Haircuts, sun-printing and more photos

First off, for those of you not too familiar with blogs, remember to click on the photos to enlarge them.

Had to post these photos of my cutie-patootie with short hair - dry and combed. It's not nearly as bad as I thought and as Keri said, it does fit her personality. It also makes her look even older, which I don't like at all. She's so long and tall that she looks more like 4 than 2 going on 3.


I had a fun and fabulous weekend - free to do as I pleased. I got the folding table from my mother and pulled the picnic table out of the well of my Honda CRV and set up sun-printing shop in the back yard. Steve told me not to set up in the sun, but I told him I had to make the printing work. Well - not long after I did I realized that I didn't have to do the entire process in the sun - just the last part. So of course I had to go get him to help me move the table, which he did with a smirk on his face.

The effect I was going for was a pale brownish/greenish blend to use as a background for my butterflies. I want it to look natural, but sort of blurred like a photo with the main subject crisp and the background blurry. What I realized was that I had not ordered brown Setacolor ink from Dharma, rather I had ordered Burnt Sienna. Obviously, it was more orange. So I just played to see what kinds of effects I could get. Here are some of the results.

I like these colors a lot, but they are definitely not what I was after. I was thinking it might be fun to stitch around the darker one - cut it up into cards or whatever - and do some outline stitching. There are a couple of others that might work with, too, but I don't have those photos here.

Saturday was a gorgeous day, and part of Sunday, too. I planted some basil (the first ones didn't work out after I separated them) and played around the yard taking more photos. I tried the Polarizing filter with the hood and it worked pretty well in the bright sunlight. Got a great shot of this yellow iris in the back yard.

But here is the same shot taken seconds later - how did this blue/purple get in there? I didn't change anything at all except slightly where I was standing. Isn't this cool? It would make a pretty card.

So here are my Gerbera daisies. There are even more coming up from underneath the leaves. Very prolific, this plant. Until last year I rarely had more than one flower on it. It seemed to like the drought last summer and kept blooming and blooming and blooming. Here it is only May and it's already showing off.

And here is a picture of our goldfish pond. Steve put this in for me about 6, maybe 7 years ago, for my birthday. The understanding was that he would put it in and I would keep it clean and take care of the fish. We know how that goes. I don't have as much time as he does! It is positioned right beside the screened-in porch. The chair I sit in is in that corner beside the screen, so I can sit there and look out on the back yard or down into the goldfish pond. Very serene - as long as the pump is running in the pond.

Just a few months ago something ate the three goldfish that we had had for about 4 or 5 years, so when Steve cleaned it out for spring, we had to go get some new ones. These are so tiny compared to the old ones we had. We bought 4 - one calico, two orange, and one bright yellowish

gold. The calico was floating within 3 or 4 days, but the other three seem to be doing all right. I'm afraid these will all end up the same color. The last batch we did the same - got a gold one and an orange one - and they both ended up orange. We also had a cool orange one that had big blobs of white on him - reminded me of a Creamsicle...

And here is the best photo of the day. It is the Louis Phillipe rose that supposedly washed up on the east end of Long Island (Bridgehampton) a hundred or more years ago. A French ship wrecked off the coast and all this stuff washed onto the shores. Steve's uncle had this and gave it to Steve's mother. She had it for years and gave it to us. Like the Gerbera daisy, we've never had much luck with it blooking. For one thing - being an heirloom, it is susceptible to black spot and mildew. It gets black spot every year. We can do anything about that because the rosemary bush is practically growin on top of it and we don't want to poison that.

So this year I went out and looked at it and there must be 25 or more buds on it. Of course, it already has a few leaves with black spot, but so far so good.