So! Last week I was visiting some of the neighbor girls on our estate (you can see our flat from their balcony.) And we were chatting about birthdays and holidays and decorating, and one of the girls mentioned she’d just learnt how to make really easy, beautiful paper snowflakes. And I said, “You should show me on the bus tomorrow!” So she promised to do just that.

[Have I mentioned that I'm volunteering on this bus? It's run by XLP, a Christian youth work charity, and it comes round our estate every Thursday after school. It is very, very purple, double decker, complete with laptops, karaoke machine, air hockey table, X-boxes, and a Kinect.... We hang out with teenaged girls and make art and bake rainbow cupcakes and talk about life in our neighborhood. It's a good time.]

Anyway! The next day on the bus, I was really excited to discover that these snowflakes were indeed a) easy and b) gorgeous! I love learning new skills from 12-year-old girls! So we made a bunch to decorate the bus, and then I promptly came home and made some more to decorate our flat.

If you’d like to give it a go, there’s a tutorial with photos behind the cut!

How to make Simple, Gorgeous 3-D Snowflakes!

You will need:

• 3 sheets of printer paper
• scissors
• glue stick
• tape

Fold the paper in half horizontally to 8.5 x 5.5″, unfold, and cut in half along the crease. (You can do most all of the following folding and cutting to three sheets of paper at once to save time.)

Turn your half-sheets into squares: fold the top edge over to match the side to make a right angle triangle, then trim off the extra paper along the bottom edge. (Don’t do all six sheets at once! Just three.)

Fold the triangle in half again.

With the folded edge on the bottom, make three cuts parallel to the longest edge of the triangle, stopping about a half inch from the top.

Unfold; if you’ve been doing three sheets of paper at once you should have this:

 
Take one of your squares; peel one of the centermost triangles up and apply some glue to the backside. Curl it around your finger and glue it to the other center triangle.

Flip the square over. Peel up the corner of next innermost cut-out layer, put some glue on the backside of it, and glue that corner to its opposite.

Flip the square over again. Glue the corners of the third layer together.

Flip the square over again. Glue the last two corners together.

Now you’ve made one petal! Traditional snowflakes have six; so make a few more…

When you have three petals, join them together at the center. (It looks best if you line them up so all the largest sides are facing the same direction, like the photo above.) Tape two petals together, then add a third.

 
See how all the biggest cut-out layers wrap to the right? Now tape the other three petals together so you have two halves.

 
Now you can tape the two halves together—try to overlap the centers as much as you can. (Try to get all the petals going around the snowflake facing the same direction; in the picture above one of the two halves should be flipped top to bottom.)

 
That’s the basics! The next bit is for structural integrity: joining the petals together so it will hang nicely. Grab just under where the glued corners of the petal edges meet, where the two petals are touching naturally.

Hold the two edges of the paper together, and twist it to the side so you can wrap tape around the underside where it won’t show from the front.

 
Go round the snowflake to tape the six petal edges together from the front like this, then flip it over and do the same from the back. And ta-da!

 
And there you have it! You can experiment; the snowflake in the photo at the very top of this post actually has nine petals, or you could make half-size ones to put on your tree. The girls on the bus decorated some with gold glitter. Let me know how yours turn out!

P.S.—If you do 9 petals, there’s a quick and dirty way to join the petals instead of taping all the edges round front and back. See the “x” the outermost layer of each petal makes where you glued the corners together? You can just put some glue on the outside of those “x”s where the two of them from each petal meet. It just tends to pull out of alignment more when you do that with six petals.

It’s rare that I post more “touristy” art photos, but we were in the area. So, say hello to Big Ben.

This week was our church’s annual week of prayer and fasting, and most of the prayer meetings were at the church office building. It’s about a half hour walk from our house, and I was so inspired by the fall colors that I brought a camera one day for the walk home. The churchyard at Saint Anne’s, Limehouse, was especially gorgeous, full old graves and bright leaves.

As photographers, it’s easy to get set in a habitual way of taking photos.  So it’s always really cool to work on a project where we get to see the vision of others.  It’s especially cool if the project is done by kids.

