Catch-up, and Stupid Kid Tricks.

My whole family suffers from ADD, and I admit, so do I.  There are lots of pros and cons to this.  We are a bunch of really creative people, who are always inventing new ways to get out of the proverbial box, but living with us is always a challenge.  One of the great features about people with ADD is the ability to hyper focus.  So that’s basically what I’ve been doing morning, noon, and night for the last couple months.  I get into a project, like the web site designs, and I don’t come up for air.  So everything around me can get really neglected.  I try to keep up with the laundry and housecleaning, because I, unlike the rest of my family who thrive in clutter, can’t stay focused when there is chaos all around me.  But I’ve put off a lot of little correspondence things, and I had a couple of orders that needed shipping, I promised Tien I’d send her some interfacing samples from my vast stash.  I had some follow-ups, and a huge pile of bills to organize, banking to do, and general desk clean up.  So I took the day to take care of all the stuff that had been piling around me.  It felt really good to do that.  I’m getting to the harder parts on the website, not that they are difficult, they are just frightfully time consuming.  Each lecture and workshop has to be updated, polished, PDF’s created, and then pasted and linked into the new site.

photoSo then there is my creative ADD son.  He got distracted by his friends in the car, leaving the ShopRite parking lot this afternoon, and didn’t realize there was a huge curb in front of him?  The photo is of course one of about 200 taken in the parking lot by every cell phone in a 10 mile radius.  The photo is already traveling at breakneck speed through Facebook.  I was afraid to ask how the car got off the strip and into the driveway, fortunately the car was a Scion Xa, and the guys said they just lifted it.  More information than I needed to know.

I will say we laugh a lot in my house.

Focused Friday

So far the feedback has been really positive on the site.  I did, in one of my middle of the night awakenings, think that I really should have the galleries run from most recent to oldest work, so I reversed the 2000-2005 gallery.  I think it is better to click on the gallery link and see the newest work added, rather than scroll way way down and find it at the bottom.  Then I spent most of the day reprocessing images for the artwork gallery.  Some of the older pieces there were originally shot in slides.  Many of my slides were not great to begin with, and I think my scanner isn’t doing the best job anymore.  But I did my best with what I had to work with, and vowed that next time I set up a photoshoot, I’ll reshoot some of the older important work in digital with proper lighting and a better backdrop.    It was interesting to see how far I’ve come as a photographer.

The men made it safely up to Vermont for the last ski trip of the season, I got a text message at 2:15am letting me know they arrived safely. (That’s probably why I woke up last night and re-thought the gallery!)  In spite of the rain yesterday, they had a good day of skiing today, and are looking forward to the weekend.

interior

I worked on the jacket after dinner tonight, and got the upper collar/front facing in, and the backs of the bound buttonholes finished.  So I can actually button the jacket.  I love the narrow trim collar, and the lines on this are really really slimming.  I took an interior shot of the jacket before I started on collar/facing, because I always loved what goes on behind the scenes in a garment like this.jacketfront

There are a couple of blogs that I really enjoy, one of them is Tien’s Blog, the traveling tigress.  Tien is a weaver who makes garments out on the west coast, and blogs about her adventures, like me, but she is a wonderful writer.  I love her musings, and look forward to her latest adventures.  We spent a lot of time emailing this afternoon, I gave her some advice on interfacings, and she gave me some advice on using WordPress and how to get my images to be clickable, but remain rectangular.  Before when I used this feature, the thumbnails in the blog would be square, cutting off important information, like in a long gown, you’d only see the crotch.  Not attractive.  So she advised me on where to click in the settings to change this feature to eliminate the square thumbnails, and we’ll see if this works.  Hopefully my interfacing information works for her.

The other blog I follow is from Susan Hinckley, called Small Works in Wool.  Another fabulous writer, she is absolutely hysterical, and peppers her posts with old magazine images to get the point across.  It is the best laugh of the day when she puts up a new post.  And her work is great, she takes old sweaters and beads, and buttons, and turns them into little works of personally and politically charged art.