With a little Saturday morning window shopping, I came across some of these from the Re-define Your Style section on Etsy.
This clip is super awesome from new seller Apezoppa. This comb makes me glad I’m utilizing pregnancy hormones to grow my hair long again, I just might have to order one for the “hospital bag” since everything else will look hammered after childbirth!
After finding the Ampersand Necklace from seller CrumpetCake, I realized that I don’t have ONE charm on my bursting charm bracelet that is typographic. For that matter, I don’t think I even bought a charm for when I graduated with my bachelors degree! Shame, shame this might have to get added to the collection as well.
Lastly, I just thought these simple swirl topaz earrings were so cool with the square ear-hooks. Find them here by seller BadCatJewelry who’s got some other awesome stuff as well. The photography alone just makes me drool.
So I know we’re not having a girl but just wanted to post this announcement that I printed last spring. There were many good intentions of photographing and blogging about it, but the old photos just didn’t do it justice. Now that I’ve learned a few tricks on how to use my camera and shoot product so that it actually looks like the real thing, this set finally made it through the rounds of getting re-shot just in time for the March thaw.
On a completely different note, I ordered all my seeds the other day for starting my annuals and vegg garden and can hardly stand the wait to get them here. It’s going to be a big planting day with the kids in the house, and hopefully will bring some lovely greenery for the last few months of frigid weather. Anyone as crazy as I am with plans to garden a lot this spring/summer?
Okay, for those of you that requested this here’s the written out directions. I’d put the difficulty level at about easy/medium due to the fact that a knowledge of layers in photoshop will be helpful. If anyone is interested in photoshop tutorials please let me know, I’d be happy to help if I can!
Creating an animated GIF in Photoshop (beginner, should have experience using layers):
1> create a new image preferably under 350×350 pixels for web streaming.
2> place/paste each image into it’s own layer (layers palette) and label/organize them in the order of appearance. (if you can’t find your layers palette then click on “window” in your menu bar and scroll down until you find layers > click and it will open with the rest of your palettes).
3> In the “window” menu, select Animation Palette, it should open below or somewhere on your screen.
4> In your Animation Palette options, click “Make Frames From Layers.” Your layers should then appear in the animation palette.
5> Rearrange if necessary from left-right the order of appearance. By clicking on the time below (0.0 sec) you can change the time allotted to each “frame”
6> You can press play to review your animation.
Once you are ready to save, follow closely:
A> Click File menu > Export > Render Video
B> Name the file and select a folder/location to save it.
C> Under File Options select “QuickTime Export”. Click on settings for QuickTime Export and select settings again. Click “animation” and then click okay.
D> Under Range select All Frames, leave everything else the same.
E> Click Render.
You can now open your movie from where you saved it and it’ll play! Yea!
NOTE: If you’d like to keep it as a .gif file instead of turning it into a .mov file you can just rename the file after it’s exported and use a .gif extension instead of .mov extension. This will not change the file in any way except by appending the file extension.
Here’s a sneak peak on a kit I’m sending out to retailers for my debut line. I can hardly wait to get them in their hands! I’ve been so busy wrapping up loose ends with catalogues, html programming, and printing samples that the blog has been a little neglected. My deadline is for the end of the month (the hard drive crash set me back a few weeks) so final tweaks on the blog will be done by March 3rd, and the main website will have all the new collection links live by this weekend or Monday at the latest! I’m so excited for you all to see everything and to be able to purchase it in the shop too!
I’ve been a little preoccupied with switching the blog over. Something that I thought would take a weekend has slowly crept into my week and killed it! I’m still wrapping up the catalogue, and am starting to make minor changes to the website. If you head over there (attention brides) you’ll notice a new promotion going on for March! Everything should be up and running to full capacity by end of month with lots of new goodies in the shop. Here’s a little something I photographed today and will be available with all the new goods. Enjoy!
After getting a few hours of sleep last night I thought I’d check out what votives were available on Etsy and here were a few delicious finds…
From PolkaDotCandle there are lots of delicious flavors including Plumeria and Orange Blossom, both of which are bright and fun and I’m sure smell delicious!
