Blizzards have gotten so much better

Hey Blog, I have to tell the story of a time long before you were born, before there were any blogs at all. The year was 1981, the place was Deer Creek Township, Iowa. Sound like the boonies? Well, this photo shows you where that is, Blog, and it was the Boonies with a capital B.

Just how boony was it? Well, here’s the view I saw of the road there, when I went to get the mail.

But I want to tell you about a time when it was almost impossible to get the mail, because it had snowed. And snowed, and snowed. The winter of 1981, my first winter as a pastor’s wife, was a time of blizzards. Blizzards that made our tiny parsonage howl from the wind, wind that knocked out our power for hours on end, cold hours that made us close off the bedrooms (on the north side) and drove the temp in those rooms below freezing. Blizzards that buried our house in drifts six feet high, which had to be tunneled through before I could get the mail.

There was a period when I didn’t see a living soul outside my family of three for ten days. But that was not the worst of it: the worst of it was, there was no Internet. My companions for that blizzard were the four channels on our TV. Yes, no cable, no VCR, Blog, but believe me, the worst of it was, there was no Internet. A person living in Deer Creek Township could have used the Internet every day of the year, but especially during the cold and lonely isolation of a blizzard.

Fast forward to the great blizzard of 2011, aka the Groundhog Day Snopacalypse. I will rush to say that it helped that the power stayed on, it helped to have cable TV and DVR and streaming Netflix. But more than anything, it helped to have the Internet. Sure, 60 mph winds howled around our house as if to take the roof off. Sure, we had snow piles reminiscent of the Alps. But the mood remained cheerful throughout…and why?

Because all during the storm and its clean up, I shared the experience with others. I watched videos and real time blogging on local news sites. I emailed with loved ones in various places. And most of all, I hung out on Facebook, where people I knew all over the country commiserated and reported and joked, and people I knew all over the world sympathized.

We kept abreast of each other’s locations. Even those without power updated via their smart phones. And everyone--including me, of course--posted photos and videos of their little slice of Winter Wondergeddon. Digging out a buried car wasn’t such a hardship when you could share it with friends and get their sympathy. Living in a world suddenly dominated by snow was kinda cool, since you could photograph it and impress friends living in Florida and California. For all of us, to one degree or other it was a pain, but we turned it into a party too.

My dad lives 15 miles away. We both knew we were fine and we didn’t feel cut off, because we could email and share links and photos and other cheery bits. Transfer the 2011 Blizzardathon to 1981 Iowa and we would hopefully have had the phone, intermittently.

So I say to the young folk out there, who can barely remember a world without texting and Skype and Twitter, be thankful for the Internet, especially in times of crisis. Sometimes it saves lives. Sometimes it spreads truth when cruel regimes want that truth stifled. And sometimes it simply makes hard times much, much happier.

Happy like our cat Cody was after Davie shoveled, and he could see out the patio doors again.

My new craft gallery revealed!

Well, Blog, I'm just as pleased as planter's punch to be able to announce the Sorta Secret Project I've been slaving over for a couple of weeks. It's my new, spiffy online craft gallery, and I am unveiling it officially today. It's a wonderful place for me to share my polymer clay, needlecraft, beadwork, and graphic arts projects.

www.dianasgallery.com is the nifty URL!

You see, since one of my Christmas presents was a professional photoshoot of my crafts by the inimitable Chris Robleski, I decided I needed a nice venue to properly display the resulting images. So I created this new gallery, and I think it turned out mighty nice.

What I was striving for with this gallery was:

• a clean look that would show off the stuff
• easy navigation
• a quick way to view the items in a decent size
• only enough text to provide key information
• just a little bit of whiz-bangi-ness

It's amazingly difficult to find a balance between all the elements that can make for a good art/craft gallery. For example, I wanted quick and easy viewing of decent-sized images, which kind of required the use of Flash. However, that means you can't view the gallery on smartphones. Oh well!

I wanted clear enough detail, but not huge images that would take a long time to load. That meant having to put high-resolution images of everything also on Flickr, with links there from the gallery for those who want to be able to see more detail.

