Or, what a difference a good camera and some sunshine make! Below you will see a comparison of photos taken with two cameras, and with the new one, indoors and outside on a sunny afternoon. I used a tripod in all cases. Hint–if you click on the pictures, they will open up larger. In Firefox, I can right-click and open in a new tab or a new window…that lets you compare large (and therefore detailed) shots side by side on your screen. Amazing differences!

1. a full shot (and then detail shots) of my log cabin quilt From Sea to Shining Sea taken with my old 3.2 MP Kodak point and shoot digital at maximum resolution. Photo taken in my sewing room with a combination of halogen, daylight, and “reveal” color-correct bulbs.

2. a full shot taken with my new Panasonic DMC FZ30, 8 MP (!!) at full resolution jpeg (haven’t started messing with TIFFs and RAW files yet, due to limitations with Photoshop Elements). Photo taken in my sewing room with a combination of halogen, daylight, and “reveal” color-correct bulbs.

3. a full shot (and then detail shots) taken with my new Panasonic DMC FZ30, 8 MP (!!) at full resolution jpeg. Photo take outside on a sunny afternoon (and even though there were no shadows from trees apparent when I stood there I can now see I ought to try this again tomorrow morning, perhaps less interference from the surrounding trees).

4. Detail shot taken indoors with the same lighting setup with the 3.2 MP Kodak at maximum resolution:

5. Detail shot taken indoors with the Panasonic 8 MP, same lighting, blah blah.

6. Detail shot taken outdoors with the Panasonic 8 MP in afternoon sunlight.

So what did I learn:

1. I need to work on my studio lighting, since given that I live in Maine and it is winter 6 months of the year, I can’t count on taking photos outdoors all year long. But when I can shoot outside, just do it– Mother Nature rocks!

2. My new camera is SO good that I need to remember the lint roller before taking photos …. I saw a thread that was less than 1/2 inch long and two cat hairs when I enlarged the detail photo! Yes, individual cat hairs! I think I LOVE LOVE LOVE my new camera!

OK. So the sub-title to this posting should be “How pathetic is my life.” Oh well….

Yes folks, today I am blogging about the lowly sink brush. A bit of background: last fall, I got fed up. I decided we didn’t need to live like paupers with ragged holes in the kitchen towels, tatty potholders shedding their innards and so on (hubby detests spending anything on the house). I decided that each month I would replace something small and shabby…nothing expensive, mind you, but still… (we are still on a tight family budget…retiring and then having kids, who keep eating and growing, is not the smartest thing financially, but it sure beats not having the kids!).

At about that time, I visited a Target for the first time. LOVE at first sight! Reasonable prices with style! (“For the first time” I hear someone muttering? “Where has she been, living under a rock?” No…just on a small island of 7000 off the coast of Washington State, where it is very expensive to take the car ferry to the mainland….and even then there were no nearby Target stores…that required a couple hours of driving….even now that we live in mid-Coast Maine (two hours north of Portland) the nearest one is about an hour and fifteen minutes away.

On my last visit to Target, in early March, I needed to buy a new sink brush. Among the boring white usual stuff, I saw the lovely “dot” brush in my favorite tropical citrus colors (well, the blue is tropical, the lime is citrus). Decision made! Then, a wonderful thing happened at home….

After nearly two months of use, it’s not smashed! In this second photo, you can see the business side of it, and it barely shows use compared to the (!!!!) extra brush head that comes with it! Even better, the bristles are kinda krinkly, not super-straight. For some reason, that means food and gunk rinses out of it relatively easily!

The negatives: I’d love it if it had a straight edge on the end for scraping pans, but we have one of those on the soap/sponge wand, so I can cope. And the handle is a little short: But I’ll live LOL!

As for Mr. Clean …. have you tried those magic sponges? WOW…they even got the rust stains from water drips off the kids fiberglass tub…took a bit of rubbing, but nothing abrasive needed that would scratch the tub. I bought an extra box and now have one in each bathroom (we have 3 in the house….one on each floor…good thinking by the guy who designed it!). Now, if I can just get anyone else to USE them!

Oh…and as for being fed up: tossed the old ratty potholders, have two nice new ones (from Target!), two new kitchen towels, two old ones were relegated to dog-drying towel duty and two others were so awful they went into the trash, and the yellow lemon thing under the sink brush: four new placemats on sale at a dollar each…score! Next, new bath towels without shreds on the edges……..

Hopefully soon I’ll get back to blogging regularly, reading my favorites on the blog ring, and actually include some quilting / fabric content that isn’t the same picture with a little progress of the Tableau quilt!

