Jewels of the sea

I never used to be that interested in collecting stuff on the beach. But since I married into a family of collectors (my father-in-law has a growing collection of arrowheads and my mother-in-law decorates the house with a variety of shells, sea glass and recovered bits of ceramic from the beach), combing the beach for little jewels of the sea has become a constant pasttime. On a recent trip to the in-laws, we went out on the Chesapeake Bay to visit some of the sandy isles near Crisfield, Md.:

We also brought Miyagi along, although he wasn't very much help when it came to hunting for artifacts. He spent most of his time in the water, waiting for us to join him.

Anyway, I've generally been focusing on sea glass during our outings. This recent trip turned up some of the best in my collection:

I'll point out that among the basic white glass, there is green, purple, cobalt, light blue and amber. See if you can see the little piece of sponge coral I discovered dried up and  lodged in a broken bottle that I left on the beach to get a little more wearing down from the waves.

Anyway, I keep most of the glass in a bamboo bowl, along with my Coca-Cola bottles I brought back from Morocco. Like so:

I'm not sure if the tableau makes any sense at all, but it does make me smile when I see it. Call it my little memory corner.

Around the house: Not too big for this wall

I realize I haven't really managed to post many pictures of the inside of my house. Except for the dining room, which I only posted about after doing so much work to organize it. But now that I am in possession of a new painting from Berrybody, I figured it was time to show a picture of my living room, where it earned its place of honor.

And a close-up of the painting (and it was $20!):

Call it an early birthday present to myself!

Around the home: Cleaning up the dining room

Until recently, the dining room has been a storage room for things that didn't have a place yet. Or for coats, scarves and other things that really shouldn't be just thrown down. It looked a little something like this:

But no more! I've spent a bit of time every day working to remove the clutter so that one day, we may actually be able to use our dining room table. A shocking concept, I know. I've just recently alighted up an idea for what to with the unused portion. See it's sort of empty and calling for something to live there. Something that is piles of clutter, but more organized. A cube storage system, perhaps?
Yeah. That was my thought, too. Especially after a visit to a friend's house showed how nice they can be, displaying books, photos or hiding other things in those neat canvas cubes. Like this one:

And above the lovely unit, I'd like to frame and hang my Hokusai prints that I've rescued from a wall calendar (Calendars are the easiest and cheapest way to get art. Add a frame and they look like you spent a bunch of money on them). I have four favorites that are about 11x14. I'd love the hang them above the unit in a neat row like so:

With these frames, from Bed, Bath and Beyond, perhaps.

Around the house: On the walls

The reason I still feel like a college student might have a lot to do with the fact that our wall art consists of posters stuck to the wall with 3M. I love many of these posters and wouldn't dream of getting rid of them, but I want to frame them at some point, if only to finally feel at least a little bit like an adult.
At the same time, I've fallen in love with new pieces. Like this one:

Which I bought at Target for $6.99.

And this one:

Which I haven't bought yet, but might this week, especially since it's on sale right now for $18.99.

And there's always this:

There's nothing like supporting small companies on Etsy, with this print from the Keep Calm shop.

I love the graphic simplicity of all these prints. Plus, typography is just awesome.

Wedding Photo Wednesday: Not-so-insurmountable project

We have a huge project ahead of us, one that I've been putting off since September. That's right, I still haven't edited wedding photos. Beyond scanning the photos given to me by my stepdad or uploaded to the paid Flickr site we set up just so we'd have easy access to all of our guests' photos, I haven't even really given a second thought to how we would preserve our wedding for posterity.

It's not that I don't enjoy looking through the photos. So much of that night was a blur, so it's fun to go back and relive some of the moments that have grown fuzzy. The problem is that completing the task always seemed a little insurmountable.

Not only would I have to tone and crop the photos, I'd have to weed out the ones that, despite how much I like the moment they represent, really don't deserve to be printed due to quality issues. There seem to be a lot of those, unfortunately.

Luckily we were introduced to a program from Creative Memories that makes it much easier to pull something together that we can eventually have professionally printed. Basically we purchased the company's Memories Manager, which not only organizes files but also allows me to edit photos within the program and with many of the more useful Photoshop tools, and Storybook Creator, which is basically a program that lets me lay out scrapbook pages using a computer interface similar to scaled-down InDesign. In fact there are some options I wish PS or ID had that are really easy to do in the programs. Plus, instead of buying our programs straight from the company, we were able to support a friend who also happens to be a consultant (go to her page if you are interested in scrapbooking! If you look at her profile picture, you may recognize her husband as a pretty awesome biology professor at CNU). She is EXTREMELY passionate about the programs. Seriously. A quick demo from her was all it took to convince us. Plus the awesome markdowns that were going to end two days after we finally had time to meet with her. Talk about serendipity.

