Fiber Fool

Wow, what a topic! Of course it is in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, but some of my very favorite things are green and green is one of my favorite colors. I have no shortage of green handknits or yarns. And I’ve never been one to shy away from veggies and some of my absolute favorites are green - broccoli, spinach, kale, asparagus, edamame and on and on. Not to mention one of the most trying things for me about living in Colorado is the lack of green and prevalence of brown. Since I grew up in moist and humid Minnesota I’m accustomed to lush green woods and fields of various crops to surround me all summer long. So I present to you a pictorial look at just a small sampling of 10 favorite green things.

1. Trees in Background, 2. Project Spectrum May Wallpaper, 3. Eggplant - Black Beauty Seedlings, 4. Suzie Pro Spinning Wheel, 5. DSC_0792wtmk.jpg, 6. Edamame with Salt, 7. Balance Ball, 8. Peacock Feathers, 9. Ferns At The Historical Terrace Mill

Despite having made some on Saturday, I made more of these delicious whole grain chai cake donuts on Wednesday. It made it feel more like a holiday/weekend even though it was just one day and DH was still up to his eyeballs in thesis editing. It also allowed me to set aside the iPhone for photography and take real photos with the dSLR (aka the “big gun”).

Next week, when more people are back to reading blogs I’ll share my recipe for these doughnuts. In the meantime, if you don’t care about them being whole grain, you can pick yourself up a copy of Lara Ferroni’s Doughnuts book and have them this weekend.

1. Some sequence geekery with chevrons!, 2. Whole grain, homemade, baked chai cake donuts! You can’t even tell they are sort of good for you :-), 3. A great breakfast for a hot Saturday morning - hard boiled eggs, Greek yoghurt, fruit salad (left over from Drew’s defense which he passed and I’m sure it was the fruit salad that did it, LOL!), and whole grain chai cake donuts! Delish!, 4. Still have hemming and top stitching to do. Not sure on skirt length yet…, 5. Fruit salad, Greek yoghurt and a skirt rub off project!, 6. My tab was less than my savings! Yay for the one day 60% off notions wall plus a 15% off total purchase coupon!!!, 7. Swapping out books! It was my first visit since the grand reopening after the remodel project. I need a map!, 8. Fish tacos! Yum!, 9. Iced latte!

If you’re on Instagram, I’m fiberfool over there, or if you aren’t on Instagram you can find my photos at instagrid.me/fiberfool.

What did you do this weekend? Anything fun? Eat anything yummy?

As scary as I felt the High Park Fire was in its first days and its vicinity to town, I cannot even fathom what residents of Colorado Springs and perhaps even Boulder feel like. And while my removal of smoke was in post-processing and unfortunately for our 86+ degree house not in real life I’m proud of my abilities to do so. And, well, sometimes you just have to grab hold of the little things to keep yourself afloat.

I have to say I am thoroughly pleased with my current temp assignment that I’ve been on since March. I love my co-workers. It is awesome to work “in the country” in the city where even meeting people on the road to work results in the country steering wheel wave! While I have occassionally crabby people taking out their frustrations on me for no purpose, I help people. It was no hardship to hear that my stay here was being extended.

After two particularly rough weeks it was a thrill to push the limits of my job description and do a photoshoot for them. They were in need of a high resolution image that could be blown up onto a banner to go in our new museum opening this fall. They borrowed a slighly higher resolution, but more or less the same camera as mine, from the museum and a coworker lined up her grandson and a friend of his to be the models and the five of us headed out to one of the natural areas in the foothills.

You have to love a job that has you hiking for an hour on Monday morning!

Of course when you are on a deadline and have extra people lined up you cannot plan for perfect shooting conditions. Sure enough, Monday morning dawned and things looked pretty promising, then the winds shited and smoke literally rolled into the foothills and into town by 6:30am. We were to shoot at 9am. Driving to the natural area you could hardly see town it was so covered in smoke! It wasn’t nearly as dramatic looking on our way back into town so I didn’t end up taking a picture.

