mama urchin

We’re in the upstairs hallway today. I’ve had a display of photos in a variety of black frames here for a few years. But, they hadn’t been updated in a while — notice not a single photo of Tristan is displayed. So that’s something I’m working on this week. I don’t know about you but this seemingly simple task can be sort of daunting to me. I have trouble figuring out who to put where and then I inevitably print all the photos I want and then I don’t like the way they look. So, I thought of a solution.

The first thing I did was add a bunch of frames to the display so I could still have a good variety. Next I took the photo you see above. I brought the photo into my image editing software — PhotoShop in my case but I think almost any other image editing software would work. I whited out the frames where I want to add or change a photo. Some I knew I wanted to keep as they are.

After I did that I had a much clearer picture of what I wanted in each frame. The next thing I did was add some notes.

Now I knew that I needed three individual shots of each of the kids, plus one of our niece and one of our good friends’ kids. I also need to find three of Katie and Tristan together as well as a couple of family ones. So the next step was to identify the photos I wanted to include and then to scale them down to put over the white areas. This is really great because I can see how the wall is shaping up, plus I can also show the draft of the wall to Stefan without printing all the photos.

So far I’m liking how it’s looking. I still need to figure out which photos to use in a few more spots — the hard part is narrowing down the photos. By the way, if you look close you will see a few more shots from our recent photo session with Nichole.

See more Corners.

So I know I promised you a doll quilt but it turns out mine won’t arrive at it’s destination until tomorrow so in the spirit of surprise the quilt will have to wait until then. But quick, look, here are some photos of my girl in gorgeous handmade clothes!

I’ve mentioned Sandi before but she really deserves her own post. Sandi is the proprietress of a one-woman children’s clothing boutique called Portabello Pixie. Don’t you love when you can purchase items from someone who is just a lovely person? I first found Sandi via Heather Bailey’s blog. Since then I’ve gotten to know Sandi a little bit through her blog and she’s made a few outfits for Katie.

I’ve been promising her to take some good photos for her to use in her gallery of past designs and last weekend while we had the studio set up we took a few shots of Katie in the two outfits Sandi made. Then last week Sandi sent us a new outfit for Katie so we took some more photos last night.

As you can see her work is gorgeous and the workmanship is wonderful too. If you are ever in need of a special dress or some adorable separates make sure you visit Sandi’s blog. I am certain she will be able to create something you’ll love.

To see more photos from last night visit Papa’s photostream.

I’m trying to decide which I like better:

I think the Papa and I make a good team and one thing we’ve sort of fallen into a routine with is photography. He knows about stuff like exposure speeds and f-stops and I seem to know what looks cute in a photo. A while ago I had seen this photo and with our friend’s baby turning one I thought we could try to recreate the cuteness. So today we did a little photo shoot with the tiny model. Here we are set up in the garage with the big background paper and two lights.

We actually did a number of outfits/poses before we let her dig into the cake but this was definitely her favorite part. I’m sure Papa will be posting some to his flickr photostream and blog soon but here’s a preview before she got too messy:

So one thing I highly recommend doing occasionally is getting really lost in flickr. There is so much amazing stuff there. Find some photographs you like and start stalking the photographer. Well, not really but if you keep an eye on their photostream you can learn a lot. For me, one of my favorite flickr photographers is Nichole Van. I love the way she captures her subjects and the colors of her photographs. If any of you use Photoshop you may know that there is a way to record common actions — actually you can do this in a lot of programs. Nichole found herself repeating the same steps to edit her photos so recorded some actions and now is offering them for sale.

Now this is not a post advertising for Nichole but more a post to show that editing a photo can sometimes be the thing that makes the difference — and her actions are just what I used in this case. This photo was taken by Papa over the weekend and the one above is the original, no editing. Below you’ll see two color versions and four black and white versions. Let me know which one you like best…

Today is Papa’s birthday and yesterday to celebrate we got a flooded basement. Well, it was only partially flooded but all of Papa’s rooms — office, woodshop, theatre — were at least somewhat flooded. The worst was the theatre which is still under construction but has carpet — very waterlogged carpet. Actually, it’s not waterlogged anymore, I got a good workout using the steam cleaner to suck it up. Now we have all kinds of fans and de-humidifiers going down there.

