Gorgeous and Fun

Magazine Collage 2

Some red more red, black and white to whet your appetite. Another magazine collage.

 

6 Sites For Printing Photographs in Different Ways

If you have any interest in printing your photographs in different ways check these sites out:

Blurb - You can make your own photo book! Cookbook, Instagram picture book, albums, pretty much any kind of book!

 

PostalPix - Right now this is an app only available on the iPhone for printing out pics. I tried this out, I printed my instagram pics out in a square format - and the pics were great.

My only problem is that since this is available only as an iPhone app and doesn't have a web area for picture uploading, the photos have to stay on my iPhone to use this.

 

Printstagr.am - Printing out your instagram photos as posters or tiny, tiny books or stickers and some more ways.

 

Postagramapp - Send real postcards from your iPhone or Android phones.

 

Keepsy - Print out albums of your photographs. They hook up with  a bunch of places including Facebook, Instagram and Flickr.

 

Easy Canvas Prints - Have any photograph printed on a canvas! You can hang your on photography on your walls this way. Love this idea! I have got to try this out.

 

My image for the day - the statue of Captain Parker in Lexington, MA. Photo taken with Instagram on the iPhone and manipulated with different iPhone apps.

 

Magazine Collage 1

My heart has been wanting to tell stories!  Telling stories with images.  At some level, don't we all like stories? Stories intrigue the imagination.

So starting today I am sharing images that I am calling magazine collages. Something about these pictures in magazines appealed to me. Say hello to inspiration!

 The color palette of the bold reds and blacks......

Images are from magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair, Instyle..... I wish I had written down the exact publication months. Some of these images are ads.

Creamy cauliflower soup .....

Wow, it has been long since I popped in here! I have been doing some thinking about what I want to blog about. If you go back in my archives you will see my first year was about interiors, clothes, art.

And since then I have evolved. Blogging made me want to take better photographs. I have rubber stamped, I have painted silk scarves, painted watercolors and all kinds of things in between. 

In the last year the themes that have emerged for me are photography (and Photoshop), jewelry, collage. And of late -  cooking! 

This blog is not going to turn into a food blog but images of food are very likely to appear. I am going to keep sharing photographs of whatever I shoot. I am going to share images of magazine inspiration collections/collages. And about jewelry, I am upto something but can't reveal yet.

This is the direction my heart is going in. Beautiful images and stories. And in this part of the world where the winters are long and snowy indoor images of food and such things are easier to create.

Today's image is of a creamy cauliflower soup.

Ingredients:

Oil

3 -5 cloves of garlic, crushed

2 onions, diced

2 heads of cauliflower

3 cups of stock (whatever kind of stock you like)

1/2 cup Dry white wine

Salt to taste

Pepper to taste

Cilantro for garnish

 

Recipe:

1. Heat up some oil in a stock pot.

2. Saute the onion and garlic till the onion turns transparent.

3. Toss in the cauliflower.

4. Put in the stock and the white wine.

5. Cover the stock pot and let this boil until the cauliflower softens.

6. Take the stock pot of the stove, let the soup cool a little.

7. Now blend the soup in the blender in batches.

8. Put the blended soup back in the stock pot and back on the stove.

9. Let the soup simmer on the stove, put in salt and pepper.

10. Stop simmering after a few minutes.

11. Garnish with cilantro when serving.

Soups and soft food

Hello, hello! The extraction is over. Lost all my wisdom :-) since the wisdom teeth are gone. It went as well as it could. Now I am just waiting for my jaw to feel normal again, right now the jaw feels tuggy and tingly.

So it's a week of soft food and ice cream! Today I made a tomato soup and oven fries. Here is the recipe for the soup.

Ingredients:

2 tsps olive oil

3 medium sized onions

6 large tomatoes

3 bouillon cubes (I use the non-salted Rapunzel brand found in Whole Foods)

Pepper

Salt to taste

 

Preparation:

1. Dice the onions and quarter the tomatoes

2. Warm the oil in a stock pot

3. Saute the onions in the heated oil

4. When the onions are translucent toss in the tomatoes

5. Saute this mix for a couple of minutes

6. Add a 1.5 cups of water

7. Cover the stock pot and cook till the  tomatoes go soft

8. Remove from heat when the tomatoes are soft. Add the  3 bouillon cubes, pepper and salt to taste and use an immersion mixer to puree this mixture.

9. Put the stock pot back on the stove, add a cup of water and let this come to boil.

Done!

It's pretty easy and I cheat. Instead of using the stock pot I use a pressure cooker to soften the onions and tomatoes.

You can garnish with croutons, or a sprig of mint or rosemary or a dollop of sour cream. I keep mine plain.

 

 

 

 

Flowers for the weekend

Tomorrow is the d-day, the teeth get pulled.

At this moment I am distracting myself. Catching up with the last season of  the 'Big Bang Theory' before the new one starts, playing with Photoshop. Just trying not to think about surgery.

Here's the result of today's playing - flowers - dreamy and vintage.................... The last vestiges of summer. Some of the trees started changing their leaves in August! It is starting to feel more and more like Fall.

Papers and Colors

One of the things about being interested in collage or mixed media is that inspiration can come through pretty much anything. There is a serious risk of becoming a pack rat :-). But I am finding that I prefer minimalism. Less is more. More is overwhelming. I love and admire the work of artists who create many, many layers. But in my own work I like to keep it minimal. 

I don't collect a lot but I am still slowly weeding out stuff that I know I don't want to use. I give it to friends who I know will like it. This weekend I sifted through my stash and found tissue papers in different colors. They look so lovely. To keep or not to keep is the question.......

 

September 11th

10 years.....

So much has been said about that sad day. No words come to mind. I am just sharing pictures of a demonstration of how the Minute Men prepared for battle. Demonstrations performed through out summer in the Minute man national park in Lexington, MA. I took these pictures on the 4th of July this year.

 

 

 

A Rainy day in New England

It is raining today, going to rain tomorrow, going to rain until the weekend. But the rain I don't mind, it is going to the dental surgeon. I am absolutley terrified. Being an engineer, a person of technology I wonder why in this day and age the process of extracting teeth still seems like something out of the Roman times. Open mouth and yank....... There are lasers for eye surgeries but for teeth it seems like the good old tongs.

Is there any way I can keep avoiding this? Sadly, no.

The picture below is from July 8th of this year. It was a misty, rainy kinda day when I took this picture from the rooftop of the Decordova museum in Lincoln, MA.

 

 

It's been long!

I know, I know I haven't been blogging much. But you will definitely find me on Instagram @gorgeousfun and if you aren't on Instagram you can see the pics at at Gorgeous and Fun tumblr blog.  I have been incredibly busy so blogging pics directly from my iPhone seems to happen much more easily than typing out words.

I will be back with a more regular posting schedule after I get a few things out of my way. One of them being getting my wisdom teeth extracted, something I have been avoiding for a year. I am absolutely terrified about it but now it must be done! But I am also working on some fun things and will reveal more in September.

I have been giving myself a holiday from creative activity, some times a girl needs to recharge her creative batteries, no? I am reading loads of books and ogling beautiful creative books as a part of the recharge process. So my creative kicks have been mainly coming from cooking. Yep, you read that right. Somewhere in India my best pal and my mom are pinching themselves when they read this. 10 years back you wouldn't have caught me saying that.

So I share with you the photo of an Indian dish called "Masoor Masala", absolutely delicious and healthy!