fisheye

I have a little plastic camera that uses this stuff called film. It's cheap but fun to play with because it has a fisheye lens.

Some vacation shots as scene through the eye of a fish:

I could make a statement about how hard it is to shoot through the fisheye lens, because you only see a very small part of what you're photographing, and when you get the pictures back you see so much more than you remembered and the bigger picture is even better, and how much like life that is.

But really I'm just glad Walgreens still develops film and simultaneously burns the pictures to a disk.

gettin' my party pants on

This is the year of the 30th birthday. I celebrated mine in June with a vacation to Belize, and in August my friend Mary Ann threw a birthday bash at the house to celebrate hers.

I realized that I love planning a party...I like to know there will be good food and the decorations will be appropriate to the theme and would make Martha Stewart proud. I don't really care if people show up but I want it to look good. I think we accomplished that. (and fun people showed up, bonus!)

Now I'm off to my next 30th celebration, a tour of the coast of New England with my friend Jackie and our new friend Hurricane Earl!

before & after

For the first time in a long time (maybe ever) I have more blog ideas than I have time. I'm going to start to "catch up" by sharing my most favorite project this year...the re-covering of my garage sale chair. This chair was $35 and is turning out to be the best money I've ever spent. It began life in the 1980s and was probably the accent piece in a room of pastels. I recovered it hastily with a paisley sheet 3 years ago, which was cute but not very durable. So this year I decided it was time to make it a "big girl" chair and bring it into a new decade (much like myself).

Found fabric at Calico Corners, had a little help with the seat cushion covers, but covered the rest myself.

Ta-da!