So back to the birthday. While I was sucking up gross water from the carpet and Stefan was having a total freak-out I was thinking Boy, I’m glad I got Papa a good birthday gift. The kids and I gave him a new camera but it won’t actually be available until April/May. I decided that maybe Katie and I could make him a camera out of cardboard and wrap it so he would at least have something to open. A quick search led me to a pattern for a very cool pinhole camera that was published in 1979 in Czechoslovakia. This is not a project to attempt with an almost four-year-old. The cutting and putting together requires some serious fine motor skills but was really fun and now he has a new low-tech toy to keep him occupied until the new high-tech one arrives. Now, we just need to find some film…

Thank you guys for all the Katie-love. For those who are wondering her red coat is isabel garreton. A tip when buying such a coat is to buy it big — really big — so they can wear it for two or three winters. That may seem fairly obvious but I figured I’d share anyway.

The dress pattern is Burda 3026 from their Start line. I am very pleased with how the dress turned out and Katrina loves it since she can’t seem to even wait for it to dry from being washed before she’s trying to wear her Eiffel tower dress again. I will say, if you plan to use this pattern, it is more of a tunic then a dress. I’ve gone a little garment-making crazy so you’ll be seeing more of Katrina modeling in the future. The credit for the photos goes to Papa Urchin. He had the idea to have her stand up like that on the catwalk even if it was just the trunk at the end of our bed.

And speaking of Papa, as I mentioned previously, he’s been working on sharing some of his photos with the world so I am pleased to announce he has started a photo blog — Papa Urchin. He has requested that I ask you guys to start looking at the posts from the beginning but since I know not everyone will be able to do that I’ll give you the skinny here. His plan is to post a photo daily (or close to daily) and tell you what he feels is good and bad about the photo. Then you can leave a comment to tell him what you think is good or bad. On Fridays he’s posting some of his best photographs. Anyway, get on over there and give him some commenty love.

Back in December someone was talking with me about how we were having such a mild Winter. I had one word to answer February. It’s always our snowiest month. I took these photos this morning to show you that you don’t need a studio set-up to get great photos. There’s nothing crafty in them either, just an adorable little girl enjoying the snowfall.

1. Catch One, 2. Snowball, 3. Snow

So that post wasn’t supposed to overwhelm you guys. In fact, I hoped it would have the opposite effect — I know nothing and get pretty good photos, you can too. The little roll of paper is cheap (like $30) and you can get it at your local camera shop. Hang some off a chair near a bright window and voilà you have a mini-studio. Or you could find a partner who is obsessed with these types of things but that will cost you a lot more. WAY MORE. Papa Urchin is a pretty good photographer though and I’ve been bugging him to start sharing more of his talent with the world so hopefully I can share something about that soon — are you reading this Papa?

Anyway, onto this week’s WIP — a flower using Blair’s tutorial. There’s a flickr group for finished ones too. Mine is going to be a hair adornment for Katie. The adorable fabric is the same as something else I’ve recently made her — more on Monday — that she loves so I figured I should stick with something that works. The selvedge says nothing so I’ll see if I can check out the tag on the bolt the next time I’m at the fabric store. These are super quick and easy to make, mine is just held up waiting for some felt for the back They are so easy in fact I might start making them all the time , I think I’ll be hunting through the remnants next time I’m at the fabric store too.

And one last thing, my blogging buddy Dawbis posted a fun little photography challenge for next week (starting tomorrow). Why not pop over there and read the details so we can see next week through your camera lens too.

This is how our guest room typically looks and this is a little peak into how I do my photographs for this blog. I intend to add a static page about my photos but hopefully this post will answer some of your questions in the meantime. So my husband, Stefan, is a pretty good amateur photographer. He is a gadget guy and doesn’t really do anything half way so we have a lot of camera equipment. A LOT. One thing we have is seamless background paper and studio lights. Before we got dining room furniture we only had two gigantic rolls of the paper — one black and one white — for Stefan to use for people portraits. Once the dining room ceased being a studio and became a dining room we didn’t have room to keep the big rolls up all the time. So we bought a small roll — 53″ wide — of white paper and a tiny roll — 26″ wide — of black for crafty photos and photos of one kid, sitting down in the case of the white.

We set the background stand up in the guest room and unroll the paper onto the bed. We leave a small piece of MDF on the bed to support whatever we’re photographing. The light on the left is set up as a normal flash and the light on the right is set up as a soft box — a recent addition. I know very little about the technical aspects of photography so I pretty much leave everything set up the way Stefan left it and go from there. Mostly we use a Canon EOS 10D but we also have a Canon PowerShot SD200 that we use more for snapshots. So there’s a little corner that I usually don’t show anyone — at least not when it looks like that.

See more Corners.