Spring at the New York Botanical Gardens

I love spring, and I love spring flowers. Thus, I knew that if I couldn't find time in my busy work schedule to go to the New York Botanical Gardens and soak up the season, I'd be very depressed. And that's how I ended up playing hooky on Thursday afternoon and walking (and it's a loooong walk) to NYBG. And now you get to see some of the photos!

One of the biggest challenges I feel I encounter every year is photographing daffodils. They're my favorite flowers, but whenever I take a picture, I feel that it's not quite right. I don't know what it is, but I find it very difficult to take a picture of a daffodil that really captures what I love about them. This year, I think maybe I had a little success.





Then, of course, there are all of the other spring flowers: tulips, hyacinths, hellebore, and pasque flowers (and loads of others I'm not sharing just now)!









And of course you can't forget the cherry blossoms!





One of the big high lights of spring at the NYBG is the annual Orchid Show! I go every year and take ludicrous numbers of pictures of the gorgeous orchids placed all over the Conservatory. This year was no different...













And orchids aren't the only lovely plants on display in the Conservatory!







Finally, all that was left to do was to walk home beneath a glowing sunset. Yeah, I got a sunburn. :)



You can see the full set (which has more than 350 pictures!) here. :)

Finished Object Friday, 4/15/2011

Well, I didn't finish either of the projects I'd mentioned on Wednesday that I hoped to have finished by today (shocking! ;) ) but I've still got two projects to show for the last few weeks of missing FO Friday/Fiber Arts Friday. :)

Wheel Chair Cushion Cover
A week and a half ago, I spent the weekend with my family down in College Station, Texas, to celebrate my grandfather's 93rd birthday. (No, we're not from TX - we're from New York, but my uncle is an A&M professor, and my grandfather now lives with him). For that occasion, I made my grand father a cover for the cushion on his wheel chair.





He's a really tough guy to shop for, but the cushion on his chair was really, really ugly with this gross semi-plastic stuff on it, so I thought a cover would be appreciated.



He liked it so much, it got transferred to the cushion on the chair he sits on all the time!

All in all, it was a nice party! There's a Mexican woman who we originally hired to help take care of him, but as events have unfolded over the past couple years, her entire family has become part of our family (or maybe we've become part of their family, I'm not sure). She and her family helped to organize a party for him. There was even a pinata!



We took a family shot:

From left to right, my uncle, my mom, me, my older brother, and my grandfather. And Sponge Bob. (it took the kids like an hour to break that pinata open...)

Jose Estrella, Star Starfish Shortstop for the Oceans!

I finally got around to doing the back stitching on Jose. After several trials, I decided to not give him a face - just his OCN #5 (for obvious reasons). The pattern is now ready for testing, if I can only find the time to get it started. :(

Join in on the Friday fun! FO Friday on Tami's Amis and Crochet Blog, and Fiber Arts Friday on Wisdom Begins in Wonder!

Work In Progress Wednesday - 4/13/2011

Well, for a couple weeks life was so busy that I didn't have time to make anything, so there was no WIP worth reporting! But things have calmed down a little, and now I can once again share how things are!

Gokk
Gokk - my self-designed imagined alien based on a single passing quote from Babylon 5 - hasn't progressed since I last shared him two weeks ago, but I hope to have him finished soon (certainly by next Wednesday!) so I figured I might as well share another in-progress shot. :)


Mystery Amigurumi Project
Another Nerd Wars inspired project, I'm actually almost done with this (I started it yesterday, but it's working up very fast, which is good cause I'm still really busy) but it's part of a secret plan by my team, and since I think one or two Nerd Wars folks might actually read my blog, I don't want to show anything that will spoil it, so I took the most obscure, non-understandable picture of this I could manage:

It should be done by Friday, but I won't be sharing it as a FO until after the 20th (so...next Friday's FO, I guess).

Handspun Romney Progress
A while ago I shared some homespun I was working on. I had one night earlier this week that I was so tired that spinning was about all I had the brain power for, and I made some progress!

I think I'm getting better! And I haven't even gone in to the pound of fiber I bought - and Maryland Sheep and Wool is in less than a month - so there will be more spinning in my future!

