I’ve learned a new technical skill. Creating photos with a transparent background (like a logo, for instance). Transparent background logos can be very important.

It may be irrelevant to you. Or perhaps, you’ve never noticed how photos that look like cut-outs on a web page make a bigger impact.  Or allow you to continue reading text whilst being visually entertained.

I recently downloaded a free pattern called Stars by Xandy Peters demonstrating stacked increases (the technique most popularized by my current knitting  project, Fox Paws).

I loved the impact of her design on stark white, but I couldn’t get one of my own photos of a similar design to photograph so…well starkly.  So I taught myself how to create transparent background .png files.

With my mad web skills, and now my updated photo-editing skills, I can make shit dance around my page!

Technical (Non-Knitting) Video Tutorial – Free Image Editing-Transparent Background

There is a photo editing tool that has become a household name and even a verb…PhotoShop by Adobe.  Unless you’re a professional, it’s prohibitively expensive.  There is a free alternative that has an amazing amount of functionality called Gimp.

Photo editing software is not intuitive (in my opinion). It required me to learn a whole new language of layers, fuzzy select tools and alpha channels. But there are tons of tutorials on YouTube that let me learn (once I learned about Gimp and how to query what I wanted to do).

If you’d like to try your hand at photo editing, I put together a very brief tutorial.  Download Gimp and try it out.

Current Knitting

Recovery of the Fox Paws ripping out has been completed and now I’m on the 3-steps forward after 2-steps back part of the project.

You’ll note I’ve added a few inches and now I’m at at total of 20 inches long.

And also mades some progress on Sports by Stephen West.

I’ve made it below the crotch where the legs begin to separate. Sorry, didn’t mean to go all PG-13 on you.