Digital Chopsticks

Here's what I've been working on lately! We had these super cute pictures of Kate playing with chopsticks at I Love Bento, our local Japanese place run by Koreans, so I made this set with the word for "chopsticks" in different languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese). I took of a picture of a real set of chopsticks from I Love Bento and extracted them, then made one version uncrossed with no shadows, and one version crossed with realistic shadows that I made myself. The shadows were fun. I ended up taking the chopsticks outside and crossing them the way I wanted, and taking a picture so I could look at the way the shadows fell.



Here's the layout I made with the pictures of Kate. Isn't she funny? She was about fifteen months old there. Maybe she'll catch on to chopsticks early. I remember first trying them when I was about six.

I made two red chop-style stamps for the chopsticks set, and they were so cool that I ended up getting sidetracked and made a bunch more. It was fun to work on something quick. I got each set put together and uploaded to the store in a day. (And these are small enough that I was able to upload them from home without any trouble from our Comcast connection--hooray!)



Oh yeah--here's a link in case anybody wants it!

Elvis is dead and I don't feel so good myself.

Kate was 20 months old yesterday. Boy, August just zoomed by. Where did it go?

Kate has been learning about counting. Sort of. When we're looking at books, we'll ask her if she can count something, and she'll point to things and say, "One, two, three, five!" and then clap. So cute.



We've been sick. Kate came down with it first, and passed it on to me and Doug. (Yep, we share.) We all ended up staying home from church yesterday. Actually I wasn't feeling too bad by then, but I didn't feel up to taking Kate, and I didn't think she should be going to the nursery sick (though, come to think of it, that's probably where she picked it up in the first place). So we stayed home and recuperated. Kate has developed a violent aversion to having her nose wiped. She screams, she struggles, she runs the other way. Nose-wiping has become a three-person operation. (That's one wiper, one wipee, one human vise grip.)

The Bishop asked me if I could print out some of the photos that I took when I was in Young Women's to replace the very outdated photos that are currently up in the display case outside his office. I put this together yesterday:



(If you look closely, you can see Kate in the bottom right picture!) I'm not working on my commercial stuff on Sundays, so it was fun to putter around with something else for a while. It kind of reminds me of a movie poster. I used a paper from Veronica Ponce's "Cottage Bluff" kit that is free at Two Peas here.

Surprise!

Amy B. posted this picture of her daughter on her blog (and isn't that layout wonderful?). I'd seen the picture before and expressed admiration for the dress she was wearing, so I had to post a comment and express it again. Actually what I said was, "I totally want that dress!" And she sent it to me! (!!!) Kate got a package from Libby, with the dress in it and a cute little denim jumper (and everybody knows how much I love denim...). What a fun surprise! Thanks Amy!

Music Time with Daddy

Doug and Kate playing with the cittern (it's like a big mandolin with ten strings), in the back yard.

Sidewalk Chalk (and other stuff)

We found a few stubs of sidwalk chalk outside by the neighbor's back porch, and Kate was having such fun with them that Doug picked up a bucket for us. Kate, and Doug, and occasionally some of the other kids in the complex, have all been decorating our patio. It's very colorful.

This last week we went up to the Seattle temple with our friend Tom, and left Kate with a family in our ward. We were gone for over seven hours, which was definitely longer than we've left her before, but she did just fine. (We, on the other hand, were sitting in the cafeteria saying, "I wonder what Kate's doing right now?")

We've noticed a difference in the way Kate plays with her toys, in the past couple of weeks. She'll sit and play with the little Fisher Price people for long stretches at a time, moving them around and making little talky noises. We wonder what they are saying to each other. We were at Target recently and she must have spent a good twenty minutes playing with the Schleich animal figures, completely engrossed. Now we're trying to decide which ones we should get for her first. Probably the lions, or the tigers. Or both.

What's brown and sticky?

Here's the marshmallow on a stick that I made for the ndsib August mega kit. I had a real stick that I took a picture of, then I traced it with the vector paths pen tool and filled it in and added my own shading. It needed a bit more texture, so I tried taking the original photo and overlaying it on the new version, but the lighting was opposite what I had created and it just didn't look good. So I thought, "How can I get the texture without the shading?" and it hit me--high pass filter. Ta da!

Spam Spam Spam Spam

I've frequently had to delete one or two spam comments a day, which is not a big deal, but the volume has suddenly increased drastically, so I have turned on comment moderation. This means that I get to approve or reject any comment before it gets posted. I've been doing a lot of rejecting. Darn spammers.