More fences

The challenge of day 53 at BL was to watch a video lesson and try it on an image by Kim. I didn't see much point in simply copying what she had done, so I went straight to the second part, testing the recipe and techniques on an image of my own. It wasn't actually a spoken part of the challenge, but the underlying idea seemed to be fences, so I decided to try the techniques on a fence image.

First I found a fence picture related to my previous post about our re-fenced yard last autumn. It's a photo of the fence on the northern side of our yard after some snowfall last December. Tried Kim's techniques here, but not the recipe, since warming up a snowy picture didn't feel like a good idea.

Snowy Fence

Resources:
- framing action Simple by Chain

So I had to dig into the archives again, but after a while I found exactly what I needed: a photo of a fence around a church in Lübeck, photographed in May 2012. The dark fence against the red brick of the church was well suited for the warming and reddening Kim did in her recipe, so I used Kim's recipe almost as such, with minor adjustments, and followed the techniques as well.

Fence in Lübeck

Resources:
- texture Pumpkin Grunge by Kim Klassen

- framing action Simple by Chain

And on to posting the next challenge. I'm determined to get all this stuff posted so I can start working on something new.

Finding Fences

Day 52 challenge at BL was to go and find some fences. The idea was to find some interesting (somehow I think they were meant to be pretty?) fences and photograph them. Well, this made me dig into my archives for something not so much pretty but what actually was precisely what we did last autumn. We went looking for fences.

At the end of October, tired of the little girls always finding their way on the fields and disappearing there to hunt for heaven knows what, we finally decided it had to stop. We had fenced a sizable part of our property back when we moved here in the 1990s, but back then, we had
a) a large dog
b) many dandies
c) unrealistic ideas about the need for space
d) illusions of how much time we'd be able to dedicate to taking care of our yard.

Over the years, we kept repairing the fence here and there, but had already come to realise that we had fenced much more than was either necessary or practical. Parts of the fence stood in the middle of untouched old fields, pushing up fireweed and willow, parts were rotting in the wet ground by the brookside. So we went to the bushes to find the old fence and dig it up and move it so that it could be planted closer to our actual garden.

Not so easily done, the two of us toiled away with it for a good while, but   after a couple of weeks, just before the the ground frost set in, we finished the project. The fence had to be revisited and the posts banged in again in the spring, and we'll have to do the same every spring after the ground frost melts, but there's significantly less fence to take care of now.

Resources used:
- template 27 by myself
- paper Cloudbusting 05 by myself
- font SF Arch Rival by ShyFonts
- font Janda Elegant Handwriting by Kimberly Geswein
- font KG Call Me Maybe by Kimberly Geswein

Remembering

Got to day 51 at BL. Wow, I'm almost half-way through a course that actually finished five months ago. Go me.

This time the challenge was to use two of Kim's textures, Thursday and Yesteryear, and follow the recipe she gave on any image.

As the day I processed these photos marked the fourth anniversary of my father's death, I chose something that made me think of him as my first image. I took the photo when I was staying at father's flat after his death, helping my sister to clear it up. The flat never was a home to me, and only a few years to my father, but the objects there are soo familiar. I remember what meticulous care father took of the little flat, dusting and hoovering and tidying up and watering plants and washing each cup straight after use, and I remember teaching him to use the washing machine after mother died two years previously. There is the sofa and armchairs that used to belong to my grandmother and that father had reupholstered for her sometime in the seventies. There's the painting of the waterfall in our town - like all paintings in my parents' house, it was painted by an acquaintance. The painter was the boyfriend of our that time lodger, and I used to sit in their room and watch him paint and we'd talk about art. Father was very fond of the painting, me much less, but it was an essential part of the living room even in the old house. Here I followed Kim's recipe rather closely.

My Father's Living Room

Resources:
- textures Thursday & Yesteryear by Kim Klassen
- photo frame by Rita @ The Coffee Shop Blog
- background paper Close to Ground 05 by myself

The second photo I tried the recipe on was chosen for similar reasons. It is a shot from my parents' summer cottage window, our second home in my childhood. It belongs to my sister now, and I was visiting the cottage quite probably for the last time in 2010. The July evening was like countless others I've spent there, except for the fact that I've never before been there all alone, not even waiting for anybody to arrive. The view is not what I would have seen as a child - the trees have grown, others have been cut down, the garden swing is a newer one. But the sauna and setting sun and lake are the same, as is the old bathtub grandmother started using as a flowerbed and the whole feel of the place.

