. I discovered mouse droppings in the corner of the pantry behind a cooler. And I didn’t dare stop until I made sure he had not eaten any of our food!

The beginning of October we heard some scratching in the wall and discovered mice had sneaked into our attic. It was just five days before we were to leave on a three week vacation. We managed to catch five before we left and enlisted our neighbor for mouse patrol while we were gone. And..... by the time he finished the grand total was 18. Creeps me out.

Back to purging. I have a packrat side of me, then I have a ‘throw it out quick before you can think’ side also. I spent nearly 2 full days on the bedroom. I have a desk in there that’s just used as a catchall so it was piled quite high. (and even higher during the holidays.) every time it’s cleaned I’m tempted to move my laptop/external monitor set up in there. Where I have it now, in the dining room is much more cheery and bright and I can look out the windows and watch the world go by. It would be nice however to get my dining room table back. Although we would seldom eat on it. I would really like to paint that table and chairs and recover the chairs. Right now that seems a daunting task.
OK, back to purging again.

I have a lot of nice cleaned off spaces in the house now. I also have several boxes of orphans, those things that don’t seem to have a home.  You’re not sure where to put them, store them or display them. And you’re not ready to throw them away. Perhaps today will be their day to find a home.

A daily site overhead.

Taken in Hipstamatic. I finally updated my app and now I need to sit down and figure out all the changes. While transferring from my phone I discovered an annoying thing. Hipstamatic names images files crazy. This one is JXIM6881 and the numbers are totally random so they are not in numerical order at all on my computer. If I arrange by time created that doesn't totally jive either. I'm determined to find a solution. To be continued.......

On A Roll

I've been on a roll lately. I've gotten so much done around the house it's crazy.

What's got me totally confused is that I got off my hormones 6 weeks ago and frankly I haven't felt this good in a long time. I did go through a couple weeks of insomnia and extra hot flashes but this past week I feel like a million bucks. I'm supposed to get a hormone implant next week and I'm thinking about cancelling it......

This is one of my latest projects. An old dresser I use for storing treasures in the 'art' room. (My grand daughter calls it the girl's room, no boys allowed.) It's about 40 years old and fell out of the back of the pickup during one move. The top piece split in two and it has road rash on a top corner. (So it stays covered) You'll have to imagine it as a totally stained finish for the 'before' photo.

I've done some 'real' chalk paint before and it's just quite a hassle. When I found out that Rustoleum made a clear matte finish coat that was a spray my ears perked up. Then I saw they had spray chalk paint too. I only bought the top coat that day. (I'm in heaven! Look out furniture in my house!)

We just happened to have a day with no wind (miracle). I took the drawers outside, contents and all, covered them with a cardboard and towels and sprayed away. I had this finished in no time and it dried fast. I did go on a hunt for new pulls for the bottom 3 drawers and viola! Super fast update.  I think the grey looks a touch dark in the photo than in real life.

These are the products I used. Hobby Lobby had the Krylon and HomeDepot the Rustoleum. (Although Rustoleum does make the colored chalk spray I was at Hobbly Lobby when the idea hit me.)

Since I'm still on my organizing binge, these drawers are the current target. One down, four to go. One drawer is full of beading supplies. I have tons of seed beads. Wish I could figure out something fun and 'current' to do with them. Most have sewing stuff that's never used so it'll get packed and moved out to make room for currently used goodies.

I have an old sofa table that I just happened to leave a pumpkin sitting on too long this winter. It ate the finish. AUUUUGH! Oh well, I'll be painting the top of that at least but perhaps the whole thing. It's going to be hard to decide on a color for it. Do I dare do turquoise?

Mobile Art Monday No.52

The first edit for 2017...
I've spent a whole week cleaning out my 'studio'. Completely rearranged. Cleaned off shelves. Took stuff off walls. Hauled out three bags of trash. You can even see the 'whole' floor. It's so nice I don't want to mess it up. My still life shooting area is twice as big and I now have a wall to shoot against instead of a window. One big thing remaining is that I'd love to pull out the carpet and put down vinyl wood plank. But I don't need another project right now. My brain is fried. I was just thinking about how many decisions I have made in the past week. Everything I picked up had to go somewhere. I was making decisions every few seconds. No wonder that was so tiring. And the past couple days I've been culling photos from last month. After awhile you just say think "oh heck, keep 'em all." But after reclaiming space in the 'studio' I intend to reclaim space on my computer too. More about that later.
One thing I did while cleaning was take photos of all my dried weeds I've been collecting so I could throw most of them away. (That took a few hours.)
This is the first in my 'weeds series'.

I began layering and in Superimpose. The only downside to this app is you must merge the top layer into the bottom before adding any more. 

The upside of this app is that you can save (upload) your top layer if you've masked away the background and then 'download' it to reuse it again and again. Which is what I did with the hydrangea flowers.

 Next I opened Stackables to add one of my formulas.

 Then in iColorama, under Sketch, I used the image before texturing to get this line drawing.

I opened the two images in Procreate to blend the sketch over the textured image. The blend mode was set to multiply and slightly skewed for effect. I usually don't use procreate for simple 2 layer blending but I wanted to try some hand drawing on it. I wasn't impressed with anything I tried this time.

At this point I opened it in Retouch to eliminate a couple stems that I should have taken care of earlier, resulting in the finished piece.

Hope you're having a great Mobile Art Monday!

Taste Crisis

I feel like I'm in the middle of a 'taste' crisis. I browse the digital scrapbook stores, seeing varying styles and none really seem to appeal at the moment. Not enough to buy any which is good for my pocket book for awhile. 

I look at my friends art, totally enamored with some yet not knowing how to begin to do something similar.

I'm feeling very unsettled. Perhaps I should be out working in the garden...

