Relaxing Afternoon

It seems I wasn't just kidding around when I said I was going to take the afternoon off yesterday. I ended up taking a nap and generally loafing for the rest of the day. It was a refreshing change of pace from the business of the past couple of weeks. Today I'm ready to get back at it with some barbecue sauce. If I have time, I'll re-pot the tomatoes today.

Backing up to what was accomplished yesterday, I sewed the first section of the scrub jay together. Now I can see what I'm doing. Only...after looking at this

and comparing it to the original photos, I realized I had a background piece where the beak should actually be. There's some glare on the top of the black beak in the original photo that makes it hard to accurately visualize the colors in the beak.

So I switched in a black piece where I had background. The pieces to the right of it (not yet completed) will finish off the beak. The image below shows where I left it yesterday.

Since walking away yesterday, I've suddenly had a big brain storm (beware of smoke and burning embers) about the background. Today I'll do a little experimentation and I might decide to do something really wild and crazy. I'll say more with pictures later.

So what drew me away from my bird in progress? Okay...so I have a small confession to make. Remember when I talked about the Sketchbook Project? As I mentioned, I ordered a sketchbook with the idea of taking photographs of our upcoming trip and including those in the book along with some brief captions about what we were seeing in the photo. Pretty much the instant I clicked on the "finalize purchase" button, I realized the fatal flaw in my plan: I have no way to print pictures when we're traveling. Doh!

So, enter my favorite shopping mall...Amazon...and I was pretty sure there were some little mini printers on the market that would meet my picture-printing needs. And, bonus, they are small enough to store in the seat bottoms of our RV dining room chairs. As it turns out, they aren't even terribly expensive, and so I purchased one. This is the Canon Selphy CP1200. You can get either black or white. I clicked on the white to see what it looked like and discovered it was $10 cheaper. Really? 

So anyway...it arrived yesterday. What a cool little machine! It's about the size of a small clock-radio. The screen tilts down flat, and the paper cartridge is removable so that it all folds into a tidy little box. It requires special paper (of course). Here's the explanation from the Amazon website of how this works:

"This printer is a dye transfer printer. The dye is on plastic sheets. Special paper is required. A print is made by the 'printing head' heating a spot on the plastic sheet and therefore transferring the dye to the receiving paper. The roll of dye sheets has sheets of 3 colors, cyan, magenta, and yellow. The printer also has a fourth clear sheet which it uses to cover the print after the dyes have been printed." 

Mike tells me that "dye transfer" is a good choice because the resulting pictures will resist fading. I've ordered paper and print cartridges and those will come separately, but the printer came with a print cartridge and eight sheets of photo paper. So we gave it a try. Each sheet passes through the printer four times. It happens automatically...it travels back and forth. After it's made four passes, it spits out a finished print.

The two photos above were printed directly from the camera's memory card. The white edges of the paper are serrated and tear off so that you end up with a 4 x 6-inch print. Cool! Then we tried the wireless function. The image below was printed from my iPhone photo album.

Ha! I love it when a plan comes together...and where technology is concerned...when it actually works like it's supposed to! So...that was kind of a fun diversion. Now I'm set for the sketchbook project, but I'll also be able to print my own picture postcards while we're traveling.

Speaking of fun diversions, Smitty caught a mouse yesterday, and then brought it to the door to show it to Sadie. It's good to have a friend, isn't it? Sadly for the mouse, this game was a lot more fun for the kitties. The mouse quilt playing fairly early on.

And that's about all that happened yesterday. I told you I was lazy. This morning I have a set of clean jars, and I'll get to work making another batch of barbecue sauce. While I was drinking my coffee, I noticed the morning sun was shining on the needles of our fir tree out front, turning them red. I've never noticed this before.

Ya gotta love a warm summer morning. Time to get going on the barbecue sauce before the house gets too hot.