I say all that to preview a new weekly post I'll launch today: Wedding Photo Wednesday will be an ongoing look at some of the photo editing and scrapbook page layouts I've been working on. This serves the purpose of giving me deadlines (which I work better on) and giving you guys a chance to critique some of my work.

I'm brand new to this particular program, but like I said, it's so similar to PS that I had no trouble adapting (though I miss a lot of the useful shortcuts Adobe developers spent so long coding) and already have examples of editing that I've done.

This first picture is an example of some of the detail shots that I am really grateful that some people thought to capture. The colors in this particular shot are sort of washed out and there a few pesky background components that really annoyed me.

So I cropped it to bring the centerpiece in as the focal point. I did a few other things, but if you can't find them, then I'm happy not to point them out:

I loved this next shot for capturing a great shot of dad getting ready to give me away, and Travis ready to take me. Can you guess what annoyed me about this one?

Well, color definitely became an issue. My dress in most of the photos looked white when it's not white at all. In fact, my favorite thing about that dress was the color, and that of course is my biggest challenge with most of the photos. But that wasn't even the hardest part with this shot.

If you thought I just cropped my mom's elbow out, you're wrong. If had just done that, I would have lost my bouquet (which took too much work just to crop out) and that detail of Travis in the upper, left hand corner ready to receive me. So I used the editing software's simple cloning tool.

It only took me about 5 minutes to not only completely rid my mom from the shot (sorry, Mom), but to also replace it with believable details, like continuing the pattern the sun was making in the grass and remembering to give Travis the leg my mom was blocking in the original.

So, what do you think?

NaBloPoMo: TGIF fotos

Nothing is better than being on the edge of a weekend. So here's to Friday's.

More time to relax

More time for my baby, Miyagi

More time to drink a beer with friends

NaBloPoMo: On philosophers and comic strips

Sometimes I wonder how comic artists can continuously come up with new gags and hilarious situations. And then I remember that the world is a funny place. Today I thought I'd share one of my favorite comic strips. Of all the comics printed in the funny pages, this comes in second only to Garfield.

Click on the image to see a full-size version.

Bringing Spring home

I was so excited that Spring has seemingly arrived that I went to Trader Joe's recently and bought two bunches of tulips.


I put a few stems into a collection of coke bottles that I brought home from a college trip to Morocco.


I lined them up on the stove to help brighten up my kitchen.

One bunch was yellow, the other was reddish orange with yellow tips. Absolutely gorgeous.


The rest I put in a huge measuring cup that I got for Christmas. It looks a little more like a pitcher than a measuring cup, but it was a simple solution to me not actually owning a vase.

10 minute redesign: Kitchen sink

This is a big fad on the design blogs I read, and I wanted to take a swing at this fun little activity. Here's the deal: There is a space (likely small) in your house that you aren't quite satisfied with. Using items you already have, your goal is to spruce up that space. That's what I did today.
Using the tea containers my dad got me for my birthday last year (the tea is mostly long gone from these beautiful vessels) and my tea pot and french press, I created a lovely sight for my boring kitchen. Bright colors almost make up for the fact that I can't paint the walls of an apartment rental. Makes me want to wash dishes all the time!

Morning pick-me-up
Originally uploaded by Beth Beck

Origami

For Christmas I received an Origami day-by-day calendar. At first I was super excited.

When I was a kid I enjoyed origami. But on Jan. 1, I sat down to do my first day's lesson. And that's as far as I got. Apparently, I am not so good at this origami. I tried several more today and managed to just barely make a passable canoe.






I'm gonna say that any preconceived notion I might have had about how easy origami was and how it was a viable option for a fun wedding decoration might have gone out the window today.

Flickr Finds: "Street Life"

As a people, we all take to the streets. We drive, we bike, we run, we walk the streets of our own cities and cities that are not our own. But we sometimes forget to see the streets for the lively colonies that they are. The photographers who contribute to today's Flickr group strive to do just that.

In Street Life you can see...

