Twitterpated by Tim’s Sally

Some fun things from around the web that I enjoyed this week:

1.  I am currently taking Kelly Rae Robert’s ecourse – and loving it!  If she offers another one someday, and you are the creative type, I highly recommend it!  One of my favorite things about this course, besides the content of the course itself, is being introduced to all sorts of new, creative people.  One of my new favorites is Mindy Lacefield, the artist behind Tim’s Sally.  She makes the cutest mixed-media art (that is one of her’s above).  I love it!  And even more fun – a lot of her work is inspired by 80’s toys (like Strawberry Shortcake!  LOVE!)

2.  I totally want to make this rainbow cake for Rachel’s birthday. (via wee wonderfuls)

3.  I also want to make these decorative flower balls out of crepe paper … maybe for her bedroom, maybe for birthday party celebration … not sure yet (Rachel’s 2nd birthday is in November.  You can totally count on the fact that I will forget all this by then and be making a plain cake from a box the night before). (via How About Orange)

4.  How cute is this ruffle pillow?  I want to make a bunch of those, too …

5.  This post from Cori Dantini is from a month or so ago, but I still love it.  I love the idea of just painting over and over and over whatever you don’t like … and keeping the parts you do like.  Kind of a good metaphor for life, no?  Just keep redoing the bad stuff and leave the good stuff …

6.  I joined One Sydney Road’s Alphabet Blog Hop, happening next month!  Go check it out and sign up – it’s going to be a lot of fun!

TGIF, friends!

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Don’t forget the giveaway for Boise, Meridian, Eagle, Nampa, Kuna area peeps!  Less than a week to go!

See:
-Colors! Bright colors are everywhere this week … in my crafting I played with brightly colored thread.  You can see the flags against a blue sky above.  Vibrant yellow Daffodils are in bloom.

Hear:
-Geese honking and ducks quacking during my walk in the park.
-The boys playing “ninjas” with their plastic swords – home for spring break!
-Rain dripping in the downspouts and splashing against the windows on Wednesday.

Taste:
-Red Wine
-Hashbrowns and eggs for breakfast … mmmmm … my husband is such a good cook!

Smell:
-Wet cement and dirt from the rain.

Touch:
-Sewing projects. I always feel so homey when I sew.

I am getting really mad at how this is formatting – I give up! everything is all lined up funny … aargh. I will have to figure it out later this evening.

Ok, I fixed it, sort of.  It’s not quite how I wanted it but at least I don’t want to throw things at the computer when I look at it.

Ok, not really a polaroid.  It’s a Faux-laroid. Heh. I have plans for a new blog header one of these days, and I wanted to figure out how to make my images look like polaroids.  So I found quite a few tutorials, but none were quite what I was looking for. So I took some ideas from the tutorials, looked at real scanned-in polaroids on flickr, and then made mine up as I went along.

What do you think?

Day 26 of 365.

This week I plan to sew a pillow cover using this old sheet from a thrift store.

I might use this thread, too.

We need some springy colors around here – it snowed again this morning!

Remember – It’s green week! Go find some spring inspiration!

(These images are from my 365 Project as well … )

I briefly mentioned a few weeks ago that my husband (Brian) built me a light tent.  I thought I would show you pictures and encourage you to try it out for yourself.

It was such an easy project, it took Brian about 20 minutes to put it together.   We (roughly) followed the tutorial found here (via photocritic).  We didn’t glue the legs to the top frame, so we can take the whole thing apart and lay it flat or stash it in a closet.

Here is a picture of the finished product:

You can see in that picture that I had my camera sitting above, shooting straight down on my subject. I took my Valentine’s picture from this angle. Below is a picture that I took with my camera positioned in front of the tent (with blue paper as the backdrop). And the picture of the patchwork ball was also taken using the same angle.

If you are selling on etsy, ebay, or some other online venue, it would be a super handy tool to use. Your products will look great with nice even lighting and a clean background.

I love to photograph crafty items in the tent, and I have used it for some photos for istockphoto.

If you have a light tent, let me know what you like to photograph in it!

We are having a crafty weekend at the Torres house … My husband constructed a lightbox for me (more on that later), my six-year old son Eli had to decorate his Valentine mailbox for school, and I am working on baby shower gifts.

Above you see the “For Kicks” patchwork ball from Anna Maria Horner’s Seams to Me.  This is actually the second ball that I made from this pattern. I have a ton of friends and family that are expecting, so I will be making many more of these as shower gifts in the coming months!    Over the past few weeks, I have been cutting and marking fabric pieces whenever I find myself sitting still for a few minutes at a time. Then when I have a baby shower approaching, I sit down at the sewing machine and they come together in just a few hours.

I am not an experienced seamstress, so here are a few tricks that have helped make these balls easy and reasonably quick to pull together:

1.  Definitely practice the piecing technique before you begin on a “real” ball.  It is a tad tricky, but after a few tries it clicked, and after that I found it pretty easy to manage .  (Anna Maria recommends practicing the technique first in the book, and it is good advice – don’t ignore it!)
2.  My poor geometry-challenged brain kept getting “hexagon” and “pentagon” mixed up as I went through the instructions.  So right away I highlighted every instance of the word “hexagon” with one color and “pentagon” with another color– that way I didn’t mix up the two shapes.  I just knew that as I saw a blue highlighted word, that I was supposed to use the hexagons … it helped a ton!
3.  I SUCK at eyeballing seam allowances– especially if the shape is other than perfectly straight or square.  So, I used a fabric pen to put a tiny dot in each corner of my cut-out shapes to indicate where each seam would begin and end.  This saved me a lot of grief when sewing the ball together.
4.  I also apparently suck at the blind stitch that she recommends using to finish the last seams after stuffing the ball.  I attempted it with the first ball I made, but wasn’t really thrilled with the results.  The second time around I used invisible thread and did tiny running stitches to close the last few seams.  It turned out much neater, and there was substantially less yelling and swearing involved.  I will have to practice the blind stitch more before trying it again on a real project.

Overall the project is fun and simple.  Both moms-to-be have been excited about the balls, so I will keep crankin’ them out for the rest of the babies that are coming in 2009!