Tag Archives: everything else

I know Tuesday is nearly over, but I over-slept, and then got crazy busy. Sorry about that.

So, I’ve gotten a whole lot of good news today, and, sadly, none of it is anything I can share just yet. Suffice to say that I am afraid to pick up the phone for the rest of the day, because if any more amazing things happen to me in the next 24 hours, my head might explode.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to hear your something good. So go ahead, y’all! Tell me something good!

I’m waiting for my very delayed flight home from TNNA and thought that I’d take what little brain power I had left to update you on one of the things that Susan and I experienced while away.

If you’ve never been to or heard of Jomar, it’s… well… it’s very hard to describe. Kind of like TJ Maxx or Building 19 or That $1.99 fabric place (Where everything is $1.99 a yard!)… but if they were all rolled up into one and then scattered in Philly.

It’s about half fabrics and notions and the other half bizarre clothing and home goods – all sold at low low prices because they didn’t sell in normal stores, or the package was damaged. Last time Susan was here, she got a white noise machine for 50 cents because the box was lost and they had no idea what it was. They taped a vacuum cleaner attachment onto it, thinking it went together! The best way to describe this stores is to show you, and even then, I can’t possibly capture the experience.

We couldn’t figure out what this is. Any ideas? It was in the fabric and notions part of the store (but who knows if that’s accurate!)

We had some treasures in the clothing/”fashion”/home goods part of the store…

Everything’s better with a bird on it?

I always decorate with arrows. It shows how inviting my house is.

Two-eyed, one-horned sad mounted goat head?

I looked for the most ugly shoes I could find. I was disappointed that nothing topped the first pair I was drawn to!

Jomar’s rules.

I found this automatic watch winder.

The Quick start guide was not helpful. Best bet (Susan’s), is that you use it to wind the watches that are wound by movement. Any other ideas?

There will be lots more about the photo shoot and TNNA soon, but Susan and I are both exhausted and will also be trying to give ourselves a bit of time to recover as well as finish readying the patterns for Fall/Winter.

My plane is getting ready to board (a half hour after we were supposed to touch down at home! ugh!), so I’m going to shut down.

Look, look! Susie’s in Martha Stewart Living!

We’ve been keeping it under our hats since they visited the farm in April and it’s been mighty difficult. We heard that it hit the newsstands, but despite trying to find it from Massachusetts to Ohio, we haven’t seen it in person yet. These images were taken by Amy. Thanks, Amy! You’re a peach!

We hope you’ll check it out!

Susie and I had a great time staying at Lisa’s house in Pennsylvania. It should have only been about a half hour out of our way, but unfortunately NY traffic meant that we arrived 2 hours later than planned! But once we got here, Lisa’s was a little slice of paradise.

Lisa’s house is a converted school. When Susie was telling me about it, I imagined a one-room schoolhouse kind of thing, so I was absolutely floored when pulled up the driveway.

We had a great evening with a lovely tour of the house – both the stunning renovated section, as well as the in-progress funky still-kind-of-a-school section.

We met her three adorable cats – Ernie, Bert, and Luna.

Lisa’s craft room is absolutely amazing and filled with all kinds of treasures.

We had a great dinner of chicken, roasted veggies, bread, cheese and olives.

I will be telling you about our Jomar adventure another time, since it was such an adventure! When we came back, Lisa, her husband, her son, Susie and I had a fire pit and we made s’mores and noshed on strawberries with amazing brown sugar whipped cream! (I think those photos are in the memory card in the car. ugh!)

But in the morning, we took a few more photos for the photo shoot and then it was time to go.

Susie and I already miss Lisa and her amazing house, even though we’re so thrilled to be at our hotel room in Ohio!

Today, I am thinking about gratitude. I have so much in my life to be grateful for, but I am not all that good at practicing gratitude on a daily basis. It’s all too easy to get mired in the stress and struggle of life and forget that I have so much support from my family, so many kind and thoughtful friends, such a cool and exciting job and so many things to look forward to.

I’m going to work on this…

It’s Tuesday and you know what that means– time to tell me something good!

About 6 months ago, I wrote a blog post about how we need to be kinder to ourselves and, because I didn’t have a picture that demonstrated that principle, I stuck in a photo of a goose eating a pumpkin. The pumpkin-eating-goose had nothing to do with the post, or with my reminder to practice self care– it was just on my desktop at the time and made me laugh.

Since then, Goose Eating a Pumpkin (or GEAP) has become our very own slang. It can mean, “Hey! Stop treating yourself like garbage!”. Or “Just say ‘thank you’ and accept a compliment.”. Or “I understand that things appear to be coming apart at the seams right now, but I am here for you. Take my hand and lets get through this together.”

