Great Mother's Day Gift & Tutorial

Cathe Holden over at Just Something I Made has a great (and as usual, extremely clever) gift you can make for Mother's Day. It would also be cute themed for a baby or wedding shower with bits of advice written on the cards for the mother or bride-to-be. Take a look here.

photo from Just Something I Made

Out of Boredom Comes Art

Little Cat A has been on TV and computer restriction. This has caused her to look for other sources of entertainment. Lots of painting and reading have been happening in her life. Last weekend she focused on 3-D art. She rummaged through my ribbon stash, got inspired and went to work. I thought what she came up with was so clever I told her I'd blog about it. She blushed.

You can click on photos to enlarge.

She searched the web for a dog outline. Enlarged it on our printer. Glued eyelash ribbon like crazy. Coiled bits of pipe cleaner for the eye and nose. Added blue ribbon and bit of tinsel pipe cleaner for the collar and tag. Such a clever girl!

The finished pooch! (It's a West Highland Terrier)

Better Photos?? I'm trying - Here's a Few Tips

I'm not a photographer. It's very evident if you look at my product photos in my etsy shop. I've been going crazy the last few weeks trying to learn how to take better photos. I've read again and again how natural light and no flash are the answer. But that is not always (read:hardly ever) convenient. I think I'm making some progress, so I thought I'd share a few of the things I've learned so far.

#1 - Get to know your camera. Read the boring manual. I have a Pentax Optio S60 - Point and Shoot. I can't change too many settings, BUT I did learn about changing the White Balance. Very important to set it to the correct lighting.

#2 - Lighting - Miss B over BlahBlahBlag found some great lights here, but they were out of my budget, so I found these. You can get them here. $15 each. I put 2 in lamps with clamps (from my garage, but you can buy them at a hardware store) and 1 in a desk lamp from IKEA

Heres what my "photo studio" looks like. Swanky, no?
I clamped the lamps onto some overhead cabinets. Sometimes I use a light tent, but I'm finding with these bulbs, I don't need need it. Got bigger stuff to shoot like aprons or ironing board covers? Take a look at this article.

I also wrapped two pieces of scrap cardboard; one in tan linen fabric (left over from the bottom of my bedroom drapes from IKEA) and one in robin's egg blue kitchen towel (from Target - Easter clearance - $1.25). I secured the fabric by hot glueing it in the back. These are backdrops.

Here's an un-retouched photo with the bulbs and the correct camera settings and my new backdrops.

It's a big improvement over what I've done in the past. I still need to get LOTS better at staging the photo. I'm on the search for props and such.

#3 - Retouching - If the correct camera setting and lights still don't deliver what you want, there's Photoshop. There is this very helpful article from The Switchboards.com. I learned a lot from the article, but I was still having trouble getting my whites white without messing up my other colors. Well, last week, my son's friend showed me how to fix that. With your photo open in Photoshop click on the "Image" menu, go down to "Adjustments" and select "Selective Color". You can then play with each color independently of all the other colors.

Here is the original photo...
Here's the same photo after using the Selective Color controls in Photoshop. No, it's not the best photo in the world, but it is more accurate of what the product looks like.
I hope this information helps someone. I've so appreciated others who have given tips. There is Pioneer Woman's blog which is incredibly generous and knowledgeable.

Now if I could just figure out why all my photos are a tad hazy!

Oh, my aching back... No more!

I started Whisker Graphics last June on a shoestring budget. That budget has not changed. My "studio" is our 4th bedroom. It's not fancy, nor beautiful. My computer workspace is a "desk" (a plastic folding cafeteria table from Costco, ugly but roomy) and my laptop.
My laptop sat too low for me. I constantly hunched over to look at the screen and that made my back ache in the worst way. I wasn't sure how to remedy this. Then, I saw a photo of Marty Stewart in her office and she had this nifty stand for her laptop. "I want one of those," I thought to myself. With my budget in mind, I set my spending limit at $0.First I asked friends if they had an old keyboard I could have. They did. Then I did a trial run with a folding breakfast tray to make sure the height and keyboard would work. (That ugly legal pad to the right is my mouse pad.)The LOML made the stand out of some scrap plywood we had in the garage. Not up to Martha's standards for sure, but then again, Martha's budget is bigger. I had some white craft paint (bought when it was on sale 2 for $1), a foam brush (bought when on sale 10 for $1) and my trusy paint tray (an old frozen dinner plastic tray) and leftover paint from our bathroom.
A coat of the white craft paint first to act as primer.Then coat of Gossamer Blue paint from Benjamin Moore and my backsaver was finished. Both my back and my budget are satisfied!

