Squirrels Go Like This

Minolta Hi-Matic 9

Self Portrait

The last time Craftyangie and I visited my parents, my father dug through his collection and found a treasure: my Grandmother’s old Minolta Hi-Matic 9. It’s a late ’60s 35mm rangefinder camera, with a 45mm f/1.7 lens. It features fully automatic exposure, but also allows full manual exposure control. Like so many hand-me-downs in my family, even though this camera was used extensively by my grandmother, it’s in absolutely perfect cosmetic condition.

Hi-Matic 9, straight on

Of course, there’s always a catch to these things. (There kind of has to be!) In this case, there were a couple of catches. It originally took one of those nasty old Mercury cell batteries, that are now illegal in the US. And, as we played around with it, we discovered that the shutter didn’t always fire. In fact, while playing around with it, the shutter stopped working entirely. You’d hear a “click”, but nothing would happen. Fortunately, I was able to fix both problems… Read the rest of this entry »

Spring cleaning and crafting

While I’ve been quiet around here, it hasn’t been the case around my sewing machine and crafts.

I’ve been working on a few projects that I couldn’t upload right away; also known as baby shower gifts. There were also projects that I completely forgot to take pictures of…oh well!

Besides the crafts I’ve also been getting organized. While Ravelry helped me get my yarns organized this past winter, in the form of pictures and amounts of yarn, I still needed to do something desperately about my needles. They were just… everywhere!

I had seen pencil cases being used for paint brush and knitting needle storage; and I had already made some over a year ago; gifts for the cute flower girl and ring bearer in our wedding. So, why not make one for my needles? Read the rest of this entry »

World’s Largest Hasselblad

Graflex RB Super D SLR 3x4 camera

Amazingly, a couple of people have actually asked me what ever happened with the Graflex RB Super D 3×4 large format SLR Marisa gave me some time ago. Good grief, you people are actually paying attention to me?? Ahh, but seriously, it’s a good question.

To tell the truth, I’ve run two rolls of film through the RB Super D already, in fact, the first one was developed maybe a month after I got the camera (and 120 6×6 roll film back). So where is it? Wellll… it’s finally been long enough that I don’t feel totally stupid saying what happened with it… Read the rest of this entry »

Vest Pocket, Revisited

Vest Pocket Kodak ready to go

No, I didn’t take any more pictures with the Vest Pocket Autographic Kodak camera. I think one experiment with it was enough… But, my father (who you might have seen commenting as “D’Dude” on this blog) scanned in some of the prints of some photos he took with it years ago; and I re-scanned the negatives with some different scanning software that allows me more flexibility when scanning.

I think it’s worth doing this quick follow-up to give a better sense of the results the Vest Pocket camera was capable of.

Read the rest of this entry »

Manual Lenses, EOS Bodies

Pentax K to EOS EF adapter

Christmas arrived a little late this year, but today, I finally got the Pentax K manual lens adapter for Canon EOS cameras I’ve wanted for some time. A less paranoid friend of mine, Kent, ordered one from some random guy in Hong Kong via eBay and PayPal for me. Fortunately, he had no problems with the transaction, as it arrived about 8 days after clicking on “buy it now” and paying. The only sketchy thing about the whole process is that the seller marked on the customs form “gift”. However, that’s up to him, as it’s up to the person shipping an item to sign off on it. Read the rest of this entry »

Vest Pocket

2009 or 1919?

What happens when you take a camera made some 90 years ago, designed to use an obsolete format of film, and make it work again? Here’s your answer!

Since I started in with this photography hobby in earnest, my father gave this Vest Pocket Autographic Kodak camera to me about six months ago. Yesterday, I decided to take pictures with it. Today, I did! Here’s how I did it… Read the rest of this entry »

Llama, llama, llama, llama!

If you follow me on Flickr, last week you found out about a dark (or colorful, depending on how you look at it) secret I’ve been hiding: My yarn stash.

I love to buy yarn as much as fabric. I love soft yarn, yarn that makes me feel warm, yarn in bright, solid colors and my favorite: hand painted or hand dyed yarn…

In one of our Boston area visits, Boombadeus mentioned there was a farm that had llamas close by… and that they sold yarn made from the llamas! We just had to stop by and pick up some to make him a scarf.