Crochet Zouave Jacket
This is the project that I'm really excited about. Last fall, I visited the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and spotted a little display case they had with a small selection of books from their library. It was clear that what was in the case was rotated pretty frequently, and I really lucked out: when I was there, it was a display of fashion from the American Civil War. (I'm a big Civil War buff; I wrote a long post about it yesterday because yesterday was the anniversary of the first shots of the war being fired). Anyway, in that case I saw this image:



From the moment I saw it, I knew I HAD to make it. It's from an issue of Godey's Lady's Magazine from October of 1862. That was August. Flash to a couple weeks ago when the new Nerd Wars challenges were announced. One of them was "Reading Rainbow" - make an object inspired by a book you have read or are reading. Well, I certainly read enough about the Civil War (I later found out that I had to do it based off of a fiction book, so ostensibly I was inspired by Mike Shaara's "The Killer Angels" - the book the movie Gettysburg is based on - which is historical fiction). The first step was to hunt down the pattern. This proved both easy and difficult, and took a couple of days, but I was able to find a full text.

However, the next step was actually making it! The pattern called for "Berlin wool." I did some research and found out that Berlin wool is basically tapestry embroidery thread, which is the equivalent of fingering weight. And all Berlin wool was 100% merino. I went out and spent the most money I've ever spent on yarn to get some absolutely gorgeous fingering weight merino. I get it home...and I realize I shouldn't have trusted my memory. The pattern called for double Berlin wool. I felt like an idiot. However, undaunted, I simply decided to use two lengths of my gorgeous wool simultaneously (even though that means I now don't have enough...so I'll be buying more today. $80 bucks worth of yarn. Dear god. I just remind myself that buying a FO like this would cost much, much more).

So, the directions are semi-incomprehensible. It's not just changes in how patterns are written, it's that they are actually badly written. For example, early in the pattern they "establish" that one "rib" is composed of two rows of dc. However, at other points throughout the pattern they use rib and row interchangeably, which makes it impossible to tell at any given point which one they are talking about - and it can make a big difference! Then, there's no way in the pattern to figure out how the piece you start with actually relates to your body (is it the middle of the under arm? Is it the back of the under arm?). Furthermore, they frequently talk about the "parts" of the shoulder, as in the top of the shoulder (okay, I can tell where that is) and the middle of the shoulder. Where the heck is the middle of my shoulder? So all in all, the first couple of days were pretty frustrating. Finally, when I'd read it about two dozen times, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what they intended regardless of what nonsense they had actually written, and since I made the decision to just improvise around what I think they meant, things have gone much better. All in all, though, I'm exceptionally thankful that I'm an experienced sewer and have made bodices before, and therefore know basically how they go together and what the different sections need to look like, or else I'd be totally screwed. Anyway, in the past week I've made a little over half the bodice.


On the left is one half of the body, with the front forward. The back isn't quite fitting right, so I'm going to have to put in a third panel or else it's never going around my stomach, but that's okay, I already know how I'm going to do it. The right is the underarm for the second side.


This is definitely an instance where the fit won't really be right until it's all put together and the buttons are on, but here's a preliminary shot of how it looks.

And of course, after I do the bodice, I have to figure out the arms. Joy of joy. :) (actually, the arm directions look significantly clearer because there is no fit involved in quite the same way). But I'm still both nervous and excited - this is the first real item of clothing I've ever crocheted (ie, not a scarf or a hat).

So! That's my adventure. I'm sure I'll write more about it. :)


You know you want to take a look at what every one else is working on to this fine WIP Wednesday! Just head over to Tami's Amis!

What the Heck is a Sesquicentennial?