On my old gallery, I provided lots of textual information, which also meant a fairly ugly layout and probably more text than most visitors would want to wade through. Now, of course, I don't tell as much...but hopefully the photos are worth a few thousand words.

The photos are of course what makes the gallery. Sadly, Blog, I don't personally have all the neat jazz required to take this quality of pictures. As you can see from this picture of the photoshoot, Chris and assistant Katie were working with some seriously fancy equipment (not to mention some seriously fancy talent). They have given me the light box you see here, so I can do better with my own photos going forward, but I still will fall a bit short. I have made some items that I wanted to share but I no longer have in my possession, and it's easy to tell which they are by my WAY less cool photos. Fortunately, going forward I may be able to have the occasional "catch-up" session, at least for any really primo stuff I make in the future.

So, for those wanting to know some of the details of the process, I designed this site using the tools on Wix. I upgraded to a "Combo" plan which is $9.90 per month and makes the site ads-free. I blew an additional $11.95 for a year of having my own domain (via GoDaddy). Wix has all the tools I needed to create and manage the site, with the exception of course of photo editing. For that I use Photoshop Elements. (Katie did the the photoshopping on the new shots, and she has the full version of Photoshop.)

I'd love to hear feedback from artists and non-artists out there. With the vagaries of web browsers and monitor settings, no two people will experience the gallery exactly the same (another drawback of the world of web sites!). I'd also love if you have an online gallery if you'd share the URL, or let me know any gallery sites you've found that really impress you.

Huge thanks again to Chris and Katie for making my gallery possible! Now I am inspired to MAKE MORE STUFF!!!

Saying goodnight to your cats

Blog, I seldom say goodnight to you (sorry), but I do very often say goodnight to my cats. Last night all three of them were in a rare mood to be curled up in adjacent areas, and as I made the rounds to give each a pet and a goodnight, I remarked upon the weird human custom of saying goodnight to our pets.

With cats in particular it has to be baffling. I can imagine them saying to themselves, "Geez, I've gone to sleep 35780 times in the past 24 hours, and I didn't feel obligated to say goodnight to anyone on any of those occasions. Not even the ones which actually occurred during the hours of darkness. What is it with these humans and their ridiculously simple sleep schedules and crazy customs?"

Selke did not say goodnight before conking out within the comforting confines of the wrought-iron side table legs.

Cody did not say goodnight before passing out on my computer keyboard.

Or underneath this patio chair.

This cat that I don't know probably didn't say goodnight either, before falling asleep under this squash.

I guess I have to admit, it would be bizarre if anytime a cat was ready to nod off, he or she felt obligated to say goodnight. That would be even more annoying than Selke's insistence on having a meowing fit during our favorite TV shows ("Selke, no talking during 'The Vanilla Ice Project'!")

Cats also don't seem to care about acknowledging that they are leaving the room for the night. Actually my husband Davie isn't always big on that either. At any rate, it's no slight when they slink off for parts unknown without so much as a fare-thee-well. Obviously they really don't get it.

Why then is it that I feel I ought not pad up the stairs to bed without a proper goodbye to at least those cats which I can locate? Honestly, my emotions tell me if I passed Pookie snoozing on the back of the couch without acknowledgment of some kind, she would be all "Sheesh, I guess I'm chopped liver! And oooh, that sounds good. Later maybe ...zzzzz."

In point of fact, saying goodnight to cats is not for the cats, it's for us humans. Well, it's for us humans who lock their cats out of the bedroom, anyway. No point in saying it if the door is open, because the feline(s) in question will most likely join you at some point while you are a-slumber. But for people like me, we feel like we are leaving the poor little furry creatures alone for the night, deprived of our companionship...practically shunning them with our closed door and our refusal to acknowledge (in the case of Pookers) their proud howling at having caught and exterminated that jingle ball.

Actually, I think it's a nice custom, foolish or no. Once each night we get to acknowledge by that little gesture our bond with our pets, and remind ourselves how much a part of our lives they are. And I'm just silly enough to think that maybe, in some corner of Cody, Selke, and Alice's little brains, they are glad about it. I like to think they really do miss me during the eight hours I spend so quietly behind the bedroom door.

