Mr. Pan

As of the beginning of the week I had all but given up on finding Henry a costume I liked. I was pretty sure I wanted him to be Peter Pan but wasn’t willing to spend 30+ dollars on an outfit he would wear for a day, plus I wasn’t obsessed with any that I saw online. Tuesday I found the most perfect Peter outfit on makeit-loveit.com, a site I used to frequent all the time but hadn’t been on in awhile. I remembered she always made the cutest costumes for her kids and was so happy when I saw her tutorial for the Peter Pan outfit. it looked so simple, even for me. I got the supplies Wednesday (poor Mckay had to experience the line to cut fabric at Joannes, which is always insane) and had plans to make the costume on Thursday, talk about last minute... It took the majority of the day but I have to say I love it, mostly because of the little man that’s wearing it. Those of you that are experienced sewers please be kind… :) this was my first time sewing any sort of clothing and my sewing skills are limited at best. but, thanks to the tremendous help of my mom it all came together. Not bad for less than 11 dollars.
 






thanks to husband for indulging me in a little impromptu photo shoot. Hope everyone is enjoying their Halloween weekend! This has just got to be the best time of year, love love it!

Halloween puppets

since we don’t have our own little space to decorate for the holidays this year I’ve been finding other crafts to do to celebrate. Last week I made a bunch of Halloween finger puppets during nap time. These were fun, easy and relatively quick to make. an ideal craft. Henry’s already shown some interest, by putting them straight in his mouth. I’m sure he’ll enjoy them more in a year or two.

the letter T and Z.

 

I finished two more quiet book pages this week, t and z.

T- for Train took me awhile, mostly because I was looking for pictures of the each of us that I liked and that were the size that I needed. I cut out the shape for the window and then lined it with a clear page protector to cover the picture.

I was kind of figuring things out as I went along, so there are definitely some flaws, but I like how it turned out I suppose.

Z- for Zoo. I started this page months and months ago, but for some reason just finished it this week. I loved the animal finger puppets from the farm page that I decided to make some more. These are so quick and easy to make! So easy in fact that I got a little distracted and kept making more puppets in honor of the upcoming holiday. more pictures to come!

photos from our weekend

 

school has pretty much been a full time job for mckay this semester and homework often has to take the place of playtime so weekends are much anticipated around here. Saturday morning we took a spur of the moment trip to the local beto’s for breakfast burritos and headed for a drive up the canyon still in our pajamas. I live for those moments. it was beautiful.

Later we enjoyed a late night at Cornbelly’s with the Klappoths.

Sunday brought some quality family time, relaxing, eating, board games and football. hooray for weekends!

october, how I love thee

 

 

sometimes my obsessive picture taking embarrasses Mckay.

8 mos

 

our little man is not so little anymore. he turns 8 months old today. I’m kind of sad, time goes way to fast. but it is so much fun to see him learn and grow. he is so curious and I absolutely love watching him experience new things. babies make everything new and exciting. today we will celebrate with some family pumpkin picking, a little lunchy with friends, and a flu shot. big day.

quiet book progress

I’m slowly getting closer to finishing the quiet book I started two years ago…I tend to work in it like crazy for a few days and then get sick of it and take a break for a few days/months. I’m making progress though, thanks to henry being a phenomenal napper so as of right now I have three pages in the works plus six new pages to do. that sounds like a lot, but it’s a lot closer than where I was a month ago.

I finished these pages a few months ago:

I- for Ice cream. nothing fancy here, just a variety of scoops to customize an ice cream cone. I like to have each page target some sort of learning skill but it’s not always easy to come up with one, so this one could help with decision making I guess.

L is for “Lift Off”. I had to get creative for some of the pages just so I could do the ones I wanted. I couldn’t decide whether to do rocket or robot for R, hence the “lift off” page. The rocket slides from the earth to the moon on a thin ribbon.

These pages I’ve done in the last few weeks:

Q- “Quack” The ducks are velcro-ed on. pair the babies with the mom.

