Simply Handmade Sewing, September issue

Isn't it interesting that just when I finally started blogging again, the universe started sending me things to blog? The September issue of Simply Handmade is a sewing special, with lots of fall and Halloween projects to make from fabric and felt. Tucked among the projects is a little article on sewing room decor, and in that article is ... me!

 See down there on the right page? That's a photo of thread from my late grandmother's sewing basket:

There are some other wonderful artists featured in the article, including Rebekah Leigh Marshall, Heather Kojan, and Alyssa Nassner. Pretty cool!

The Contents of the "Cars and Trucks" Box

I think I've mentioned the wall of boxes that lines my studio. Well, lately it's been overflowing, so I'm going through all the boxes and trying to be ruthless with the contents. I had one large box labeled "Firetrucks." You can see the results above. Here are the first photos from the box labeled "Cars and Trucks."

The photos are for sale in my Quercus Design shop (if you click on the photo it will take you there) and the actual cars and trucks are for sale (well, most of them) in the Quercus Detritus shop (so we don't all get confused about whether I'm selling a car or a photo. You've got to be careful when you set out to deal in used cars!)

Rainbow Buttons

Rainbow Buttons, a photo by quercus design on Flickr.

Blustery, wet, snowy rain today - a good day to stay inside and play with buttons! Most of them are vintage. They came from my grandmothers' sewing boxes. The little green mother-of-pearl one I bought in a market in Soreze, France. And the dark green one with two holes I found on the beach! So this is sort of a beachcombing photo, well-disguised.

These antique cards of buttons came from the tailor shop my husband's great-grandfather owned in Minneapolis. The brown ones are the most beautifully heavy glass, full of highlights and swirling tones of amber.  They are all so lovely on their cards I can't bear to take them off for a mere sewing project. I should frame them, but I've run out of wall space!

My thread collection

Vintage Thread Labels (available in my etsy shop)

My mother's mother, Grandma Magda, was a wonderful seamstress. She made a lot of my clothes when I was growing up.  Grandma tried to teach me to sew, and when I was young I really did try to learn, but it just didn't stick. I can still sew on Boy Scout patches, or turn an old pair of stockings into a rag doll, but I never mastered clothes.

Vintage Thread Spools (available in my etsy shop)

My father's mother, Grandma Mary, preferred crochet. She made huge afghans of brown squares topped with brightly colored flowers. They would be super fashionable now, in an Anthropologie sort of style, but in the 1980s when I was a teenager, they were painfully out of date, and I didn't keep any.

Getting slowly to the point, when my grandmothers died and we cleaned out their things, I took their workbaskets. I kept them intact on a shelf for a long time, as if something of them was preserved there. Last year I finally took everything out and mixed it in with my own things. Thread is thread, after all, and there's no sense leaving it shut up in a box. Now Grandma Mary's pincushion holds a mix of needles from three generations, and I sew on my son's patches with thread that was spooled in the 1940s.  I love the worn feel of the old wooden spools, and the wonderful typography on the old labels.

Wait 'til you see "our" button collection!

The Trouble with Red

Rainbow People

Kind of reminds me of the Brady Bunch, or Hollywood Squares. Probably because I was happily chewing and drooling on these guys when those shows were on. (Because I was a toddler!) Ahem. Coming back to the present day, these vintage Fisher Price people presented an interesting photography challenge. Red!

Yes, if you have ever taken a picture you have probably noticed that red does not play well with others. It flattens perspective, outshines other colors, and generally behaves like the worst sort of diva. Here's what this looked like out of the camera:

 You can see how the two red plastic people just glow. They are made of a particularly fluorescent red plastic, which is not just brightly colored, it's reflective and I just couldn't get it right. The first thing I tried was adjusting the saturation:

They didn't glow any more, but they look flattened and tampered with. Unnatural. So I went to the photo critique groups in Flickr and asked for advice. About 5 people responded and said "adjust the luminance." Hmm. There's no "adjust luminance" in Photoshop Elements. You can, however, make an adjustment layer for hue and saturation and select luminance there. So I tried that:

Still glowing. Posted it in Flickr again and asked where to adjust luminance. The answer was "in Lightroom before you import it into Photoshop." Oh. Hmm. Well.

