with many thanks to tthe internets

Thank you ALL who joined my Photographing Your Knits webinar for the live webcast from Interweave last Wednesday. * I applaud you! (Sorry about the overuse of um for the first three minutes, then I got rolling. At least I'm not one of those artificially perky speakers, right?)

I was so jazzed up after the virtual live presentationended, I had to go to the beach to get my ya-yas out with Zoe for an hour of hooky-playing.  I love knitting but it doesn't offer the level of ya-ya reduction required at the time.

humungous, 3 foot tall lilac bouquet  courtesy of the internets

 Friday morning, I set down to work started blog-reading, and there was Carole's peony.  It reminded me that my peony might be flowering, and the weird 24 hour tropical storm rain falling was going to knock off any blooms. I figured I'd better get out there and investigate.
Last fall Hurricane Sandy radically landscaped our backyard.  We kind of ignored it, dealing with replacing our roof. Good times!  I recalled a section of downed tree pinning the peony.  I thought maybe it was dead.  Not so! Friday morning I discovered it as healthy as it had ever been (which is not all that healthy, to be honest).  It is a late bloomer, so still budding.
But had I not been out there in the rain seeking an internet-inspired peony, I'd never have noticed a lushly bloomed old lilac tree in the back corner of the yard. Thanks to Sandy and her ugly older sister Irene the year before, this antique was torn mostly out of the ground, meeting a small apple tree in a combination bramble/deciduous tree canopy. For the past few years this tree had been my least productive lilac, with its best blooms  tantalizingly out of reach, high up over the neighbor's yard. Not anymore! Crazily blooming and so perfumed. Pruning my way through downed branches like a gardening Indiana Jones in the rain, I collected me three big bouquets. Thanks Carole!

 This here is on my front porch. We have a new thrift in town and I'm buying up teapots and other housewares for porch planting. Buck at a time.  I got my idea when visiting the charter school my sister teaches at in downtown Washington DC last fall. Check out their entry walkway: 
Keep in mind it was October, so the plants were on the way out for the season. When I called her confessing I had openly ripped her off, she said, no worries. She'd gotten the idea online, from Guerilla Gardening.

 I mean, seriously, where would we be without our internets??!!

 In knitting news, if you are still reading this-my Caliz shawl is 5 rows away from being done, and I need a wooly not-too-big-to-carry and not-too-attention requiring project to take with me to an adventure in Maine this weekend. Suggestions?
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*If you want to experience learning with me, sans the hands-on part, there'll be a link to purchase the webinar, recorded in all its 1 hr 45 minute glory, in about 10 days. If you already purchased and/or joined it, you should have a link to it already, in your email.

in which we wander about webinars...

So you know how you agree to do something, like say, teach a webinar for Interweave on Basic Photography for Knitters, and you figure that your presentation  is 90% all there so no need to get fussed about it...

a slide from the webinar revealing  behind-the-scenes glamour

and then when you go put a few last touches on it, you end up spending the better part of 3 days re-doing it? Yes, you do? Oh good, then we understand each other. I am pretty psyched cough understatement cough for this. Sign up any time , we are live webcasting on Wednesday June 5th at noon eastern time--but you can watch it later, all recorded.

the real photo we were making Fussy Cuts blanket fr Craft Activism , designed by Mason Dixon Knitting

Anyhoo, I've been gettting lots of questions about webinars and what they are, and who they aren't so I figured I'd , as Ricky Ricardo would say, do a little 'splaining.

My webinar is a one session online slide presentation--just like watching a normal slide talk without being in the same room as the presenter.   Unlike an online class, you will not see me, the instructor. And me, the instructor, is very thankful, because this way I don't have to worry about what to wear* or that you will  see the shmear of poison ivy  on my cheek this week.

You will receive an email from GoToWebinar with log-on info, and a reminder of what time the webinar begins.  When you log on, your browser window will have my opening slide on it, and off we'll go, I'll change images as we talk about them (I have alot of images and a lot to say). I'll be sitting here narrating the talk by phone, you'll hear it coming out of your computer.  You don't have to download or acquire any software, but you need to be online.

Photography is a subject perhaps uniquely suited to the webinar format. You see a photo, I talk about it.   I have to confess that I love taking webinars, but that is probably because all the ones I take are  about the photo business. I have friends in the corporate world who cringe at the word webinar.  It means they have to watch  stultifyingly dull powerpoints in which the narrator reads  bulleted sentence fragments, all about insurance regulations.

I promise we will not discuss insurance.
Here's a link again.** Best of all--the webinar is initially webcast live, but it is recorded, so if you do not have the free time to join me mid day Wednesday June 5th, you will receive an email within 48 hours of the live webcast telling you to go ahead and log on at your leisure. Those who watched live will receive the same  email, in case you'd like to watch it again . All, or part and return later. Those who are watching live can type in questions. The Q&A will also be recorded, so you miss nothing.

Those who purchase by Wednesday 6/5 noon eastern can either join live, or soon after ( you'll be notified with 48 hrs).  Those who don't sign on on by noon Wednesday will be able to access the webinar, but not till it goes in the Interweave shop, in about 2 weeks. 

If you have questions about this all, feel free to send them to me ezisusATsnetDOTnet.

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*OK, I am going to be honest. Even though no one will see, I am still going to think about what to wear. And keep my fingers crossed that Bobo doesn't run into the room barking.

** just noticed they reduced the price . Costs less than a skein of Silk Garden!