A quick update

So we had Photoshop 4 last night. We were allowed loose on the sample files to try all the different textures, effects and colour changes that we could find. On last weeks day off I played with some of my photos and Kate helped me with a few of the problems I’d encountered. I can feel a lot of ideas coming on.
We also discussed how something’s are best suited to the Illustrator programme (e.g. logos) so I’m thinking about training on that too.

And today was the writer’s group meeting. I’d chickened out of doing last months homework – I just couldn’t work out how to move forward with it. But I wasn’t the only one.
Homework this month is to take something you love and something you hate and write about them. Hum…..

Tea with Wendy Cope

I’ve just gotten back from seeing Wendy Cope at the Book festival.
I was most impressed and she is now my all time favorite poet. Of course I don’t really know many other poets except, for instance, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Wilfred Owen who were all met thought school or my Open University courses and are all very dead.
So it was really great to actually see a live poet reading out her own work. She could put the emphasis where it was meant to be and tell us a little about how the poems came to be. As someone who is trying to write, it is very nice to hear that other people get their ideas from odd places too.
And she has a lovely dry sense of humor which I think adds the life to her poems. I like that she gets right down to human emotion, without taking herself too seriously.
The fact that there was free tea and cake in the interval has nothing to do with me thinking this is the best session so far.

Ray Mears – Vanishing World

On Friday me and ‘im outdoors when to our first event for the Guildford book festival. Ray Mears in jeans and a familiar dark green shirt, sleeves rolled up, sat for an hour talking to Fred Marden (whoever he is) discussing his new book and life in the wilderness. I found it quite interesting, and it was nice to see that even in the flesh he is much as he is on TV. He comes across as very sincere and reminded us on several occasions that teaching bushcraft is his job and it just happens that he’s got a TV show too. He does at least seem very aware of the plight of the people he visits and made the very good point that we should sort our own country out before poking about with someone else’s.
The half hour or so of audience questions were made up of the normal sort of questions he’d obviously been asked a hundred times before and a few more inspired ones.
All in all I think it was a good couple of hours, even if ‘im outdoors thought he promoted his book too much. It is after all a book festival, and if he doesn’t promote his book why else would he be there?

Starch Paste

I’ve just made my self some glue or to be more precise some starch paste. It’s very easy and I’d love to make all my books using homemade starch paste instead of PVA, but the paste only lasts about 3 days in the fridge before starting to grow stuff.
Anyway there are certain things which I just can’t use PVA on, for instance material, so I’ve been saving them all up and I’m going to try and make them all this weekend.

To make starch paste you just need some plain white flour and some water.
Get a bowl and about 2 tea cups of the flour. Add water until you have a dough which, to quote the guy who taught me to make this, 'is of an ear lobe consistency’. Then you fill a small milk pan half full of water and pour that into the bowl with your dough. Knead the dough gently for about 5 minutes – it will have fallen apart by this point and all the starch will be released into the water, the glutton will be at the bottom of the bowl.
Pour your mixture into the milk pan through a sieve to get rid of all the glutton and then comes the tricksy part.
You need to gently heat the mix, while stirring constantly for 10 minutes plus. The longer you heat and stir the better the glue. You must not boil or burn the mix or you have to give up and start again. At about the 10 minute mark the watery mix should start to thicken and if you’ve got it right you end up with a pale looking custard.
Pour it into a container and keep in the fridge.

Depending on the amount of water and how long you heat it will depend on how thick and strong your glue is. And of course this glue is totally safe with children as its just starch.

To use the paste, scoop a bit out of your container and put it on a flat hard surface, a clean baking tray is good for this. Then use a paint brush and brush it out flat. When it doesn’t feel lumpy any more you can use it. Don’t worry if there is the odd lump in the paste – it will dry flat.

Good luck!

Photoshop Part 3

Had the 3rd part of the photoshop course last night. I’m very excited as I feel I know enough tools now to start doing something with my photos!
I’ve already done the first thing which was to resize a photo for my Etsy profile. Easy! And as I’ve got the day off on Friday I hope to have a go at actually putting two photos together to make one.

Also the Guildford Book Festival starts this week. I’m really looking forward to going to hear writers speak. Ray Mears is first on Friday evening. Do you think he’ll be wearing his shorts?

Wrapping paper

Its Mum’s birthday today – Happy Birthday mum.

I think she’ll like what I’ve got her, but it means that I have to wrap it up. I have a real issue with wrapping presents. Wrapping paper is so pretty and I don’t think it deserves to be used for an hour only to be ripped off and discarded!
I’d rather keep it as something pretty to look at, or to cover my books in.
One of my friends has the right idea, keeping all wrapping paper and using it again, unlike ‘im outdoors, who insists on sticking the paper to what ever the present is and so making it impossible to gently slide it out of its wrapping.
We saw some lovely wrapping paper in waterstones last week covered in cherries. It looked good enough to eat.
The problem is deciding what to use the paper for. Once the sheet has been used its very hard to get another one so it must be used wisely, but with all this dithering I end up not using it at all.

Photoshop Part 2

I went back to South hill Park last night for the second part of the Photoshop course. We’ve now covered the whole tool box, man is there a lot in there, and just started looking at Layers.
Next week we’ll be starting on real images to see what we can do, so I’ve just bought my self a brand new 16GB memory stick to keep all my files on.
I’ve found that the 7dayshop is the perfect place to get memory sticks etc at a really good price. All my memory sticks and camera memory came for there.
So now I need to find some images that I want to play with. Think I can manage that.

A New Book

I’m really struggling with Perl at the moment. This is for my CIW Website Design qualification, and Perl is the hardest thing we’ve had to cover so far, except for JavaScript.

To take my mind off that I’ve bought my self a book on digital photography in the hope it will help me choose a new camera.
Its called ‘Understanding Digital Cameras’ by Jon Tarrant, and although I’ve only read the first couple of chapters so far it seems pretty friendly.
Just in those few pages I’ve learnt some stuff about view finders that I didn’t know, which bodes well for the rest of the book. Fingers crossed.