Monthly Archives: October 2015

Sweater Weather is Here

Blustery, Cloudy, Cool! This is our weekend weather forecast for northern Illinois. I don’t mind—it’s sweater weather!

I went through my older photos and found my warmest looking fall sweaters. Most of these are knit with a fingering weight Peruvian Highland wool.

These tiny sweater were all made for Kish’s little BJD, Lisbet. She came before Amelia Thimble and is slightly larger. I hand dyed all (except natural, of course) of the lace yarn (merino/silk) in fall colors.

Bethany’s sweater was knit with a Sport weight wool to make an even warmer sweater for chilly fall weather.

This striped sweater for Patsy was a “weaving in ends” project, but I love how it turned out.

Fall is Colored Brightly 742

Gina’s natural colored sweater was knit with a fingering weight wool/angora yarn.

orange you ready for fall 141

If it’s cool where you are I hope these photos warmed you up a bit.

Cozy fall weekend wishes to everyone in this half of the world!

Bye for now and thank you for reading along.

A Photoshop Elements Trick That I Often Use

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Today I thought I’d share a little Photoshop Elements retouch trick that I use to warm up my doll’s skin tone. I take my indoor photos with a variety of lighting going on in the room: natural, fluorescent, and a studio light. The season, time of day, colors in the outfit, and doll’s skin tone will all affect the feel of a photo. I often get photos that seem greenish, which I don’t like. Often a tiny tweak will take a greenish skin tone and make the doll look warm and healthy without affecting the colors in the outfit.

First of all, I am NOT in any way a Photoshop Elements expert. I know what I know to get the job done, and that’s it. Secondly, my Photoshop Elements is number 6 and I think they are up to number 14, so my version may be quite a bit older than yours is. Also, my screen shots may look different if you have a different version, but hopefully the newer version will still have the same capabilities.

Here are some before and after photos.

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Here is Talyssa wearing green. Since red and green are opposite (complimentary) each other on the color wheel, tweaking this photo to make Talyssa rosier starts to muddy her green sweater, so very little can be done here. The first photo (untouched) is closer to the real colors, however you can see she looks quite sallow, her skin is very ivory. Talyssa is always my hardest doll to photograph. I move her around a lot because I may find she looks better in a different location. The best photos I took of her were in front of the Christmas tree; I’m looking forward to getting that up again for her photos. Also, outdoor light doesn’t look too bad either.

Before

After

Since the springtime, when I thought the magnolia blossoms would be pretty with Patience’s similar colored cardigan, I’ve been taking most photos outdoors. I use Auto White Balance set in my camera and have found that outdoor photos need much less help, especially if taken when the light is warm outside. BTW, for indoor photos I set my white color balance to a piece of glossy white photo paper.

Here are the screen shots of the steps involved, so you can try this out if you’d like.

Under the Enhance tab you’ll see adjust color with an arrow, go to adjust color for skin tone and this window will open up.

Your cursor will turn into an eyedropper. Place it over an arm or any part of the doll’s skin and click. The photo will color correct. You can them play with the sliders. I will often use the ambient light slider and go very slightly cooler or warmer. You can always reset (or don’t save photo) if something strange happens.

There you go, something new for you to learn today (if you want to). 🙂

Have a great Friday!

Still Learning DPNs and Having Fun

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I spent the bulk of the day yesterday working on my DPNs. I stopped knitting the hat I showed you yesterday and decided to learn the invisible cast on technique so I could knit from the top down.

You are probably wondering why. Good question and I have a good answer. That white mohair, while so beautiful for its fuzziness, tends to get knitted in with the red wool. It is so fuzzy that for nearly 10+ rows after changing to my red wool I am still trying to get it to stay out of my red stitches. Truthfully, it is nearly impossible to do this 100% and that bothers me if it is avoidable, and it is; the solution is to knit with the white mohair last.

Okay, so that meant learning the invisible cast on. The first thing trying to learn this new cast on taught me is that I am not very coordinated, and I don’t have a photographic memory in the least. I watched the tutorial again and again and again. Hmm, where have I heard those words before? There are four needle movements for every two stitches cast on. Finally, I had to write out a cheat sheet and I was then able to perform the steps four times to get 8 stitches cast on. I won’t lie, it probably took me an entire hour to get this. And then, I kept on practicing it throughout the day to get it down better.

You probably have no idea what my notes mean, but it was all I needed to get this down, sort of.

And, after a day and evening of knitting this is what I made for my Little Darling, Gina!

Here’s my Santa hat, my first DPN project! I had the pom pom left over from last year, so I pinned it on where the one that will match this outfit will go.

For next time, I will use a rewritten pattern to make it a bit longer with a wider “fur” trim band. I also don’t like knitting garter in the round because it involves purling in the round, which I am not comfortable doing, so I will probably knit that part flat and make a short seam for that area. I found pics of garter stitch in the round and it looks seamed anyway.

Oh, Happy October everyone! It really feels fall-ish here todyay, very breezy and cool with puffy white and dark clouds moving rapidly across the sky, but it’s mostly sunny; it’s a very perfect fall day in my opinion. And, the moon is still out at almost 10:00 am!

Thanks for reading and big thank yous for your comments. I love reading them and commenting back. I work by myself all day (except for my dogs, of course), so it is so nice to connect with my readers.

Bye for now!