Quilting: WPC

This week’s theme, “variations on a theme,” presented so many ways to proceed. I ended up settling on showing you a quilt I made last year for my mother. Her favorite color is blue and she loves floral prints.

Wall: CB&W

I thought about going the route I went with the “silence” weekly photo challenge and using “walls” as a springboard to talk about something political. But I started the spring term this week so I’m talking politics quite enough at school and work, thank you very much.

So here are some beautiful old walls.

Breaking the Silence: WPC

I was planning to take a photo of a nice, empty cobble stone street down in the Soho area for this week’s photo challenge: silence. The idea was to do some sort of photographic illustration of the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Sound of Silence” (speaking of, I recently heard Disturbed’s cover of the song—it’s beautiful). But I just wasn’t feeling it. I even had the song (both versions) streaming on my phone to inspire me.

I’d gone downtown after walking for a while with the Women’s March and I guess that changed how I listened to the song.

Delicious: TPC

This week’s Tuesday Photo Challenge from Dutch Goes the Photo is “delicious.” As a trained pastry chef, I really wanted to bake up something special and photograph it. But as a PhD student and adjunct professor who is starting term next week, I knew that was a bad plan.

So I decided to incorporate this challenge into my dinner run.

I don’t often go to Eataly–and I’ve never been to the downtown one–so I thought I’d treat myself on my last weekend of freedom and get dinner there.

Circles and Orbs: TPC

I’m trying out a new photography challenge (Dutch Goes The Photo’s Tuesday Photo Challenge); this week’s topic is circles. Seemed like fun!

Circles are just a two-dimensional spheres. I read about physics in my spare time. I study science policy and while I don’t need to know theoretical physics to understand science policy (certainly the policymakers don’t!), I pretend it’s for my studies rather than purely for fun. Then I feel productive!

Summer in Central Park: WPC

As you can tell from the green leaves (not to mention the title of this post), I took these photos over the summer. I thought they were perfect for this week’s challenge: weathered.

There’s something quite beautiful about how nature weathers wood and metal–it sort of takes off the harsh edges, making the man-made blend with the naturally occurring.

Newton’s Cradle: CB&W

This week’s challenge for Cee’s Black and White Photography Challenge was toys. Fun! I toyed with (get it?!) the idea of photographing my sewing machine or my silly ‘adult coloring books’. But for me crafting and toys are different categories. So I decided to fiddle around with my Newton’s Cradle.

I wanted to freeze it with one of the end balls in mid-air but my apartment isn’t light enough to use such a fast shutter speed and still have a semi-decent photo. Still I got some fun shots, I think.

Particularly this one, where even though the movement isn’t frozen, you can see the movement of the end balls.

 

You can sort of see the motion in all of them actually. And in some ways I think it’s cooler that way than frozen mid-swing.

18 Resolutions for 2018

Happy New Year!

I’m not one for major (or even minor) New Year’s resolutions, but I feel like I should try to make some non-work/school related goals for myself (I have many work/school related goals for myself that aren’t tied to this silly tradition).

Here are 18 tiny goals for 2018:

1. Take the stairs instead of the elevator more often.
2. Cook with more fresh fruits and veggies.
3. Make more recipes (aka use my cookbook collection more often).
4. Read for pleasure.
5. Finish knitting the blanket I started in 2015.
6. Make a dent in my tapestry (I won’t say finish, because that isn’t realistic).
7. Finally make the itty bitty wedding gift for my friends who got married this fall.
8. Finish the purple quilt that I cut the pieces for over a year ago.
9. Make at least one project with left over fabric or miscellaneous fat quarters.
10. Blog more (my goal is to not skip more than a fortnight, but if I don’t skip a month I’ll be thrilled).
11. Bake more fancy stuff.
12. Make proper ice cream.
13. Restock my freezer with baked goods.
14. Take more photos of my baked goods with my good camera.
15. Bring my camera with me more often.
16. Be more mindful when I’m shooting photos (digital is cheap, but slogging through millions of photos is a pain in the rear.)
17. Go to Staten Island. (It’s absurd that I still haven’t been to one of the 5 boroughs.)
18. Go to a Broadway (or off-Broadway or off-off-Broadway) show.

I probably won’t report back on all of these, but as I complete goals that have a final product, I’ll post them.

P.S. The featured photo is of July Fourth fireworks–but close enough