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The Silicon Folly Glass site fusing forum in USA has recently had a glass exchange where each person taking part makes a number of 2x2 inch pieces of fused glass with a different theme each year. These are then sent to a central collection point and that person then repacks the individual pieces so that each person that has taken part recieves one of each of the pieces made by the other people. When the images are available, I'll put in a link so that you can see all this Christmas' efforts.
I didn't take part but have been doing some fusing tests of my own.

A few weeks ago I came across the first issue of a UK Bead magazine The other mags I've seen have all come from USA so I was glad to see this with it's adverts for all things beading from UK suppliers. I liked the look of this necklace but hadn't made any small beads before so put off starting for a while. I finally took the plunge and decided to use red and green glass in honour of the season. I coated about 5 inches of each mandrel and wound 10 beads on each. The bugbear was cleaning all the beads but I'm looking out for an easier way than cleaning by hand with a reamer. All suggestions gratefully accepted. Here's the result.

I've added 3 pictures to my bead album on Picturetrail.
Pat from Canvey's Picturetrail
Basically, I was just playing around to see what the end result would be. I used a 1.5mm crochet hook and 34 gauge copper wire bought from an electrical suppliers because I couldn't find very fine wire anywhere else. As a plus, this wire is coated so doesn't tarnish and it is easy enough to string beads on the wire before starting to crochet and then incorporating them into the work as you go.
I wanted to try the crochet because I bought a book recently at a beadfair in Newmarket, UK. The book is called Crochet with Wire by Nancie M Wiseman published by Interweave Press and sells in US for $14.94. It has projects for all crochet skill levels and has a brief "How to" section.

I didn't take my tripod to New Zealand this year because last year I used it very infrequently. Plus it is a bog standard tripod without a panoramic head. The view of the lake was so spendid that I decided to try a panorama by standing in one place and pivoting myself about 5 times, each time taking one photo whilst keeping my hands and elbows still. When I got home, my November issue of Your Family Tree magazine was waiting for me and one of the full products offered in the free disc that comes with it was a Serif program Panoramaplus 1.0. I thought "Why don't I try out this program rather than a couple of others I have to see what the results will be".These others have given me disappointing results and have required subsequent manipulation.

I shot this panorma some time ago while on a business trip to Germany. I managed to get into Berlin one evening and subsequently took a lot of pictures of the architecture. I've put more effort in to this picture than it was really worth on the basis that I've learnt a lot while producing it. It was three images handheld at 18mm x 1.6 crop factor. There was some significant mismatching in the stones making up the foreground which I've repaired although if you look really carefully you might just be able to spot an oddity that I've left in! The image has also changed a lot since it started. I started off doing it in colour with a natural look (it was taken in the early evening so it was lightened a bit). I then started going with a bit more of a fantasy look with more of an overdone HDR look (although looking at some peoples HDRs you have to wonder whether there is a limit to how far you can push them into fantasy-land). The final image is obviously black and white and I'm personally more happy with it this way. Taking this image through a process of evolution has been interesting in making me more aware of what sort of look I like and given me lots of (not necessarily wanted) practice at masking!

Cross

A photo to honour the death of the 250ish spam comments I just deleted out of my approval queue and the IP address I have subsequently banned from the site. It's still trying to add stuff (you can tell by the number of guests online and the site slowing down every so often). You'd think they'd give up after a while but apparently not.

My parents bought me a flight in a balloon as a Christmas and Birthday present last year and Saturday was the day I was scheduled to fly. My mum had organised for me to take a flight during one of the launches at the Bristol Balloon Fiesta. After checking the weather reports on the Friday night it didn't seem likely that a Saturday morning launch would take place but given no cancellation message on the balloon company's weather check line I dutifully turned up to the launch meeting point at 05:30 on the Saturday.

I've finally started looking at some of the pictures that I took when I visited the British International Motor Show 2006. It took me a while to identify this car as in all the links that I clicked on the Beaulieu website I didn't manage to spot the obvious! I finally identified it by stumbing on an entry for a classic car aution in the states where one of the lots looked suspiciously like the car I was looking for. Still, nevermind, it got identified in the end. The two photos I took are below. The first - just a record of being there, the second - trying to be more arty! ;-)

Wow! It's been a while since I've updated due to spending long evenings at work doing coursework and generally not being in the mood to sort out any of the photos that I's recently taken. I thought I'd break the drought by uploading a couple of images of my friend Dave taken at Kimmerige Bay. I have lots of other ones still to sort but I generally choose images with friends in to work on first as they have the most meaning to me.

I've been playing with some of the photos from the photography weekend a couple of weeks ago. The first image out is a semi-collaborative effort between me and my friend Dave. I asked for him to model for me for a silhouette photo. He agreed and once he'd seen the results he wanted a go too. So to summarise, I took the picture of him, he took the picture of me. I'm entirely to blame for the Photoshop work. ;-)