Ok, the new computer is up and running

The new computer is up and running. I've been able to do email since Monday. Yesterday I got my camera set up to attach to the computer so I can move photos from it to the computer for storage, and also so I can put them online at my blog and also on Facebook. So here I am.

I haven't done much art during the last week. I can manage to do a few things every day, but energy levels aren't up to doing massive amounts of stuff at one time, so I'm doing one or two computer things a day now that the basics are up, and I'm just waiting on the rest until I actually need them. Still I decided to keep doing a face a day and some doodles every day. The face a day thing really worked to make my faces look better and I figured the doodles would work out similarly.

 So here is the most recent face. I've never done one on book pages before and it is also the first face that I've ever colored with oil pastels. These are water soluble, but I didn't activate them. I just left them as they were. I'll need to use a fixative on the page to set them so they don't just smudge off.

I am rather happy with it.

The doodling is something else I've been doing. I discovered that I did not know how to doodle. I was never the kid who doodled on their pages during class. I think kids start doing that in Jr. High, and the school I was in would have had fits if any of us had done that. So I never did it.

I also did not doodle during phone calls. So I have had to literally learn how. One of my new realizations is that free motion quilting is just doodling with thread using a sewing machine, and, of course, I did have a hard time getting comfortable with that as well.

So it occurs to me that when I go back to quilting, learning how to doodle with a pen should help me with the free motion quilting as well.

And I own books full of free motion quilting designs, so looking through those ought to help me discover my own style of doodling.

Take care all.

Why I'm not blogging

About a week ago my main computer died, extremely suddenly. It was 4 years old, and worked perfectly until its last day. The hard drive had been racing for several weeks, and I'm pretty sure that is what killed it. I'm currently on an old laptop I bought the last time a desktop died and I knew I'd be without a computer for a month. This laptop is not only 4 years old, it was the cheapest laptop I could buy, and it is the slowest computer I've ever had to deal with. But it is still with me which is why I can write this blog post.

What I can't do is get photos from my camera to the computer. All of its USB ports are engaged.

I'll get the new computer which will be a laptop this time, but one that isn't the bottom of the barrel and isn't 4 years old. I bought a Windows 7 Pro laptop online from HP. You can't get new Windows 7 computers from the big box stores but you can from the manufacturer's website. I had such good luck with the old computer I decided to buy the same brand again.

And with any luck, you will hear from me in less than two weeks, with photos of what I've been up to. I've been playing with my paints and my art journals, and as usual I've been learning all kinds of new things that I would love to share.