Not board!

The current cooler weather is very welcome for our reorganisation projects - hooray!  Even better, we can see progress being made.

We hired a skip bin recently, which was great for clearing out the garage/shed.  (Some stuff had survived the Great Cull of 2015 but was superfluous to our Queensland life).

Given the downstairs flooding of early 2020 (and lesser incidents since), we have become cautious about what we store - and where. More culling and organisation is on the agenda.

The various reshuffling has also prompted other projects.  Yep, I made an ironing board cover today - finally!  

I can't remember exactly when I bought the board but it was after arriving in QLD.  The cover was well-used, so I put a bright tablecloth over the top.  Easy, no-sew fix!

Last night I unpicked the old cover while watching TV.  It was funny to see the flower imprints!

I trimmed that batting piece this morning, as it had been too long for the board.  I then rediscovered an insul-brite remnant in the stash, for extra padding.  (I think the remnant was $4.00 and I still have another one for the intended use).  It wasn't exactly the same size as the original layer but covers the top and most of the overhang.  I sewed both pieces together with a zig-zag stitch.  The floral fabric was a $2.00 Dalby op-shop find from our overnight trip last September.  It had some marks and fading but I was able to use the best area for the cover.  

I'd watched a few YouTube tutorials yesterday and pretty much followed the common construction method, using elastic to fit the cover snugly over the padded layer.  It turned out really well, which made me wonder why I hadn't made one sooner! Of course, there was some fabric left over and I've used a bright section to trim two hand towels, upcycled from an old bath towel.  I'm really liking the co-ordinated look (and may also make more lingerie bags, trimmed with the same fabric).  The laundry area never looked so good!

Bee happy!

I really liked using my travel bowl cosy while away in Canberra - and decided to (finally) make a set for home.

The sunflower bee print is one of my images, printed on metal.  It's displayed in the kitchen and other bee art (including a gorgeous original painted and gifted by Kerry) hangs adjacent the kitchen doorway - so it made sense to feature this lovely bee fabric.  

I don't remember where the sunflower yellow batik came from but I'm sure it was a bargain!

I've watched many YouTube tutorials on bowl cosy construction.  There is much emphasis on using cotton fabric, batting and thread to ensure safe microwave use.  I watched a different presenter this morning, who offered an alternate view in terms of safety - and I was pondering her approach while viewing the next clip, of a cosy that had caught fire in someone's microwave!  

Although we used our travel set in the hotel microwave without incident, I'm thinking I'll mainly use this new set as bowl holders, to protect hands/laps after food has been reheated.  They fit our standard soup bowls quite well, though are a bit roomier around the pasta/porridge bowls.  I went out today and tried various Kmart and BigW bowls.  They were all quite similar in size.  It occurred to me that I could adjust the darts for a better fit around the deeper bowls but then the shallow bowls wouldn't sit well, so I'm just going to accept that's the way it is - and bee happy!

Cosy mornings!

Earlier this year I made two padded carry bags for our owl mugs, purchased during our anniversary splurge.  

The bags were a bit roomier than necessary, which has proved to be an expected bonus - now that I've added extra items to each.

Nick and I are heading off on another short adventure, staying several nights in a Canberra motel.  

Our room has a kitchenette with microwave and we've decided to breakfast as usual, so will take our preferred porridge/oat mixes.  We use large bowls at home when cooking our porridge, so thought it best to pack similar - because the larger volume bowls ensure no boil-over/less mess when cooking. 

Obviously the bowls get quite hot in the microwave.  I sit mine inside a cereal bowl when serving, to prevent burning my hands.  I've made bowl cosies previously as gifts but finally decided to make a pair for us.  They will provide extra padding for our bowls when in transit - and then serve their intended purpose when microwaving.  As it happened, there was just enough lining fabric leftover from the padded bags to make two cosies, so the sets look quite co-ordinated.

The cosies are intended to be used with the bowls inside (to protect hands/laps from heat).  When in transit, the cosies will sit inside the bowls to provide padding between them and our mugs.  The mug rugs will tuck around the mugs - and all will pack sideways into the bags.  I'm quite pleased with how it's all come together!

Glad to go shopping?!

I have bursts of sewing creativity and really enjoy having my infamous stash to work from.  It's been carted along (in various forms) to our many addresses - and made two interstate moves.  

There are inherited fabrics from my Mum and Granny, some others that I bought years ago and then more recent remnants / op-shop bargains.  (As well as fabric, there is haberdashery).  

I've made lots of shopping bag sets as gifts.  Typically, it took longer before I made a larger set for use at home.  

I'd been thinking of making a holiday pair to take away with us - and finally started on them last night.

