Year of Monthly Dates

When my daughter suggested that we all make our Christmas gifts for each other this past Christmas, I was really glad that Pinterest announced the

secret boards.

I had fun pinning items to the secret board I created with all my Christmas ideas for my family.

For my husband, I put together a

Year of Monthly Dates

.

On our

Cozi

calendar, I set up an 'appointment' for us to meet on the 1st day of each month to open the envelope for that month and set aside a time/date for our monthly date. Included in each envelope is a prayer prompt for each of us, as well as a prayer bookmark where we can record prayer requests we have for that month. There is another envelope inside the manila envelope with the details for the date for that month.

For our January date, we were to create a

hint box

for each other. After being married for a while, sometimes you need a little help from your spouse on what would be an encouragement to them. These can be simple things like, making sunny side up eggs for breakfast or picking up a 3 Musketeers bar on the way home. Our job now is to fill out the little slips of paper and decorate our boxes for each other.

The pictures are a little out of order on this post because we did go out for breakfast first at a nearby place that a lot of the locals just love and we had never been there! We just might have to go on a few more breakfast dates in the future... :o)

Since we were heading to Hobby Lobby anyway...I was wanting to look for some items to rearrange the

mantel

, especially since I have this new pallet art work that my husband made for me for Christmas! Isn't it beautiful! I found just about everything I was looking for, just need to figure out what will go in the shadow box (and I did trim the flowers so they fit in the vase better).

Want to know what we are doing for our date next month? Be sure to check back next month! :o)

Catching up on my Capture Your 365

1/320, f/2.8, ISO 800, 50mm

For some reason, I have not been able to upload any photos on my blog since last week. So I uploaded this photo I took last week to my neglected Flickr account and was able to add the HTML code and voila! I can work around the problem and still upload a picture! Took me a few days to figure it out... :o)

I am still borrowing a 50mm lens from a friend. On the day that I took this picture, I had been listening to an instrumental CD from

Mark Schultz.

I just love a good instrumental CD! Listening to the CD was the inspiration for this photo. I wanted something with sheet music and piano keys. I did apply an antique black and white preset to the photo in Lightroom to give it an aged look, otherwise the photo would have been just black and white.

What have you photographed lately?

Simple things

ISO 100, 55mm, f/5.6, 1/50 sec

Day 2 of

Capture Your 365

!

It has been so cold here in the mornings! From our kitchen window, we can look out and see our frost covered glass patio table. This morning, there just happened to be a couple of leaves on the table and it hit me...I just had to take a picture! I probably should have attached that 50mm lens that I am borrowing, but I really didn't want to have to go back out into the cold to take another picture.

We really didn't have to go anywhere today and I am thinking we are going to wait until next week to resume our school schedule. So today, Kelsey and I watched all of

Anne of Green Gables - The Sequel.

It was such a nice, lazy day together, just us girls. We also learned that it was

National Cream Puff Day

, so Kelsey made cream puffs this afternoon and they were amazing! I may just count today as a school day after all :o)

Save your calendar pages!

I still like to have a wall calendar at home even though our family uses an electronic calendar these days. This past year, I had a calendar from Dayspring which had beautiful illustrations with Bible verses for each month. Instead of just throwing the calendar away, I turned the pages into a project to send to my Compassion kids!

 First, I took apart the calendar, page by page.

 Then I trimmed the pages down to 8 1/2 x 11 inches.

 I pulled out some card stock and a glue stick. I mounted each of the pages onto some cardstock to strengthen the pages and to cover up last year's calendar pages.

We wrote letters to our Compassion kids yesterday and I was able to include these in our mailing. I hope they enjoy them!

Adjusting Aperture

Today is the first day of my participation in the

Capture Your 365

project. My goal for this project is to take at least one picture everyday to improve my photography skills. Last week, I reserved a few photography books at the library and was reading through

Understanding Exposure

today. Our library only has the 2nd edition of this book, which is still proving to be very helpful.

So I decided to do a little experiment with some chess pieces. This is something that is easy to set up. I made sure my camera was sitting on a stable surface since it would be impossible to get an in focus shot while hand holding the camera at the shutter speeds I was using.

 ISO 100, 50mm, f/5.0, 1.6 sec

 ISO 100, 50mm, f/8.0, 4.0 sec

ISO 100, 50mm, f/22, 30.0 sec

When I adjusted the aperture, I needed to adjust either the shutter speed or the ISO to get a proper exposure for the photo. Since I decided to leave the ISO alone, I had to adjust the shutter speed each time. Notice the difference between each of the photos? In the near future, I would like to try this same 'experiment' with moving objects to compare the results.

In this experiment, I would have to say that my favorite photo of the day would be the middle picture. I like that the snowman pillow in the background is not quite in focus,  but you can make out that it is there. Which one is your favorite?