Sunday, November 18, 2007

bloggy makeover

Hey - didja check out the new header? Hard to miss it, I know, it's freaking huge. (All attempts to make it smaller only made it bigger, so there it stands.) I've been meaning to add it for ages, pretty much since I started blogging back in January. Originally, I wanted to have a picture of one of those Newton's cradle things, like this:



but all the balls would be balls of yarn. Cool, right? But maybe a bit ambitious. So I decided on the picture of Isaac with his needles, but I couldn't figure out how to draw on the picture. The only photo-type program I have is the one that came with my camera, but after my playing around and helpful instructions from fellow bloggers I knew how to trim pictures, add captions, tweak the color, contrast, brightness, stitch pictures together, and get them into the header, but I couldn't draw the freaking knitting needles in Isaac's hands. This is where it had sat since late summer.
So the other day, J comes home from work and starts telling me how he and his friend at work were playing around sending funny emails to each other.
"I sent him a picture of a big SUV, and I put a garden gnome in the driver's seat and 'canyonero' on the license plate!" he told me. (The man works very hard all day.)
"Tell me how you did that." I asked him urgently. Perhaps I missed the point of his story.
Anyway, it turns out he did it using the Paint program. Can you believe that? Paint - the program I used to play around with as a kid on my dad's computer, making blocky pictures of horses and castles. Occam's razor, you know?
So there it is, pretty much how I envisioned it. I did have to combine it with another picture to keep it from being a big scary stretched Isaac across the top of the screen, but that's okay - I got to put in some of my beloved fall leaves.
Funny how a little thing like this just makes my day. :)