Yarn Zombie

Random Craving – When I saw that the Clinton campaign had spent $1,200 on Dunkin Donuts in the month of January I, 1. Thought that was perfectly reasonable and, 2. Had such a strong dougnut craving I made Travis go to Tim Horton’s for a box of Timbits when he came home from work.

Random Outrage – While perusing Jezebel, I clicked on their post which revisits the great Paula Danziger adolescent angst book, ‘The Cat Ate My Gymsuit.’ If you’ve ever read this book, go ahead and click on the link. I dare you. Because the new cover “art” for it is absolutely stomach-churning. WTF?! Pink? With an actual cat on it? And a skinny Marcy? NOOOOOOO!!! What is wrong with book publishers now? Someone needs slapped for this.

I started knitting the Belated Birthday socks for my mom. Travis’ socks are on hold, temporarily, until I get my shit together. Sorry, Poo! Anyway, I wanted to knit my mom some socks using kind of skinny yarn, so I busted out a skein of Yarn Love‘s Joan of Arc in their Violets colorway. I’m using the Squoosh pattern because it’s casual, and, more importantly, mindless. I replaced the heel with an eye of partridge heel, because I’m kind of in the mood to knit those, I guess, and shortened up the gusset a bit. I’m about halfway through with the foot of the first one, so they’re speeding right along.

Obviously, the picture was taken a little bit before being halfway done with the foot. My mom was normal sized feet, not elf feet.

Since becoming interested in HDR photography, I’ve been visiting the Stuck In Customs blog, which features some really awesome HDR photography. Lately, the photographer/blogger, Trey Ratcliff, has been hyping a tutorial on incorporating textures into photos that I’ve been looking forward to viewing. It came out today, but unfortunately, it’s a pay thing, starting at $299 for the tutorial and a pack of 100 textures. More power to the guy – I’m all for people making money off of their work, but there’s no way I can afford something like that. However, after viewing the page talking about the tute, I realized that, at a very basic level, what Ratcliff is doing to get some of his texturey goodness is to take a photo of something textured, add it as a layer in Photoshop, and then make it transparent.

I know there’s a ton more that he probably goes into during the tutorial, but I was like, “Hey! I take pictures of textures all the time! I just never know what to do with them!” So I spent a little bit of time messing with some of my HDR photos and adding texture to them. Here are the results:

These first two are okay, but I really like the way the third came out:

So, no $299 (or $499) texture tute for me, but hopefully I can muddle through and figure out this stuff on my own. Here’s to learning!