Everything Is Beautiful….

I have found a new obsession, a new toy. In fact, I think it’s a crime for people to sell these things during the busy season, but that’s one of the dangers of going into the city…toys waiting in every shop for hapless bumpkins. This one is called Kaleidoscope Kreator, and it hit me in an Achille’s heel - I love playing with patterns, and I love to avoid all the work (and skill!) of cutting and pasting. I used to make similar designs by color-copying random bits of images and then repeating them… but this is so much easier that I feel like a rat pressing a bar to get a hit of speed -- press, press, press… :-}

The moment I got home, I loaded it, and starting bringing up all my photos to see how they would slice and dice -- and before I knew it, I had missed dinner (folks - that’s amazing), it was dark, and I had two dozen “to die for” designs that I just had to print immediately!! Of course, the first thing I discovered was that Windows does not understand circles or squares… Picture Manager assumes that anything worth looking at will be in the center of the photo, and crops accordingly. This felt like having bought a candy bar and not being able to get the wrapping off, or hitting a large rock with your speedboat. I could almost feel the whiplash. Grinding my teeth, I searched the computer for software that understood “shrink to fit” and finally found one that had come with my printer. Then figured out how to load the photo paper so that it didn’t go through 7 sheets at a time, and was in fact printing on the right side… and voila! I had four sheets of -- tiny -- mandalas to use for cards, magnets, coasters, frisbee inserts… the possibilities were endless, but my supply of ink and paper wasn’t.

It occurred to me, painfully, that I was gonna have to choose some files to print and leave others… and fairly quickly realized I actually had to choose which to save, unless I wanted to choke my computer! Since my motto since childhood has been “anything worth doing is worth overdoing” I was sore grieved by this… but I’m getting some sense of balance now… it’s been a whole halfhour since I made a kaleidoscope image… I can last until the timer goes off … I know I can…

-- Actually, I couldn’t. Just writing about it brought an overwhelming urge… I tried a couple of new photos, and moved from template to template… backed off a bit after a fairly frightening kaleidoscope of my face popped on the screen… back to Nature images… I started humming that old song “everything is beautiful, in its own way…” It’s almost true… and to prove it, the three images I posted with this blog entry are: an iris, a peony… and one of the mega-slugs in my garden.