Author: lauramchugh

I see that my posts for 2008 in my “daily” art diary totalled 164, leaving 200 days that I didn’t post art.

One of my very small handful of resolutions for 2009 is to post something every single day, starting today – 1/1/09.

Here are two photos from today. The first is a tree I spied through Angus’ window. I’m up in Washington, on the Columbia Gorge.

The other photo is of a barge that was going down the river, mid-morning.

Enjoy, and Happy New Year’s!

Here are some better photos of the matting work I’ve done over the past few days.

These are the two photos of Madrid – the skyline of amazing architecture, and a single building in an office park just outside Madrid.

Close up of the office building:

Here are some up close photos of the small box framed photos I’ve done. My favorite is the red one.

And finally, here is one of the 5×5 photocollages I made with the fruit stand background (see post on Strawberries and Pomegranates). This is a promo just to see how they look matted and framed.

Christmas is over and I have time to get back to doing art-related things. I’ve finally got my Canon Pixma printer working well – they seem to have fixed the software glitch that had all my docs printing out at 1/4 original size. The new interface software for printing photos renders the colors nicely, so I printed out a bunch of photos I took on my last trip to Europe in small size – roughly 1.5 x 3 in. I matted them and popped them into these cool shadow box type frames I got the other day at Cheap Pete’s for $5 each. They’ll make nice gifts.

Here are all of them

and a close up of one of the Eiffel Tower.

I also matted and framed these two architecture themed photos I took in Madrid on that same trip.

Thanks to a lesson from Kati, I was able to mat four of my black and white photos. These were flowers from a beautiful bouquet someone sent me when I had knee surgery back in September.

I used a white, slightly textured mat board (4 ply) and cut the openings with the 45 degree bevel cutter. The whole thing went really well, except for when the cutter dragged and marred the surface on the last mat I did. Kati came home right about then, and told me I should be cutting with the mat face down so that any boo boos like that are on the backside. Live and learn!

Mat Board – $16 for the whole sheet which would have done six 12×12 pieces.
Black frame – $15 at Cheap Pete’s
Photos – $1.39 for all at Costco.

Total cost for this project: $78. If I’d had Cheap Pete’s do them, it would have easily been $150-200.

I like my mat cutter very much!