A Visit from Good Friends

This blog post is a "twofer".  Earlier this week, my college room-mate came for a visit with her husband and oldest son.  We had a great day together, touring some of the interesting places on the Wheaton College campus.  Also, this week in Kim Klassen's Beyond Layers class, we had a tutorial on how to make a photo look like a Polaroid.  So here's some polaroid style images from the visit.  The first is Debbie standing behind the podium that Billy Graham used to use to preach behind.  I think she wasn't exactly ready for me to take the picture.  Sorry, Debbie!

 Here's Jonathan walking through a cross-shaped corridor which framed the cross on the wall.  I liked the angles of this shot.

Debbie marvels at the illusion of infinity in the "heaven room".

 Here's the family shot in front of the Billy Graham Museum (where all the rest of the shots were taken inside).

 It was a great visit!  How wonderful that a friendship forged so many years ago is still flourishing!  Now we need to go to the Pacific Northwest to pay them a visit!

Trying again!

OK, that's a little better.  But I'm still not sure I like the result!

Experiment

I just tried to do a little animation and now is the moment of truth.  We'll see if the confusion, frustration, switching things around and overall effort was worth it.

Oh dear, I'm getting a headache.  I'm going to try to slow it down!

Creative Church Conference

Last weekend I had the opportunity to attend the Creative Church Conference in Indianapolis, sponsored by The New Renaissance Art Movement.  There were Christian artists attending from all over the country -- networking, sharing, worshiping and learning.  Here's a few images from the week-end.

Painters painted during the worship/singing times.  Here's one example:

My friend, Cathy Feeman also worked on several pieces throughout the weekend.

There was interpretive dance as well.

All in all, it was an uplifting, encouraging and inspiring week-end!  And now it's Friday again, and we'll see what this weekend holds.  Hope you have a great one!

Calendars finished!

I belong to a calligraphy study group, and each year we create a calendar to sell or give to friends.  We just finished collating the 2013 version, and it's a great one!  Here's some pics of my two pages, as well as the whole group with finished copies.  (I forgot to take pics during the process -- we were too busy).

 Usually we only get to do one page per year, but our credits person moved a couple of months ago, so I volunteered to do it.  I used pastel pencils on black paper to try to get the look of a chalkboard.  And for my June page, I used some of the techniques I have learned in Joanne Sharpe's Letter Love class.  When we get together every year to put the calendars together, there's lots of oohing and aahing over everyone's techniques!

Living vs. Blogging

Does anyone else struggle with finding the time to document their adventures on their blog?  For example, last week-end, my daughters and I went to a Bed and Breakfast in Indiana and the enjoyed visiting "Amish Country".  I kept taking pictures and thinking of what fun blog posts I'd be able to do, but here it is a week later and the time never presented itself.  So maybe I'll post a couple of pictures and let them speak for themselves.

Our B&B -- Scottish Bed and Breakfast, was wonderful, and we enjoyed our delicious breakfasts in the pool room:

They also had a lovely hammock in the back, which made for some fun!

The clop, clop, clop of the horses and buggies going down the road was a sound we never hear in the city.

And on the way home we picked the most juicy, delicious, sun-ripened strawberries I've ever tasted!

There you have it -- no artistic pictures or eloquent descriptions, but a whirlwind tour of one magnificent week-end!