S- Shapes. I embroidered around each shape to create an outline onto the page, match the shape to its outline.

P- for Potato Head. the top of the body is velcro-ed to the page and holds the extra pieces. this helps with learning the names of body parts

X- is for X-ray. another body parts page. again, all the pieces are attached using velcro.

U- Under the Sea. a few years ago I saw this template for ocean felt magnets on purlbee and was obsessed and that’s what I used to make this page. the fish are just attached to the page and since everything is so colorful I guess it can help with learning colors.

the Z,T and J pages are almost finished, so hopefully I can move on from those soon.

swing

there is nothing better than a quiet morning at the park. oh how I love this boy.

pictures from our weekend

 

weekend trips to the cabin are always heavenly and this weekend it was extra wonderful. lots of lounging around and relaxing, pretty drives, beautiful fall leaves and a sweet little hike to Ruth Lake.

DIY Camera Remote

For a few weeks now, I’ve been thisclose to buying a remote for our digital camera. I’d like to try my hand at some star trails like this one taken by Declan McCormak:

 

To get pictures like that you need to use an extremely small aperture (large f-number) and a long shutter time. The shutter time for this shot might have been 10 minutes or more. The longest possible exposure time on our D60 is 30 seconds, so any star trails would be almost impercepticle. The camera also has a bulb setting, where the shutter stays open for as long as the release button is pressed, but it would be a huge pain to hold the shutter release down for 10 or 20 minutes. Your best best is to use a remote, like Nikon’s ML-L3:

With the remote, the camera can be set to open the shutter when the remote button is pressed once, and then close it when it is pressed a second time. The remotes are between $15 and $30, depending on where you buy. Every time I thought about buying one, I decided that I should just wait. The other day, I stumbled across an application called PhotoIRmote for Android. This application creates an audio signal that can be converted to an infrared signal by a couple of photodiodes (basically LEDs that emit infrared radiation instead of visible light). Simply put, it turns almost any Android phone into a programmable camera remote. This remote can control most new Nikon, Canon, Olympus, and Sony cameras with an infrared port (probably mostly DSLRs). It can also be programmed for time-lapse photography, delayed shutter release, and extended exposure times. It has more functionality than the Nikon remote and at $4, it’s a bargain. The only thing missing was the infrared emitter.

The PhotoIRmote website has instructions to make one using two infrared photodiodes and an old pair of headphones that you don’t need anymore. Like everyone else, I have about 12 pairs of Apple headphones lying around from a decade of iPods that me and Emily have gone through. I decided to use one of those old, beat-up pairs of Apple buds for my IR emitter. When I cut it open, there were four different wires inside. One copper, one red, one green, and one with both green and red bands. After some time, I found out that the red and green are the audio signals, while the red+green and copper are the ground wires. If you use iPod headphones, just cut off the red+green and copper wires and don’t use them. The second hurdle is that these wires are all covered with acryllic. Acryllic makes for bad electrical contact. What I did was use a crème brûlée torch to burn off all of the acryllic. It burns pretty fast, and you don’t want to keep heating the metal after it’s gone because before too long it will melt. The acryllic burns brightly, so it’s not too hard to tell when it’s gone. Once you’ve burned off the green and red acryllic, go ahead and wire up your photodiodes and you have your emitter. Honestly, it took me about 10 minutes to go from iPod headphones and photodiodes to a finished, working IR emitter. It’s extremely easy to do. My finished emitter looks like this:

The PhotoIRmote application has a feature that lets you check to make sure your emitter is working. I tested mine and it worked on my first try, so I tried it on the camera. It worked perfectly! In fact, I took this picture on the kitchen table using the application:

I still have to clean up the exposed wires, but other than that it’s done! This has been one of my easiest projects ever and It ended up costing my under $6. The application was $4, the IR photodiodes were $1.65, and the headphones were free! As soon as I get a star trails photo that I’m happy with, I’ll throw it onto the blog.