Sham

 


What I love more than taking photographs is sewing. I intend to bring these together in my work at some point when I come up with a clever idea for doing it.

About a year ago I decided to make a quilt. It's a t-shirt quilt, inspired by a book written by Cathy Cano-Murillo, the Crafty Chica. I got a bunch of cute or funny or whatnot t-shirts from a thrift store, and chose other fabrics to go with the t-shirt panels. Measure measure, cut cut.

As I'm pretty new to sewing, it took forever to assemble this thing. But I finally finished it sometime in the Fall, I think. Ever since then I meant to make some shams to match the quilt but one project or another kept me from doing that and a couple of weeks ago I decided to just get it done. I finished them this morning and whew! I can clean a few sewing things off the dining room table so I can get to getting some photos ready for next week's show.

What have you been making? (Or what would you like to make if you had the time, space, etc.?)

Phooey!

 

Turns out that the blank roll of film was NO problem, because my film developing class, which was supposed to begin tonight, has been canceled. So now I've got to come up with a new plan to learn the process. More than a few folks have told me that it's fairly easy, but I'm more of a learn-by-doing than a learn-by-reading type, so I was hoping to have the chance to try it out with instruction a few times before I attempted to tackle it on my own. Anyone local who has ideas on somewhere else to take a course in this?

The photo above is one of the handful of digital photos I took on Saturday's excursion. The Knotty Pine Inn and Motel is in Breese, Illinois, on Old Route 50. I had fried chicken there.

Oh, before I forget!: I am super excited to be participating in the Cherokee Street Open House on Saturday, April 4. Mike from Foam* has generously offered to let me have some photos on display the day of the open house. My first solo show! Yay!

If you are in STL that day, won't you pretty pretty please come by and see me? It would mean the world to me. Holler at me for details. I promise to continue to harrass you about this until it's over.

Love,
Me


*do you know about Foam? It's going to be a coffee and beer place (but way more than that) opening at the corner of Cherokee & Jefferson, right where the statue is. Got to take a peek in it the other day and the work that's in progress there is way cool. Come take a look!

Avon calling

Avon
Originally uploaded by Hilary (curioush)

As I type this I can see some neighbor kids wheeling a basketball hoop out into the alley for a little pick-up game. I don't think I've seen them do that yet this year. It must really be Spring!

===============
I've signed up for the black and white film development classes that I mentioned in this entry. Yay! Thanks again to my friend Darren for inspiring me to finally take action.

Classes start this Tuesday. I get all nervous when I think school, so I'm hoping that this isn't going to be as school-y as regular school.

Not sure how quickly we're going to be getting into the darkroom -- this is a five-week class -- but I thought I'd better get a couple of rolls of black and white film shot first before class starts in case we are supposed to be developing right away.

I haven't had occasion to really get out of St. Louis much lately, so I decided to take a drive on US-50 in Illinois yesterday. I take US-50 in Missouri every chance I get, because it is way more pleasant than the the major highways, and it's got a lot of charm. But I haven't been on it on Illinois much, if ever.

Yesterday seemed like the perfect day to get in the car and do some exploring in Illinois. Fill up a roll or two of film. Win-win. I saw some neat places! Got a whole roll of film filled! Snapped a few digitals and Holgaroids too, but my main focus (haha) was on getting some black and white photos.

Except. When I got home last night, all happy to have gotten some shots that I felt pretty good about, I went to rewind the film and. Nothing. It wouldn't rewind. Because as far as I can tell I must have done something wrong in the first place when loading the film and I actually took no photos. Doh!

I guess I'll wait and see what happens when I try to develop the film in class, but I'm not too hopeful on this one.

This is one of the digital photos I took (haven't scanned the Holgaroids yet) of the Avon Theater in Breese, Illinois. Breese is a really cute town -- as were the others I passed through along the way. Will definitely have to make another trip there. And practice my film-loading technique.

Send me a postcard, drop me a line, stating point of view

I've been thinking about this for a while -- having postcards made of some of my photos. I am accustomed to making my own prints; I get all nervous when I send something out to be printed for any reason. When I make a print I work at it until I am perfectly happy with it. If a color is a little off I make it again and again until it's something I'd be proud to show as my work. I can get a little fussy!

So I sent in one test image for the postcards to see how well I liked the results. I liked it a lot! And had four other images put on postcards. I love them so much I am thinking about which ones I will have made next.

See them in my Etsy shop here.

Firecracker Firecracker Boom Boom Boom

Originally uploaded by Hilary (curioush)

Did you used to say that little rhyme in pre-school? Did you get in trouble for saying "girls got the sexy legs"? I wonder what it was really supposed to say.

I dropped off some new photos -- including this one -- today at The Firecracker Press on Cherokee Street here in the Gravois Park neighborhood of South St. Louis.

If you have not been there before, please do yourself a favor and go! If you haven't been to this new location, or haven't been in a while, you should also go! Their work is gorgeous, and if I could I would probably paper my whole house with it.

To see more of Firecracker's work or learn about the letterpress process watch this little video from a couple of years ago.

Meet the new boss

Originally uploaded by Hilary (curioush)

I bought this guy last weekend off of Craigslist. Earlier in the week I bought the Polaroid SX-70 off of Craigslist that I used to take this photo of the Canon.

This all started with this photo of my grandpa feeding my dad.

A few weeks ago I was back-and-forthing with my friend Darren on Facebook and he asked about this photo and what a great look it had and we got into a photography discussion and it reminded me that I really want to learn to develop film before the opportunity passes me by.

I sort of came to photography from the wrong direction. Or the right direction. My direction. Anyway, I started with a digital camera and then began to shoot a little film in a Holga and then picked up Polaroids and have a few other film cameras but I've never really learned the fundamentals of photography. Someday I'd like to have a little darkroom but first I need to learn how to develop film.

I see that there are classes in film development at the community college. So I needed to get a camera that would be worth shooting with. I've always liked the looks of this Canon, the AE-1. It's just so handsome.

I've been vaguely poking around eBay and elsewhere for a while, thinking maybe I'd pick one up someday. Conversations with Darren and the community college course schedule arriving in my mailbox just about collided with me getting a tax refund in the mail. Most of that is more than spoken for, but I took a little bit and bought this camera and the SX-70 last week. I got terrific deals on both and I am so so happy about that.

I've been cracking open photography books and magazines, which is a change because my heart's not been in the learning and reading for a little while here and I'm feeling reinvigorated and excited about photography in a way that I've been missing for a bit.

Celery

I will be donating a photo to the Missouri Coalition for the Environment's 2009 Earthworks exhibit and auction at the Regional Arts Commission* in the Loop here in St. Louis in May.

I was in this show a couple of years ago and found it to be really cool. So be sure to check it out once it's up!

Still thinking about what photo I'll use. I have a few things in mind. One idea that came to me tonight was one of these photos of celery that I've been working on. In my brain there are reasons why one of these might fit with an environmental theme, but I've not got all the words for it yet.



* I still have a couple of pieces hanging there currently in the Holga Polka Invitational through February 22.