To Choose a Church

How do you choose a church? I've faced this question a couple times in my life when moving to a new city, but I'm still not sure how to answer it.

When you know nothing about the town and know nobody in it, your initial church visits are based solely on the exterior of the building and what little information you can find online. So you end up spending weeks of Sundays feeling uncomfortable in churches whose outside marquees completely misrepresented them.

When you do already know people in your new town, you will inevitably commit to the church of your favorite friend, and live with the nagging feeling in the back of your mind that there could still be a better church out there that you never got the chance to visit.

The idea of a "better church" brings up another question: if you're a Bible-believing Christian, shouldn't you be happy in any Bible-believing church? Some would say yes, I would say no. Choosing a church is a rare opportunity to choose your extended family, and there are so many more factors to consider beyond the obviously important factor of faith.

I'm excited about starting a new long-term relationship with a church in the area, but I'm dreading all the blind dates it will take to get there. If you have any advice and/or recommendations I'd love to hear them!

Homeless No More?

What a great weekend! My sister came into town, I got to play with her babies, I had a sleepover with my brother, my mom made opossum pie, and I bought a house! Not one of those plastic houses you buy with pink money to put on Park Place, I bought a REAL house! Well, maybe. I guess I don't really know for sure until they hand me the keys at our closing date.

We've spent the last eight months pouring over house listings online, so after moving to Arkansas and landing a job it only took two weeks for us to find and put an offer on the perfect house. And only a few short hours after that, we got the call that they accepted our offer! We expected a counter-offer with compromises, but luckily for us the owners have already moved out of state and are just anxious to sell the home!

Bryan and I were very subdued in the agent's office while writing up the offer. The agent asked why we weren't more excited. I shrugged my shoulders, "We know it's not ours yet." I figured we wouldn't get excited until closing day, but now that we know they accepted our offer the excitement is building. I know things can still fall through if the inspection fails or some unforeseen problem arises, but it's getting harder to hold back the giddy expectation of home ownership!

I'll keep you updated, and I promise to post a picture if we make it to closing day!

One Week Later

Well I don't want to leave you hanging after that last post. You'll be happy to know I've gotten better about bringing my brain home from work. The environment and coworkers are great, it's just the busy workload that is difficult to get used to. (I hate ending that sentence with a preposition, but I just don't have the energy to reword it.)

#1 question everyone wants to ask a new hire: "So what kind of music do you listen to?"

Sara v. The Man

I started my new job today. If the rest of these sentences are short and lack proper grammar/punctuation it's just because my brain is simply overloaded. If I could sum up the first day in one word: overwhelming. I suppose that's the same for anybody starting a new job though. Except for those statues of liberty that wave at cars during tax season. I bet they can still use their brain after their first day of work. Not me. My head is not my own right now. I left it in a black leather office chair facing a wall.

But I'm realistic. I can handle this, and things will get easier every day. I've just got to remember to bring my brain home with me tomorrow.

I'm Baaack

Three weeks ago today I was in the middle of a cross-country transition… somewhere between the good life I had with Bryan in North Carolina, and the blank pages of a chapter in our lives titled "Return to Arkansas". This chapter is beginning like many good novels do: with desperation. We are currently jobless, homeless, churchless, and all our meals come from the microwave oven. We are one stolen loaf of bread away from being characters in Les Miserables. Fun times, eh?

But despite the stress of job interviews every other day, mortgage loan complications, and allergic reactions to my parent's rent-free flop house, we really ARE quite happy to be back in Northwest Arkansas! Every day that I get to see beautiful green hills outside or get to cheer on my little brother's baseball team I'm reminded of how truly grateful I am to begin this chapter surrounded by all the places and people we love best!

Lovely Distraction

With less than a month until our big move to the Midwest, I was spending several hours a day job hunting. I scoured every online job board in the morning, and again in the evening. Google search became my intimate friend. I found perfect jobs for everyone I knew, except myself. I was consumed and verging on despair when I finally accepted the hard truth: I need a hobby!! Something to distract me from my job-hunting obsession!

Cue the craft blogs. Yes, all of them. I visited one of my favorites for inspiration on a new project for me. Soon I clicked on one link, that led me to another, and after a messy maze of hyperlinks which I could never recreate, I finally found it. It was beautiful. They called it a buttercup bag, but I called it a savior. I knew instantly its destiny was to save me from my depressive compulsory job hunt. 24 hours and some leftover fabric later, I'd made my first purse. Another 24 hours and a fabric store after that, I'd made my second purse.


I'm extremely proud. I cannot stitch a straight line, the buttonhole is crooked, the magnetic snaps don't align, and my attempt to tackle piping is quite flawed, but I'm SO happy with the results! Considering I've never followed a pattern nor sewed anything more complicated than curtains, these purses were super easy to make. And best of all… I have three job interviews this week!

Tutorial Time!!!!

I LOVE tutorials, don't you?! Especially when they come with LOTS of pictures! So when my friend, DeMo, suggested I post a vector art tutorial on my blog I thought it was a great idea! My techniques are not closely guarded secrets—I strongly object to designers keeping design secrets from one another! The vector illustrations I create are actually quite simple and only require patience and the ability to squint your eyes! Now, prepare yourself for the longest post my blog has ever seen. Are you ready, class? Let's dive in!





















