A Photographic Aside

Today I got up early to take my car in to get fixed. Usually I would spend my Saturday sleeping in and eating waffles for brunch, but with my service engine light on and my car shifting hard it seems like it was a good idea to get it in to the shop. Instead of my usual routine I was up early and off across town...well two towns technically. We then drove back to Tempe and had breakfast at The Farm. It's an actual small farm with artist studios, several small restaurants, and a lot of gorgeous trees. It's set back from the nearby roads making it seem like you really are out in the country. Living in Tempe, land of strip malls and multi-lane streets, it's easy to forget that Arizona can be beautiful. If all of Arizona looked like it does at The Farm I would certainly reconsider moving.

Even though I've enjoyed my day so far, I'm sleepy and might take an afternoon nap. At least I will once the car guy calls me back again. So instead of a full post about clothes I thought it best to honor my other grandmother in my blog. There are very few photos of her and some I'm using photoshop to repair them. There's one of her with her sisters with a huge gouge taken out of the center. Quite the process to fix. In any case below is the photo I think I want to get enlarged. I plan on taking some key family photos and getting them enlarged onto canvas to hang up in my future home. I want them big enough that they come across less like a collection of family photos and more like art prints. We'll see how that goes. For now, here's my maternal grandmother looking all stylish and relaxed.

A Photographic Aside

Sorry for my blog absence this week. I've been feeling a bit down and somewhat antisocial. In an effort to engage myself in a project, I've been photoshopping old negatives. My paternal great-grandmother and grandmother were big into taking photographs. Most now exist only in negative form since one of our relatives made off with a large percentage of them. I now have over 1,000 family photographs that I'm slowly working my way through. This is a long process of scanning them and using Photoshop to remove the dust and scratches from the image. If anyone has any quick ways of doing either of these things let me know. Until then I'll be slowly working away on them. I think it's a long-term project to say the least.

To capture my grandmother's "style" I have two photos for you. One is her wearing her first husband's suit and hat. The image hasn't been cleaned up at all so ignore the speckles. The second is a combination of flannels (skirt and shirt) which would certainly be useful if not fashionable when working on a farm in upstate New York. Toward the end of her life she only wore dresses that she made herself. I can only remember her wearing pants on a handful of occasions.