There's considerable pondering when I make these bags, pairing fabrics together and trying to create combinations meaningful or pleasing to the recipient.  I wanted this holiday pair to be a bit special.

Our at-home set is used often and definitely brightens our grocery shopping.  The outers are furnishing fabric with brighter linings (leftover from previous projects). I've double-stitched all seams, to ensure extra strength. We're often complimented on those bags, so they're a nice talking point.  

I don't remember when or where I bought the floral denim.  I've had it a long time.  I decided it had languished long enough, waiting for the perfect project.  When I measured the piece, there was just enough for two shopping bags.

After discarding several lining possibilities, I spotted the tartan. It was quite a recent op shop find. It reminded me of travel rugs and picnic blankets, so it seemed a good choice for holiday shopping. The remnant was actually a t-shape when unrolled but with careful cutting it yielded linings for both bags. I finished them this morning.  

When I showed Nick, he commented that the tartan was a great choice as our Gladstone bags are similarly lined.  How good is that?!

It's a mega decline!

I think I started using Lightroom in 2012.  

Yep.  Amid all the other stuff going on, I took on new software.  I do admire my younger self and her optimism!

As much as I've had the program all this time, I definitely haven't used it to it's fullest extent.  I started some YouTube learning earlier this year and then was side-tracked by other events.

I've done a lot of research over the past few days.  Three cheers for YouTube and all the generous presenters out there.  Thanks to them, I've really expanded my knowledge of what can be done with Lightroom.

Of course, my main incentive was transferring Lightroom and my photos to the new laptop but in doing that, I've learned other tips and tricks as well. I'm sure I'll continue broadening my knowledge.  Working on a project is great motivation to seek better methods of streamlining repetitive tasks.

The top pic shows the automatic folder structure generated by Lightroom, when new photos are imported.  It's pretty nifty and I've never thought to adjust it.   The bottom photo shows my revamped 2015 archive, with short descriptions added to each date folder.  Many photos within the folders now have keywords also, which should assist considerably when I'm looking for a particular image.  I hadn't ever previously added keywords but times are changing!

Till now my method of finding images (perhaps for my custom diaries or calendars) is to try and remember when the shot was taken - or search Facebook and my blogs for particular words, which might return the photos and a date to search for on a hard drive.  Once found, I then put copies of the images into specially labelled folders, which requires more storage.  

Although these screenshots show the transformation of 2015, I'd started with 2014 and already made similar changes to it.  Why 2014?  Well, I had to start somewhere!  

I was able to significantly reduce the size of both years.  How did I chose what to delete?  I was quite conscious of not just keeping perfectly focused happy shots - and trying to document our history authentically.  There was a lot of household chaos and that's part of our history also.

While a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes it's great to be reminded of the stories accompanying the image.  I did a lot of blogging when we lived at the original Hamby Home(in)stead, documenting cow rearing, caring for our chookies and our vegie gardening attempts.  I also shared progress of the Great Cull of 2015 in the last months of our tenancy.  Much of that history is available in earlier posts.  I'm thinking of PDF-ing them. This freed me to delete huge numbers of photos, knowing events were recorded more fully elsewhere.

I worked on 2014 over the course of five days.  I did other things as well.  I got through 2015 in three days.  I was lurgi-ed and not up to much else but I was more confident about my methods and had worked out a quicker system of deleting.  I realised most dates included a subfolder of previously edited images. It occurred to me that I could keep those photos, set the rest to reject - and just do a quick double-check rather than going through every image again. I mostly trusted my earlier judgment but in some cases I increased the number of saved photos.  Generally I kept around a third of the photos within each date folder.  Some dates I completely deleted.  

2014 initially had around 16,500 images (75.8 gigabytes) and now stands at 8,448 photos (40.4 gigabytes).  2015 had about 11,650 images (41.7 gigabytes) and is now a more manageable 3,675 pics (11.7 gigabytes).  I'm very pleased with those reductions.

We spent 10 weeks in Yowah during early 2014 and had some excellent adventures while there, including side-trips to Thargomindah, Charleville and Innamincka so I expected that year to have a larger volume of photos.

Shifting focus ...

During the 10-year period of 2005 to 2015, we moved seven times.  Most shifts were local but we also relocated from New South Wales to Victoria.  

At one stage I calculated we'd spent 18 months to two years of that ten year period preparing to move.  I couldn't quantify the time we spent unpacking and trying to set up home again - and I didn't want to calculate the financial impact of all those moves.  

Each move involved other acute stress. Family Court, hospitalisation and major medication changes were just some of the extra stressors.  Our life was like a soap opera. We dealt with huge, ongoing drama.  I'm amazed at how much our younger selves accomplished.  We definitely deserved more credit!

