Art Every Day Month

Today I was developing some "culinary arts" for a church banquet . . .

"Celebration Apple Cheesecake":

And Mixed Bean Salad (made with whatever we had on hand!):

And a little acrylic painting inspired by one of the old hymns we sang at church today:

Life is hard sometimes, but "Christ in me, hope of glory" :)

Art Every Day Month

Unless you're a reader of CAN'T STOP MAKING THINGS, you might not be able to guess what I created with some white card stock and these:

I dribbled a few drops of each colour of food colouring on the paper, then sprayed everything with water (that happened to be scented with patchouli  -- might as well make it smell nice ;) and got this:

Lovely, eh???? (NOT!) Gail put hers through a shredder -- but my shredder is a cross shredder and, well, actually shreds paper to bits -- so I just used my paper cutter and left about an inch uncut. It would have been easier to use the strips completely cut, but I was afraid I'd mess up the order -- like it mattered! I ended up snipping them all free in the end.

If you haven't already peeked at Gail's blog, have you guessed my plan? Maybe this non-related picture will give you a hint:

Yes, I wove (rather pain-stakingly -- weaving is harder than I remembered!) the paper together to make this:

As I worked, I hoped that I would be able to dig up this old picture frame I knew we had in which I planned to put my finished work:

Kinda cute, eh? The colours are much prettier and more vibrant in real life.

Of course, while I was working, DD8 said, "Oh, I wish  I could do that!" So I gave her some of my cast-off pieces and she did a great job creating this:

Thanks, Gail, for the great idea:)

Has anyone or anything inspired  you lately?

Art Every Day Month

I'm going to have to look into this tree obsession of mine . . .

I created the tree and coloured the blocks last night, but wasn't sure how I was going to fill in the branches until this morning when I read Skip to My Lou's post about being thankful.

In case you can't read the writing on the sky background, it says, "I am always thankful for . . ."

We're between Thanksgiving celebrations in Canada and the US, but are you thinking about the things for which you are thankful? I need to do that on a regular basis!

Collectorz.com Book Collector 7.0 Pro - Product Review

I don't remember a time in my life that I didn't love books. Even before I could read, I remember sitting on a couch pretending I was reading a grown-up book. When our television broke while I was in high school, I wasn't phased because I just delved into the fictional world of Victorian novels.

A few years ago I read a study that explored the average number of books in households of different social groups. Most people might have up to a couple of hundered books; homeschoolers tend to have libraries of more than a thousand books.

I've never taken the time to count, but I'm pretty sure that we fall into the latter category of book collectors. And that is why I was very excited to be on the list of reviewers of Collectorz.com 's Book Collector Pro. What an ingenious concept! It had never occurred to me that such a thing existed!

Book Collector Pro enables us to calalogue all of the books we own -- and even the ones we would like to own. Simply entering the ISBN number (manually or with a scanner) enables the user to access detailed information that relates specifially to the edition in hand. (Books can also be entered by author and title.) Once the particular version is selected from the software's searched results, an abundance of information about that particular book is presented.

Here, for example, is a screen shot of one book in our collection:

Call me crazy, but I'm tickled by the fact that I automatically get the cover price and dewey decimal number -- in addition to the exact cover image of the book I own. Now, maybe one day, we can fulfill DH's dream of having our home library organized by the Dewey Decimal System! (Ya -- not likely before we're empty nesters, by which time our library will likely be dramatically diminished anyway!)

I don't know if you noticed the "Personal Details" in the above picture, but that's another thing that I love about this program -- I can feed it information unique to our family -- such as where the book is located IN our  home. (OK -- where it's supposed to be! If only the software were capable of teleporting the books back to their proper places when they've been removed!) I can also document how many times and when each book was read  (Hmmmm . . . that could be very telling information. I wonder how many books we own but have not read . . . ) That means we no longer need to argue about which advent book in the series we read last year! LOL

As you can see here, the editing options are extensive. How cool is it that I can even rate my own books? As someone who sometimes can't even remember if I've read a particular book, I find it rather helpful that I can document whether or not I liked it in a quick and easy way.

Another feature that I love about Book Collector Pro is the ability to track the books that I lend to friends and family. I mean, we're talking about a real library system here! Never again will I need to keep track of those random slips of paper on which I've noted the people to whom I've lent our resources -- it can all be documented so easily.

If I wanted to get really fancy, I could make pie charts and graphs using the statistics of my book collection -- such as how many we have in each genre, or in each room of our home.

I have yet to spend a lot of time in-putting many of our books because I'd really like to find a scanner (preferably for free:) to help make the process go faster. It is a tad time-consuming, but I really believe worth while.The software is a fabulous way of documenting text resources for insurance purposes (lists can be printed, saved to a USB stick and stored elsewhere, or "connected" to an online data base for storage and sharing). And because it can be uploaded to an i-phone (or blackberry -- soon), it enables instant access to personal book records. That's quite handy if you're like me and can't remember if you already own a particular resource you've come across on sale!

But books aren't the only things Collectorz helps organize -- they also have software for games, movies, music, and comics. While some people (like me!) might be a bit intimidated by the learning curve required to make use of such cool programs, it is easy to rest assured because Collectorz.com is an easy-to-navigate website with extensive online manuals that outline the easy steps (with pictures for all of us visual learners!) for every task you might wish to perform with their software packages.

For more details, check out this list of features and screenshots, as well as this abreviated list of nitty-gritty facts from the Collectorz website:

If you're not sufficiently impressed by my experiences with Book Collectorz, I encourage you to take advantage of their 30-Day Free Trial! Find out what other TOS reviewers had to say by going here.


Note: I received this product free of charge in exchange for an honest review. All opinions expressed are genuine. No other compensation was received. Thank you TOS and Collectorz for the privilege of using this product!