Hoooray! I got the background of the Tableau quilt finished today…well, most of it…think I’ll add some borders once I get the rest of it done. Here’s a picture of the background without any figures:

Then, here’s before I finished the sewing (both “piecing” and mostly invisible applique..I actually turned under the edges!), but placed figures on it. I like the placements here better than in the last photo. In addition to the Mary and baby, Joseph and the kings, there will be a manger to the right of Joseph, three or four shepherds on the left (see the faces pinned up) and an angel in the upper left. I plan on adding a comet in the upper right sky area (kinda pointing down toward Joseph’s head), a cow in the stable, a donkey coming in from the far right with the kinds, a sheep sleeping in the foreground somewhere, maybe a cat, a dog…another sheep?

This last photo is after I finished the background, and pinned up just the completed figures. Think I like the placements, above, better. I am thinking of adding a border on three sides, only…left, top and right, with a bias insert of the green plaid (winter uniform fabric), then the navy “batik” of the sky. I can quilt some larger words into this area……I also need to do something to punch up the contrast between Joseph’s garment and the stable…he may acquire a cloak….

I LOVE the mountains, but at the moment they seem kinda distracting. May need to tone down the white with a wash of green paint. Will wait until I have all the figures done, the halos added, and the comet in place and then decide…..let me know what you think!

No…I haven’t been AWOL! (Absent without leave for those of you who haven’t been in the military or federal service!)….

Over the weekend I started working on the beading on a quilt, which, alas, I can’t show you (grumble grumble!). It is my entry for the Viking competition, and according to the rules cannot be published anywhere including one’s website. I’m playing it safe and assuming that also means not on blogs, either. Durn. But I can TELL you about it, and will (change that to won’t…decided to delete the photos…sigh) flirt dangerously with the edge of the prohibitions by sharing three close-up shots since NO ONE would be able to know what the whole quilt looks like!

According to the rules, the quilt must be 51×51 inches square. Hmm….square is an awkward shape for most “art” quilt compositions. Challenge number one. Then, I began some small blocks in an improvisational class with Dianne Hire last summer, when serendipity stepped in and I got to be her assistant for a week at a quilt camp (lucky me!). Well…..what to do. The blocks are fairly “not me” in style, but wanted to do something with them. Challenge number two. Got the idea to use them in the Viking effort….except they worked up waaaaayyyyyy too small–under 40 inches square I think. Challenge number 3. So added borders, and border, and border.

This quilt is SO not me in so many ways, though I’ve tried to make it “me”…I don’t usually do red, I’ve NEVER had this much beading on anything, and I’ve never used sequins before! I love how the sequins worked as fish scales. For the head, I used very small flat 3 mm sequins with a stop-bead; for the tail, the larger sequins were translucent, so I placed a smaller opaque 3 mm green sequin under the clear-ish yellow 5mm sequin, then held them on with a stop-bead (a seed bead–bring thread up through the holes of both sequins and into one side of the seed bead, then go back down into the quilt sandwich through the holes in the sequins and snug up). Anyway, that’s it…has taken about five days to do the beading (OK….I’ll confess I’ve been HORRID about getting to work this week, so lots of dithering around, but still…..five days have elapsed!). By the way, to find another way to fritter away your cash, check out Cartwright’s Sequins, which is where I got these. That Quiltart list will get you in trouble on a routine basis if you let it, LOL!

I finally got back to the Tableau quilt today and sewed the stable building. Tomorrow, I will try to stitch the mountains and make the background, then back to the figures, and animals and and and…..pictures tomorrow I hope!

Today I didn’t really accomplish much in the way of “finishing” something, other than re-doing Mary’s skirt.

BUT, I did audition a bunch of different fabrics for the stable roof and wall, nearby buildings and I think I’ve got the background “roughed in.” I dithered away the morning catching up on this and that and working out (feeling a tad better…still not well but better).

But, even though there is little concrete done, I feel like I got a lot done in terms of how the final quilt will look. On Monday, I hope to maybe get the background cut and assembled (or mostly assembled). I need to “amend” some fabrics to get what I want to use for the background buildings. I don’t plan on a lot of detail in the buildings…maybe a window or two and the rest to be done with the quilting….you don’t see much detail in the dark! I have –believe it or not– a Halloween fabric with bats on it that I want to use….will use the back side, put some dark opaque textile paint over the bright yellow eyes/red mouth (these are just dots on the back side) then use a wash of something dark-ish over the whole thing to tone it down and make it look like stucco! The light “stones” fabric here is too bright…but want to have something lighter than the fabric behind it to create a sense of depth and dimension….time to play with paint!