Christiana Childers Photography Blog

My husband was singing that particular Christmas song to be funny as we pulled into our driveway from our weekend in the San Juan Islands.  But Summer to me IS the most wonderful time of the year.  I just love being outside and not being cold and wet.  Here are some of my favorite photos from the weekend.

Does that say Summer or what!

Check out this view!

Don’t you just want to climb in and sit by the fire?!  Hi Ed and Alice!

The perfect roasted marshmellows…

And the S’mores -

Ah, Summer.  What’s not to love?

I’m going to add a new category called Cousins.  In the “About” section on my website I admit that my friend’s tease me that my stories always start with “My cousin”… here’s why – I have so many talented cousins!

My cousin Kelly is an amazing artist. I’m lucky to have a couple of her pieces in my possession and I remembered thinking once (while looking at her art) after our car got broken into and so many things taken that if someone broke into our house and took everything, the only thing I’d really be sad about is my photos and my art.

Kelly’s got a great blog that takes through the day-in day-out life of an artist and Mom of three boys.  It is always inspiring for me – Poesies and Rye.   In light of my recent photo project with a book cover, I thought I’d show you her latest project which is so cool!  I feel a new collection of manila envelopes coming on!

OK.  Here is attempt two at getting this post up!  Here we go -

Now that you know what Trading Graces is all about, I get to talk a little more specifically about this project.  So as I mentioned before, this family has two kids with special needs so getting their house “put together” was not really a priority.  Their priority was/is their kids.  When the design team (Lora, Debbie and Lauren) asked what she liked she said she that orange was her favorite color and they really liked warm colors. They had her collect photos from books and magazines of things she liked but other than that, the family didn’t know what all was going on in their house.

Most of these pictures aren’t mine because I wasn’t there for the beginning of the project and I left before the family came home so didn’t really get the finished pictures.  I compiled these photos from emails and Lora’s camera so sorry that some of them are a bit grainy.

Here is a before picture of the kitchen -

And the after -

I want you to know that the cabinets came from all over.  None of them matched.  Lots were from Craig’s List and some from salvage places.  Lora fit them together like a puzzle and volunteers painted them all cream to make them match.  Don’t they look amazing!  Look at all the extra cabinets she has now!!

On the opposite side of that little half wall, they had a dining room so the half wall was ripped out so the kitchen could use the whole space and then they put a built in with shelves and a desk and moved the dining room into what was originally intended for the dining room but was being used for an office.

Desk wall before -

Desk wall after -

They had blank wall and came up with this fun idea…

Before -

After -

Now here is an view of where the office was and is now the dining room..

Before -

After -

Now here are some finished shots of the living room done by Lauren Neal – www.laureninterior.ueuo.com.  (She also designed the dining room)

It takes a lot of talent to design but I think it takes even more talent to design with few resources compiling donations, found items from salvage yards or Craig’s List.  Didn’t they do an amazing job?!

And now I need to show you what Lauren did with my portraits of the family.  So cool!  It’s the first thing you see when you walk into the house.

Cool huh!!  There is so much more here to show and tell but it’d be too long.  I just wanted to give you and idea of some of the finishing touches.  And I love this photo of the family seeing their new kitchen for the first time -

And of them seeing the photo wall when they walked in -

The whole thing makes me so happy!!

Here’s one of Lora and me.  The thing that makes me laugh is all the people in the background trying to fix an issue in the pantry which sort of sums up Trading Graces – people are just excited to help…

There were so many many people that helped make this such a successful project but there are a few poeple who need special mention.  Steve Higgins (www.higginsbuildingco.com) – contractor extraordinaire – was there from dawn until well after dusk and sometime unto the wee hours pouring himself into this project.  He was always happy and helpful even when people were slowing him down.

Professional Organizer Elisa Adams put in many hours helping the family organize and purge before the project as well as being on site to help during the project and then helped move the family back in to their new space.  She gave a little seminar about organizing that I was able to go to and am so motivated to do some purging and reorganizing myself! www.how2organize.net.

Well, I feel like there is so much I’m leaving out as well as so many people I’m leaving out but I just need to stop. Thank you to all involved for a truly enriching and blessed time.

This morning a did a huge post with the before and afters from Trading Graces but it must have been a bit too big so I’m trying to fix it and re-post.  Hang tight!  Hopefully it’ll be back soon.

In the meantime (because a post without photos is boring!) enjoy this photo of Jamey (hope I’m spelling your name right!) the awesome electrician that worked all weekend long for Trading Graces -

I finally get to post about my photo shoot with the family I shot for Trading Graces.  Let me first fill you in a little about Trading Graces and say that this is going to be a two part post.  The first part will be to show you the portraits and the second to show you the project.

Trading Graces is the brainstorm of my BFF Lora.  The two of us used to love watching Trading Spaces.  Remember that show?  Where neighbors would swap houses and redo a room in the others house under the direction of a designer for $1000?  Lora is a fantastic designer (I can’t even hang a picture without checking with Lora! She’s good.) and she came up with the idea of doing that as a service project through her church.  They pick someone in their church who gives more than they take and needs a new kitchen or whatever (although I think every single one has been a kitchen or more) and just love all over them by blessing them with a new space.  So Trading Graces was born.  I don’t know what it is like at their other service projects since I only help out with this one but the people at Northshore Baptist get so into Trading Graces!  You would not believe the amount of volunteers who do everything from bringing meals to major contract work to cleaning the bathrooms.  I makes you feel all warm being around all that Love.

So this particular project was for a dear family who needed help with their house.  The description “dear family” is the best way to describe them.  They are so “dear” and loved by their community.  And I felt very fortunate to get to take their photos for this project.  They have three kids and two of their kids have special needs.  The oldest and the youngest.  They were a challenge to shoot because I couldn’t really get them to look at me.  They are both legally blind so I’m sure someone who they don’t know pointing a black shiny thing at them and calling their name isn’t really the best situation.  So I quickly gave up having them look at the camera which is so fine with me because I like getting shots of kids playing anyway.  I’d rather just be an observer.

C was in constant motion.  She dances and prances and hugs.  This is the shot I got of her that we used for the photo wall.

I love it because it looks like she is sitting still but her hair betrays that fact that it is really more of a very quick pause.   And then I got one of her hugging her mom.  I used this one for the photo wall too.  We did all the photos in B&W for the wall but I actually prefer this one in color because I think C is color.

And one last one which I love again because I think it captures C.  I’m calling this one “Drinking Sunshine”.

Then there was T.  He brought a truck to play with.  We didn’t use this one for the wall but this is my favorite one of him.

This is the one we use for the wall only in the color version.  Can you stand it?!!

OK. Now onto J.  He brought a book about music and was buried in this well loved book pretty much the whole session.  This is the photo that we used for the wall of J.

And now for what I think is one of the best photo of my life.  I can’t seem to get this photo big enough so you can see the quote on the book but it says “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent” – Victor Hugo.  J has a hard time being understood and music is very important to him…

His mom said of this photo – “I have never seen anything that has more captured the soul of an individual in a photo.”  Sigh.  The Greatest Compliment.