A city's fun lovers by rastabike

A city's downtrodden by Igor Berezovsky

A city's street performers by Renzsu

A city's young workers (SHOESHINE BOY 01) by Tran Duc Tai

A city's old workers by cstam

But, no matter what city, you should always see its streets. (Photo by Dom Cruz)

Flickr finds: Abandoned

I love browsing through photos uploaded on Flickr. They are great when you find your creativity drying up and you need an inspirational boost to get out there and make your own art. Recently I discovered a group on Flickr called Abandoned, which is a group for people to upload photos of "places or things that have been abandoned." Here are some recent shots that I'm in love with:

Chai a vin by Guillaume Linard

Two Worlds by cwachtel

Abandoned Fire Truck by lovelifewinepictures

Pyestock flower by Bousure

Textile-033 by JAhNoszh

Movie review: "Wendy and Lucy"

For Christmas, my dad bought me "Wendy and Lucy." Little did he know I had been eyeing this film for months after seeing a trailer and reading a fairly positive review. His reason for purchasing it: "It's a girl and a dog on the cover. I figured, Beth will like this, right?"

I must admit, I decided to write a review of the film for today's post without watching it first, thinking it'd be a cinch. I've spent the last several hours trying to come up with the best way to adequately describe the film.

Overview

A gritty portrayal of a young person down on her luck, "Wendy and Lucy" is an independent film from Kelly Reichardt, starring Michelle Williams as Wendy and a gorgeous mutt as Lucy. But this movie was so much more than a film about hard times. It was a portrayal of life in small-town Oregon, as well as how humans react in the face of poverty. It is also, at it's very core, about a girl and her dog.

The film opens as train clacks by in the seeming wilderness. Our introduction to Wendy and Lucy is one of them at play, Wendy throwing a stick and Lucy romping around after it. It seems very innocent, until Lucy wanders off into a bunch of rough, outsiders around a bonfire. That's when you get your first close-up glimpse at the dirty face and worn clothes that Wendy is wearing. And so, in the first five minutes, Reichardt is able to easily and poetically put Wendy and Lucy's life of general poverty into a visual nutshell.

Wandering from town to town in search of work, the two have only each other when confronted by strangers and meager times.

Gut reactions

This, to me, seemed like the essence of the story: As Wendy and Lucy fall asleep in Wendy's broken down car, Wendy whispers, "Night, baby girl."

As I said, the film is first and foremost a poignant look at the love between a girl and her dog. Reichardt then steers it toward darker landscapes, as we are confronted with a grocery store clerk so set on doing right and following rules that he breaks the best friends apart, setting the real story in motion. You also glimpse the townfolk's reaction to this rough young woman sleeping in her car, the car repairman who is woefully ignorant of Wendy's troubles, the shifty homeless population that accosts the newcomer and (thankfully for the redemption of the human race) the congenial night guard who aids Wendy in her time of need.

In the end, if you're anything like me, you'll cry at the heartbreak, rage at the hypocrisy and smile at the small token of friendship that gives you the tiniest glimpse of the goodness we wish all people were capable of.

I think the beauty of the film lies in the grittiness of Reichardt's videography and lighting and in the gentle lesson that she lays out for the viewer, without shoving it down your throat. There's also a lovely circularity to the progression of the story, where the beginning is darkly mirrored by the events of the ending.

Bottom line

Watch it, but be prepared that it is not a happy-go-lucky film. And that is what's great about it, I think, that it's not the same old movie fodder we've been force-fed recently. But please soak up and enjoy the beginning. Because, even if you're nothing like me, I bet that when the film ends, you'll wish you could actually go back to the first five minutes of the movie, where a content Wendy is humming softly to her happy-go-lucky dog as they play fetch in the woods.

Friday Finds: 20x200

Today I thought I would share a Web site I found that I enjoy. It's called 20x200. 20X200 is a Web site that aims to create "a place where almost any art lover can be an art collector." Essentially it offers 8x10 versions of unique works of art by relatively unknown artists with intriguing perspectives for only $20. Larger prints cost more, but just having a beautiful work of art, even if it is fairly small, is a lovely feeling. I haven't made a purchase myself yet, but I wouldn't mind owning one of these:

Paintings

"Can You Imagine" by Trey Speegle

This piece makes me think of my lovely former roomie and the colorful prints that she used to cover our walls with. Love ya, babe!

"Curvilinear Time" by Jessica Snow

Photography

There's just something gorgeous and intriguing about the composition of this piece:

"Engine Lathe Shelves" by Joseph O. Holmes

I love the swirls and textures in this print:

"Velodrome" by James Deavin