Today is the sesquicentennial of the opening salvos at Fort Sumter. Or, in plain English, today is the 150th anniversary of the first shots being fired in the American Civil War. One of the things I don't talk about much - because it's not really pertinent to this crafting blog - is that I'm a huge Civil War buff. As such, I've been eagerly anticipating this anniversary (and am very disappointed that I wasn't able to find the time to go down to Charleston for it) and have been a bit sad that I couldn't figure out some way to babble about the Civil War in my blog a bit. And then I realized I did have a way to babble about it without entirely changing my focus! See, I've been to a lot of sites related to the War, so consider this a photo blog - some of my photography, and a lot of attempting to wax eloquent on the start of the Civil War. Feel free to ignore the prosey parts and enjoy the photographs. ;)

I've always been really interested in US History, and especially the Civil War. I think it's an inevitable side effect of having a father who is a buff (though my brother never developed any interest, so I guess it's not inevitable ;) ). I firmly believe that there's no way to understand where we are without understanding something about where we've been. I'm not talking about learning about unusual people and memorizing dates - neither individuals nor dates mean anything unless the context is known. There are a few defining moments in American history, but I would argue that the Civil War is either the most or the second most significant (I might be prepared to cede the #1 spot to the events surrounding the Revolution). The Civil War is so defining that the entire period before it is called the Antebellum Period (antebellum, as in, before the war). Shelby Foote, one of the great historians of the war, talks about how before the war, people talked about the United States as a plural, as in "The United States are..." But after the war, they talked about the US as a singular: "The United States is..." It forged us from a set of states with individual identity in to a nation that saw itself as unified, even as the divisions that caused the war lingered.

Collar for a slave (National Museum of the Civil War, Harrisburg PA):


A lot of things happened before the Civil War began that led to it's happening, and the war wasn't inevitable. However, fundamentally, the war was about slavery. It was about state rights only to the extent that the southern states denied the right of the Federal Government to interfere with slavery and slave property that was protected in the states. The state rights fallacy is easily dispelled: if the war was about states rights, the south would not have insisted on a fugitive slave law, because they would have had to acknowledge that it was in the rights of the northern states to pass whatever laws they wanted about slavery. But instead, the southern states insisted that the government provided positive, explicit protection for slavery, even as they denied the right of the government to legislate about slavery at all! Contradictory? Perhaps - but it's worth remember that there was never any such thing as a South - just like nowadays, views are nuanced and no one area all felt the same way about things. Leading up to 1860, a series of political and social battles paved the way to the war - battles that had they gone differently, had the combatants made different choices, could have resulted in history going very differently and might not have led to a Civil War. If the Compromise of 1850 doesn't overturn the Missouri Compromise, perhaps there is no war. If John C. Calhoun doesn't change his position on the constitutionality of federal interference with slavery, perhaps their is no war. However, we'll never know. The specific events don't matter so much as the common thread: all of the events involved slavery. But it's more than that: repeatedly during the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s, the actions taken by the South began to make it clear that in order to preserve the servitude of African Americans, they would need to infringe on the rights of whites. And thus it came to be that hundreds of thousands of people in the north who didn't care on bit whether the African Americans were slave or free came to care passionately about the importance of protecting their own freedoms, without interference from what they saw as an elitist slaveocracy. On the other side, the Southerners felt increasingly that they were being manipulated and controlled by a mob of Northern wage slaves and immigrants. Not a recipe for friendship!

Nominees for the Republican Presidency (Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC):


These contradictions, and everything that they represented, tore apart the only national party that had survived through to 1860, leading to a contested election with four nominees - a northern Democrat (Stephen Douglas), a southern Democrat (John Breckinridge), a Unionist (...er...something Bell) and a Republican (Abraham Lincoln). Can you even find Lincoln in the image just above? A few months before, he was hardly known at all. It's amazing what little events can shape history! The selection of a compromise candidate led to the election of a Republican even though there were states in the south that didn't cast a single vote for him. Had the Democratic party hadn't split, Stephen Douglas would have been elected, and the Civil War wouldn't have broken out. So why did it happen? After all, Lincoln vowed over and over again that though he personally felt that slavery was a moral wrong and that slaves should be manumitted and sent to Africa. The South didn't believe him, but how could that alone have driven them to secede?

