My Place and Yours: Through The Front Door

This week's theme for My Place and Yours over at Meet Me At Mike's is 'Through The Front Door', set by Femme de Montmartre. The brief is "What is it you see when you enter your home? And how do you feel? Whatever happens when you walk through your front door, we want to know about it!"

The first thing I should mention is that we rarely use our front door, everyone comes and goes through the back door, so it's always a bit novel to come in my own front door! I do love it though, it sums up what attracted us to the house in the first place - except better because we've done it up since then.



Our house was built in the late '40s most likely, and was moved onto the section in the late '80s - you can see the line in the floor boards where it was cut in half. The wood is all native rimu, essentially untouched except for being stained/varnished slightly darker, which we removed. I think in decorating terms it would benefit from being painted white as it's very dark altogether, but I can't face it, especially considering it's escaped that fate for all these years! We stripped the floor boards and polyurethaned them all ourselves, I highly, highly recommend NEVER doing that, get a professional in to do it!

The other view you get when you come in the door is our sideboard of knicknacks. I think they pretty much sum up our interests in total - except for books. And Hazel. And the cat maybe. But otherwise it's all there! I've tagged it over at Flickr if anyone's interested in a rundown of what all that crap is.

Two birds with one stone

Though I can assure you that there is no way I could hit one bird with a stone, let alone two, because I throw like a girl.

Fabrics, a flash test and hopefully some recommendations from readers

I bought some fabrics yesterday at my favourite fabric store Global Fabrics as they were having a sale on knits. I know, any excuse to get in there! They have so many beautiful things at the moment, just gorgeous. I was in a trance the whole time, wandering around thinking "oh I could make something with this! And this! And ohhhhh, that's amazing! And oh! look at this, I could make something from this" with visions of fabulous garments floating in front of my inner eye. I ended up with the ones in the pictures below. The right-hand fabric is a cotton voile which will be a floaty summer top. The other three are knits destined to be tops and the orange one will be a dress. I'm going to make Hazel a dress from the kitty fabric and she faithfully (and rather desperately) promised me that she'd wear the dress if I made one. There should be enough for a dress for her and a tshirt for me.

Now the second part of this post is a small test of the flash diffuser idea from the previous post. I discovered that although my SLR is a Canon, the integrated flash isn't quite like the one in the tutorial and doesn't have the long metal arms. I managed to get the paper attached anyways. Robyn, I think that you could do this with a point-and-shoot too, I had a quick try with mine and just taped a bit of paper below the flash. I think you'd need to do a lot of fiddling with the position of the paper but once you'd sorted that it should work the same. Anyways, here are the results:

No flash, light coming in from the window to the left. Not bad, but a few shadows here and there.


Full flash. Again, not bad but you can see it's burnt out the shadows at the bottom of the orange fabric.


Bounced flash. Pretty good - more even lighting than no flash, but it hasn't burnt out anything. I had to fiddle with the angle of the paper a bit, the first time I had it angled up too high and there was a dark patch in the middle of the photo.


Third part - I need recommendations for a pattern to make a dress for Hazel from the dot/cat knit fabric. Just something really simple with a one-piece A-line body and short sleeves. I have in mind something maybe with a gathered neck and gathered puff sleeves. Nothing too frou-frou because that fabric is all about simplicity I think! Does anyone know a good tutorial or purchased pattern they can recommend?

Taking photos indoors

I came across this great tutorial on bouncing the built-in flash of an SLR off the ceiling instead of having it burn out the object you are photographing. I got there via Sew I Do and she's got some good examples of how useful it's going to be for photographing things inside on those (sadly frequent) rainy Auckland days! I don't like the lighting I get outside on the deck which has a plastic cover, the camera doesn't seem to cope with it well and it often has an odd colour cast. If I could combine this technique with natural light from a window it could be a real winner!

Spam spam spam spam...

Is spamming not the most inherently stupid way of trying to sell your product? Or is it just the ones I notice doing it aren't very clever? I'm wondering this because my waterproof sheet tutorial keeps getting spammed by people selling mattresses or latex covers for mattresses. It's a bit annoying on one level because I have to go in and delete them; but on the other hand it's pretty funny. Firstly it's funny because obviously there are people whose job it is to go around finding blogs who have a post that might relate to mattresses so they can spam them. And not only do they spam me, but they pay me compliments when they do it! Then it's funny because they aren't targeting their market very well - people looking for free tutorials on making a waterproof sheet aren't likely to be wanting to buy one. And finally it's funny because my stats don't really suggest to me that I'm worth spamming. I mean really spammer people, do you want me to show you the number of hits I get a day? Was it really worth the 5 minutes you took to leave the comment and type in the verification word?

I had a really odd comment last month from a woman looking to exchange photos for 'friendship' and then discovered it was as a result of leaving a comment on another blog and all her commenters had been spammed with the same comment on their own blogs. That made it a LOT less creepy for sure, and again, rather funny. I mean really, what's the point of sending someone a comment like that when you've found them on a craft blog? They're likely to be a) a woman and b) not on the internet looking for love. Well ok, maybe crafty love but that's not what this lady was offering I imagine!

I can see sending out a million emails to random addresses in the hopes that 3 will respond, that's not a lot of effort for not a lot of return. But this personalised spamming seems to involve moderate effort for no return at all - not a very good business model!

Scrappy felt

Felt is my life at the moment, but it's not too bad having to look at such beautiful colours.



My favourite is the orange, especially when paired with pink.

My Place and Yours: Secret Weapon

This week's theme over at Meet Me At Mike's, courtesy of My Bricole, is 'Your Secret Weapon'. Oooo tricky! I thought long and hard about this, as the description specified it should something that you know you can go to in a pinch and it will never let you down. I thought about chocolate, but sometimes it doesn't do the trick. I thought about Mat and Hazel and other people in my life and I thought that perhaps it was unfair to put that kind of label on them because so often being let down by people is more about you than them. I thought about makeup, but that definitely lets me down sometimes! Then I remembered my red merino dress. That never lets me down, it always makes me feel good when I wear it, and it's the perfect shade of red.



It's by a NZ outfit called Stitch Ministry and if that name isn't perfect then I don't know what is! The story of my dress is this: One day I was down in Wellington visiting my Aunt and I was browsing through a Saturday magazine from the Dominion Post. I came across an ad for Stitch Ministry and the dress . I fell in love. I memorised the name and checked it out online when I got home, pretty sure that I couldn't afford it. But as luck would have it, it was on sale and they had one in my size! I felt it was destined to be, so I bought it online along with another top. An hour later I had a call from a very nice girl at the shop saying that unfortunately their website was playing up and they didn't have the red in that size, perhaps I'd like it in black instead? I said no, the red was the object of my desire. She said they'd refund the money and get the top in the post asap. So I was disappointed, but as a pessimist I sort of expect these things in life! A couple days later the package lands on my doorstep and it feels a little heavy (you know where this is going of course) and inside, much to my astonishment, was the dress! They had it after all. So it really WAS meant to be, and I love my dress all the more for it.

ETA: Deb asked for a photo of me in said dress - the only one I could find is this very blurry self-portrait from just over a year ago. Check the sassy hand-on-hip pose!

Distracted

Real life has intervened in the form of a health crisis in the extended family, so blogging is going to take a bit of a back seat for a few days - mostly because I'm going to be a single parent while Mat heads south to be with family for awhile. This might actually mean I've got more time in the evenings though which might mean more projects completed! That's balanced by the problem of some present recipients reading this blog and hence the projects have to stay secret. Pity you can't block some people's ISPs temporarily! ;)