Fiber Fool

Going back through my Flickr account, starting at January 5th, 2006 (my first upload of the year) was quite educational. I was not using Flickr to host all of my images at the time so I had to also roll back to the old blog. But, fact of the matter was, I really wasn’t doing much photography other than taking shots of my knitting projects - some in progress, some completed. Also, unless it was an FO shot, I really wasn’t setting up decent shots or doing any photo styling at all.

Then, March rolled around. Suddenly my monthly upload counts to Flickr skyrocketed to around 50 shots uploaded per month. Guess what occured in March? Project Spectrum! Yes indeed, I have Lolly to thank for starting PS and the fact that I’m so scattered that some of the months the only way I could participate was through photography. I was highly encouraged by the lucky lighting of one shot in particular in March that made me feel like I had some skill in the area of photography and it was all down hill from there, LOL! (PS is going to be back again in 2007 in a slightly different format and will begin in February!)

Really, it seemed that for the most part Project Spectrum was the catalyst for my photography in 2006. It was really PS that started the food photography that I’ve started to become known for around blogland. Yes, there are still technically poor shots in my food photogrphy. Partially because sometimes you are a but rushed to capture a shot before people dig in or before the food starts to get cold and oftentimes restaurants or small gatherings are not lit properly. But, when I have more control over the shooting conditions I feel I have come a long way in my food photographing abilities. Prior to PS I don’t think I had ever really taken food pictures before.

Thanks to all of your wonderful comments about the food photographs I keep doing it. It has been really good for me because it has broken me out of my shell in a certain respect as well. I feel less self-conscious about pulling my camera out in public. I even didn’t mind enduring all my relatives asking me why I was photographing the tables of food at my aunt and uncle’s this Christmas, or DH’s relatives making comments about how wierd it was for me to be photographing food on Monday at our belated holiday gathering.

My photography was also aided greatly by the upgrade to a new point and shoot camera in June. Again, my Flickr uploads jumped, this time to around 100-150 shots per month. The difference? A smaller camera that was easier to carry around in my purse so that it is at the ready. Taking more photos in a wider variety of locations improved my photography even more. I was taking way more shots which meant a higher chance of some really good ones, but it also meant I was more comfortable with taking some shots with manual settings and taking over more control of capturing the photograph. It was also the old addage “practice makes perfect” (or at least improvement) in work.

I also discovered the joys of a light tent set-up. I’m doing a cheater one and it is kind of fiddly to set up so I probably don’t do it as much as I should. But I am more than pleased with the photos that have resulted from its use. In fact, I hope to eventually get larger prints of a few of the shots framed and hung in our bedroom.

Speaking of hanging prints, I did finally hang some of my 2006 photos in a public area of the house. I printed and framed my lychee nut series and we hung it in the dining room in September. It has garnered many compliments as well as questions from those unfamiliar with the fruit. One fellow SnBer asked if they were DH’s photos though! Grrrr!

There are certainly things I need to work on in 2007. The first of which is learning more about SLR photography in general and digital SLR photography in specific thanks to the wonderful gift from DH. Also, I’m still not consistently posting project pictures to the blog here that are nicely styled (mom’s bag keeper for example). I am still very self-conscious about taking photographs of people - even family. Because of that, my candid shots of people are often dull, boring, and look like all the average (or even less than average) snapshots stuffed away in boxes and not lovingly placed in albums and scrapbooks. I hope to improve upon that a bit more. I also plan to continue trying to capture nature, this time trying to capture all of the seasons rather than just my favorite - autumn. It means I would also like to get up to the mountains a bit more frequently, especially RMNP!

To keep up on my practice of photography I am going to try to do project 365 (you’ll see the latest photo over in the sidebar on the right there). I won’t always pull them from the camera immediately, but I hope to take at the very least one photo a day. Knowing me, I won’t settle for a poor photo so it’ll probably end up being more like 25 photos a day for the entire year of 2007. If 365 sounds too intimidating to you but you wish to also work on your photography perhaps you’ll give Stephanie and Margene’s 007 Snap a Dozen Days a try.

Of course, with the addition of sewing and more serious photography to my plate combined with the increasing interest in knitting and spinning, some older crafty pursuits have kind of fallen to the wayside. At the same time, some crafty skills from long, long ago were also put to use this year.

In miscellaneous crafty output I have included the binding of two books (I think I may have also bound 2 knitting journals that went out before photographing), the making of one collage, the making of one digitally manipulated image (I need to do more of this as it is something doable when pain levels are higher, though I lost all of my “goodies” in the hard drive crash), designing freezer paper stencils for a ton of baby onesies and painting five of them myself, making teeth out of polymer clay and beading into jewelry, and weaving many weavette squares that were then sewn into lavendar sachets.

I remember feeling quite pleased with the books I bound as well as the collage, but somehow I’m just not finding much time to do these things. The culprit may be more due to the state of my “studio” than finding time. It is more finding the time/energy/low pain levels to clean out said studio so that it is quicker and easier to sit down and create things like collages and make prints. Definitely something to go on the list of 2007 goals…

It was also a blast to return to some crafting I hadn’t really done since I was in junior high or high school. I remember sculpting a whale for my sister to use in a diorama for school and being heart broken when one of the kids broke it on the bus. I was so proud of it. I went on to make some rose pendants and such for friends as gifts one Christmas. After that I didn’t do much. Of course this was all before the widespread use of pasta machines to condition the clay and before they came out with some formulas that are a bit easier to work with. I was pretty proud of my teeth beads and the jewelry never fails to get a comment. It’ll be fun to pull it out each Halloween season.