The answer is, it couldn't. However, in the 19th century, elections were about more than just the office in question. Whoever won the election had it within his power to appoint his supporters to political (but not elected) offices. This spoils system was used to reward those who helped get you elected. So, if Joe the butcher, an influential Republican I've just made up, helped get Abraham Lincoln elected by encouraging his township to vote for Lincoln, Joe might be rewarded by being named the postmaster of his town. This is all well and nice when Joe lives in Illinois, but in the South, they knew that the Republican party was the anti-slavery party, and they knew that once Lincoln started appointing Republican's to offices in the South, it would be impossible to prevent the development of a local anti-slavery group. After all, not everyone in the South was pro-slavery, many were just conforming (for any number of reasons not worth going in to). Rather than let this happen, South Carolina worked up the nerve to secede, and was followed soon after by Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas. But that wasn't war, yet.

War Banner (Gettysburg National Military Park Museum):


Both sides started to mobilize. Southern states seized formerly national arms depots to arm their revolutionary militias. Forts held by soldiers loyal to the Federal government were ordered to surrender. Some did surrender. Some left. Some decided to join the rebellion. And some held out. A small contingent of troops under a Major Anderson, positioned at a fort called Sumter located at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, decided to stay, and soon became a key to the whole situation. The South Carolinian's insisted that they withdraw. Lincoln told them to stay. The fort was the property of the national government, after all. Militia under P.G.T Beauregard surrounded the fort, and rebellion - now called the Confederate - ships prevented goods from reaching the troops. Anderson considered surrendering. They were running out of food. Lincoln was walking a fine line with his policy. War was looking increasingly inevitable, but if the north were goaded in to firing the first shots it would change the entire international perception of the war. Relations between the two sides broke down rapidly, and finally the Confederates delivered an ultimatum: surrender Sumter by tomorrow or else! And Anderson wrote back and said, well, gimme a couple days, and if we don't get any food or reinforcements, we're going to have to leave! And the Southerners decided that wasn't good enough, so instead of letting Anderson evacuate on April 15th, which he surely would have, they opened fire on April 12th just at first light. The bombardment lasted 36 hours before the Anderson's men surrendered. The only casualty was a horse. As soon as the men of the North - the Union - fired upon the South, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee joined the Confederacy, and the course of events was set (at least to the extent that there would certainly be a war). Four years later, 650,000 men north and south would be dead.

So, those first shorts matter! Until that moment, there was still the chance that something else might happen. What if Beauregard's South Carolinians had let Anderson have his couple of days? What if Anderson hadn't bothered to hold Sumter at all? What if Lincoln had ordered the fort evacuated, or ordered it held at all hazards? Part of what makes history so fascinating is that at the moment that the men, women, and children involved made their decisions, they faced numerous options, and made choices for a whole range of reasons, and they didn't know what would happen. We look back, and we say, "that was inevitable," or "that was the critical moment," or "that didn't matter at all," but at the time, the parties involved didn't know which events mattered, they just did the best they could with what they knew and what was at end.

When Abraham Lincoln stood up to take the oath of office in March of 1861, he made an impassioned plea in his inaugural address: "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." We face a time now with a lot of sectional conflict, and every day I find myself hoping that we too will be guided by the better angels of our nature!

Okay, I'm done babbling history. Here's the plan! I've been setting aside the dates over the next few years when the 150th anniversaries of the major battles will take place. I'll do a full photograph post related to each one, and babble some more about history (sorry, everyone, but it's my blog, ha!). The first big anniversary is Bull Run, on July 21st of this year, but I've never been there before, so no pictures to share (but I'm going for the whole week around the battle). Here are some previews of what else is to come! :)

Shiloh (TN. Anniversary will be April 6th and 7th of next year):


Antietam (MD. Anniversary will be September 17th of next year):




Fredericksburg (VA. Anniversary will be December 11th and 12th of next year):


Gettysburg (PA. Anniversary will be on July 1st - 3rd of 2013):






Chickamauga (GA. Anniversary will be September 19th - 20th of 2013):


...and there will be others! (including some I've not been to! And others that I don't seem to have any good photographs of! :) )

Anyway, I've let this go on long enough, but I can't resist signing off with a shot of my personal hero.