Ok, this is the image we will be working with. It is one girl that is part of a larger photo. I do my work in Illustrator CS2. These images show you the original photo, and the finished vector art.

First, open the photo in Illustrator. Select the photo, and in the Transparency palette bring the opacity down to about 60-80%. This will make your paths easier to see when you draw on top of the photo, and also help hide the unimportant details so they don't distract you. Lock the photo layer, and create a new layer to start the drawing!

Set your stroke to black and your fill to empty. Set the stroke weight to .25. Using the Pen Tool, begin outlining the perimeter of her face. Now start squinting to see where the main shadows and highlights are in the face. Trace each shadow/highlight. At the very least a face will have 4 degrees of color. The darkest shades are always around the eyes and under the nose. The lightest is always on the tip of the nose. As you're drawing, keep in mind the layer order that you are creating. Trace large areas of color first, and the smallest areas of color last. Ignore the boundaries of hair, eyes, and smile for now.

My advice: Know your Pen Tool!!! This tool is frustrating for beginners, but with enough practice you can master its subtleties. Modifier keys are essential to use with the Pen Tool, and pressing space bar while drawing a point will allow you to reposition its placement.






Once you're satisfied with the job you've done of scribbling all over her face, begin coloring the paths. (Open the "Skintones" color palette for a good place to start.) Reposition the path layers as necessary to make sure none of them get lost underneath the others. After the skin of the face is complete, go through the same process to draw other areas of skin, like hands.











Occasionally you may want to hide the photo layer to see your progress and make sure you're not leaving any gaping holes between paths. (I always think they look kinda freaky/cool at this point without any eyes or mouth!)








Now let's temporarily hide the skin layer(s) so we can draw the eyes and mouth. Same process as before. (Be sure to zoom in close for this, don't try to do it from far away!) I usually use the circle tool to draw the pupil because it can look funny if it's not a perfect circle. Btw, did you know that in photos people's eyes and teeth are grey/yellow and not white? Shocker! Let's do them a favor and color them white anyways. It also helps to add a little circle of white reflection in their eyes. Instant depth.


Before we move on, I want to explain a technique I use a lot. I've zoomed in on the mouth to show you that when I draw the lips, they start out as only one or two paths, all the same color. This screenshot shows how I selected the lower lip on the left, then used the Knife Tool to cut through it. Now it is two separate paths that can be colored independently. In the smile on the right I cut and colored the bottom lip once, and the top lip twice. I use the Knife tool a lot to help me break up the colors in a solid path.

After the skin, eyes, and smile, it's time for the hair! Hair like this can be quite intimidating because we see so many little lines and streaks and shade differences. Remember to just be patient and to squint your eyes! Squinting will help you drown out the details and see the big picture. After the hair is finished, continue on to draw the clothes. I think clothes are fun because they have VERY distinct shadows in the fold lines—but that makes it easy to overlook the highlights. Always draw both shadows & highlights because illustrations will look flat if you have one without the other. (All these elements are drawn the same way: everything in a black .25 stroke and filled with color after all shadows & highlights are traced.)

Finally, when we turn on all the layers and reorder them correctly, we have a beautiful finished vector illustration! (See finished vector at the top of the post!)

Below is a screenshot of what my layers palette looks like after finishing all the elements. In this particular project I was doing a group photo, so each person had their own layer and all the elements—skin, hair, clothes, etc—were grouped inside the layers. But if you're only doing one person, it makes more sense to give all the elements their own layers.



That completes my tutorial! Let me know if you have questions about anything I didn't cover, if you have suggestions for other tutorials, or if you think this was incredibly long-winded and never want to see me post another tutorial again—all comments welcome!

Vicariously Me

Sometimes instead of actually going outside to read my Bible, I just draw a picture of myself doing it. (with one continuous line)

Cats

This morning we had a visitor in our back yard! At the time Avee and Bryan were both gone from the house, so I let Suki outside to mingle with our guest. It was fun to watch them interact, both curious and hesitant about the other. But eventually I stopped watching the show and put on my running shoes to go for a jog. As I left the house I met Bryan and Avee just getting home. I told Bryan about the visitor & Suki and recommended he go look at them.

When my jogging was done, this is what I came home to find:


Funny, I'd forgotten how most cats PURR when you pet them and ENJOY being held. Watch out, Suki. Your days may be numbered!

Three Years in Three Days

I'm not an extremely fit person, but I try to jog a mile or two every few days. (It makes me feel a little less guilty about all the delicious homemade cookies and breads that I eat.) Since the rainy weather was not conducive to an outside jog today, I drove to my little Gym to tread the mill for a bit. (Does anybody know how a treadmill got its name?) When I arrived at the Gym I was slightly annoyed to discover it was closed because of the SWINE FLU and would reopen after it was "sanitized" sometime this week. Yeah. Swine flu. There has not been one case of swine flu in our entire state, and after the Gym is sanitized and they let people start using it again, will it really be any safer than it was before the big clean?? So stupid.

Moving on…

I cannot let this week pass without announcing to the world that on Wednesday Bryan and I will FINALLY get to spend an anniversary together!! In fact it will take all my effort not to mention this in every facebook status for the next three days. We don't have any big plans for the special day because saving for a down payment on a house has us on a tight budget. We're thinking a nice restaurant and a sunset walk on the beach. Any other low-cost celebration ideas??