Drop spindling while fun turns out not to be as fun as spinning on a wheel (IMHO). I had been coveting a spinning wheel all year and decided to purchase one for Christmas and join the local spinning group (Ponderosa Spinners and Weavers).

1. What have you learned from your experiences? 
2. Is there any advice that you are known for giving? 
3. What special phrases do you often say? 
4. What advice do you have for your posterity? 
5. What kind of legacy have you created?

We are almost there in our journaling prompts series on Life.  This week we continue the theme about Special Memories.

1. Have loved ones sign on one page.
2. Write special memories, thoughts, messages for those same loved ones.

In week 10 of our journaling prompts series, we talk about: Special Memories.

1. What do you want to be remembered for? 
2. Did you create any fun traditions with friends or family? 
3. Who do you think of when you think of the good times in your life? 
4. What do you enjoy most in life? 
5. What are you most proud of? 
6. What memory do you hold most dear?

1. Where is your favorite place to visit? What is it like visiting your favorite place? 
2. What holiday traditions carried over from your childhood? 
3. Have you had any adventures as an adult? 
4. If you do not travel, do you have any dreams of traveling? 
5. Have you had any special reunions with family or friends?

1. What special awards or recognition have you received? 
2. What personal qualities do you think helped you to be most successful in your home life or in the work force? 
3. What special interests do you have as an adult? 
4. What talents & skills have you acquired as an adult? 
5. Have you ever changed jobs? 
6. What are your goals now (adult)? 

Thanks for joining us this week. We are at the half way mark on our 12-part series of Journaling Prompts about Life.  This week we focus on: Family & Friends.

1. When did you fall in love? 
2. What was the courtship, engagement, or wedding like? 
3. What was life like for the young couple? 
4. When did you have children? (Give names and birth order of children. 
5. What did you like to do with your family? 
6. What close friends did you have at this time?

I'm trying to get into digital scrapbooking again. This has been a lot more difficult than it sounds. When I moved from from PC to Mac a year ago, I didn't really think about how I'd access my digital scrapbooking programs including ACDSee, the program that organizes all my digital scrapbooking supplies.

To my disappointment, I discovered ACDSee for Mac can't open an ACDSee for Windows catalog. This meant I'd either have to stay with the Windows version or retag all my png files again (not the jpgs because tags can be embedded in jpg files, just not png files. And note, png have transparency so I couldn't convert them to jpgs).

Of course, the snag to staying on Windows was that I wanted to use my Mac with Lightroom for photo editing and management, but to scrapbook I'd want both the photos and the supplies on the same computer.

Well my new solution isn't perfect but I'll document it for you in case you are struggling with the same thing. I have Lightroom set up on an EHD (note Lightroom can't access a networked catalog, it must be local), including the catalog, thumbnails and photos. On the same EHD is my folder of digital scrapbook supplies and my ACDSee catalog. The EHD is NTFS formatted and my mac is running a driver that allows it to read and write to the EHD.

My Workflow
I prepare the photos using Lightroom on my Mac but export the photos I think I'll need to jpg with all the edits onto the EHD. Then I unplug the EHD and plug it into the PC, open up Photoshop and ACDSee on the PC and pull all the supplies and photos into PS. Ideally I'd like to be able to use the Mac for the scrapbooking/PS piece but that would mean identifying the supplies in advance and copying them to a readily accessible location.

If you have any suggestions as to how I could improve my workflow I'd be interested in hearing them!

Here's the layout:

This week we are going to start documenting our adult life starting with: Young Adulthood.

1. When did you first leave home? 
2. What goals did you pursue at this time? 
3. How did you decide which path to pursue? 
4. What were some of the challenges you faced? 
5. What were some of the triumphs that you experienced? 
6. How did you serve others during this time? 

It's been a long time since I scrapbooked, but here a couple of new pages:

Welcome to week four of our 12-part Journaling Prompts series on Life. This week we are providing some prompts to get you writing about your: Interests & Hobbies.