That was the first of our trips to Iron Horse Farm. Read the rest of this entry »

The geekiest scarf ever.

While I never make New Year’s resolutions -I believe ideas/learning/projects/resolutions should be a year round thing-, this year I have a resolution to make. I would like to finish my DNA double helix scarf.

I started the DNA Scarf about 2 or 3 years ago, but has become an UFO (knitter speak for UnFinished Object). Every time I re-start, I knit a few rows, get distracted and stop. The project only gets re-started when I have a few moments away from busy daily life and the knitting bag is close by, which isn’t very often.

I first came upon the DNA double helix scarf in the Fall of 2003 Interweave Knits magazine, where the pattern was featured. According to the article, June Oshiro was in the middle of a lecture when the idea came to her. She turned on her voice recorder (obviously to not miss the rest of her class, in bio classes we tend to get tested in things that are mentioned for 2 mins in class) and she started to draw the now famous pattern. This pattern isn’t just famous around knitters, it has even appeared in Nature Genetics!

For this scarf I chose a beautiful yarn I found while perusing the yarn at Iron Horse Farm, a farm in Sherborn, MA. I had gone there to purchased some of their llama yarn (they grow llamas and make yarn!) which was to become a scarf for Boombadeus…but that’s a different blog post.

While looking for that yarn, I happened to touch this one. I liked that the reddish yarn had bits of color here and there; from white to yellow, pinks and even a beautiful blue. It claimed to be 50% “soy silk” (I had never heard yarn made from soy) which I thought was weird but interesting, so I thought “why not try?”. Read the rest of this entry »

Eternal Spring: The Monarchs

I love Flickr, I get a lot of ideas by looking at pictures….but it can be dangerous for me to visit it while working on a project. As I mentioned, after seeing this picture, i just had to add a butterfly to my embroidery! I keep on getting more ideas every time…

Monarch butterflies are another icon of México, and boy are they amazing little things. A few days later after seeing it, I printed out Will’s picture, and  worked up a little pattern to draw this pretty little lady.

Males of the Monarch butterfly have two spots on the lower wings, on the black “vein” closest to the abdomen, and the black lines in these wings are much thinner than the females, so I knew the picture Will had taken was of a female.

A little more biology: Some of these beauties migrate from the US and Canada to central México; in specific they travel to the border between the states of Michoacán and México to winter on the oyamel trees of these mountains.  That is where where the Mariposa Monarca Biosphere Reserve, a world heritage site, is located.

Around winter time the trees get completely covered with the monarchs to the point that branches bend down (think of how pine trees look after a heavy snow storm) and visitors have said that the wings of the butterflies create a soft rain-like sound. I can’t wait to visit this reserve some day!

Back to the embroidery, I went shopping as I had no orange or black thread and started. The idea was to use double threaded stem stitch for the veins and single thread satin stitch for the thicker lines, also the abdomen had to be padded for it to look round.

After the outline was done I was amazed. I liked what i saw so far:

I wanted to add more butterflies everywhere! But not so fast, let’s finish the first one: Read the rest of this entry »

Eternal Spring - the sweet smell of vainilla*!

I bet everyone thought this had become a photography blog huh? Wrong! I’ve just been lazy (well, lazy to blog; trust me, I’ve been quite a busy bee!).

Not much progress has been made on the runner as I keep on finding things I’d like to add to it so it never seems to want to be done!

Last time I blogged, we left off with the dahlias; both were done in satin stitch, one with the two colors separate and the second one with the colors blending with short and long stitch…well, let’s move onto bouillons and dessert, shall we? But before, some biology:

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If you are lucky to live in southern climates, you might have noticed that bougainvilleas are a lot like Poinsettias; the red/colorful “petals” are actually leaves, the flowers are the tiny yellow/white centers!

So how would you portray that in embroidery? Well i chose to use bouillons in a light yellow color…what do you think?

And after adding the yellow bouillons, AKA the flowers, the flower ovaries were done. These were done with double thread, in brown, because that is what I have noticed in these flowers.

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And now we have this: Read the rest of this entry »