My strange desire to be a cartoon

What does it say about me if I want to be a cartoon, Blog? Does it mean I envy cartoon characters their 2D lives, their linear plot lines? Or do I merely wish I could be rendered in fewer colors?

That paragraph sounded way more poetical than a subject this silly merits. Actually, I just have always loved cartoons, comic books, and animated movies, and would really like to see myself reinterpreted as a cartoon character because it would be fun. And cartoon characters are always cuter than I am in real life, Blog.

The other day I was seized with my periodic desperate urge to find the technology to really do a good job at turning my image into a cartoon character. I had made the image you see here maybe a year ago, and while it's okay, I wasn't crazy about it. The resemblance is decent, but I would never carry a bag that big and it surely wouldn't be pink. This "cartoon yourself" site just didn't provide quite enough options. In the interest of full disclosure I suppose I should also mention my calves are bigger than that.

So, I set out to see if there were any new sites around that might make me into a good cartoon. There are some to which you can upload a photo and they will make that transformation...but they don't do anything I can't do myself in Photoshop, and they don't make a person look very cartoony. Well, I just do it right now so you can see what I mean. That's it to the left. Rendering in fewer colors doesn't really do the whole job, Blog.

What I ended up finding was a site that you can use to design yourself in "Scott Pilgrim" style. I just saw the movie "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" (and it's awesome), and during the film there are a few scenes with cartoon versions of the characters, drawn up in the style of the original comics upon which the movie is based. Now that's what I'm talkin' about, Blog. So I made a Scott Pilgrimized version of myself and you can see it here. Very, very cute, mostly because it doesn't look that much like me. I'd kill for that tiny chin.

There are sites where you can provide a photo and hire an actual cartoonist to do your cartoon self. This would certainly work, although you know me, Blog: too cheap for that sort of dealio. In point of fact, I did appear in an actual artist's cartoon once, this one right here that was created by my friend and illustrator, CC Rogers. That's me on the left and her on the right. As you might guess, I was really thrilled to get this. She even put an appropriate necklace on me.

So I probably shouldn't complain that I can't turn myself into a fancy, full-color cartoon under these circumstances, Blog. Actually, I suspect this may simply be another manifestation of my longing to be a better artist and able to do cartooning myself. Wouldn't that just be the swellest? Well, at least I can claim that I've done a self-portrait, (although it's far from a cartoon one), back during my drawing phase ten years ago. It's even partially nude on account of the fact that I wanted to have some human body work in the picture. (So shield the eyes of the kiddies, Blog! Just kidding.)

Well, we may just have to put this in the Unfulfilled Dreams file, along with "Ability to sculpt the human figure in polymer clay," "Singing backup to a rock band," and "Getting Oprah's endorsement for one of my books." And I guess, how would a person appreciate those of her dreams that are fulfilled, if she didn't have an Unfulfilled Dreams file?

Armed with a Dremel tool!

Speaking as we have been, Blog, of Christmas gifts, this year I received from Davie my own Dremel tool and accompanying workstation. Specifically, I got the Dremel 300 Series Variable Rotary Tool Kit, but that's rather lengthy. (And clearly the little guy has become such a friend already, he merits a name. Will have to think on that.)  Here's a photo of all the neat junk that came with this kit.

And the workstation, specifically, is the Dremel 220-01, which you see here. Also super nifty but it seems weird to name a workstation so I don't think I will. Anyway, in spite of it's not coming with any documentation, I succeeded in finding same online (yay once again, Interwebs!) and assembling the thing.

Where the Interwebs did let me down was in providing some handy all-you-need-to-know article for polymer clay artists who have purchased a Dremel. (And suddenly I find myself singing "Dremel, Dremel, Dremel / I bought to use with clay...") I found other people looking for said info, but no answers, not even on the Dremel website. What bit should I get for drilling beads? What should I use to polish them? Etc.? I did, however, discover that there are no less than 27358903 accessories for Dremel rotary tools. Yikes.

The one useful thing I found, since the initial inspiration for my getting this tool was to be able to drill through lentil beads, was a tutorial for making a jig to use for drilling through lentil beads. So yay! I had my first construction project. This meant--oh how exciting--I would get to go to Lowe's to buy some quarter round (my first experience in the lumber area, awesome!) and some clamps. I had some scrap wood, a big needle, and Gorilla Glue already on hand.  

