Too darn hot!

For me, anyway. Wensleydale told me that it is only 21C on the outdoor thermometer – that’s the one in the shade, on the north side of the house.

I think it is a tad hotter in our south-facing garden.

So, over the last two days, instead of sitting embroidering in the garden as I’d planned, I've been doing paper-work in the house. Yesterday was RP day – researching and collating images, printing them out, writing notes, putting them in the portfolio. Worthy, educational – boring.

Life got a little more interesting when we went back to the Watermill last night for the second time, this time to see ‘Comedy of Errors’. As usual, with Propeller, it was very very good. If they played Richard III as a comedy, they played Errors as a pantomime – and the music was brilliant.

I don’t think Mrs Cheddar will ever forget it. I won’t go into details, but there are drawbacks to sitting on the front row at Propeller productions. Tall, male, acting drawbacks. Twice.

Today I turned to more interesting paperwork.

These were inspired by a wallet, believe it or not. The paper is some hand made [not by me] from my stash, alternating front and back.

 

 

 

 

This is a little more elaborate. I haven’t made a lot of books by binding over tapes – and none by binding over roving – but it seemed like a good idea at the time. My first idea was not to make a cover, and leave the ends loose, [bottom right]but it didn’t look right, and the binding was sloppy. I decided to contain it in an adaptation of a paper cover from Sue Doggett’s ‘Hand Made Books’. [I am gulping after following that link. Needless to say, I did not pay that price for it…]

In the middle of all that, I made these. Hot uncrossed buns. Well, the bread maker did some of the work.

Despite making our own bread, we usually buy hot cross buns, but we forgot this time. So inspired by Babybel and her mummy’s excellent example, I decided to have a go. Of course, I didn't have all the right ingredients, and I couldn’t be bothered to make the crosses – but they taste almost as good as Babybel and her mum’s efforts – perhaps they’ll give me a few pointers next year?

The End – at least for now.

No, I'm not giving up blogging – just the last of the imaging program posts for now.

The final instalment is the only one of the more PSP-like  programs I’d heard about before I started all this – Gimp.

Just looking at the website makes you realise that this is a different sort of beast to most of the others I’ve looked at. The page of tutorials alone is thiiiiiiiis long – and, of course, full of words you never knew existed.

However, as a novice and non-techie – I found the program a bit irritating. Click on ‘File – Open’ and you get a list of your pictures. Not thumbnails. A list. The Help section acknowledges that this can make life difficult if you don’t know the name of the image you want to work with – but I couldn’t work out how [or even if] you could change the list to thumbnails. I suppose if you are working on a few images, you probably will know what they are called – but when you’ve got hundreds and they are almost all called something like IMG 1234…

If you click on a name the program shows you a thumbnail of that file – but clicking through  all the files in a folder can take a while – and I'm an impatient soul.

Another thing that irritates me is that as you move the cursor around, little arrows on the scales across the top and down the left hand side move around too. I’m sure there is a way to stop it but I don’t know what it is.

Unlike most of the other programs I’ve tried, when you use the filters, Gimp doesn’t always show you a preview on the actual image, but in a separate pane – and most of the time it is only part of the image, not the whole. You can move the preview around, but I prefer to se the whole thing at once. For ‘Tools’ on the other hand, it does use the actual image. Most of the time – it doesn’t seem to be consistent.

Having said all that – Gimp has a huge range of things to play with, [try ‘Colours’, ‘Tools’ and ‘Filters’], even if some of them are [and I quote from the program] ‘special effects that nobody understands’. There are lots of sliders to play with too, even if you don’t understand what the labels mean.

This is ‘Supernova’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Cubism’ which is in the ‘Artistic’ set of filters. Lots of bits of layered sheers, I think.

 

 

 

 

‘Value – Invert’. Very moody.

 

 

 

 

 

Equally moody – the ‘Edge’ filter on the dahlia – love those colours.

 

 

 

 

 

‘Predator’.  No, I don’t know why either, but interesting for counted thread techniques.

 

 

 

 

‘Artistic – Softglow’. Maybe I’m turning girlie in my old age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And ‘Waves’. most of these samples have had sliders slid – but don’t ask me what I did!

 

 

 

I didn’t find Gimp the easiest of programs to use, but I think it has enormous potential – and is probably much easier if you know more about this sort of program than I do. It also seems to have the best ‘Help’ section of all the programs I downloaded – and, I think, of all the others too.

Of the 4 programs I downloaded [as opposed to on-line programs]Photoscape is probably my favourite, because it is so easy to use and has extras like the collages etc. But I may well come back to Gimp – if only to explore the tutorials on layers, and the paint section which looked quite user friendly.

Mmmm – have to think of something else to do tomorrow!

On a completely different topic – Mrs C reminded me that I hadn’t mentioned where we all went on Monday night.

Here.  Or, more geographically accurately, here – but I posted the review rather than writing my own, which would have been pretty similar.

I don’t think actors are allowed to work at the Watermill unless they can also sing, dance and play at least one musical instrument – preferably all at the same time. I have seen people dance on grand pianos before [as they do in this show] – but not tap dance with a double bass. Has to be a first. Strongly recommended – if you can get tickets. Mrs C got ours last Easter. Very good for taking your mind off interviews.

P.S. Am I the only person in the country who didn't know who Craig Revel Horwood is? – had to look him up.