While we tried our best to stick to relatively close backgrounds to keep smoke impact to a minimum, the shot really kind of needed the vista and variety of terrain to have a visual impact. So we shot a ton of both options. Then during down time at work I did some research on reducing haze in post-processing and gave it a shot. I think I suceeded.

What was even better in my mind is that I did all post-processing in Lightroom! I always do rudimentary, all over adjustments in Lightroom before I send the images to Photoshop as Lightroom edits are non-destructive. But I’ve never really gotten much into spot editing. Now, if any of these are chosen for the banner I’ll certainly go do some more detailed work in Photoshop. But I’m quite pleased with my results.

The basic idea was to reduce saturation and luminosity of blues in the image, up localized contrast (via clarity) and in general improve the dynamic range of the image by manipulating the histogram. Because messing with the blues reduced the haze so well I then went back in with localized edits and added blue back into the sky as well as darkened and boosted contrast further in the distant objects. There are a lot of tutorials out there for making these sorts of edits in whatever software you prefer, just Google it or check YouTube.

I can’t wait to hear which image they choose and I’m even more excited to see my photo in large scale out in public! Wowser!

Wow, what a week it has been. I’m not sure if it is the heat or the smoke or the solstice or what, but people have been extremely rude! One day this week I had been called almost every bad name you can think of, all before 10:30am! Yesterday afternoon I had a woman use the F-bomb no less than 12 times in a 5 minute span, along with many other instances of equally offensive language. Unlike most callers, she did realize she was rude and aplogized before she slammed down the phone. But dang, I am ready for this week to be over. In none of those cases was I in a position to do anything about what they were cussing at me for. *sigh*

So, onto happier things - I did go on the hiking program last Saturday and it was fantastic! Soapstone Prairie is an Natural Area owned by the City of Fort Collins which shares borders with Larimer County’s Red Mountain Open Space and Cheyenne’s Big Hole Open Space. It is located roughly 30 miles north of Fort Collins. Soapstone contains the Lindenmeier archeological site famous for its Folsom culture campsite. What was unique about this particular program at Soapstone was that we were allowed to wander off the trail at points to get a closer look at some of the homesteads on the property.

The Master Naturalist volunteer who lead our group, Brian Carroll, was a great storyteller and very knowledgeable about homesteading practices of the time (late 1800’s and early 1900’s) in this area. He and one of the NA employees are digging deeper into the history of the homesteads that were on the property and are unearthing many different tidbits. Of course, as is the case with puzzling out the history there are some more questions being raised and some conflicting information. It was all quite fascinating though - marriages, divorces, moves into Fort Collins, affairs and all manner of events not that different from today.

We hiked about 3 miles, much of which was on-trail to what is currently being called the “Lindenmeier Homestead” but some new information is making it sound like maybe the Lindenmeiers never lived in that particular building. We had some visitors keeping us company for our lunch too! Portions of Soapstone are still leased out to area ranchers for grazing.

One view of the homestead.

Parts are still standing.

Near by is a naturally fed spring. It has been so hot and dry that you can easily see where it flows! Looking for such things are always a clue to finding evidence of prior habitation! This particular spring also had the remains of an aquaduct very nearby, though that was no longer being used to bring water to the stock tank near by.

While I had my doubts about the weather when we were setting out on the hike, it ended up being just about perfect. The air was free of smoke. The temperatures were moderate and the sun very quickly came out. It wasn’t a bad way to spend a weekend day burning some calories and learning some local history. They’ll be repeating the program again in the fall and I’d definitely recommend it to any locals.

If you want to see more photos from the day, I’ve put up a set on Flickr. Though I haven’t yet gone through and appropriately captioned everything yet. If you have questions about any of them, feel free to comment!

With the forecasted temperatures this weekend and the rudeness of people I’ve dealt with this week I think I’ll be hibernating at home aside from the required weekly grocery jaunt. Hopefully I’ll be in the basement, perhaps in front of the sewing machine! What are your plans for the weekend?