Well, Blog, I got waylaid a little by cooking, but that was good, because I discovered our two nice kitchen knives were really dull. Instead of using the sharpener in the drawer, I took them down to my new Dremel studio in the basement and sharpened them with the D-dawg! (Probably not his official name.) They are now literally killer sharp, Blog!

Well, I was successful in whipping out that jig ("Use Dremel to cut and sand quarter round, check."). And I was ALSO successful in drilling lentil beads using it!  "Check again.") Thanks to advice from my friend Paul, I used one of the small drill bits I had for our electric drill, with a collet I ordered online (different size than what came with the set). This worked WAY better than my first trial attempt at drilling, when I used the cutting tool that came with the Dremel and looked deceptively like a drill bit. That ended up just carving the bead all up. I must say, it's weird that the set doesn't seem to have your basic drill bit...that whole topic was my biggest point of confusion. Anyway, here's a photo of my setup, with the new jig in the foreground, and you'll see the drilled bead hanging out with the equipment too.

Okay, so yeah, that was awesome. But I wanted to do something really fantastic next. While at Lowe's I found some glass tiles that were pretty enough for jewelry (the check out girl raved about them too). I also had some colorless glass pebbles that I'd bought to use for jewelry somehow but never figured out how. TILL NOW! I was able to drill holes in both using the diamond bit I bought online, underwater in a little plastic tray. Well, aren't the possibilities endless NOW, Blog? So here's what I made with these items, in the photo. And yes, I'm thrilled.

What next for me and my Dremel tool who I suspect is going to end up just being called "Dremel"? Not sure, but I have a hankering to find a piece of steel and force-rustify it, and make it into something that needs to be drilled....  

Stay tuned. And if anyone out there wants to share any good Dremel resources, please comment!

Homemade Gifts Reveal Part 3: Polymer Clay Stuff

In our third and final segment of the reveal of my homemade Christmas gifts, Blog, I'm happy to present the polymer clay projects.  It's my favorite medium! So let's get right to it.

MANZI'S REMY SALT CELLAR

My daughter Manzi likes Hitchcock movies, sure, but she's a fan of a lot of films, including Disney's "Ratatouille." She's nuts about the little rat chef hero, Remy.

Now Manzi and Nate's place is a little crowded (they're moving to bigger digs soon, yay!) so I didn't want to give her a Remy that didn't justify his existence somehow. Meanwhile, I knew that culinary devotee Manzi didn't have a decent salt cellar. So I decided to incorporate salt storage into my Remy. And, synchronistically, a week or two after I made this decision, Manzi even mentioned to me her desire for a salt cellar. It was destiny!

I sought out a few images of the cartoon Remy from different angles to use as models. Then I made a core of aluminum foil and incorporated some sturdy wire to support Remy's tail and arm. I used a pair of leftover eyes I'd made previously (a time-consuming process I was glad to have pre-completed), a lot of gray and pink clay, and beading wire for whiskers. A scrap of white fabric became his kerchief, emblazoned in red pen with "Cucina alla Z," a reference to Manzi's imaginary restaurant/catering business (her other nickname is "Z"). A salt cellar purchased from Bed, Bath and Beyond and an old baby spoon completed Remy's accessories.

Here's the little guy ready to assist in the kitchen:

And a back view showing off his tail:

If I had any artistic skill, this project would have been easier (it took me about five hours), but I admit I struggled to get my rat to have a proper resemblance to Remy. I guess I succeeded, because when Manzi opened the package, she obviously recognized him right away:

Happy happy joy joy, hey Blog?

DAD'S ROBOT

My dad taught me a love of science fiction from practically babyhood. He introduced me to one of sci-fi's most famous robots, Robby from "Forbidden Planet," way back in the early 60s. As I pondered what I might create for a guy like him, the idea of a robot came pretty quickly to mind.

My day job is at a company that sells machine parts, and it so happens we have a lot of parts that have been used as promotional and display items and end up sitting around in odd corners and drawers, going to waste (and making a lot of clutter). From these I scavenged a nice collection of bolts, brackets, washers, oil site glasses and other nifty steampunk-y elements. Supplemented with a few items from our own junk drawers, I had enough stuff to combine into a robot. In fact, I used nearly everything I had glommed: again, kismet.