1. What were your interests & how did they develop? 
2. What was the most important thing you learned from your parents? 
3. What extracurricular activities did you participate in? 
4. What responsibilities did you have at home or in the community? 
5. What books/music/movies did you like? 
6. What did you most enjoy doing in your younger years?

1. What was school like when you were younger? 
2. Was there something you were really good at in school? What school activities did you participate in? 
3. What did you want to be when you grew up? 
4. Are there any funny school-related stories to share? 
5. Who were your favorite classmates? 
6. If you could spend the day doing anything, what would it be?

1. What was life like for you as a child? 
2. What experiences do you remember having with your siblings? 
3. What was your earliest childhood memory? 
4. Did you ever get into mischief as a child? 
5. Who were the important people in your life & what did you learn from these people? 
6. What interests & talents did you have early on?

1. What is your birth date and place of birth? 
2. What are the names of your parents & siblings? 
3. Where did your family come from? 
4. What is unique or special about your background? 
5. How did your ancestors contribute to your future? 
6. How did your parents choose your name (any nicknames)?

I have been knitting on and off since I was a kid. A while ago I picked up a Turkish drop spindle from Knitpicks to try my hand at spinning my own yarn. This week I completed my first batch. It was generally lumpy with thick and thin parts and lots of joins. I plied it myself by plying both ends from the center pull ball from the Turkish drop spindle to create a 2 ply handspun yarn. This process actually gave the yarn much more stability and consistency in terms of its thickness and I am actually pretty pleased with how it looks now.

So much so that I have started my 2nd yarn, using a bat of Purple People Eater (purple is my favorite color). My plan is to spin this yarn as thin as I can and try to create something in a sport or dk weight, for shawl knitting (lace weight would be too ambitious).

I have to say I never thought I'd become a spinner but I have to say it is both enjoyable and relaxing,and has a useful output. I can see myself easily creating far more handspun yarn than I'll ever have time to knit, so knitter friends you may be getting some handspun sometime soon!

Pastel - 22x28 - Art Spectrum Colorfix paper.

Finally finished this painting I started over a year ago. It's been sitting on my easel waiting for some love. The missing part was the foreground hedgerow and the apple boxes.

Not sure if non-Okanaganites will recognize those!

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, especially those rolling clouds.

Like many people who have been touched by either an iPhone or an iPad, I made the move to the Mac with my last computer purchase (iMac). I love it! But I still have my PC laptop running Windows 7.

I am still trying to get the two systems to live in harmony.  I would like to be able to share a Lightroom catalog and photos between the two systems.

I already have a 640GB external hard drive (EHD) attached to my iMac and formatted in HFS format (Mac). This was necessary because the iMac won't Time Machine backup an EHD unless it is HFS.

Of course this introduced the problem of how the Windows machine was going to read the drive.  During my research I came across a program called MacDrive that claims to provide read/write access to EHDs on a windows system. I installed the software and, yes, the windows machine could read and write to the drive. Of course I wouldn't be writing this post if that was the end of the story :)

I unplugged the EHD and took it back to my iMac. Wait, the iMac can't see the EHD? What's that about? I plugged the EHD back into the windows machine and lo and behold it works fine. So let me see, software that is specifically designed for your windows machine to read your Mac's EHD suddenly won't let the Mac see it. Isn't that the whole point?

Now I have a mac-formatted EHD that only a Windows machine running MacDrive can read. I am scared to uninstall MacDrive until I've finished backing up the EHD onto the Windows machine just in case.

So if you are successfully sharing an EHD between Windows and Mac, can you please leave a comment as to how you are doing it and which format the drive is in (NTFS, FAT32 or HFS).

Honestly, this makes me want to run out and buy a new mac laptop!

February was the month I tried oil painting for the first time. It's been the last medium (?) that I've attempted to work with. The chemicals and poisons involved have given me some concern with young children in the house, but now they are old enough to understand not to drink or touch mommy's art supplies!

Of course, it may be the medium I have enjoyed the most or perhaps it's just been so long since I painted anything that I had such fun.

Cut - $200
16 x 20 Oil on Canvas


Sunshine in a Vase - $100
5 x 7 Oil on canvas board