With votives though, one always needs a unique holder to display it in, enter ElementClayStudio’s Micro, Urchin clay votive holder. I could use a couple of these in my kids rooms and bathrooms for sure!
Wow. It’s liberating watching 3 men for 3 hours dig an 8×8′ – yes FOOT – hole in my front yard. Occasionally a head will peep out but for the most part they’ve gone more than six feet under (and sometimes I wish they’d stay there). The best part out of all of this? It’s currently 3:34 in the am.
This is the second time in the last 14 months digging has happened (I won’t even start to count the single-hour outages that don’t require digging). Power outages in my rural subdivision, hours of freezing and bundling up in the house, what fun! Along with the new worry that our hundreds of dollars of insulin in the fridge will go bad if something doesn’t get done FAST, I have now found the joys of realizing that 1) I need to buy at least one of these and about 1,000 of these for emergencies:
And what’s with being pregnant, it being winter, and power outages are abound? I love that it’s close to 10 degrees outside and these poor men are stuck in my new hole with a now ripped up sprinkler system, reviving a 30 year old broken buried power line, in coveralls and sweatshirts.
The last time this happened you say? Thanksgiving 2007. I had 2 turkeys in the oven. I was told that they’d temporarily fix the line and come back in the spring to replace the whole line that extends the length of our 1 acre lot on the east side. They also said they’d replace our landscaping, and fix the sprinklers. Let’s just say our lawn dried up pretty fast last summer…and I gave up on that section of the yard for a season. Good thing, as I’d probably be more than close to crying to see all my hard work ripped up for the second time.
Why oh why can’t they just do what should have been done the first time? Tired, pregnant, winter, sick kids and power outages are not a good combination. Signing off at 4am, and they’re still not done!
I don’t generally feel like I MUST BUY certain advertised typeface, as usually it takes a client request or some serious thought. However upon opening today’s email, I was tickled to find Bodoni Script Pro flaunting it’s lovely swashes and alternates at me. I REALLY love Bodoni and other transitional and modern typefaces, so this feels like it might get added to the already outrageous library of 1200 sooner than later. Thoughts?
As we were wrapping up bedtime tonight one child had disappeared amidst the brushing teeth, insulin injections, crying and hugging, and Children’s Motrin routine (both kids are recovering from a cold).
Upon tucking Dave in, we went looking for a good 5 minutes for Evelyn. Tracking under beds, in bedrooms, closets, tubs, we finally realized some little feet poking out from under the kitchen sink. This is the first time she’s hid on her own, and in a NEW hiding spot (I think she’s been thinking about this one for awhile though). This was a camera moment not to be missed, and amazingly Evelyn didn’t make a peep once until I snapped the toes picture. Then of course the reward, my sweet baby face! Too bad I had a fixed lens with not a very good night time aperture so the shots are a little blurry due to slow exposure and no tripod (hold your breath)!
Usually I don’t take a ton of initiative when I come up with and idea (hey I should make an animated GIF with this picture…wait I don’t know how). But tonight I decided to go for it. If you want to learn how to do an easy animated GIF from photos, in photoshop, comment and I’ll post directions if there’s enough interest!
Happy Valentines, and for you Americans, have a great long weekend (unless you work in retail or don’t have bosses that let you take the day off, and then that’s quite unfortunate for you!)
Since there aren’t any takers on the giveaway, I’m changing the requirements! Leave a comment by the 20th and you’ll be entered to win one of these BABY SHOWER INVITE SETS:
Just make sure you let me know which one you want and that there’s a way to contact you!
This is a great example of a template design customized to a client’s color scheme. Here’s a job I just sent out last week that was printed on Super-thick with a chartreuse envelope in the Blossom design, available for purchase here!
I’ve never been on the Croc bandwagon until they came out with the prima ballet flats, which I LOVE! The rest I think are simply ugly, however the design team seems to be picking up a few new cues as you can see in these new flats: Olivia and Malindi
I think my brain is too heavily relying on the snow melting sometime this week so I can get out in my garden, however as wishful thinking doesn’t ever dictate, the snow will melt around here in May or June.
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