Wishes can come true

Welcoming in the first day of 2012 finds me excited and reflective.

I am so grateful for all I have~and so excited to start another year.

Dream it, Wish it, Do it is a saying around this house~

encouraging one's self to dare to wish and then accomplish!

Discovering blogland has unleashed the creative forces inside me

in a deeper way than ever I have ever experienced.

On New Years Eve I happily spent my time drawing and painting.

Mr. Maison Decor was preparing to tame the lions

down at the police station on the midnight shift.

So as he went off to bed early for his prework nap,

and I spent most of the evening creating.

I will be sharing this project later this week~

it is something that stretched my creative tendons.

So grateful and excited to have the Canon DSRL camera~and look what I learned already. Trying to move away from Auto focus into custom settings I discovered "Creative Autofocus". The main reason I did not like auto is that you cannot eliminate the flash, and since my house tends to be dark, it was popping off all the time, creating an image like you see above. This is our remote control. Hubs snapped this pic with Autofocus. It is nice and clear~but look how it looks on Creative AutoFocus.

This picture was taken ten minutes later. Same interior lighting, but now I could control it by selecting that the flash be off, I was able to brighten the picture taking setting and make the background blur. You can make the background sharper or blurrier with Creative Auto. You can lighten every pic or darken every pic until you change the settings again. It is so much better!!

I was amazed at how much better this picture was. Another wish I want to fulfill this year is to learn how to take better pictures by truly understanding the camera and what it is capable of doing. I will be sharing what I learn here and there along the way~so if you are on the learning curve of DSLRs I am hoping you will find this helpful.

The winter is a good time for reading and learning and being creative.

It has yet to snow in Boston, with the exception of one freak storm early on.

I find once there is snow cover, it makes me feel like

cooking stews and soups and reading by the fireplace and painting and sewing.

I also read so many great books on design in 2011 and I will be sharing these with you too. My latest read was Patina Style, which was a Christmas gift, and it really resonated with me. Last Christmas I got Barbara Streisand's book, My Passion for Design, and it was a tremendous book, one of the best I have ever read! Reading design books is one of my favorite past times, always tons of inspiration in the pages from so many different perspectives.