Brian and I love to go for drives (or hikes when it is warmer than an arctic tundra) and explore areas of Idaho. On Sunday we drove south (we live in Kuna, for anyone familiar with the area) past Melba, to Murphy Idaho, and west a bit to Reynolds Idaho. I have a couple of books on Idaho that I like to read and find out the history of the areas that we explore. Reynolds was just a handful of farms (ranches? I am not a cowgirl…) but it was really beautiful. It was cloudy and drizzly and gray, so I didn’t get spectacular photos, but I got a few that I am happy with (above is Day 14 of project 365). And I learned an interesting fact about Reynolds, Idaho from my copy of The Ultimate Idaho Atlas and Travel Enclyclopedia:

Reynolds was named after a prospector from Washington named John Reynolds.  He was notoriously lazy, and his cohorts named the slow-moving creek nearby after him in honor of his slowness.  The community nearby adopted the name Reynolds also.

On the way back home we stopped in Murphy so that I could take some pictures of some old buildings in town.  A couple of my favorites:

We are having a crafty weekend at the Torres house … My husband constructed a lightbox for me (more on that later), my six-year old son Eli had to decorate his Valentine mailbox for school, and I am working on baby shower gifts.

Above you see the “For Kicks” patchwork ball from Anna Maria Horner’s Seams to Me.  This is actually the second ball that I made from this pattern. I have a ton of friends and family that are expecting, so I will be making many more of these as shower gifts in the coming months!    Over the past few weeks, I have been cutting and marking fabric pieces whenever I find myself sitting still for a few minutes at a time. Then when I have a baby shower approaching, I sit down at the sewing machine and they come together in just a few hours.

I am not an experienced seamstress, so here are a few tricks that have helped make these balls easy and reasonably quick to pull together:

1.  Definitely practice the piecing technique before you begin on a “real” ball.  It is a tad tricky, but after a few tries it clicked, and after that I found it pretty easy to manage .  (Anna Maria recommends practicing the technique first in the book, and it is good advice – don’t ignore it!)
2.  My poor geometry-challenged brain kept getting “hexagon” and “pentagon” mixed up as I went through the instructions.  So right away I highlighted every instance of the word “hexagon” with one color and “pentagon” with another color– that way I didn’t mix up the two shapes.  I just knew that as I saw a blue highlighted word, that I was supposed to use the hexagons … it helped a ton!
3.  I SUCK at eyeballing seam allowances– especially if the shape is other than perfectly straight or square.  So, I used a fabric pen to put a tiny dot in each corner of my cut-out shapes to indicate where each seam would begin and end.  This saved me a lot of grief when sewing the ball together.
4.  I also apparently suck at the blind stitch that she recommends using to finish the last seams after stuffing the ball.  I attempted it with the first ball I made, but wasn’t really thrilled with the results.  The second time around I used invisible thread and did tiny running stitches to close the last few seams.  It turned out much neater, and there was substantially less yelling and swearing involved.  I will have to practice the blind stitch more before trying it again on a real project.

Overall the project is fun and simple.  Both moms-to-be have been excited about the balls, so I will keep crankin’ them out for the rest of the babies that are coming in 2009!

I have been practicing some portrait retouching techniques in Photoshop. I am not an expert photoshop user at all, but I am learning. One of my favorite resources for learning photoshop techniques is from Scott Kelby’s book, The Photoshop CS2 Book for Digital Photographers.  Scott Kelby is hilarious, and the book is really easy to follow, with step-by-step instructions about all the basic (and some not-so-basic) techniques used to enhance digital photos.

Here is my original image:

And here is my processed image:

I adjusted the white balance a bit, cloned out some of the skin imperfections, and softened it a bit.

What do you think? I think I might have softened it a little too much … might be a tad too blurry now. I will have to think about it some more.