Friday, April 23, 2010

Projects & Tomes: Black Water & Three Weddings and a Bar Mitzvah

I'm sorry I haven't blogged lately. I've been very busy this week. I did finish reading two books last week. One was Linda Hall's Dark Water. It's a mystery, and it was good, but I've had other things going on that made it take a back seat on my priority list and so it took me a long time to read it. But it is a good mystery because it has a big twist at the end.



The other book that I finished reading last weekend was the final installment in the 86 Bloomberg series by Melody Carlson. It is called Three Weddings and a Bar Mitzvah.  I loved this series. It's about three girls who rent rooms in this house. The owner's granddaughter also lives in the house and she is using their rent to keep from having to work. But, that's how they get together in the first book. Read the whole series. It's worth it.



I watched a few animated movies this week, but I will try to post those tomorrow or first of next week.

I really wanted to tell you about my four new projects. First of all, I've been working on a cookbook for my mother and her siblings. So far, the main thing that I've done is type my mom's share of the recipes and formatted them. But, I finally convinced her to let me get Creative Memories' Memory Manager and Storybook Creator!



These two programs are awesome! The Memory Manager pulls your photos into folders (without creating extra copies of the actual photo) and allows you to label them and journal them. You can tag them with as many categories as you like. You can also modify your pictures with MM. You can crop, rotate, change to black-and-white or sepia, or you can do a color wash. You can actually "clone" over something that you don't want in the picture. For example, if there is a guy standing in front of wallpaper and someone's hand is in the picture, you can clone/copy the wallpaper over the hand. It's so cool. You can also do the color-tinting. This is one of my favorite features. This is where a photo is black-and-white or sepia, but one thing in the picture is colored. It makes a very artistic photo!

Anyway, my first project is pulling in all of the pictures on our computer and tagging them in the right categories. We have digital pictures that go back to 2005. This doesn't include the few that I've scanned in, nor the rest that need to be scanned in for backup.

My second project, of course, is using Storybook Creator to do my cookbook. I already did about 7 pages, but until I get the recipes and stories from my aunts and uncle, I won't know how many pages to put in each section or what order I'm going to put them in and since I want the facing pages to either match or coordinate, that's kind of a crucial thing.

My third project is a family tree. I found this free software online - MyHeritage Family Tree Builder. (Of course the premium version isn't free.) I have been working on a family tree. It's so neat to see how everyone is connected and the really cool thing is that I can click on any person in the tree and run a report on that person and it will show all the people they are related to and how. So, if I want to, when a cousin gets married, if I know the spouse's family, I can include them.

My fourth project is a new afghan that I'm crocheting. I haven't spent a lot of time on it this week, but I did get a small start on it. I think I'm on the fourth or fifth row. It's going to be perfect for me. It's my two favorite colors: green and purple. It's Red Heart's Sage Mary. I'm doing a Mamie Shell pattern. It's easy and the pattern I've done the most. The main part of the afghan is repeating 10 double-crochets and then doing a shell (2 dc-2 chains-2 dc) and then repeating 'til the end of the row.



Well, tomorrow, I'm going to scrapbook with my friend Lou and some other ladies, so I better call it a night.

1 comment:

  1. It's cool you've started to check out Family Tree Builder, it is always exciting to find new leads in your family lineage. Make sure to check out the new features on the online platform, new features allows you to place your family into a historical timeline of world events and a timebook which organizes your pictures and important dates chronologically in a fun to view format.

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