For the past month, Peter and I have been assisting with just this sort of photography exhibit. Energize4Girlz, a charity I volunteer with, lent cameras to girls in our neighbourhood for one week to document their “life in pictures.” Then, over the October half-term holiday, the girls chose their best photos to be framed, organised collages of their other photos around common themes, and helped us hang the exhibit in a local cafe.

Last week we had a gallery opening for their families and the community to come and see.  It was wonderful seeing how proud the girls were to show people around, talk about the photo they took, and get excited whenever someone decided to buy a print.

If you happen to be passing through London during November, you should visit Departure Cafe and take a look around!

Here are a few of the girls’ photos that got enlarged and framed. We asked them each to pick a title and write a few words about their photo:

Bam! Shades, by T., age 13: “This photo hits you in the face!”

Magical World Ahead, by J., age 10: “I see this every day, but when you take a
picture it’s completely transformed!”

Colours of Peace, by sisters T., age 10, and S., age 8: “We saw the first rainbow and took a picture
from our back garden.”

A couple weekends ago, I spent a Saturday photographing Spitalfields during a workshop hosting by London Independent Photography.  Spitalfields is an area of Tower Hamlets, including part of Brick Lane, that has become a cultural conglomerate:  it has lots of East End heritage, with a history of cultural waves of French, Jews, and Bengalis, yet is now dominated by hipsters, artists and college kids mixed with young professionals living close to the city.

Yet walking around, no matter how much of a hipster town it has become, there are always reminders that you’re in the East End, the “bad side” of London…

More pictures are up, and will continue to be posted, on the photo blog.

Brick Lane, also known as Banglatown, is at the edge of our neighborhood that borders hipsterville. There is some truly impressive art and really creative graffiti lining the walls there; it’s exciting to be in an area with such vibrant color and life. Have a look:

Hey friends!  Sorry we’ve been a bit incommunicado of late.

As a way of saying thanks for your patience, we thought we’d share our favorite photos from Greenbelt.

September has been a month of travels and transitions. We thought you might like to see the places we’ve been transitioning through… so here’s the illustrated record of our adventures thus far.

First: Indiana is harvest-timing now. Morning strolls through the cornfields and evening walks together towards the sunset were lovely spaces to breathe, and think, and just watch the beauty unfold in front of us.

Then we zipped through Chicago to say hello to a few dear friends and a final goodbye to the city.

Somehow after living in Chicago for four years, we’d never managed to get to the Shedd Aquarium proper, so we popped in to say hi to the sharks.

Then we found the vista where apparently all classic panoramic photos of the Chicago skyline are taken. (If you need a shot of your own, it’s on the sidewalk rounding the Adler Planetarium. Just FYI.)

Then we flew to California to be with Liz’s family. You can tell we’re actually on the West Coast because there’s an In-N-Out. It’s basically a family tradition now to stop for burgers here on the way home from the airport. They’re delicious.

We were just in time to hang out with Liz’s sister before she flew back to Chicago to start college classes again….the timing only barely worked itself out, but we’re so glad it did.

You can also tell we’re in California because there is an actual ocean! With waves! And rocks! And saltwater!

Even pictures taken through the car window driving home from the coast are pretty.

So, now we’re mostly settled in California for a season while we work on raising support. As we’ll be here for a few months, there will probably be more pictures of the West Coast to come. Stay tuned!

A few more, black and white this time:

A few weeks ago, I got my newest toy – a medium format Yashica-Mat LM, a fun old camera from the 1950′s.

Film cameras have always been a bit of an adventure for me – although my first camera was film, it was a basic point-and-shoot that could think for itself. I didn’t really learn photography until I received my first digital SLR, and everything since then has been digital. So playing with film – that is, playing with a format where I have to wait days to see if my shots came out – is what I do when I’m looking to play around, feel artsy, or just want to challenge myself to be more creative with fewer shots.

Anyway – after waiting a couple weeks for the Yashica to get repaired, I took it out for it’s first test run. Here are a few shots from the first roll of developed film, taken at a sunrise over Lake Michigan from the beach in Rogers Park – plus one extra one of the train!