Hey people! I hope everyone is enjoying the summer format of our blog.
I sure am.
Partially because I only have one night of sweaty nightmares leading up to my turn, rather than a full week of them (sweaty nightmares are not my favourite) and partially because of all the diverse talent here that we've been enjoying (diverse talent is my favourite).
So here's my offering of the day.
Something I'm going to call: ONE KIT: Three Ways.
My initial title was (said with feeling): OMG. Libby Pritchett you do the cutest stuff and you say you WILL make a mini kit for me to give away on my WCS blog host day?! You're the best. I'd like to be like you one day with all the digitizing and making stuff.
Sigh.
But I thought maybe it wasn't to the point enough.
And as I'm confused enough for the all of us, I thought I would simplify it.
I put together a little tutorial for one of the projects including an image to download if you are so moved to do so.
Oh right, first, here is:
PROJECT ONE: Not Your Nana's Decorative Plate
And here is where I tell you, I had planned to take photos of this project from start to finish to share with you.
And then I didn't.
So, please, close your eyes and imagine, if you will, a place that looks suspiciously like my garage complete with basketballs and razor scooters strewn about willy nilly and a large flattened cardboard box in the middle of the space that is covered with the spray paint remnants of days gone by.
Nestled in a box nearby, lives a family of well loved spray paint cans.
Let us remove the can of Kilz (which sounds much more awful and violent than it is in reality - this is our primer) and a can of Rustoleum Ultra cover gloss white (normally, I'm opposed to shiny, among other things, but I find a gloss works better for painting plates).
Spray the plates that you've lovingly chosen from the thrift store, Aunt Olga's wedding china, or wherever you have found them.
Spray them lightly and from a distance to avoid puddling and drippings (more things I am opposed to). You might need two coats of this to cover the ducks/roses/insert ugly decorative pattern here on your plates.
When that business is dry, give it a coat of the gloss paint.
And when that business is dry, bring them in and we'll get to the photo portion of our project.
As you can see, I'm not always silly, sometimes I am VERY businesslike.
The first thing I did was use this lovely little kit (download available at the end of this post, monsters however are not).
To create this:
Downlaod May Love Always Follow You
The download should print as approximately 7.5x7.5. I don't think there will be too many dinner plates with a diameter larger than this. Mine was about 7 inches across. I left a little extra room around the edge of the patterned paper to account for this.
Then I used my cricut to cut mine.
You don't need a cricut, but I figured I may as well use it as I am not too handy at following the lines (or colouring inside them for that matter).
So...
Measure across plate and make sure you give yourself about 1/4 inch inside of the rim of the plate (if you cut it too large the circle won't lay flat on what I'll call the "meat'n'potatoes" part of the plate, ie. not the edge).
This is part of the reason my next photo shows not a little birdie circle being cut out but a lime green practice piece.
Take the practice circle, we'll call her Bob, and make sure it fits flatly (is that a word? Or only when referring to the Lord of the Dance? WCS readers are pretty clever chickens, so you get the gist) against the meat'n'potatoes of the plate.
Next I went on to cutting the actual digital print.
To make sure I had the circle cutting exactly where I wanted it (step one was developed after the circle cutting exactly where I didn't want it too many times to count).
What I did here was keep the sheet on the cutting mat and peel up the edge where the circle had been cut from and slide in the digital print, using the negative circle as a guide to where the machine would be cutting and stick down the photo paper and only then did I remove the green sheet.
And proceed with cutting.
Now a word from our sponsor.
Not really.
Just an aside.
I just wanted to show you what I did with one of the matching plates (I ended up making 4 more for my niece's bedroom) which I kind of wish I had of done with the larger plate that I'm sharing the instructions for.
But I didn't.
And sometimes you just have to forge ahead.
One thing I really dig about digital is that you can add dimension by printing and cutting out elements.
So, see the banner and heart that I printed? I thought it would be nice to have a bit of dimension on some of the plates, so I printed them apart from the main circle and handcut them. (And hated every minute of it. I swear!)
Here I used some of my baker's twine and my trusty Zig glue pen to attach to the top of the banner.
And here is the heart, upside down, slathered with pop dots (pssst...it's the pop dots that give it the dimension).
I glued the tiny buttons on to "hang" the banner from and secured the banner with a couple more pop dots.
If I were going to redo it, I probably would have used this technique to make the bird pop on the larger plate.
But I'm not.
So that's that.
What I did do to add dimension to the larger plate was use the Zig glue pen to adhere more of the baker's twine around the perimeter of the circle. I tied a bit through a red button and added that to the centre of the circle as well (you can see this in the first photo I shared.)
Now, on to:
PROJECT TWO: Layout
(I use capital letters and italics to both catch your attention and wow you. Maybe I should have tried a different font?)
As I mentioned, I am making these plates for my niece, as I have been both blessed and cursed with stinky little pink hating boys.
Well, not so little anymore, but plenty stinky still.
So I thought I would whip up a layout that I could frame to go with the plates.
I made the layout in 8.5x11 format, but the white frame I had was a weird shape (the photo opening was 6.75x8.5) so after I saved the layout in normal size, I cropped it to the weird size.
I do this often for framing layouts - usually before cropping I group all the elements together (everything but the background paper) and using the corner dragging option I resize everything a bit smaller.
PROJECT THREE: For You
Finally, I made a digital card.
I do this almost exclusively now.
It's so fast and simple it's almost silly. (And I know silly.)
Here it is with the layout I framed:
and here it is as a download if you like:
Download For You card
And here is a final shot of everything together:
Still with me?
Thanks for sticking around, I know I get so wordy on these blog posts.
I feel like I'm all - "and this, and this and this...did I mention this?"
They say that admitting you have a problem is the first step, no?
This is the mini kit, Libby so kindly designed for us!
Supercute Free Download from Libby
The rest of the projects I made using the original kit that she made, you can find it here:
And Your Bird Can Sing
(take a look at Libby's other kits - they are awesome. And while you're browsing, don't forget to check out her titles - they are always make me laugh!)
With that, I am out of here!
I think I'll go catch some sun on the deck and clean up my mess later!
Hope you all have a most excellent summer!
Cheryl O. (I'm supposed to have a cool uploaded signature here, but I haven't done it yet. Sorry Marnie! Have I told you how beautiful you are lately?) [Dearest Cheryl, No, actually, you haven't. I haven't slept in weeks worrying that perhaps my new bio picture with my gorgeous new grey roots and awesome new wrinkles had either scared or scarred you. So tonight, finally, I can sleep knowing that you still think me foxy after all these years... xxMarnie]
Wait a minute, was that just a means of distracting me away from that missing siggy???