I just can't say I think William T. Sherman is awesome anywhere south of the Mason Dixon line, or I'll face the consequences. :)

2,000,000 Hits - My Latest Flickr Milestone

Almost two months ago, in this post with some photos I took of Venice, I mentioned my anticipation that I was approaching 2 million hits for my Flickr account. Well, as I write this I actually only have 1,995,114, but that's close enough that one big day, or two just above average days, will push it over, and as I have very busy days both today and tomorrow, I thought I should go ahead and write this post (but I will have 2 million before I actually hit the post button - in fact, I have 2,000,036 - it took two additional days from when I first wrote this...).

This is my third milestone post. The first two were at 500,000 hits, on May 4th, 2009, and 1 million hits, on January 3rd, 2010. It's been a long time! I took me from May, 2007 - when I started my account - until May, 2009 to get my first half million hits (2 years); then it took only another 8 months to get my second half-million, and now it's taken 15 months to get my second million - so things haven't actually sped up much since the first million, though I've noticed that the last couple months I've been getting more hits per day. I took a hit in the fall, when I switched the entire collection from a Creative Commons license to an All Rights Reserved license.

So! Ultimately, these dedication posts are about how much I like statistics and how numbers make me feel good, and this one will be no different. It's numbers time!! Note that all comparisons are to the January, 2010 benchmarks unless otherwise specified. :)

I've currently got 43,393 photographs up on Flickr (up from 34,386). Of these, 10,990 are unlabeled (25.3%). While that's way more unlabeled that I'd like to see, it's actually not bad as a trend over time - when I last updated, 30.8% were unlabeled - and I've been really trying to get stuff labeled over the past few months, by not uploading anything without labeling it almost immediately (though I've slipped the last couple weeks - I'll be "caught up" again soon.) That means that, strangely, most of the photos that are unlabeled are actually the same photos that were unlabeled in Jan, 2010 - shots from the trips I took in 2009, especially, when I was down and unmotivated and just didn't keep on top of the labeling well. A further perk of eventually getting this done is that many of the unlabeled photographs are shots of the labels of other unlabeled photographs, and the labels I'll get to delete; I'd estimate I actually have somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 photos to label (still a daunting load!)

In terms of what I photograph, I'd say there hasn't been any significant shift. The only real addition to my repertoire has been a growing tendency to take long walks during interesting weather conditions for the express purpose of taking photos. This has resulted in some of my best work (in my opinion), such as shots I took of the blizzard we had on 12/26/2010, and my attempt to capture fall colors at the New York Botanical Gardens on 10/23/2010. However, other than that it's still a random mix of things I've done (like the Macy's parade or baseball games), places I've gone (Italy and Paris since the last update), and lots and lots of museums and cultural institutions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art remains the solid leader in terms of "most photographs I've taken at one place." The Metropolitan Museum of Art tag is one of my single most used, and 3,671 of my shots have it (which is less than the actual number of pics from there, as some old sets still don't have the tag.) This is 700 pics more taken there than at the last update! It's bizarre that I still find things there to take pictures of. (though they do rotate what's on display, and I have re-taken some shots...)

My three largest sets are all unlabeled museum sets - which means they're probably not actually my largest sets, because once I've finished putting the labels in and deleted the photos of the museum labels, the sets will be smaller. All three are sets from Paris, two from the same trip! Indeed, it was entirely an arbitrary decision to make this set and this set, both taken at the Louvre only four days apart, in to separate sets. If they were combined, they'd be not only my largest set unlabeled, but my largest set even when they were labeled! Combined, they have 1942 pictures. The third set was at least from a different trip, 801 shots at the Musee de l'Armee. My largest labeled set, on the other hand, is one that I touted as my largest unlabeled set when I last wrote - the Art Institute of Chicago, with 762 pictures. I'd been to the Institute twice before, but both times events had conspired to result in my not having any photographs of the trip (for example, the second time was part of a larger trip that lasted about two weeks, on the last day of which my camera was stolen without my having downloaded a single shot from the whole two weeks - I was more disappointed to lose my pics of my mother's birthday than those from the museum, though). Second biggest labeled set is from the Met, and the third is from my first visit to the National Museum of Natural History (the trip before I squee-ed and acted like a moron upon the discovery that there were fossils from the Burgess Shale there). Yeah, I'm a huge geek. :)