As much as my camera and photos provided a respite during our earlier years, computer issues added to my stress.  We had two major computer crashes when Vaughan was quite young and some other close calls since.  I have never given up hope of salvaging some of those lost photos.

In preparing for our 2012 move, we bought a laptop computer.  Vaughan was still doing distance education at that stage, so we needed a portable option for "school". (Yes, I was supervising his lessons amid all the chaos of considerable uncertainty, possible redundancy/homelessness - and then short-notice interstate relocation).

The old desktop was packed into one of our storage units - along with a box of old hard drives.    They travelled down to Victoria and then came with us to Queensland in 2017.  

Nick and I became debt-free last year, more or less on the 17th anniversary of our first date.  We are slowly working through our wishlist, upgrading furniture and computers and basically ticking off tasks that had been put on hold till finances improved.

My recent laptop purchase has sparked a thorough overhaul of my photo archives and better application of my LightRoom cataloguing system (ie. lots of research, learning etc). It's become a rather large project - because of adjusting to new technology, decision-making, file transferring and so on. In my significant culling efforts, I have unearthed various treasure and rediscovered many memories - so while there is a lot of work involved, it's mostly a pleasant undertaking. 

Although physical culling was an ongoing theme for us, there was little time spent on digital clean-ups.  I have a grand plan of dealing with all the digital photo archives (including retrieval of those lost pics from Vaughan's early days), overhauling photo albums and digitising many slides also.  I expect all those missions will keep me out of mischief for some considerable time.

Picture this ...

I have a new project.  It's a bit hard to show what I'm doing.  Mostly it involves deleting digital image files rather than creating anything real.  

Well, I'm creating space and increased order on my hard drive but again, tricky to visualise.  

Let's back-track for a bit and talk about cameras, cos without them there wouldn't be any images!

In 2004 I bought a very basic digital camera, from Groupon.  That first one replaced a point and shoot film camera that was probably about ten years old. 

I think I'd been camera-less for around a year between the demise of the film camera and the arrival of the digital one.

Finances were very tricky during that era, so I used that little digital camera for several years.  When I say basic, I think the file size under 1 meg.  My current DSLR has 24-meg resolution.  Even my older model Samsung phone has a 12-meg resolution! We've come a long way since those early days!

I received a Samsung L110 camera for my birthday in 2008.  (Erin had the previous model and I'd often used hers before receiving mine).  I had great results with those two Samsungs and really enjoyed playing with them, so much so that Nick did a lot of research and gifted my first DSLR for Christmas in 2009.  He decided on Nikon as a brand, with D40 as the model. It rated very highly in reviews (one in particular by a professional photographer), even against the later models (they were up to the D90 at that stage, which is very whizz-bang with in-built movie and lots of other stuff but much heavier as a result - and definitely a lot more expensive). 

The D40 was still being sold new in USA but Nick found an excellent eBay deal for a pre-loved, hardly used one, which included two lenses and various other accessories.  I loved that D40 and carried it everywhere!

In May 2012, Nick decided to "invest" in me, so upgraded my D40 to a D7000.  It was a quantum leap forward (16-meg vs 6-meg) and great timing also because the D40 failed not long after that.  As it happened, a few months later, in August, Getty Images invited me to submit 19 images to them for licensing! 

Buoyed by that success, I opened my RedBubble shop in September 2012.  My Getty portfolio now stands at 33 and I have 53 images available via Redbubble (link in the right sidebar). I've made commission sales via both platforms and sold other work also.

I can be reluctant to embrace new technology but came to love the D7000 - and the 16-85mm lens (specifically chosen for the bushwalking and geocaching we were doing then).  The D7000 needed some minor repairs in December 2015.  I felt lost without it and told Nick I didn't need any other Christmas gift, he could just wrap my repaired camera and I'd be happy!  As it happened, Nick collected my camera after night-shift on 23 December and it did stay under the tree till Christmas morning (though obviously was the first thing I unwrapped)!

My latest Nikon is a D750, gifted in February 2019 as a distraction after the death of my mother.  It was an excellent pre-loved purchase, again thanks to Nick's extensive research. I'm still learning the nuances of the D750.  As it's a full-frame camera, my lovely 16-85mm lens wasn't compatible so I needed to adjust to a new camera/lens combination but am feeling more comfortable with both, though they're definitely heavier than my D7000 setup.  (All other comparison aside, the D750 has 24-meg resolution, rather than 16-meg).

Nick has just read over this post and and commented that he doesn't see my cameras as gifts but rather necessities.  We've dealt with huge drama over the years and while some people may drink or smoke to cope with stress, I took photos.  Many photos. My camera and photos were my solace, providing some respite from all that was going on around me/us.