Thing-a-day.com

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):

yesterday	today

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:

• re-learn illustrator
• make tshirts from illustrator and/other designs—try iron-on transfers or diy silkscreening
• needle felting
• re-learn crochet
• crochet hyperbolic planes and sea slugs
• knit squares for a blanket
• make more stuffed animals/creatures

i’ll probably keep documenting my projects on my blog (probably not every day though) and look forward to next year!

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:

before	after

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.

I got a fisheye camera last week. These are a couple of the pictures I got developed today.

-Robayre

Some months ago, I ordered the deluxe Helvetica film DVD pack. It finally arrived this week, oh joy! We watched it on Saturday night and wow, it was good… It’s a full-length feature documentary on the Helvetica font, it has a great soundtrack, some bits were slow, but altogether informative and refreshing. I truly didn’t realise how ubiquitous the Helvetica font really is. I enjoyed the different perspectives of various designers; geez, some of them are really font-geeks to a level that I don’t understand, yet admire at the same time because the work produced is so… beautiful, rhythmic, visual poetry really.

My Helvetica film DVD pack is a limited-edition package with the retail DVD, three letterpressed mini-posters (I think I will frame them and hang them in a row), a color C-print of a still from the film (street scene of a LADIES toilet sign in helvetica) signed by director Gary Hustwit, two love/hate Helvetica buttons, and the letter n/u of actual Helvetica metal type.

Pictures below of my Helvetica DVD pack