So...what photos do people actually look at? Well, probably unsurprisingly, virtually all of my most viewed images are actually scans/photos of items in my anime and manga collection, especially the doujinshi (short fan-drawn fan fic manga that I collect). For example, this cute shot from a Card Captor Sakura doujin called "Febrilement" has the most hits in my entire collection. The runner up shows Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy kissing. :) However, ignoring the scans/photo hits, here are my shots with the most hits! The below also gives their "actual rank" (what place their in if I didn't omit the manga/anime) and the rank they had last time (most of these shots were in the old top ten, too).

1. Cosplayers doing Nami and Sanji from "One Piece"

I guess it makes sense that my number one images after the manga stuff is...basically also manga stuff. :) I saw these two cosplayers in Japan outside of Senso-ji. They really look just like the characters. Actual rank: 4; Old Top Ten Rank: 1

2. Ms. Marvel, Daredevil and Spiderman

And also unsurprising that my second is three of the best American cosplayers I've ever seen, at Gencon a few years ago (they were actually on Marvel's payroll). Actual rank: 5; Old Top Ten Rank: 2

3. Bed Bug Bites

That's my arm. So, when I got these bites, I tried to find good pictures of bed bug bites on the web, but I couldn't - every shot I found was of an extreme case, not a regular case, which made self-diagnosis impossible. I ended up dropping $300 at a crappy neighborhood clinic. Boo. So I took this shot, and since then lots of sites about bed bugs have linked to it. Go fig! Actual rank: 6; Old Top Ten Rank: n/a

4. Reticulated Python

One of the largest python skeletons ever preserved, I gather. Actual rank: 20; Old Top Ten Rank: 3

5. House of Mirrors

Actual Rank: 24; Old Top Ten Rank: 5

6. Armor of Henry II of France

This shot got linked to from some Japanese blog, and has gotten lots of hits ever since.
Actual Rank: 40; Old Top Ten Rank: 9

7. Mystique Costume. Only my contacts can see this shot of the original costume Mystique wore in the X-Men movies. I took it at an exhibit where photography wasn't permitted, and about two years ago I developed some morals and decided to no longer publicly share shots I took under such conditions. However, before I locked it off, it got a lot of hits, and those hits have kept it in the top 10 of all three of my posts! But it's slowly slipping in rank. Actual Rank: 45; Old Top Ten Rank: 4

8. Armor or a Man and a Horse

No idea why this shot is getting so many hits. Probably that Japanese blog post I mentioned links to it. Actual Rank: 54; Old Top Ten Rank: n/a

9. Native American Tools

Actual Rank: 61; Old Top Ten Rank: 7

10. An Old Bachelor (Singing Lesson)

Actual Rank: 62; Old Top Ten Rank: n/a

So there are a few new pics in there, but mostly it's the same old. For reference, the Nami and Sanji pic has 5,073 hits; the Old Bachelor has 1,251, and my actual number 1 has 8,786 hits, so that gives you the range. It's not that my shots that are the best get the most hits. Instead, it's mostly getting discovered that does it. For example, someone popular who I've never heard of wrote a blog post that linked to the Old Bachelor, and it got like 600 hits in two days. That kind of event is what pulls up photos, not their quality. Overall, 1,731,153 of my views have been to individual photos (as opposed to sets, which have gotten 101,526 views; collections, which have gotten 5,681 views, and my "home page," which has gotten 161,676 views), an average of 40 views per shot, but 6,538 of my shots have NEVER been viewed. On the other hand, 104 of my shots have more than 1000 views. The whole collection usually gets between 2000 and 2500 hits a day, though some days get as low as about a thousand, and other days I break 4,000 (though not that often).

