A New Piano

Aug 12, 2016

We haven’t had the best summer here in Victoria but today is nice and sunny and warm. It makes me want to take the day off and head to the beach. Oh well, maybe tomorrow afternoon if the weather holds.

I have20160808_130503 my computer in the den which is just off the kitchen and my partner Kevin decided to put a
n old drafting table in the room as well thinking we may use it. Well it got used all right but mostly as a dumping ground for papers etc. After about a year of this he decided that it simply wasn’t working for him so got rid of the drafting table and found a used Roland piano online at Used Victoria. It was in good working order but needed a little TLC. What does Kevin decide to do? Spray paint it red! It then got reassembled and placed in the corner of the den.

I have to admit it does look nice. It gets played too! Not by me really although I do sit down occasionally however I haven’t played piano since I was 9 and I have forgotten anything I might have known.

Kevin can just sit down and play. He makes it up as he goes and it simply amazes me how he can do that.

 

You can watch him in action here. I am going to recover that piano seat with patchwork. I think that would be appropriate. Kevin says that’s fine as long as it’s black and red.

Ah technology! Don’t you just love it. I sat down two hours ago to write a quick post and here I still am because I wanted to show a video. So how can you do that and do I need to go to YouTube etc. I can’t just upload video to a free wordpress.com account. I took the video from my smartphone and when I downloaded it to the computer it was sideways. So ok how do you fix that. OK I need a new program, so download the program. Oops the computer needs a restart for the program to work. OK done now back to the blog post. OK now you have to find the draft of the in progress draft post, and on it goes. Nothing is ever as simple and as easy as it looks. Of course once you understand what needs to be done it’s fine but sometimes just trying to figure things out the first time you try something is time consuming.

So enough of this, I do have a new quilt to show but I will save that until Monday now. Ah something to look forward to.

Remember to sign up for the newsletter and you get the free pattern for the Inspiration journal. Just click on the picture of the journal itself if you are interested. I am working on the pattern for “the Light Within” quilt and that should be available next week. I send out a separate newsletter every two weeks. Have a great weekend.

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Art Quest and Other Updates

Jun 8, 2016

Well Saturday dawned bright sunny and very warm! It was a good day for an art show though. We got a lot of traffic through the show however I was so busy setting up etc. that I forgot to take pictures. My partner Kevin and I did very well at the show. I sold a lot of my Inspirational Journals that I had brought. Kevin sold some of his CD’s, cards, prints and some journals he had made at www.myskoobi.com.

My partner Kevin Finley is a very talented guy (although he gets embarrassed when I say that). I picked him up for our second date (can’t remember why I was driving that day) but the first thing he did when he got into the car was hand me a CD. I listened to it when I got home from the date and I was blown away with how good it was.  Check out the crazy artwork he did for the album cover. You can check the music out at www.coastcafe.ca/albums.html

The most exciting news is that he sold a painting! Yeah! That was thrilling, although I am not sure who was more excited Kevin or the shows organizer Linda! I don’t have a picture of the piece that sold I will have to post that later.

Has anyone ever used myskoobi.com? It is a company here in Victoria BC that you can upload photos of your artwork and create beautiful journals from them. The quality is fantastic and if you haven’t looked into it I would recommend it.

On other news I finally decided to upgrade my phone! I used to have a BlackBerry Z10 which I loved. I had it for 3 years and it was still going strong! So why did I change you might ask? Well, a number of reasons. Blackberry was slowly getting less and less support from different app makers and although I loved the phone and the operating system now that I am working for myself and I only have the one phone I needed something that allowed me to have access to more apps than the Blackberry was able to support. For instance I want to be able to offer debit and credit card capability to my customers and I was not able to do that with my old phone.

So yesterday I bit the bullet and purchased a Samsung Galaxy S5 Neo. 

Why not an iphone you might ask? Well, the iphones are just too expensive and really the specs on this phone far outperformed the available iphone in the same price range. It has taken me most of last night and some of this morning trying to figure everything out though and getting things set up the way I want it to work. So far so good. I think I am really going to like this phone once I get the hang of it.

On other news I finished quilting a customer quilt today so stayed tuned for some pictures and some info on that quilt tomorrow.

Happy quilting!