Today I cleaned the desktop of my iMac. I've always created a folder on the desktop titled "Desk cleaned (date)". My current folder was titled Feb 2016. Inside it was various files plus a folder titled Desk Sept. Inside that was another titled On My Desk July. Inside that was another for May 2015. Besides all these folders a ton of files or photos were randomly scattered throughout. 

They haven't all disappeared but I threw a ton of stuff in the trash and backed up others. Right now those folders are still there but I think I'll put them all in one called To Put Away and save that for another day.  (This is to say nothing about the stuff stacked up in my Downloads folder.) Can anyone relate?

I am proud to say that as I cleaned my current desktop off, nothing was added to that folder.

It was nice to look back at some old work with new eyes, even back to 2009 (not sure why some of those things were there.) And I sure looked a lot younger 5 years ago. 

This was a try out of Picsart on my iPad.

It will add layers but not show them for editing after the effect is applied. Sort of similar to iColorama. I'll be exploring it more.

Finding Space

I must be weird. I'm getting a thrill out of cleaning and throwing out. What probably makes it more thrilling than normal is that I'm gaining valuable space for what is important to me. My photography and still life set ups. 

For the second time this year I'm 'reorganizing' my home studio (formerly sewing room). I'm reclaiming the closet. The fabric and other stuff is moving out. The problem was where to put it. 

The last time I did a major reorganization was a year and a half ago and that time half the fabric and sewing stuff got moved to the other spare bedroom so there is no more room there. The only other closet available was the master. As I looked around at what was piled on the selves I got real excited. It didn't take long and there was a huge trash bag full of things that I couldn't part with earlier. Another huge bag is currently in the car waiting for drop off at Good Will.

I have more empty space on the opposite wall now too. Yippee!

Don't you think I need it? That tiny corner on the right is my 'shooting space' Only side light unless I do some finagling. And I want to reclaim the north window light covered by my backdrops.

All books are going in the closet which has only one tiny rod. I had all built in shelves for fabric when we moved in. (I'd love to move the sewing cabinet to the basement.)

Don't be in a big hurry to see the after. My afters seem to take quite awhile because of creative interruptions before they're finished.

My other finds this week include awesome wildflowers. We've not received this much rain in decades and species are showing up that I've never seen and they are showing up in massive quantities. Here's just one sample. Bee balm.

Joining Kim for Friday Finds!

And Lisa for Life Thru the Lens!

UFOs

How about something pretty before I start on this?

Lightly edited in Lightroom. (lightened the shadows) Taken with iPhone5 HDR setting. 
I decided to clean out the notes on my phone today. (I also need to clean out my email and my closet.) the only reason I even started to do this was because the microphone all of a sudden was greyed out so I couldn't speak my notes in. (If you haven't tried this it's soooo awesome, speak your texts and anything else that has keyboard access. hmmm I need to see if this works on Instagram)
I found notes from 2009.  I guess that's when I got my first iPhone. I found a To Do list for August 20, 2009 and guess what? It may as well be today's date. 

TO DO

Phone case

Cream (let's just say this is hormone cream)

Bug spray. House. Yard 

Fertilizer Sutherlands  

Fertilize flowers  

Prime and touch up paint at work

Guess I won't delete this, just add it to the most current To Do list. 

Speaking of notes...

Early last year I had this bright idea. I went around to every room in the house and made a list of UFOs for each room on sticky notes and stuck them to the door frames. I was surprised that I had only 4-5 in each room. What is a UFO you ask? Why, an UnFinishedObject. I first learned about these in my quilting days. A project would get started and then end up in a box to be completed later, sometimes by the next generation. I acquired a lot of these over the years. I seldom sew these days but they are all labeled and stored in the closet.

(Snapseed edit)

Back to the sticky notes.

I could swear I took a photo of them because I planned on a blog post, but I've searched Lightroom to no avail. Also thought I had saved them, (I'm sure I did, but only found one still stuck to a large framed painting of poppies leaning behind a chair in the bedroom. The good news for the bedroom is that only one thing on the list gets carried over to this year. (the painting, but I've added painting the frame to the list.)

(Snapseed edit)

So I've redone my list of UFOs and mostly what's on the list is redoing wall decor and some new shutters or blinds.

I seem to have a hard time staying focused as the years go by. So I'll just add another class to my list to take in July. What is wrong with me?!?!?!?

Can I have the month off?

Rabbit Trails

This morning I sit down at my computer. I am feeling rather brain fuzzy. And I remember that I was going to check out the iPad app called Evernote. 

Remembering that Matt Kloskowski had written an article on his blog about Evernote, I start searching through my Safari bookmarks. 

I decide I have too many and start making folders and moving things around. Time passes and I remember what I was doing, Evernote. Well I never did find Matt's blog. 

By now my coffee needs reheating so I go to the kitchen. 

I decided that I should write a blog post called rabbit trails, use blogger on the iPad and dictate. So far so good. I have made many corrections though. 

Getting back to the bookmarks. It seems what I'm most interested in is at the top of the list. Right now that's iPhoneography. One of my favorite blogs is iartchronicles.com. 

Of course I have to go check it out. I noticed in her tweets that Vintage Scene HD for iPad is now free. Have to get it. Excuse me while I change pages on my iPad. Ok. 

It's downloading. I'm back. 

Let's search for Matt's blog. Well..... that would have been faster if I had spelled his name right! Here's his blog link. Now to go get the app. Maybe I will actually get organized this way. I just have to believe there is hope. 

I guess some Mondays are just like this.

Here is my first edit with Vintage Scene HD. Now to get back to downloading that Evernote App. 

I need to reheat my coffee again for the 5th time. 

So how is your morning going?

We took a fast trip to the Texas Hillcountry to see wildflowers this weekend. Those are bluebonnets. A rather scraggly patch of them I might add.