Genius Hour: Exploratory Experience

This week I spent a little bit of time with each of my choices. I have to admit, it was a lot of fun to devote some time to things that I'm interested in AND since it was homework, I had to do it. 

First I tried out embroidery. I've been a very amateur sewer for a few years now, so I made a stuffed animal for my son based on one of his favorite books, "Creepy Pair of Underwear" by Aaron Reynolds. There was minimal embroidery involved, just a few stitches for his face and ears, and I think it turned out pretty good for a first attempt! I started to look for inspiration for a more challenging embroidery design and found the very intricate ones to be pretty intimidating. Intimidating is fine, that's the point of this whole exercise, but it also seemed a bit tedious, which is not what I'm interested in pursuing at the moment. So embroidery is getting bumped to the back burner for now. 

Next, I watched this video tutorial for beginning knitters. I already know how to crochet and knitting doesn't seem too far off. It looks like it would be fun, but not as much of a challenge as I think this assignment warrants, so that's getting set aside for now, too. 

That left me with photography. I was really excited about this one. I pulled out my "fancy camera" and took some pictures of my daughter playing with her doctor tools. After watching several videos to learn about what the heck all of the buttons and dials on my camera even do, I had a vague understanding. Enough to get started at least. I took some photos in manual mode and, after finding one I was pretty happy with, I got to editing. I have Adobe Lightroom and have purchased lots of pretty presets to edit my pictures with literally one click, but I'm not supposed to be taking the easy way out. So I messed around with the Lightroom lighting and color tools until I ended up with a photo I liked. I can still see plenty I'd like to change about the picture, but I don't know how to do that. YET. I had so much fun taking these photos and I spent a loooong time in Lightoom editing. But I super enjoyed myself and was so excited that I got to call it homework!

SO as you probably guessed, I've decided to focus on photography. It makes me happy and it's something that I think will be fun, but with enough of a productive struggle to make it the perfect Genius Hour project.