Combining these elements with metallic polymer clay, assembled with super glue and support wires for strength and stability, after something like four hours I achieved this final result:

Note that inside his belly you can see behind the glass a little red heart! That's 'cause I love my dad.  :-)

Here's the back view:

He looks ready to take over the universe, hey? And here's Dad showing him off on Christmas Eve:

JEWELRY FOR SHERRIE AND AVA

Polymer clay jewelry is where I started with this hobby, so for sure that came into play come gift-making time.

For my mother-in-law Sherrie, who likes pins, wears a lot of blue, and collects birdhouses, I made a bird pin. I used techniques from my idol, Christi Friesen. Here it is:

I'm a sucker for jewel tones. Alas, I was at the day job when Sherrie received this so no photo of her wearing it, but she told me on the phone she loved it. Yay!

Meanwhile, for Nate's daughter Ava, I had to utilize Christi Friesen's dragon techniques. Ava loves the movie "How to Train Your Dragon" (who wouldn't?) so I wanted to give her a dragon of her own. I also worked her name into it! Happily, it's not hard to carve "AVA."

The little guy is curled around a blue stone and has bead eyes and a nice string of iridescent beads along his spine. As of this writing we haven't had a chance to give it to Ava yet, but I have been assured she will adore it!

Both these pieces came out in less than three hours. You can make such cool things with polymer clay so quickly!

STOCKING STUFFERS:  TREE ORNAMENTS

Not content to leave the claying at that, I also made a little tree ornament for each of the grown-ups. I had several ideas I had accumulated during the season and wanted to try them all.

For foodies Manzi and Nate, it seemed appropriate to make something that looked edible. I had seen faux chocolates at Stein's Garden & Gifts and knew you could make fake chocolate a lot better with polyclay. I made four different chocolates and strung them up in pairs with red cord on homemade wire hooks. See what I mean? It starts me drooling just to look at them. Trick of the trade for stuff like this: use mismatched scrap clay for the cores and then cover with the good stuff.

For the older generation among us--Dad and Sherrie--I went for elegant. Sometime during our holiday shopping I saw tiny packages made of polymer clay, so I wanted to try it myself. I made red and green striped wrapping paper of pearlized red and green clay, and YES, it was just as painstaking as you might suppose. Yikes. But all worth it when I saw the result, such evenly striped, thin stuff. I literally wrapped two "boxes" of scrap clay in this wrapping. They were finished with tiny ribbons and bows of white clay. After baking, I painted Future floor polish on the bows and ribbons to make them shiny. With a wire loop inserted and strung on red cord, the ornaments were good to go on the trusty tannenbaum.

Katie and Chris are the whimsical types, so for them I had to make a pair of anthropomorphized Christmas tree bulbs. I think you can work out from looking at them the simple approach I took; and I used leftover clay wrapping paper for their little scarves (that stuff was too cool to toss out). A coating of Future on the "glass" parts makes them shiny.

Well, Blog, that sums it up for this year's Creative Christmas presents on my part. I can report that I've never had a Christmas where I enjoyed giving gifts even half this much. And the getting was just as much of an upgrade! From the promissory note for a professional photoshoot of all my crafts by Chris (much better than these pix have been, Blog), to Nate's crazy "Give me the Davie Special" gift basket of rum and amaretto...

...to Katie's spa kits and certificate for a full-fledged spa day at her house, to Manzi's fun homemade gift cards for activities with her stepdad, everyone came through. Even non-artistic Davie found some absolutely amazing gifts we never imagined existed.

That was our Christmas at Magic House. If it sounds fun to you out there, you have almost a year to plan for having a Creative Christmas in your own family's style in 2012! Needless to say, we're already percolating ideas...

Homemade Gifts Reveal Part 2: Graphics Stuff

Hey Blog, welcome to Part 2 of my big reveal of the gifts I made for my beloved family for our First Annual Creative Christmas. For three of the presents, I made use of the countless nifty ways in which we can use modern graphics technology to make neat stuff.

