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Solar Powered

That’s me. And it’s never so obvious to me as in late spring, with Oregon’s on and (mostly) off sunshine. On a sunny day I can get right to things. On a cloudy day, with or without rain, it takes half the day to get revved up.

It does not help that my inner two year old controls my sleep pattern. 1 am: “I need to go to bed.” “No!” 2 am “I need to go to bed.” “No!” 3 am: “I need to go to bed.” “No!” 4 am: “I need to go to bed.” “Oh, okay.” The “No!”s are usually buried in “I just need to finish this page/section/file,” but that’s what they are, nonetheless. Only rarely will I get up before 7 or 8 hours of sleep. That means I’m up at noon and ready to go by dinner time. Aaarrrrggghhh!!!

The sun will be here to stay by the end of this month, or beginning of next month. I hope to get into a 12 to 8 or 1 to 9 sleep pattern by then, even if I have to knock myself out with Z-quil or weed to get started. If it works, I might have some whole days of getting things done, even with needing more frequent rest breaks than I used to. I truly miss the days when I dug in as soon as the school bus left and kept going until it got back, or until it was time to make dinner.

Last night, after reading Jude’s Forever Zone post about sketching our stitching, I put a photo of one of mine into GIMP to make a computer sketch. I did three different sketch filters, but I think there was a glitch in two of them (because they came out in layers and in no way resembled the original). The third was okay, but was still too much detail for me. Or, rather, it detailed all the wrong elements, except the actual base patches. It just isn’t what I want and know I can get when I figure out the right filter.

Busy sections of the original are too dark. Light plain sections are nothing.

So, being the ADD driven person I am, I tried something totally different. I ran the image through the kaleidoscope after cropping and making it square.

[OMG! So much trouble to get my gif here. I can’t upload directly because it’s too big. YouTube doesn’t take gifs. Last time I was able to input a link where I uploaded it in Facebook, but they’ve changed things again, so I couldn’t do that. However, they did convert it to a video, so I downloaded that and then uploaded to YouTube. It just took so much time. I hope these sites don’t change again too soon.]

And it turns out that I looked at, but never actually made, the one that really caught my interest. Maybe I’ll play with that tonight. It was simple rows of different stitches. It made some interesting designs that could be reproducible in threads again. The stitches remain the same, but are no longer just straight lines.

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