I guess I could reword and repost it here, but why don’t you just head over to my own blog and read my little re-cap and requiem for Thing-a-Day 2008. And you can find out what the hell this thing is:
Thanks for a great month, everyone!
Greetings Commrades! Thanks to you all for the fun of this month! I have loved doing this, and thanks to Michelle for the idea/link to TAD! It’s been great for the FLOW. 
Following on yesterday’s theme, Russian poster style mashup with aquatic life…
Woo! I made it! Each of the past 3 days I spent some time working on finishing up these humongous, hideous slippers that will be felted. (My husband wanted these colors!) How apropos that I finally finished knitting this project tonight, the last night of Thing-A-Day.
I really hope they shrink down to a decent size. They are too ridiculous.
today i copied craftykeg and made a haramaki/tummy warmer:
mine is very simple, not like hers with the cute pattern, but i like it still and am going to wear it today. i didn’t follow the instructions to the tutorial closely and chose to make mine single layered instead of double (basically, i just sewed 2 pieces of jersey together on each side)—i liked craftykeg’s idea of tapering for the waist and did the same. i like to layer my tshirts, so i think of this as an extra tshirt layer that i can interchange easily. i want to make more—with patterns and designs, i also think it’d be cute to add lace or a lettuce/rolled edge using a serger. i also might want to add long sleeve arms to a short sleeve tee following the same idea.
i also wasn’t entirely happy with my results from yesterday, so i re-worked one of them (the first one):
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i tried to make the vignette softer, but i didn’t really notice until afterwards that i probably could have softened it even more and made it lighter. i also backed off on the cyan/blue color tinting because i thought it was too heavy handed yesterday. similarly for the second photo, i took out the color tinting effect entirely.
i have really enjoyed participating in thing.a.day and am sad that today is the last day. there are some projects that i’d hope to do/do more of this past month that i didn’t get to, so i’ll try to do them in the near future:
i’ll probably keep documenting my projects on my blog (probably not every day though) and look forward to next year!
Happy Leap Day! I can’t believe I made it through this month, making something every day! For my last thing I made a tummy warmer. Apparently these are all the rage in Japan? I saw them yesterday on neatorama. Trying to figure out more about them, I googled around and I found this tutorial at Planet June. She did a great job at explaining everything, and mine came out great.
Since my waist is much smaller than my hips, I tried to taper mine a bit. It came out alright, but tapering both sides would have been better. I will have to implement that in version 2. I just used a T-shirt that I took out of my free T-shirt drawer (you know that drawer, stuffed with XXL size shirts that you could wear as nightgowns, right?). After I made it, I put a cute little design on it. I found the picture online, printed it, cut out the shapes and used it as a stencil. I filled it in with silver puff paint, “painting” it on in a thin layer with a q-tip.
I might re-use the shirt a bleached a few days ago and make it into one of these instead, I think it will look cooler that way. I have to say, I’m wearing this one right now, and I’m pretty toasty! I hope everyone else had as much fun as I did this month!
This is dated the 29th, but it is actually my thing for the 28th (it was just after midnight when I put the date in I guess). We get one more last one tomorrow.
I’d promised to make the family fried rice for many many visits now, and finally I got round to it. It’s a good thing that I don’t tend to go out when I visit. Fried rice traditionally is a way of using up leftovers so there’s a lot of flexibility about what goes into it.
cook the rice the day before or in the morning and let cool
dice chicken, cook and set aside
in a hot frying pan or wok, sauté mange tout beans until just tender
add beaten eggs and lightly scramble
add rice, add a splash of water if too dry
return chicken to pan and heat through
season with soy sauce, salt and a touch of sugar
I wanted to do something other than 3D today because thats all I was doing all day at work. I was interested in what invisible.co and cignoh were up to by manipulating photos to look like film. I did the same tutorial they both posted. I cropped the images to 16:9 ratio first. I had to change some of the tutorial settings because they seemed not to work on higher resolution images. I wound up recording actions in Photoshop to automate most of the settings. One could do this to video in after effects fairly easily.
Before:
After:
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Made labels for my Spice Rack. I know this is a silly one - especially since I printed them on my computer, but I did figure out how to feed odd size paper into my laser printer - I really have never tried this before and it opens up a lot of possibilities I hadn’t thought of before
And a close up -
today i copied invisible.co’s earlier post and followed the same tutorial to give a film-like effect to a photo. my photoshop version didn’t seem to have all of the adjustment layers/filters that the tutorial called for (exposure and lens blur) but i approximated the best that i could and tried the effect on two of my photos:
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the vignetting effect on the top photo is too prominent/hard, i was going to add black bars to crop to cinemascope or re-do the vignette. i also saved non-cyan/blue tinted images that can be viewed here.
Thing-a-day #27 (belated by about 12 hours)…
- I did yoga. That’s always fun and sort of feels creative, even though you’re just doing what the instructor says. But, hey, doesn’t that fall under “Follow instructions”? 
- The other day, when my husband got the car I mentioned in previous post, we had to get the check for the loan cashed. So of course, we ran to the house to shoot some rap video stills.
Tried out making this photo I took a while ago of a flower into some sort of cubism art in photoshop
edit: thought I’d add the original pic
Today I crocheted these squares which will one day be joined with many more to make a scarf or a bag or a blanket. I found the pattern in a knitting book that I bought in Tokyo. I used Sirdar Snuggly DK 100% acrylic yarn. I’ve always been snooty about only using yarn made from natural fibers, but I’m a changed knitter now. I love this yarn!
February 26th
I can’t post what I did here because I’m not sure if it’s okay to post an essay from my pending application on the internet. So I want to play it safe. I submitted my college application for Colorado College (as a transfer applicant) on the 26th, and so decided to use that for my thing-a-day considering I had just finished edits on several rather creative essays that were required for it. Basically, I was asked to detail and design my own class. I had a lot of fun doing it. Those on the lj thingaday08 community should be able to see it though, friends locked.
February 23rd
With the assistance of a friend (i.e. her helping me find a tutorial for my lj), I managed to add a lovely header onto my livejournal. It was not created by moi, because I have no graphical skills. Rather, this was something I had been putting off for awhile, so I’m glad to have it done now.
today i practiced some more in photoshop… first i tried the gold tutorial that i tried earlier this month on a photo that i took last week. the gold doesn’t look so much like gold, but the matte edge looks better than my first golden egg attempt. also, i think i like the original photo better, but that’s ok…
* i have edited the gold look from earlier today based on feedback and the fact that i didn’t like what i made earlier… i think it definitely works better but still doesn’t look quite gold-like…
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next i composited a pink cocktail umbrella into a photo that was taken of a friend of mine:
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he just loves pink. i might even add a cherry/pineapple to the drink if i have time…
Yesterday I got an amazing new knitting book, New Pathways for Sock Knitters by Cat Bordhi, which blew my mind on every page. I knit a little practice Coriolis sock, which is like a regular baby bootie with a ribbed spiral going up the foot. Awesome.