CHRIS'S PERSONALIZED SIGN

So, while on our fall shopping trip to Cedarburg, I saw those photography alphabet letters you can buy to make personalized signs. (Later, I learned they also offer this sort of thing at Michael's: their "Sticks and Stones" line.) Their use of black and white photos to suggest letters was really attractive to me, and reminded me of Katie's boyfriend Chris, who is a professional photographer. However, the ones I saw cost $7 a letter! Oy, who could afford to say more than "YOU ROCK" with our spending limit?

Later, I had the brainstorm to make my own sign in a crafty fashion, and the first step was to get photographs of letters.  It suddenly dawned on me that Chris himself has taken photographs of a bizillion signs over the years. I went to his Flickr pages and, over the course of a VERY long time, found all the letters for my sign message.  I then had to crop and resize them to precisely equal dimensions, convert them to black and white, and fix the brightness and contrast for consistency and visibility. Thank you, Photoshop!

I bought a balsa wood board at Michael's; one of the hardest parts of the project was sawing it evenly with our lame saw (could have used my new Dremel tool that day!). Then I sanded the cut edge and painted the board black.

Printing, very precise cutting, and very even mounting of the letters followed. And after that, I put approximately 37582075 layers of Mod Podge on the board. The whole project took about 12 hours. The final result:

The coolness of this sign is in direct proportion to the coolness of the original images (some of which, you'll note, are not letters but rather things that mimic letters). When Chris opened the present, I pretty quickly pointed out that all the photos were his, and that was awesome! He started identifying the locations of the various shots...super fun! (Some of you can recognize the second "R" was from an Iron Maiden poster he photographed.)

And best of all, no copyright infringement! Well, technically it was, but Chris didn't mind. Here he is with Katie happily studying his new sign:

NATE'S "MAD MEN" COCKTAIL BOOK

The brilliant illustrator Dyna Moe has been creating awesome Mad Men art for some time now. She's offered tons of cool images for free download for fans of the show, with plenty of support from the AMC cable channel. She's not allowed to sell her stuff, nor are those of us who privately enjoy it and/or give it to their daughter Amanda's boyfriend for Christmas.

Dyna's illustrations were the source I used to create a set of cocktail recipe cards. Once again Photoshop came to the rescue as I had to do quite a lot of design of my own, rearranging Dyna's graphics for this format.

I printed out the cards on light card stock in my computer printer, then laminated them back to back with my Xyron® laminating machine. I punched a hole in the corner of each card and put them all together with a key ring-type ring. The results:

There you have it, 18 classic cocktail recipes to keep in the bar area, impervious to spills of gin, grenadine, olive juice and the like! This was a speedy project to complete, at only about four hours. Nevertheless, Nate was thrilled, and therefore I was UBERthrilled:

MANZI'S HITCHCOCK ORNAMENT

My daughter Amanda aka Manzi (or Manzy, as she spells it, or Mandsi, as her sister spells it) is a film buff, and her favorite director is Alfred Hitchcock. In fact, she is working on a huge book that will encyclopedically analyze every one of his films. So, when in my daily blog reading I ran into some mini-Hitch-posters, I thought of her. I wish I could remember who did them, but I since deleted the link, my bad. At any rate, once again I fall back on the "I'm not stealing if I didn't make any money" excuse here. I saved the four posters to my computer and began trying to think of how to use them in a mini-gift.

My best idea was some sort of four-sided Christmas ornament that could incorporate the images. The internet, for once, yielded nothing when I search on "photo cube ornament" and such like. So I went to Michael's in a last-ditch effort to find something appropriate.

Sure enough, I found the perfect thing! I sized the posters appropriately (they are about 3/4" x 3/4") and put them in the ornament ball, and voila:

Count the searching, and this project only took me an hour and a half or so. The actual project itself was done in like 20 minutes!

For such little effort I got a fab reaction from Manzi and Nate:

You may note here that graphic design is not exactly my forte, hence the liberal use of images created by others much more talented than me. Obviously most of the credit for these items goes to the actual artists, and I'm grateful to them for sharing their work on the internet.

Next time I will go more original, Blog, as I venture into an area that is more my expertise... Part 3: Polymer Clay Stuff!