Remembering Childhood Summers

Resources:
- textures Thursday & Yesteryear by Kim Klassen
- framing action Simple px by Chain

I decided to try the recipe on a third photo as well. This is a recent one, I took it at the end of August when we were on our usual walk route with the dogs. I mainly wanted to see what the recipe would do to the blue sky of the original. Not bad. The feel is very much the same as in the previous image, although the originals differ quite a lot.

Path to River

Resources:
- textures Thursday & Yesteryear by Kim Klassen
- framing action Simple px by Chain

Cups

Wow. Posting day 46 of Beyond Layers already. This time the challenge was to capture some cups during the week. I didn't use a week for this though - just one day.

First I thought I'd browse my archive, because I know there are some cups there, but then again, why not shoot some? So I grabbed the camera and went to my new small "studio" with a pile of mugs and started shooting. Taking many pictures of course meant I was going to scrapbook the results. Not to make the pictures tiny, I ended up making three layouts with the cups. Silly? Perhaps, but fun.  I was also rather self-sufficient this time, using my own resources, which makes me even more pleased with the results.

The first set was our dog-themed mugs, included are the Dandie Dinmont Terrier ones and some from special occasions: one from The European Winner Show in Helsinki 2006 and two from Helsinki Winner Show 2012.

Resources:
- texture Mute Light 01 by myself
- papers Cloudbusting 03, 04, 05 & 06 by myself
- template 22 by myself
- fonts Love Ya Like A Sister  &  KG Call Me Maybe by Kimberly Geswein

The second layout starts with unique handmade mugs made by a colleague of mine, a teacher of pottery. Then there is our wooden mug-stand, which I absolutely love, with yellow Teema mugs by Arabia. There are also our two Moomin mugs, my Little My and Better Half's Stinky, our plastic mugs for travelling and Glühwein mugs I got as a present from my German students.

Resources:
- papers Mellow Yellow 03 & 04 by myself
- stitches by Gunhild Storeide
- font Lavanderia by James T. Edmondson
- template 23 by myself

The third layout includes out two Russian tea sets and some rarer mugs, such as the hand-painted one in top-left corner.

Resources:
- papers Lemonade Stand 03, 04 & 06 by myself
- font Simply Glamorous by Brittney Murphy
- font Seaside Resort NF by Nick's Fonts
- template 24 by myself

That was a nice bit of work for a rainy day in July, in between typing dog show critiques.  It's only apt that I post it after the most rainy day I've ever experienced... it doesn't often rain here without a single break the whole day through, but it did yesterday.

Will be posting a pile of other challenges today as well, some of which have been sitting on the computer since July.

Our Newest Dandie

On day 37 of Beyond Layers, Kim gave us a recipe to try out. No texturing this time, just some Gaussian blur, light adjustments and cross processing.

Our Newest Dandie

I tried the recipe on this lovely statuette. He is our newest Dandie. He joined us at Crufts in March, where we first admired him at the stand, and then simply had to come back and give him a new home with us.

His expression is quite priceless. "Isn't this a pretty hole and I dug it all by myself!" Must really be thankful that our present pack isn't really that keen on digging. We've had some great diggers, especially Fanny, who always dug herself a hole to lie in when in the garden. Dandies can really be a gardener's happy little helpers… whether the gardener is happy afterwards, depends.

Snow, Birthday & Tricks

We woke up this morning to see the first snow, and it seems it's not going to go away either. Not really surprising in the sense that it's been frosty all the weekend, but still. It's cloudy now, the temperature is at zero °C, and the weather forecasts for the rest of the week promise even colder weather, with daytime temperatures around -4°. It's about time we had the winter tyres changed for my car today, Better Half has had them for a week already. Wouldn't really have wanted the winter to start already, there would have been work to do on our yard, if not exactly in the garden anymore. But luckily we were so hard-working a week ago and prepared most of the garden for winter, and it was only on Saturday that we raked the last leaves.

Our kids Justiina and Marleena turn one year today. Happiest birthday, girls! I guess they enjoy the weather - when they first got out of doors, there was plenty enough of snow around, and they had months of it before they even saw the first glimpses of bare soil, let alone grass. Anyway, they certainly have changed from what they were a year ago. Here's one of the first pictures of the girls: Nuppu, Marleena and Justiina having a meal a year ago.