What comes next? Well, when I wrote the 1 million hit post, I really wanted to start selling cards on Etsy, and I had the idea that if I could sell 300 cards, I could buy a new camera. I started selling cards later that same month, and I still haven't sold 300, but I've made a (very) modest profit. I ended up having to buy the new camera anyway, when the lens on my old camera jammed on opening day last year - I paid for the new one by trading in all the change I had saved for the previous two years, which ended up covering half the purchase price. I love my current camera, though it took some getting used to. Re-organizing my Flickr account is something I've really wanted to do, and just haven't found the time. It'll be a huge job, and it's hard to motivate for it before everything is labeled. I'd love to get it organized thematically instead of (or perhaps as well as) chronologically, so that someone who wanted to see all of the 17th century Dutch art I've photographed wouldn't have to navigate my tag system to do it. But I haven't quite figured out how to organize this yet, so it continues to linger as a side project I'd like to complete. But for now, I'd be happy just to catch up on the labeling. :)

As for what I'll photograph next, there are three particular photography opportunities I'm looking forward to in my future.
1. Baseball season! We have really good seats this year (and paid a bunch for them!) and we've got tickets to 18 games (though I already can't go to one or two) so there will be lots of baseball photographs this year! Home opener is on Friday, I can't wait!
2. Bali! A friend is getting married in Bali in mid-May, and I'll be there from May 12th - May 19th or so. Oh, there will be so many pictures of this trip. :)
3. Bull Run Sesquicentennial! July 21st is the 150th anniversary of the battle of Bull Run, the first large battle of the American Civil War. I'm a huge Civil War buff, and over that weekend (July 23rd - 24th) there will be a re-enactment of the battle featuring about 15,000 men. I think that's super awesome, and I'm definitely going, and looking forward to pics.
But in the end, it's the trips I don't expect that often produce my best shots. There's the NYBG Orchid Show to visit, and Maryland Sheep and Wool, and there's always the Metropolitan Museum of Art.... :)

The 1000 Amigurumi Crane Project Update!

I've been promising an update on the project, and now the time has come!

New to this blog or to the project? You can learn loads more in my initial post, here, or see all the posts about the project by going to the 1000 Amigurumi Cranes tag.

So! The 1000 Amigurumi Crane project is my effort at a fund raiser for Japan. I designed a pattern to make an amigurumi crane, started a group on Ravelry, and then began to advertise. I really didn't have any idea what to expect. At first, I was kind of disappointed - when I'd first put the pattern up for testing, I got very little feedback, and was feeling very discouraged. But the project has been exceeding all my expectations (except the really ridiculous ones, lol) and I'm really thrilled. It's been rough, because since I started the project I've been as busy with work as I've been in my whole life, and have had very little time to implement some of the things I want to do. However, even with these limited efforts, we've really grown, and fast!

The project has three goals, and I thought I'd just take a moment to discuss how we've been proceeding as regards each one! I say we because at this point, if it weren't for the efforts of others who have thought the project was a good idea, I wouldn't be anywhere at all! It's a group effort, and ya'll who've been helping me out are super awesome!

1. Sell copies of my Charity Crane Amigurumi pattern and donate all proceeds (between 90 % - 100% of the total selling price) to charity.

The amigurumi crocheted crane pattern is available from Ravelry, and you can buy it directly even if you are not a Ravelry member by using this link. Alternatively, I have just listed the pattern on sale from Etsy. Whichever way you choose, the money ends up in my Paypal account, and all proceeds (minus the paypal, Etsy and Ravelry fees) go to the American Red Cross. Alternatively, if you send me proof of donation, I will send you the pattern. THe selling price for the crocheted version is $5.

But now there's even more! The awesome Ravelry member Garilynn thought my project was nifty, and so she has developed two knit versions of the crane, and she's working on more different versions. Both are available from Ravelry, and are $1 each - we each chose how much to charge for our own - and her proceeds also go to the American Red Cross. The original knit version is available here, and a fun and spirited stackable version is available here.

So how have we been doing? As of this morning, I've sold 19 copies of the crocheted version, for a total proceeds of $86.45. On the 30th, I had sold fewer, but I did my first withdrawal and donation! I sent $68.25 to the American Red Cross, from 15 sales!


Garilynn, meanwhile, has sold 100 cranes as of March 29th! She made her first donation of $63 that same day.

