i was really hoping to get the chance to reply individually to everyone’s kind comments following the feature on my house quilt at sew mama sew. but since baby G is turning into toddler G at an alarming rate of knots i now have about an hour to myself over the space of a week. she’s totally wobbly and doesn’t have the sense not to hurl herself backwards head first when she loses her balance, so i’m literally hovering behind her ready to catch her most of the time she’s awake.

so here i am at least acknowledging all the comments - and those that trickle in from people who are making/have made bender or boo - it’s so lovely to hear that people are drawing inspiration, no matter how little, from something i’ve done.

click is a bit less dusty than it is around here, although nowadays i’m finding it even harder just to find the time to take a single picture in a day (let alone develop/scan film or write a blog post) i’ve totally forgotten twice in the last fortnight. still, i’m ploughing on with the 365 project. i think i’ll prolly extend it to 365 pictures in total, allowing for the odd gap (3 so far in 120-something days).

the process was fun and educational and only a little frustrating M came up with the idea to make guinea pigs and i figured there must be a crochet pattern out there somewhere. i didn’t realise at the time that the pattern had only been published a few days before. i found june’s tips for working with fuzzy yarn absolutely invaluable - i wouldn’t have attempted the pattern otherwise.

that said, it wasn’t a complete walk in the park. the eyelash yarn (the lighter, fluffy pig) was easy enough to work, but the boucle (2-colour short-haired pig) really wasn’t. i ended up running a companion thread in a contrasting colour alongside, so that i could keep track of the stitches. i don’t recall the process totally but i seem to remember the legs being a bit of a pita.

still, i’m reasonably happy with the results, once again yay for making things for five year olds. i don’t know much about guinea pigs but i think these are a pretty good likeness, although the eyes are definitely too far forward on the lighter pig.

so they now have a home of their own: click. do go over and have a look, and let me know what you think, i’d really appreciate some feedback on splitting the content and how you find the new site. the lack of response to my 365 posts is one of the things that’s convinced me that the photography doesn’t belong here.

edit: one thing i’d like feedback on is whether it’s clear enough that there’s all the usual chat to go with the pics, it’s just cunningly hidden in the “words” link on every photo page. my photos definitely don’t speak for themselves, i often need to explain myself, especially with my dodgy cameraphone “scans” of late.

on a side issue i searched and searched for a wordpress photoblogging theme that i liked and just couldn’t find one. so for click i’ve jumped ship to pixelpost. the backend is laughably primitive, but the frontend does what i want so it will do for the moment (the designer of my oh-so-slick template which tempted me to make the jump is working on something for wordpress so when that’s out it’s possible i may revert back as i do miss how damned civilised wordpress is behind the scenes). at some point i hope to move all my existing photography posts over to click to clear some space around here, but not sure when i’ll get the time

i didn’t have much chance to think about taking photographs for fun today. sunrise, instax.

this was a fabulous morning. i really appreciate my time alone nowadays. i got to walk over to the market and pick up some veg for christmas all by myself. a 3 mile round trip with my ipod and ample photo opportunities thanks to the fog, totally uplifting.

an interesting editing excercise, since i had half a dozen or so candidates. i think i picked the least obvious one, i like the textures and dodgy curvature.

takes after her mother

this dreadful pic is the only digi one i took this day. we don’t have a (conventional) tree so this was her first bauble. we were at a party and i was playing with the rollei. i doubt i got anything usable out of it, but was fun trying, the world looks pleasingly different through that vignetty finder.

it’s gratifying (yet somehow alarming) how quickly M responds to attention, her behaviour can turn around over night. we’ve both been missing our time together and lately i’ve been doing the bath/bed routine that dad had taken over since G arrived. as a result she can’t do enough for me the rest of the time. it’s lovely to see the considerate, caring, carefree little girl we know and love show her face a bit more often.

i like the movement of the water in this picture, M’s presence is definitely in the frame this time. the floaty things are her dress-up stick-on bath people.

my brain is shot. not entirely pregnancy/small children related, i’ve never had the best memory, but i’ve really started to notice it lately. hence the blog, and the photography fetish. unless i record it in some way it’s likely to disappear forever. happily this isn’t my list, i went out

the stuff M makes at school gets better and better. oh and she can write all of a sudden, after just one term. when she was small i thought long and hard about home education, it seemed to make sense in so many ways. i envied the lifestyle it brought friends who HE, the freedom from timetables and restrictions, the chance to follow a child’s natural interests and inclinations and not force them into an institutionally-determined mould. but once she hit 3 or so i realised that spending all day every day together just wouldn’t work for me, i didn’t have the patience or ingenuity to keep her entertained and me sane at the same time.

so she started preschool on a see-how-she-gets-on basis and a year on she’s really blossoming. her school is fantastic, they have kids from such diverse backgrounds they can’t fall back to a lazy one-size-fits-all approach. there is a genuine community within and around the school, M already knows kids outside her year group. her teachers are kind and caring and the whole school has a very open policy, we can always get to talk to someone with the smallest problem, which so far have been very quickly resolved. they’re not overrun with rules and regulations, which seems to be the bane of many schools. my first impression of friendly, relaxed and slightly chaotic has turned out to be spot on, and that suits us perfectly.

while i’d always consider the possibility of home ed again if things weren’t working, the leaps M is making socially and academically are a testament to how well it suits her right now.

hmm funny how this 365 thing goes. sometimes i take a picture to illustrate a point, this was just something, anything, to take a picture of at 11 o’clock last night, i never intended to write all this about it.

it’s such a joy watching a baby turn into a real person. G has just started sitting up and her manual dexterity has correspondingly jumped forward, now there’s no stopping her with her leaning and grabbing. nothing’s safe, she broke her first glass last week.

i’m not sure whether i’ve made my job harder or easier by trying to describe motherhood without including recognisable pictures of the girls. i hope it makes me think more, steers me away from the obvious, the crowd pleasing adorable kid shots (of which i have bucketloads), it certainly makes me try different angles. but i hope their usual absence doesn’t leave too much of an empty space, i’d like to think their constant presence just outside the frame (generally grabbing at the camera) makes itself felt.