Time Travel: A Primer, Lesson 2, Goin' for Baroque

~Please CLICK on this image to see the beautiful details~

The reason this gal is sitting down and her fella is standing, is because his clothes are a LOT more comfortable than hers. Breathing must have been really fun in that corset. Not to mention the probable height of her heels. They likely didn't make walking all that easy. Those corsets were so great for women's health :-) My Euro ancestress'ess likely didn't have to worry about that, because they were probably hanging out in the scullery or doing the laundry.

It looks like the well-dressed swell is playing a lute. The piece of music I included in this piece was written for Mozart for a keyboard, I'm sure this musical couple were influenced by it, though. His lady friend is apparently doing the singing, she has a little book on her lap.

I found this old pin at an antique shop yard sale. It's marked "Limoges" on the back, so I guess it is, though the original design is quite naive, not at all like the elegant china that is associated with Limoges. The little picture had a fair amount of missing bits and places where somebody tried to paint over some of the big scratches. When you play around with a piece this much, it takes you back to the first person that owned it. Wouldn't it be dandy to imagine that Rosine gave it to her sister Martha for her birthday? (For more about Martha and Rosine, see my blog entries for May 26 and May 27 ).

It looks like this little token of sisterly affection has been well loved over the years. The catch wasn't working any more. Clearly Martha wore it a lot. Maybe she was an amateur musician, like me and that's why her sister picked out the musical setting. Did she and Rosine play simple, parlor music like I do? Did they laugh at the artfully posed couple's outfits and compare the damsels torturous undergarments to their own modern and up to date health corsets?

It was a lot of fun cleaning up Martha's pin, then taking it from a blotchy little painting into a blurry landscape style, and, finally, securing it's place in time with a collage, using Photoshop CS4.

Fine Fruit:Quilt Block, Contest Entry Silicon Valley fusionwearsv

This entry won FOURTH PLACE in the Silicon Valley fusionwearsv contest!

This garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, is where the story that transformed the agricultural Santa Clara Valley into today’s technological Silicon Valley began. When Bill and Dave built their first oscillator in this garage, my husband's family lived just a few blocks away. My father-in-law remembered the area of that time, as a land of cherry orchards. In 1938, my own family was involved in the information technology of the day, as telegraphers. As Silicon Valley grew my family's information skill set evolved with it. My father, sister and myself were computer programmers.

I enjoyed biking over to photograph the restored HP garage that represents an important foundation of the Silicon Valley. I used Photoshop CS4 to alter that and other digital photos I’ve taken, to create my own 1938 vintage-style fruit crate label, honoring the birth of the Silicon Valley. All images are my own. I loved being able to honor the history of the valley by using the technology that it represents.

Tumbling Chips: Quilt within a Quilt Block , Contest Entry Silicon Valley fusionwearsv

I'm much taken by the spirit of modern day style, versus a vintage design. Here I was inspired by the much-loved 'tumbling blocks' quilt block, to create my own modern-day variation of silicon chips gone wild. These chips dance right out of their tidly-bordered frame. The well-behaved, neatly balanced background checkerboard of chips, is outraged by their bolder colleagues non-standard behavior.

Another one of my original designs for the Silicon Valley fusion wearsv contest.

I used Photoshop CS4 shapes, filters, drawing tools and line art tools, to compose a picture of a silicon chip, inspired by a real-world photograph.

Transformations: Quilt Block , Contest Entry Silicon Valley fusionwearsv

Some of the most beautiful aspects of writing code is the speedy multiplication and transformation of data. The programmer may start with one element, as I did here, with a picture I created representing one silicon chip. From there she goes on to replicate, concatenate and transform that one element into a thing of beauty.

I used Photoshop CS4 to draw one silicon chip. I duplicated that one chip many times to create a quilt background. I filtered that one background many times and then cut windows through each filtered transformation.

Please CLICK ON THIS IMAGE to see the nice detail in the design

Voting in the Silicon Valley Quilt Design Contest is on through June 11'th, 2010

Follow this link to VOTE

Contours: Quilt Block , Contest Entry Silicon Valley fusionwearsv

My Contours' quilt block, represents the beauty and excitement the programmer feels when she realizes her power to duplicate, concatenate and transform.

Sparked by the fusionwearsv contest, I created this piece in Photoshop CS 4, using a combination of contour filters worked against the melding of filtered and conglomerated chips, I created for the Transformations quilt block.

Please CLICK ON THIS IMAGE to see the nice detail in the design

Voting in the Silicon Valley Quilt Design Contest is through June 11'th, 2010

Please follow this link to VOTE

Time Travel: A Primer, Lesson 1

I finally learned how to time-travel, when I started singing in small community music concerts. Somewhere out in the ether where music is a tangible thing, I connect up with all those people who sang these things before me, and will sing them again.



The hard part is I still have to practice down here, outside of the ether.

Also I have to not muff up my entrances.

I photographed this moss and oak on a hike in the Mid-Penninsula Regional Open Space, San Mateo County, California. Please CLICK ON THE PHOTO for more detail.

Summer's on it's way