So, the goal was to sell 1000 crane patterns, and so far we've sold more than 119! WOW!! She's still working on more variations, too, and I'm hoping to do the same!

2. Sell/coordinate the selling of the cranes made as part of the project to raise additional money for charity.

This part hasn't made it as far, but it's slowly getting off the ground. Now that I'm even a little bit less busy, I can do more to spear head it. I've sold one crane for $5 through an auction on LJ, and have two more finished that I will be listing. Furthermore, several members of the Ravelry group have taken it upon themselves to sell their cranes. One has gotten permission to sell them at the dojo where she works, and Amiamour has listed this one on Etsy! So if you want a crane, there's one up! I'll be listing my two tomorrow. At the moment, the intention is to list all cranes listed on Etsy with the tag "1000 Cranes, so if you want to join in to the selling of the finished Cranes, please use that tag!

And by the way, consider this statement by me to be carte blanche that you all have permission to sell FO made from my version of this pattern. While granted, I couldn't have stopped you anyway, I have been asked for permission, and it's granted. (and of course, please donate the proceeds to a charity of your choice that is supporting relief efforts for Japan! Feel free to post info in the fiscal transparency thread in the Ravelry group if you do so!)

In short, this part of the project is the least far along, but slowly getting up and running. :)

3. Develop a community of caring Ravelry members and other crafters who want to work together to figure out what each of us has to contribute to helping that devastated country.

So, every one...wow. Seeing how much you all care has really been keeping me going. There's been a lot of community response to my project. Here are pretty much all of the things I know about...

Ravelry Group - I started the Ravelry group right off as part of the project. As of this morning, it's already up to 63 members! 9 folks have chosen to share their cranes with the group, all of which are awesome, and we're still growing every day!

Blog posts: Some of my awesome fellow crafters have been helping bring attention to the project by writing about it in their blogs. Note that the following kudos are in no particular order. ;)

Garilynn, who designed the knit patterns, has written about it twice, here and here - the first is about the original pattern, and the second about the stackable cranes. :)

SmoochPanda, who is herself Japanese and a wonderful ami maker, interviewed me, and she translated it into Japanese for her Japanese-language ami blog, too. I was so thrilled that she helped me out, and reading the translation was so much fun - my Japanese isn't nearly up to snuff to have translated it myself, but is more or less adequate to understand most of something like this, and it was so cool to see how she translated it!

AmiAmour found me only a couple of days ago (That's what I get for not advertising in Amigurumi Army!) but she purchased the pattern and almost immediately wrote a blog post about constructing her own crane, and talking about the pattern. I love that she's posted hers for sale on Etsy, too (I posted the link above).

I've also been mentioned in Tamis Ami and Other Crochet Blog (no longer just Tamis Ami Blog!). Those are all the posts that I know of, but if you've mentioned it, and I haven't listed you, please let me know and I'll add you to this post! :)

I'm also super thrilled to be one of the featured ways to help Japan in the Nerd Wars Giving Geeks challenge for this month. :)

I've been contacted by one woman who is a JET in Shizuoka, and she told me about Cranes for Taylor, Cranes for JETs, which is a crane-making project to honor the JETs who died in the tsunami, including Taylor Anderson, who was teaching in Miyagi and was the first confirmed American casualty from this tragedy. I was very sad to hear that this had happened (I had wondered if any JETs had been impacted, and really hoping that they were all okay...) and wanted to spread the word of this effort to commemorate and remember the young American teachers who've died, as well as every one else.

Edit! I knew I forgot something! Garilynn is running a CAL/KAL for the amigurumi crane that includes fabulous prizes! If you are a Ravelry member, you can read more here. If you're not, hmm...if you're not, you can submit a photograph by posting the link as a comment on one of these blog posts, and we'll add you to the lottery! The prizes are shown here and here. :)

So, to wrap up (though I'm sure I'm forgetting something, maybe multiple things)...thanks everyone!! Keep spreading the word, and keep letting me know how you're helping, and I'll keep organizing from my end. ;) I can't express how much I appreciate the help, and how glad and proud I am that together, we've raised $150 for Japan relief!