Sunny Yellow

Golden forsythia is the first shrub to show colour in our garden. The cloud of yellow in the front yard is a welcome sight. Yellow against the blue sky makes is a stunning colour scheme, one of nature's best. 

 A couple of readers have wondered how to do a mosaic featuring photos superimposed on others. Here's a quick tutorial using the downloaded version of Picasa. For those who know how to do this, skip to the bottom for more sunny yellow.

Select the photos you want to use for your collage and edit them. Select and hold them together. Choose one for the background and one or two others to feature. In the create menu, choose Picture Collage.

Once in Collage, select Picture Pile from the choice of layouts. You will see your photos on a plain background. Click on your background photo, then move your cursor to the Background options on the left, choose Use Photo as Background. You should see the background change to your photo. Then you can remove the small photo (unless you want the same photo superimposed.) 

Now you can work with the photos on top. Adjust the size and angle by clicking on the center of the photo. A wheel will appear which shows the angle of the photo. Expand or contract the size by using your mouse. Using the menu on the left, add a border if you like. 

When you are pleased with the placement of your photos, click Create. Your collage will be created and you can then go back into your Library of photos to add a border to the entire collage, should you so choose. 

 

Lemon Bars are full of sunshiney flavours. Perfect for spring. This is my mother's recipe, a classic, found by clicking over to the link above which will take you to my recipe blog.

Linking to Sunlit Sunday, hosted by Karen of My Little Home and Garden, and to Mosaic Monday, hosted by Mary of the Little Red House.

Creating Collages: A Quick Tutorial

This may be a redundant post, but someone recently asked about making collages so I'm doing a quick tutorial with my limited expertise.

I use Picasa for viewing and editing my photos, it's free and easy to download. I store my photos on my computer, not on Picasa Web Albums.

To begin, open Picasa and choose your photos.

The green push pin icon in the bottom toolbar holds the photo, allowing you to select a number of photos. The red circle will take away any you don't want.

Click on "collage," found in the bottom toolbar.

The left window allows you to choose whether you want a picture pile (as above) or a mosaic, grid, etc. 

In this picture pile, each picture can be rearranged. Right clicking on the photo gives a number of options.

To set one photo as background, click "set as background." 

To change the border, click "change border," then "white."

Each photo can be manipulated as to size by clicking on the photo and scrolling up or down. When you click on the photo a circle will appear. The little orange button to the right of the circle enables you to change the angle of the photo.

When you're happy with your work, click "create collage" and voilà, you have a beautiful work of art!

Since my house is not yet decorated for Christmas (it's hard to decorate a dusty construction zone), these are photos pulled from 2008.

Abundance

 

As in years past around the end of December I begin pondering a word for the next year. Last year, it was "new."  Well, new certainly typified last year's experiences - but not in a way I had ever dreamed or wanted. Unemployment was not fun - but it was new. And I learned new ways of coping with difficulties.

When it came time for this year's word, I thought maybe it would be something like "healing" or "grace" or "persevere". But no, the word that kept coming to me as I prayed and read my Bible was "abundance." No way, I thought. But then I started considering the things in my life that I had in abundance. There are a lot of them:

love

family

God's presence

beauty

faith

friends

creativity

hope

And so, I made my collage and focused on what was abundant here and now. I'm so glad I did. Just because my husband now has a job and the future looks brighter does not lessen any of the abundance I already had. The verse quoted on my collage is "You have brought me to a place of abundance." God brought me to a realization that I already had all the abundance I needed BEFORE he provided Tim with a job.