Laume's Studio

I had a pretty wonderful day today. I went out to run a couple errands, including dropping a book off at the library that was due. In the entryway to the library there is a shelf to hold free books - books the library thought were too old or dated or for some other reason not saleable on the Friends of the Library used book sale shelves inside the library. Today they held two entire sets of encyclopedias and one partial set, copyrights from the early to mid 1900's. I riffled through a few of the books and was delighted to find great old photos and illustrations. I grabbed four of the books and drove off with them.

While running more errands I kept thinking of the rest of the books I left behind. I mean, they were the perfect cut up books. I'd bought other old books with the intention of using them for paper art, but I've had a hard time actually cutting into them. These though seemed made to be chopped up, they were so outdated to be useless as a whole. So I went back to get a few more. I ended up with..... nooooo, not all of them. I'm not THAT crazy! I took only ONE set. The best one. With the most goodies inside them. It only took up the entire back seat. Uhm. I'm sure I'll find a corner to stack them in. I just couldn't bare the thought of leaving any behind, all of them had something totally cool in the pages, most had tons of cool things in the pages.

Then I went for a walk on the opposite side of town. I really enjoyed walking by unfamiliar houses instead of the homes in my own neighborhood that I sometimes feel I've memorized. I loved the chance to notice so many new details.

It was cold and windy, spitting rain, but I was having so much fun that I didn't even notice how cold my cheeks had become until I got back to the car an hour later. (Dang, I still have to figure out how to change this blog format. I can't get horizontal photos to fit anymore for some reason, without changing the html by hand - too much work. In the meantime, at least now I've figured out how set it to allow you to click on the image and it takes you to the flickr page where you can click on the "All sizes" tab to see details.)


Speaking of street art (which I did in a recent post), I spied this rather tough looking mermaid on the door of an old shed.

On Elizabeth's blog today I discovered she'd been involved in some street art of her own. Or, rather, tree art. But as part of a group participating in a Guerilla Art Challenge. The deadline for having your link included in the challenge was February 23, just missed it, but I still am inspired to do a bit of guerilla art creating myself. I've got an idea. If I follow through I'll be sure to share photos with you guys. Maybe you'll be inspired too. Or at least you'll enjoy visiting the participants and viewing all their efforts to artify their local communities. Here's a link to the original challenge post and the sidebar with the links to participants.



And over on Stephanie's blog, she blogged today about walking and snapping circle photos. I had to laugh because, although I haven't put up many of the photos here, I've been doing the same thing. Here's one I took the other day. Well, I'm always taking odd photos like that, but more so recently because of course I've been walking so much more. Stephanie has shared a fun montage of circles.



This week's theme over at Shades of Inspiration is "macro photography", so I've been trying to find interesting close ups. I know, "macro photography" isn't a shade. We really should rename the group "Themes of Inspiration". It started out called "I Saw Red" and was all about red. Then we all wanted to do more colors, so the hostess changed the name to "Shades of Inspiration." Now we've outgrown shades and moved on to themes, but it doesn't matter. It's a really great bunch of photographers and bloggers. I think we just like each other. If it sounds like fun, you should sign up, participate. It's a really fun weekly idea stimulator.


And last but definitely not least, on my walk today I stumbled onto a lovely cemetery that, while I knew it was there, I had never visited it because I had no idea it was so big, hidden back from the part you can see from the road. Check out the photos I took there today over at Beach Treasure.