I don't have Lightroom. Photoshop is enough of a challenge for now. So I thought about it for a while. If it has to be done before you import it, maybe it's something you could do to the RAW file? So I explored the RAW window and found a Luminance slider under Noise Control. Well, what the heck. I slid it. Adjusted the exposure, too, while I was there. OK, now let's open that puppy.

Hey, that's getting a lot better, isn't it? Oh boy, now let's tweak the saturation in Photoshop and make the background true white:

Tada! I'll bet someone who really knows their post-processing would laugh themselves silly over this, but it's like a miracle to me. Luminance, huh. I gotta learn some more about luminance.

Paranoid Elves

I love these two. It doesn't matter where I put them,

it doesn't matter how far apart or close together they are,

it doesn't matter what I angle I photograph them from,

they look suspicious and wary.

I started out just taking pictures of them for their etsy listing, and ended up doing a whole photo shoot. I may put some of their 'glamour shots' up for sale, too, because they make me laugh.

I know it's too early to talk about Christmas...

...but I was having coffee with a friend and somehow the idea came up of photographing my enormous collection of vintage glass Christmas balls. I was so excited by the idea I just about abandoned her in the cafe to run home to my studio! Finally I did get a chance to pull out the ornaments and begin experimenting, and my lord it's a whole new can of worms and frustrations. I should've known reflective objects wouldn't be easy. You can see the whole photo booth and camera reflected in the balls, so I need to re-think the setup. I also need to find some small rings to balance the balls on, because I like seeing the caps and of course they roll out of sight, and you can't see the designs on some of the balls. So the first flush of excitement has worn off, and the grind of "how the hell do I make this work" is setting in. I can still see the vision in my head, but need to find out how other people do this.
But while I was digging out my ornaments I pulled out a bunch of other Christmas things I have hanging around the studio (I like sparkly things, and Christmas is good for that!) and photographed those as well to keep my spirits up. I'll show you the others another day, but here's one for good luck:

Heaven

Venice flea market 4, originally uploaded by quercus design.

I love flea markets. (I also love yard sales, thrift shops, and eBay, but that's another post.) When I travel I always hunt out flea markets. (And grocery stores, but that's another post, too.) So when we went to Italy in 2007, ostensibly for my brother's wedding, the plane tickets I bought 'just happened' to land us in Venice the day before the Mercatino dei Miracoli, a twice-a-year flea market in the square and alleys around the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. I could have spent hours there, browsing through the wonderful things. Wait, I did!

It was the best kind of flea market, with a heady mix of antiques, vintage, and interesting junk. I've never found language much of a barrier. If you're just looking, you smile and shrug. If you want to buy, and the other person wants to sell, you don't need a lot of vocabulary to work it out.

The only flea market I've been to that could top this one (and trust me, I grew up in the shadow of Brimfield, so I know from flea markets) was the monthly market at Osukannon Temple in Nagoya, Japan. I was a student at the university there for one hellish and wonderful year in the late 1980s, and the market is still one of the best memories I carried home. (Better than Ise, you ask? Better than Nara? Well, um, it was much much livelier, and you could, you know, buy things, and even if I was an art history major I was still pretty much a teenager.)

Now I am planning a trip to India in November, and of course, if the first step is to read a guidebook, the second step is to look for flea markets. So far I am striking out. Markets abound, with all manner of freshly produced crafts and clothing and cloth and jewelry...but no flea markets, thrift stores, op shops, or the like. Hmm.

I wonder if there are grocery stores in India, or if they are part of this huge all-purpose Market that I am beginning to imagine?

Maybe I'll have to go to a museum.