Spring has Sprung!!!

Spring time has come to my house!! My backyard is in full bloom and looking beautiful. The tree that had what we thought were surely some sort of fake cherry blossom tree has turned out to surprisingly be an actual cherry tree with cherries hanging everywhere!!! I love my garden and like to spend time out there. I keep looking for just the right place to hang my hammock so I can lay out there and watch YT videos but haven't quite found it yet. I've had lots of requests for some pictures of my backyard so I'm going to show some today. I recently took both of Maggie Holmes' photography classes and went from shooting in Auto Mode to Manual Mode in a matter of 3 weeks! It was amazing and it is so much fun to see how easy it really is to use a camera to get what you want out of it.  =)

This rose bush actually does not even grown on my property. It is creeping over my fence line from the neighbor next door and I've actually got it trellised on the other side of my walk way to create a rose archway through it. It is filling out and will look wonderful next year. I got in an awful fight with it doing the first trellis though....

This is a pot of thyme that I planted last week. In the right side of the photo you can see a grape leave from the grapevine I had growing in the bed behind the pot of thyme.

In this pot I have planted some strawberries alongside some chamomile that was already growing there.

Calla lilies growing wild in my backyard.

Cherry blossom tree in full bloom. I don't have a lens for my camera that I can use to get a full view of this tree even standing inside my house, which makes me want to get another lens for my camera really badly.

Dieffenbachia sprouting up naturally in my flower bed in the back yard. It is now almost two feet tall.

Chicks and hens blasting out of the container I've got them in.

Flowers that came up on their own under my cherry tree. Oddly purple and white are the colors of my husbands workplace. Yahoo!

Tomato blooms on plant that I planted recently.

Purple blooms of two different kinds of scented begonias. When you rub the leaves you can smell the yummy smell of citrus.

This is where the rose vines come over onto my side of the fence. The bush to the right I have yet to identify. My back door is just to the right of it.

Red bloom from the bush from the picture above that I have yet to identify. If anyone out there knows what it is, drop me a note!

One of two grapevines I have growing in my backyard. They were already there when I moved in in January but were pretty dead looking then. After lots of rain and fertilizer they are looking much better.

My newly established compost bin. I LOVE it.

Cherries hanging from a branch of the tree.

I hope in the next few weeks to be once again crafting full steam ahead. My arm is doing better, but is very sore from the exercises I have to do. I am just very grateful that it isn't nerve damage or anything worse. I'd rather be hurt for 6-8 weeks than lose an arm! I can get back to crating in a bit. *laugh*
Everyone have a blessed weekend and take care of each other.
Kellye
The Distressed Crafter
LaceAndMetal Designs

Hello!!

It's been awhile since I've posted anything and all of my LSH sisters are getting their blogs going and are making me look pretty bad! lol I have been working on a special project but I cannot show it to anyone right now. It's a secret. I will be showing a video and still pictures of it on my blog as soon as I possibly can though.  I really like it and I hope all of you do too and I hope you find some inspiration in it as well.

In the meantime most of my spare time has been filled taking a photography class about how to shoot in Manual mode on a DSLR camera from Maggie Holmes. She is a WONDERFUL teacher and I highly recommend her classes. I start the Advanced Class tomorrow and I am really excited. My pictures look SO much better now than they ever did when I was shooting pictures in Auto mode although it is a bit harder. It is becoming more and more 2nd nature though and Maggie says that after awhile you really don't even have to think about it, your fingers just start moving. I can't wait until I get to that level!! My hope is to one day start a photography business, just part-time. In the meantime, my motivation was just to learn how to take better pictures of my projects so that they look better online and so that I can start sending pictures to publishers of my projects that look good enough that I am not ashamed of my own picture taking! I have yet to send anything in to a publisher but it is another thing on my bucket list.  You can find Maggie's Photography schedule of classes HERE.

Above is a picture of my yorkies Gabby on the left, and Bayleigh on the right. I took this picture on a VERY cloudy day outside on my ancient Nikon D50 on manual mode.  Maggie really liked it and so do I. They are not very cooperative photography subjects because they hate flash and they think now that every time someone points a camera at them that a flash is going to go off in their eyes. I have learned how NOT to use a flash and they are getting a little bit better about not running/walking off or dropping their heads down. It's still hard to get a good picture of both of them together at the same time.

I took the above pictures at our local Catholic Cemetery. I don't have many places to go around here to take pictures that are close to my house and I had to have pictures for an assignment the other day so I walked over there with the hubs. (He is a HORRIBLE photography subject, just sits or stands there like a slug) *lol* I must say it is a pretty cemetery. I have always liked old cemeteries, but this one was not that old. There were a LOT of people that had been born in the 1800's but nothing before that. This cemetery has a LOT of graves that are above ground. Some of the buildings people have must cost in the 10's of thousands of dollars, and hold probably between 4-20 people. I just can't see spending that much money on something my body is going to sit in. I'm sorry, I am a morbid person. I guess it comes from working in a hospital as a respiratory therapist for 12 years.   :)

This is a picture that I took of my husband while he was tossing his stick around. It was part of an assignment in my photography class where we were to show a picture that shows movement and one that shows movement frozen. This is the picture that actually shows movement. The stick is blurry and looks like it is moving in the picture and my husbands hand look as if they are moving a little too. If I had been a little smarter I would have positioned my subject a little more to my right and I would have moved a little to my left,  to get the glare of the sun out of the picture. Ah, we learn from our mistakes, don't we?

In the below picture it shows frozen movement. The sticks are all frozen as if suspended in air. My husband is also frozen. He also looks funny.  =)

I hope you have enjoyed my photos today. I hope to improve my skills during the next 6 weeks in Maggie's Advanced Class and I am really excited to see the pictures that all of the other girls in the class take as well. The message board is really helpful in addition to the lessons and the assignments, with feedback from Maggie on our pictures. She is really a talented photographer and has produced some really beautiful children too. You can see them on her website at the link I gave above about her classes.

Have a great week everyone!! I hope to start posting more often and get some pictures taken of the projects I have done lately. I'm really excited to see that my small number of followers is growing and I hope to see it grow even more in the future.  I will be having another giveaway when I reach 100 followers on my blog so tell all of your friends to check it out! If you haven't checked out my Youtube Channel LaceAndMetal, give it a try. I will be making a lot more videos in the future and will have more tutorials soon, I hope.
Love and Hugs,
Kellye
The Distressed Hippye