Credits:
- template by myself (link upcoming)
- texture Sweet Tart by Kim Klassen
- papers from kit Pour Loane by Margote
- font Daniel by Daniel Midgley
- font Channel by Måns Grebäck

But to get to the original topic of this post, on day 30 of Beyond Layers Kim shared a few tips with us. The first one of them was how to create animated gifs. Now I have to state that I'm not a great friend of animated gifs in general. I think there are far too many of them blinking around the net. Sometime ages ago I had also created quite a few of them, so I wasn't too enthusiastic about it to start with. But Kim's got this wonderful way of throwing in something new that you'd never known or realized. Since Better Half uses Photoshop at work and especially when making all the various club magazines in the so-called free time, I've also been using it for years, starting even before we bought Elements 2, but I'm constantly learning new things.  That's exactly how it was this time, too. Watching the video, I was suddenly inspired to dig these two series of photos I took of Misaki and Foxy in March 2011 and make animations of each.

Here's Misaki, placed firmly on snow and observing the road, making her presence known to anybody who happens to be within earshot by howling regularly.

This turned out to be quite funny. As if she climbed up from a hole or something, Foxy appears out of nothing behind Misaki, walks around her, goes down to the path, shakes herself and disappears again.

Credits for both:
- font Mawns' handwriting by Måns Grebäck

The second tip of the day was creating a triptych, which, simple as it was, again taught me two new, quicker techniques for creating storybook layouts. Had to try out both of them, and the beautiful bouquet I got a few months late for my 50th birthday from the trade union was the perfect subject. Well knowing my favourite colour, my workmate had ordered the bouquet only stating "make it orange". Well, orange it really was, and I just loved it. I took the photos on 15 October, and didn't retouch them in any way, only piled them together and added the labels and text.

Belated Birthday Bouquet

Autumn Bouquet

Credits for both:
- brush from Kinetic Splatter Brush Set by Dustin Schmieding
- font Mawns' handwriting by Måns Grebäck

Now off to take the car to the garage and buy some birthday presents for the girls.

Playing with Pink

Am continuing the Beyond Layers Week of Colour. The third colour was pink, and at Better Half's suggestion, I tackled it the same way as yellow, taking photos with the phone, instead of using the archives. So all the pictures were taken yesterday, 18 August. There was no shortage of pink around the house, either. Bedroom wallpaper, mugs, iPad cover, puncher, gardening shoes, bedsheets, dog toys…  Originally, I was rather uncertain about whether to call all these colours pink, but then I had a look at the Wikipedia article called Variations of pink and was satisfied. Yes, they can all be called pink.

Here are the pictures, as three scrapbook layouts. In addition to showing variations of the colour pink, this way I feel I'm also recording our everyday through some objects around the house.

Playing with Pink - Flowers

Used:
- template by myself
- texture Awaken by Kim Klassen
- gradient by Digital Phenom
- brush from Real Brush Strokes Set by Doodle-lee-doo

Playing with Pink - Mixture

Resources:
- template by myself
- textures Aurora & Sweet Tart by Kim Klassen

- gradients by Digital Phenom

- brush from Real Brush Strokes Set by Doodle-lee-doo

Playing with Pink - This & That

Credits:
- template by Scrapsvoyages
- texture Sweet Tart by Kim Klassen

- gradient by Digital Phenom
- brush from Real Brush Strokes Set by Doodle-lee-doo

Looking for Yellow

I'm continuing my week (or so) of colour for Beyond Layers.The first day was green, this one is yellow. On the 13 August, when Better Half had left for work, I was having my second or third cup of tea in the kitchen and staring at the yellow mug in front of me. I then realized there was a multitude of various shades of yellow all around me, and so, although I only have my phone to take photos with at the moment (see previous post), I was inspired to try and do this challenge by photographing yellow instead of digging it up from my archives.

And no, it really was no problem. It took me a little more than half an hour to walk around the house and the garden to get a shocking number of pictures with yellow. There were so many that in the end I was quite happy to see that quite a few of them were out of focus (note to self: keep your distance - mustn't try to get too close to the objects because the phone, without a macro function, will just blur the pics).

I thought it would be fun to collect them into storyboards to show as many as possible. In the end, I managed to squeeze the half-hour walk to three pages, one from the house, two from the garden - one with flowers, the other with… well, other things. Here they are.

A Day of Yellow - Outdoors

A Day of Yellow - Flowers

A Day of Yellow - Indoors

What I did with the photos was to process all of them in Camera Raw before placing them in the storyboard. After that I used a gradient layer (soft light) for each storyboard to even the colours a tad.

Resources used:
- templates by Miya J, myself and Margote
- gradients by Digital Phenom

What fun that was! Then off to tackle the next colour.