Pepperberry Crochet

Dia de los Muertos and a Light box

Starting with the light box, I finally revised my original light box by buying a couple of cheap lamps and two 40 watt Reveal bulbs. My previous light box was from this tutorial-- a collapsing cube made of foam-core board, so it only took a little editing to turn it into a light-diffusing box. I cut off most of the sides of the box and taped unbleached muslin (my usual backdrop) over the holes and the back of the box. I then pointed the lamps at either side of the box and voila! (My new one is most similar to the one in this tutorial, except that mine is lit from the sides, not the top)

 

These photos were taken with the lights at different angles. As you can see, the photos are not as good as what I would get using natural light, but I'm never home when there's natural light in my apartment any more! These are a vast improvement over what I was getting with the light box before. I'm pretty excited about this-- I had been having a hard time getting motivated to work on anything because I knew that I wouldn't be able to photograph it until the weekend. This is especially disheartening with patterns, since I need to photograph step-by-step shots!

We also had a crazy weekend in town with Halloween. Friday was somewhat wild, and then Saturday was crazy, as usual! Mr. Pepperberry and I went out and walked around during the day a little bit. We then had a sort of spontaneous party, followed by more gawking at costumes. My personal favorites this year: Orange Traffic Cone, two different Toadstools, and Marie Antoinette. Very calm, very peaceful this year. Very nice.

To round out the weekend, the Mr. and I went to the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center for their Dia de los Muertos celebration. It was charming, and a little silly, and all in all we had a good time. Nomad in Cambridge ran a sugar skull decorating group, so we both got to make sugar skulls. We also had lunch from Ole in Cambridge-- chicken mole for the Mr. and vegetarian enchiladas for me. All in all, a good day, and a good weekend!

Wee See World

wee see - collection one from Rolyn Barthelman on Vimeo. (you can watch a sample in full screen mode at the site)

This is a little off topic for me, but it's really cool. Via The Dieline, videos featuring lovely music and high contrast imagery. The target audience is infants, but I could imagine having a projector and one of these videos on the wall of my sensory room at work--how soothing! I've been sitting here watching the sample videos, utterly enchanted. I love the high contrast work.

New Green Wool Squid, Other News

I want to start out by apologizing to anyone who reads this via feed, I've had some Unfortunate Photographic Incidents over the last couple of days. Namely, I have a new phone, and tried to download the Typepad updater to it. Unfortunately, that resulted in every photo I took being uploaded to the blog, whether I wanted it there or not. This might not have been so bad, except that the photos were upside down! Grrr... I am updating Twitter more often with the new phone, so if you're really all that interested, hey, I'm there.

In far more interesting news, if you're in the Boston area, I have some new items at Magpie, in Davis Square in Somerville, so you can head over there for your crocheted needs. I also highly suggest that you head over there for any of your gift giving needs, Magpie sells goods by independent crafters and artists exclusively and they deserve support!

I'm finally finishing my transition over to natural fibers, so I present the green wool squid. I know, thrilling, isn't it? I realized how much I miss making squid, so I've determined to make some new squid, as well as some new octopi (including some more natural looking ones). I also need to work on some new patterns, we'll get there, slowly, slowly.

It's great to be back from DC, we're still getting settled back in and reassuring the cats that we're here. Iggy (iguana) is still sulking, but he'll get over it...