As many of you have pointed out, indeed I have accomplished a fair bit in 2006. It is just that it is scattered all over the board in terms of skills and supplies used. Tomorrow, for ECF I’ll take a look back at my photography (though all original photos before mid March of 2006 were lost in the hard drive crash) over 2006.

Being a relative newbie to sewing in 2006 (aside from Jr. High Home Ec class and short stint of unguided quilting in college) and not starting to use the sewing machine until the second half of the year I feel pretty good about my efforts. I sewed 4 skirts (one is not pictured as it requires more embellishment yet), made two bags, a bag keeper, and my first stuffed animal.

There were certainly bumps along the way, but I learned a lot on these sewing projects and I hope to take what I’ve learned and move forward in 2007. I hope to tackle pants for sure and perhaps even shirts before we see 2008. There will be at least a few more skirts for which I have fabric too!

In 2006 I even reverted back to the old skill of embroidery. I was never particularly patient with it or highly skilled, but I dusted off those skills my Grandma Bakke taught me to make the perfect gift for my sister this Christmas and it was met with all the appropriate ooo’s and aahhh’s from both my sister and my grandmother :-) I also got a book to further my skills for Christmas.

I’m not quite sure whether to classify 2006 as a very productive year knitting-wise or not. I knit 9 pairs of socks (one anklets and one knee highs so I suppose they cancel each other out), 3 baby hats, my first lace shawl, 2 baby halter tops and a soaker, 5 “warshrags” (though one never got photographed), and 1 felted squid. That is 21 finished objects. I suppose that isn’t so bad. It averages out to roughly one FO every two weeks. Yes, some took well over a month (shawl for example) and other took a day or two (warshrags). You can see more photos of all the projects in my 2006 Knitting FOs Set on Flickr.

When I compare myself to others in blogland it seems I’m oddly unproductive when it comes to knitting. I still have no completed sweaters to my name. Of course that is likely easily attributed to my size. It takes a lot more yarn (money) and time to knit a sweater in my size. Also, when I knit socks it is almost always my own pattern so that takes a little extra effort, calculation, more intricate stitch patterns than stockinette or a standard rib, etc. and it often requires my writting up a pattern for it before it is considered completed.

I did manage to keep my UFOs somewhat in check. I think I only added about 3 UFOs and I have only 1 unmated sock. So in that regard I have improved this year. I do not think I’ve knocked any of last years UFOs off and I still have my unmated mitten, but I did get all of last year’s unmated socks matched up last January.

Although, I guess it probably isn’t too fair to compare myself to others as I engaged in many other creative activities this year besides knitting, such as sewing, photography, etc, which can’t help but to eat into knitting time at least somewhat.

It feels as though I was not very productive on the spinning front this year either. The vast majority of my spinning took place as part of the Summer of Spinning Challenge. I hate to think where I would have been if I hadn’t taken part in that. Yikes!

I only had four fibers that I spun in yardages for use and even then there was some experimentation in the number of plies that still left me with some smaller sample skeins. Adding all the skeins together I spun only 1585 yds compared to last year’s 1858 and only having the wheel for 6 months of 2005. Most of this year’s spinning was 2-ply and about 600 yds or so was 3-ply so I might be about even for yardage passing through my wheel both years. Still kind of sad though considering I had the wheel for the entire 12 months of 2006.

I did, however, have the opportunity to spin a lot of new fibers and fiber blends this year. I got several different sample fibers when Lizzy B and I visited Black Pines Sheep and then Cathy gave me several samples for my birthday. I haven’t yet spun all of the samples, perhaps about half of them. The samples from Black Pines Sheep were handwashed and processed by me which was a first. They were also all spun and plied on drop spindles! So, I did make some progress in my spinning skills by processing my own fiber and working with my drop spindles more than the year before.

Also in a new low, I only used one skein of handspun for a project this year. Though to conteract that low, the project will be appearing in the spring issue of Spin-Off. That is also a new knitting high as well as it’ll be my first offically published pattern.

You can view more pictures and get more details about my spinning efforts in 2006 by checking out the 2006 Handspun Yarns set on Flickr.

I *need* to find a way to work spinning in as part of my daily/weekly routine, not only to be more productive, but to become more consistent.

Happy New Year Everyone! I hope you all had safe and enjoyable celebrations to ring in the new year. We played Book Lover’s Trivial Pursuit with some friends nearby which makes this post rather fitting. I got my butt kicked because I’m not a pretentious reader and I don’t have a mind for trivia really. Really, everyone there was a reader (some even have related degrees) and we all had a heck of time with the questions. But it was a nice low-key evening. I’ve decided this week will be the week of looking back at 2006. At least the first half of the week anyway. So, this is the first installment. It is rather boring without photos, but I think yesterday’s post probably makes up for that!

Since today marks the first day of 2007 I thought I’d take a moment to recap my reading this past year. I read 48 fiction books, and 20 non-fiction books, give or take a few that I may have forgotten to record or got lost in the shuffle when I closed my typepad blog. That is a total of 68 books in 365 days or an average of 1 book roughly every 5 1/3 days. Since I’m not the fastest reader and I do many other things for enjoyment in addition to reading I’d say that isn’t too shabby. In general I hope to do better than 1 book a week so I guess I made my goal.

As a comparison, last year I read roughly 51 books all together and was short of my usual goal. Though last years list appeared to have a bit more substance overall than my fluff mystery reading that has dominated this year.

See a complete list (as best as I recorded it anyway) of my 2006 reads in order from highest rated to lowest rated. Or read on for a synopsis of my reading habits this year.

(Read on …)