May 20, 2012 Today, I have no energy to play with images like I usually do. Why? I don't know. I have been seized by lethargy. http://www.karastewartaip.blogspot.com/ So today's image, which is actually an image from almost a month ago, has had a little crop and auto tone adjust. And that is it. It's actually an image from almost a month ago and I wanted to be sure to get at least one in from this amazing place. At the end of April, my good hearted, patient, dog-loving friend Randi made me come with her to a fabulous place in Bahama, NC. It is a specialty nursery called Architectural Trees. http://www.archtrees.com/ Architectural Trees has all sorts of nooks and crannies, specialty trees and unique items, pick your own blueberries and so many interesting vistas. I am so glad I went with Randi.

May 12, 2012 Opal's Dress This is part of a quilt that my mother made for me and my sister when we were about 1 1/2 and 3 years old and moved from the Philippines back to N.C. and were staying with her mother (my grandmother Opal) and her father. I taped an interview with my mother last weekend in order to get on record the history of each of the quilt squares. The fabric was from my grandmother's scrap bag. The scraps were mostly feed sacks which had been made into various articles of clothing for my mother and her siblings, and also into household items (kitchen towels). And then there were also scraps from various items that had been made from my mother and her Grandmother Bridges' (my great grandmother) trips to a fabric store to make clothing and special projects. The piece on the top right, the blue with pink flowers, is from a dress that my grandmother had as a young married woman. She was married at 16 and is now 93, so that particular piece is over 70 years old. The quilt is in tatters now, having been well loved and used all my life, and I wish I had gotten photographs when it was in better shape. I used a Topaz BW Effects filter (Hand Tinted Chiffon) on this image. On another note, I am not liking the changes to the Dailies gallery. I noticed when the thumbs were taken away that my Dailies galleries (any gallery that I have set to feed into the Daily community) now looks different than the rest of my website. My logo at the top is gone, as is my drop down navigation bar that was in my top banner. This makes it very difficult for a visitor to navigate around my site. That means that when I share an image from my dailies gallery on facebook or twitter, a person clicking on my link from there will have no obvious way to navigate around my site. That really irritates me as I am paying for a Pro site, which all aspects of it should be customizable to what I want (and were before the changes). I contacted smug about it and they said they were sorry, but that with the changes, all they could suggest is that I create yet another gallery (a duplicate), NOT connect it with the Daily community, and double post to both the new galllery and this gallery, and then share from the duplicate gallery that is NOT connected to the Daily community. That seems like a heck of a lot of effort and again, annoys me since there WAS a way to navigate from my site before the change of taking down the thumbs. Is anyone else having this issue? Email me if you are and you have found a reasonable answer.