So you see, a goose eating a pumpkin can be a very powerful thing. So powerful that it has it’s own t-shirt.

I have a friend who is going through some rough stuff right now. She is one of the people who knows me best in this world, family to me in all the ways that matter. I want to fix everything for her, to make everything okay, but I can’t.

So here is what I am going to do instead. I am going to be a little bit kinder, a little bit more patient with everyone I interact with today. I am going to cut everybody some slack, starting with myself.

And I’m asking you to do the same.

I herby declare today to be an officially sanctioned GEAP Day.

Act accordingly.

In the comments section of the sunflower post I did last week, a couple of you asked what kind of camera I use. This is also the question I am emailed most often. I don’t think of myself as a photographer, but I am learning and I’m happy to share what I know.

My current DSLR is a Nikon D5100 . I’ve been shooting exclusively with Nikons since I made the switch to digital. I don’t really think there is much difference between Nikons and Cannons– both have their die-hard fans — but once you buy one you will probably want to stick with that brand. That’s mostly because once you’ve learned the ins and outs of a particular system you probably won’t want to start over, but also because the lens aren’t interchangeable.

I have always been really happen with my Nikons and this is my fourth DSLR. The 5100 has about a million features, most of which I will probably never use. I shoot in Aperture Priority mode most of the time, and I almost never use all the full auto bells and whistles.

Even more important than your camera is the quality of the lenses you use. The lens that come with the camera are generally pretty crappy. In fact, I strongly encourage you to buy the “body only” option of the camera and buy your lenses separately. An exception to that would be if you’re planning to use the camera primarily for taking family pictures and don’t really have any interest in capital P Photography.  (Then again, if that’s the case, you may be just as happy with a point and shoot camera.)

I primarily use a Nikon 50mm f/1.4G . I love this lens so much that it would be one of the things I grabbed if my house were on fire. It’s just a beautiful piece of equipment and it takes gorgeous pics. It can be hard to get used to using a lens with a fixed focal length if you have been using a zoom lens, but you eventually get a pretty good feel for the framing and learn to zoom with your feet.

Almost every photographer I know uses their 50 mm 1.4 almost exclusively and I predict you will too. The only other lenses I occasionally use are a Nikon 12-24mm f/4G  and a Nikon 60mm f/2.8G. The 12-24 is a wide-angle lens, and I got a screaming deal on it by buying it used. I think I paid around $400. All the sunflowers were shot with the 50 mm  and the wide-angle. The 60 mm is a macro lens and I use it occasionally for food shots.

The most important thing to know is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on camera gear to take good pictures. I highly recommend finding a photography class in your area and learning what your current camera can do before splashing out on one with lots of fancy features. When you understand shutter speed and aperture, you can make lovely pictures almost every time. And I say this as someone who took four or five classes before I understood shutter speed and aperture.

If you live near Charlottesville, VA, I highly recommend Jen and Robert’s Take Better Pictures workshops. (They are the ones that finally made all that aperture mumbo-jumbo make sense to me.) If you live near Fort Worth, TX, Edgar at Fort Worth Camera teaches one-on-one classes that have made me into a much, much better photographer really quickly.

If you live near anywhere else, check with a reputable camera store in your area or even the community college. Once you know the basics, you’ll be amazed at what you can do! Today, is the first day of our Fall/Winter photo shoot and I am going into to this shoot with a lot more confidence than I’ve ever had before.

We’ll post some sneak peeks on Saturday.

Okay, Susie is on day two of her driving and I know that by this point she could really use some good news. So let’s give her something to look forward to when she finally gets a chance to catch her breath.

Tomorrow she’ll be in Massachusetts and we’ll be getting ready for the photoshoot! That’s pretty much my something good! I also recently got the see-through plastic umbrella that I told Susie that we MUST have in case it rains this weekend and it looks like clear skies! Clearly, buying the umbrella is warding off the rain!

What are you feeling good about?

My mama was driving to Houston on this morning and she passed the most enormous field of sunflowers she had ever seen. She called me from the car to tell me about it. Since it was only an hour or so away from Fort Worth, I grabbed my camera and headed south, even though it was raining like crazy.

I can’t begin to describe the vastness of these fields except to say that there are many thousands of acres. It was almost too big for my brain to take in, sort of like seeing the ocean for the very first time after a lifetime in the desert.

Just as I arrived the rain stopped, and I spent the next half hour very carefully picking my way through the field, trying to capture just a little bit of the magic I felt being there.

Just as I was heading back to the car, the skies opened up and it started absolutely pouring. I drove home soaked to the bone, covered in mud, and happier than I’ve been in a long time.

There is magic in this world. You just have to look for it.

I completely forgot to post Tell Me Something Good Tuesday last week and  I missed hearing your good things!

Tell me something good, y’all!