Cheap Wall Art (I mean frugal)

The walls at Print Possible (my other, other job) are bare. Have been for 2 years. We keep meaning to put something up, but time keeps moving on and the walls haven't dressed themselves. Well, no more naked walls! These will be hanging very soon. (click on photos to enlarge)

The 16 frames all laid out on my floor. I'm going to try and hang them with sticky-back velcro so they will (hopefully) be easier to align.

I bought some 5.5 x 5.5 Nyttja frames at IKEA ($24 for 16 frames!), scoured my clip art books, did a little printing and cutting and voila, instant art.

The frames still wrapped up and some trial images printed out.

I created a template in Illustrator so I could print the images 2 at a time. I printed the trim marks as solid lines for easier cutting and because the picture frame border would cover any cutting mistakes.

A closer look.

I printed the "border" on kraft paper and the butterflies on white. I ended up changing the corner images to include some of the border because the corners on their own (see photo 3) were to overwhelming when they were bigger.

Gifts for the Neighbors

Each year at Christmas time the LOML (Love Of My Life) bakes up several varieties of yummy cookies for our neighbors. He puts a LOT of work into these babies. He scours the internet for new and different recipes and no recipe is too time consuming or difficult for him. I always encourage him to keep it simple, but he's all about the taste, no matter the effort. Then, after all his efforts, he's perfectly fine with putting his creations on a cheap paper plate and covering them with ugly plastic wrap for delivery to the neighbors. He's been doing this for 15+ years and each year I suggest he kick up his presentation a notch or two. He's never interested. This year I figured, if it was important to me, then I should do something about it. So I did. Here's what we co-created together. He was responsible for the cookies and I was responsible for the marshmallows and the packaging.

A package of wrapped cookies and the supplies I used to make the cookie tags.

Here's the Hot Cocoa packaging before I cut them out.
Props to LollyChops for coming up with the great hot cocoa packaging idea.
Thanks Lolly!!

Contents:
Carmalitas
Iced Citrus Crackle Cookies
Lemon Meringues
Ginger Cookies
Cappuccino Flats
Homemade Marshmallows (little hearts - cut with a cookie cutter I bought at Bake It Pretty which I discovered from Miss B at Le Blahg. Thanks Miss B!)
Hot Cocoa Mix (store bought, but packaged with love)

The filled boxes before they get all wrapped up!

All wrapped and ready for delivery!

I like how they turned out and they were worth the hours and hours of work!

Wine Glass Name Tags Demo

My good pal, D, is part of a wine tasting group. This group meets regularly with the hosting of each meeting/dinner party rotated through the group. When it was D's turn to host, she and I had a little visit and came up with these tags so everybody could have fun tasting without fear of swapping cooties. :)

the supplies: embroidery floss, 1/8" hole punch, scissors, 1 1/2" scallop punch, 4 x 6 chartreuse card stock (really any size card stock would work, I only had this size in the color we wanted to use.)

On the computer I set up a layout with 1 1/2" circles (that didn't print) on my size paper and then centered each name in the circle. If you printed the names out on 8.5 x 11, you could just sprinkle the names about with a bit of space between them.

I centered each name in the 1 1/2" scallop punch area.

I punched each tag with a 1/8" hole punch.

Measured about 6" of embroidery floss.

Folded floss in half, threaded through the hole, put ends through loop and pulled.

Tied around the base of the wine glass and trimmed ends.

I also created menus (her last name begins with P) that she slipped into these napkin holders from IKEA that have a little slit at the top to hold such a thing. That tall brown item behind the menu is a wine bottle wrapped up in craft paper (so know one knows what they are tasting). I made a bunch of numbered labels, one for each wine bottle.

A cootie-free good time was had by all!