Andy at 39 weeks

Taken September 26.



Andy surprised us with two teeth at his nine-month checkup, a few days after this. I hadn't noticed them at all.






He really is a very good-natured baby. He's a lot of fun to have around. (Though, of course, he's also into everything!)

It's my sister Betsey's birthday! Woo hoo!

Bathroom by Kate

Here's a fun idea--kids' drawings turned into vinyl!

Kate drew this shark back in July (from the Ed Emberly animal book, though his version is rather more elongated). I thought it was just wonderful and got the idea of having it made into a vinyl wall sticker for the bathroom.

I converted it to vectors using Adobe Illustrator's live trace feature (which does not require any actual knowledge of vectors and really only minimal knowledge of Illustrator). I emailed the file to Scribble It, along with my flourish, and got it cut in navy blue vinyl.

I did have a little trouble with bits not wanting to un-stick from the backing and stay on the wall, but I found it helped to pull the paper back at a really sharp angle.

I was really pleased with how it turned out, so I thought the shark should have some company.

When Kate drew the shark, she also drew this whale. At first I wasn't sure if I could use it, since she also drew a snake playing in the spray. (Kate's snakes often have legs. I'm not sure why.)

I was successful in removing the snake.

Later I got her to draw these other fish for me. This took some patience, as she's not always in a mood to take requests. (I ended up not using the one on the side.)

I converted them to vectors and flipped the one fish so it was facing the other direction.

Scribble It is quick! I emailed the files and had them on the wall within a week.

The whale is over the towel rack on the opposite wall. (These were the best pictures I could get, with cramped quarters and bathroom lighting.)

It's so fun to go into the bathroom and see Kate's fish on the wall. They're so cute and expressive. (It's the eyebrows--don't you think?)

Update: we've been featured on One Pretty Thing. How cool is that?

Standy Andy

(September 23)



After the tummy scooting ...



... and the hands-and-knees crawling ...



... and the sitting ...



... comes the standing ...



(notice how he crawled out of his pants)



... and general mayhem!

And life is never the same again.

Paper Sculptures

The Canon Creative Park has all sorts of paper sculpture patterns (very cool stuff, and much more intricate and complicated--and time-consuming--than my little paper box animals). We put together this crocodile, which has a tricky articulated tail. (Doug had to tell Kate ahead of time that it wouldn't really be for playing with.)



This Tyrannosaurus took even longer. Lots of fiddly pieces to cut out.



I got to cut around all those teeth.



Doug was impressed by the design of the curved tail. I like the haunches.

We printed on thin paper and glued the sheets to old manila folders for extra strength, but then we had trouble with the layers delaminating at the structurally stressful points. I wouldn't recommend that method. On the site they suggest using matte photo paper.

In addition to all kinds of animals, they have some really astonishing architecture, and toys with moving parts.



Kate created her own version of the crocodile. (I helped with the upper jaw shape and some of the scales.) I love how she wants to do these things herself.

Andy at 38 weeks

Taken September 19. (Now I'm slightly less than two months behind! Woot!)



I love this shot.





Blankets--not just for sitting on!



I'm still kind of second-guessing my color editing. It'll take a while to get used to this monitor.

Today is Doug's mom's birthday. Happy Birthday Grandma Mary!

Owen Beach

More catching up! On September 18th we took a little afternoon excursion out to Owen Beach at Point Defiance. (People persist in calling it Owen's Beach. It's not possessive. Just thought I'd point that out.) Doug went back to teaching at the end of September, so this was kind of our last gasp of summer.



Andy crawls on Dad.




Not sure what Kate has on her face. (That's her rubber alligator on the log. Or perhaps it's a crocodile.)




I like the splash in this one.



Cold!




While I was taking pictures of Kate on the log, she was pretending to be a dinosaur of some kind--either a corythosaurus or a Teriyakisaurus (which, if you couldn't guess, is her own creation)--and she kept holding out her hand and hollering, "Give me your claw! Give me your claw!" But I managed to get at least this one shot where she looks like she's smiling. (With a dirty face.)

Veni, Vidi, Vector... Vinyl!

Back when I was designing laser-cut frames for Griff's Shortcuts, I got really good at working with vector graphics in Corel Draw. Vectors are quite a different animal from bitmap graphics, and very cool.



So now I'm trying to learn Adobe Illustrator. It's a real workhorse, but coming from Corel Draw, I'm not finding it particularly intuitive. I know it'll do everything that the other program did and much more (the version we got was a bit outdated even then), but figuring out how it does it can be a puzzle. I have managed to create a few things, with a lot of futzing around and using the Help function. The most frustrating thing is that I'm so used to zooming in and out with the scroll wheel on my mouse, in Photoshop, but in Illustrator the scroll wheel makes the image scroll side to side. Ack! You can use it to zoom, but you have to hold down the alt/option key at the same time. I suppose one can get used to this, but I don't understand why it's different in the first place. You'd think something so basic would be the same across the Creative Suite. Fortunately it does work on my graphics tablet, zooming with the touch strip.

I really need to just take some time and concentrate on Illustrator for a while, until my fingers know what they're doing without having to look things up all the time. Maybe after Christmas. (I'd like to learn to knit, too, more than a basic rectangle, but I don't see that happening any time soon.)

The coolest thing about vectors is that you can use them in conjunction with things like laser cutters and vinyl cutters. This is a little flourish that I made and got cut in vinyl. I looked at a lot of designs online and ended up making my own--I wanted something kind of loose and doodle-y. (I love those smooth tapering lines. You can set up the brushes in Illustrator to do that automatically. It is so cool.)

Emily Kate, who made my Korean proverb, isn't doing vinyl anymore, so I sent the Illustrator file to Scribble It and they cut it for me. I got two, and the plan is to put them up flanking the three-photos-in-a-row of Kate and Andy over my computer desk (which I still don't have--the photos, that is--though my new monitor came on Wednesday, so I guess I should get to work on those).

Some day I'd like to have a house I can paint. For now, vinyl is a fun alternative. Stay tuned to see what I did in the bathroom!

Andy at 37 weeks

Taken September 12.



Finally sitting! Kate was sitting at the end of July, so we were wondering when Andy was going to get around to it. They sure did approach things differently.








"Ooh, can I eat this? Hmmm... maybe not."



Bye bye!