Thing-a-day.com

Just to prove that I have not been completely slacking on Thing-a-Day, here is what I’ve got so far of the baby blanket that started here. More than 60 percent completed! (It’ll be 7 x 7 squares.) Of course, there’s that small matter of the blue square that needs to be ripped and reknit in the correct blue, and then there’s the hours and hours of seaming, but I have to finish all this soon, because the wretched beastie is due sometime in March.

Anyway, I have not been idle. I’ve also been toiling at another public domain clip-art set, which I haven’t yet posted on Flickr.

And on 2/28 I made another pretty good dinner for my mom, a combination of these two recipes—Pork Chops with Mustard Sauce and Pork Chops with Mustard-Cornichon Sauce—but with the addition of mushrooms, and with capers in place of cornichons and white wine in place of chicken stock. Spinach salad and rice on the side.

I also made a couple of decent illustrations for work: on 2/12, I made a sort of homebrew tritone; on 2/18, I tried out a new technique for turning a flat shot into something that looks more lively; and on 2/28 I made the collage that appears on this page, which wasn’t that much Photoshop work in the end, but which did require a surprising amount of image research.

Was this flimsy output what I wanted to achieve during Thing-a-Day 2008? No, but I did make a few things that I would not otherwise have made, and I did discover several other people whose work I really liked, thefabricator and Jason Das, in particular.

It’s been fun. I’ll see you next year.

Finally! Figured out how to print nicely and cut in a straight line

Not-so-shameless plug (hey, you’ve been asking!): These are freshly posted in my etsy, if you’re interested.
(molliefabric.etsy.com)

I can’t believe this is the last day! I’ll post one more thing tonight (this post is for yesterday).
Thing-a-day really got me goin! I’m feeling so… useful haha

Seriously though, is there a year round community for this? I want to keep going. I guess I could start my own blog, but having a community to interact with would be way better! Does anyone know? I cant find any info about it on the thing-a-day site.

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 thought I would create a banner for my Etsy shop. Nevermind that I’ve never made a banner before! I had to do it myself! So I grueled through a ton of online Photoshop tutorials, sketched out my own mushrooms, created banner after banner after banner, and 5 hours later…tah dah! I’m finally done. Yay me! Heck, now I just need to work on getting more stuff in the shop.

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:

Before:

After:

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.

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 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…

before	after

next i composited a pink cocktail umbrella into a photo that was taken of a friend of mine:

before	after

he just loves pink. i might even add a cherry/pineapple to the drink if i have time…

I made this “Thanks for the add” MySpace graphic for my bestest friend. She’s a school counselor and sponsors a high school chapter of PeaceJam. I’m not totally sure what PeaceJam is (too ADHD to read whole website), but I sure do wish they’d had a chapter at the shitty redneck high school I went to. I’m sure if she’s in charge of it, it’s freaking awesome.

She has recently created a MySpace profile for her chapter here.

So, Thing-A-Dayers, if you’re on MySpace, go add them, and you’ll get one of these posted on your very own MySpace profile:

You know you want one!

Now, more about that friend. She signed up for Thing-A-Day, and hasn’t posted a thing since, like, day 3. So everyone click here and go bug her and tell her she needs to post because T-A-D isn’t as fun without her!

So as usual instead of taking pictures and posting things as I do them, I am just posting in one big grouping all the daily things I’ve been doing.

I decided it would be cool to make some things on photoshop with positive messages on them, my idea being to eventually print them out and frame them or something and post them around my apartment to encourage positivitiy or whatever.

So here are 3 of them, there was one more but my fucking computer appparently hates me and decicded to just lose the jpeg version of it -_-
And it already took me for fucking ever to upload those onto here because my computer is being so fucking slow and annoying.

These are some quotes I found online on some website.

Made banana bread And some earrings I made, not a good picture of them, but yeah…..

And my spelling is probablyu completely horrible right now because as usual my computer won’t recognize typing any quicker than 1 wpm and I type at an average speed of 60 wpm and if I slow down for the computer right now I am going to lose what little patients I have for this peive of shit and break it….. and that would not be good because I NEED a computer for school even if it is fucking shitty.

Keiko Oikawa’s Nordljus is one of my favorite food and travel blogs.  Her photos are simply divine and exquisite.  I can’t help but make a couple of banners out of her photos and along the way, I made myself a new wallpaper too.

You can see one of these two banners in action here.  I haven’t decided which one to keep on my blog for now.  I guess I’ll just switch back and forth.

Download available for 1024×768, 1280×800, 1600×1200, 1920×1200.

Picture of  us women in my family, with a little more flavor  

i tried out the same tutorial that annie_22 posted about and tried yesterday:

there are some issues—like the fact that the border is jagged and there is a hard black edge. i would’ve worked on it more, but it’s late, and i need to get some sleep. i might try to tweak it some more later though… i learned some p-shop tricks that i didn’t know either, so that was cool… thanks for the tutorial, annie_22!

I drew these from photographs, for an illustration I’m making for my job. It’s for a story about the other kind of WASPs—white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. I’d never tried to draw a real bug before (though I did draw a finger puppet and a pin two years ago); they’re, um, complicated.

Update: Here’s the final illustration—

Made some arts with some emotional stories behind them >.>

A photo of Jims mom Virginia, (who died a couple years ago) next to some roses I was given.

Photoshop of my fiance and I with my idea of light love energies haha >.<

My nephew Benny, the loveliest person in existence

 I wanted to make dinosaur buttons today.  I thought it would be a good exercise to learn illustrator.  You know something small.  I HATE ILLUSTRATOR.  I got the lines done, wanted to blow up my computer, then gave up and switched to photoshop.  2.5 hours later the lamest unfinished button ever!  Anyone know any good tutorials for illustrator?

Tes is an amazing woman I met at a Soroptimist meeting on Tuesday night. Not only is she the past president elect of Soroptimist International, but she is the the National President of the Girl Scouts of the Philippines. She recently went to Rwanda and Sierra Leone to help educate the people against female genital mutilation & female circumcision.

I took three photos of her on Tuesday with my 50mm. The auto focus doesn’t work on this lens with my camera, so I have to use the manual focus, and that makes for some time-consuming shots. Luckily, the three I took were in focus and turned out well.

The top photo I did very little to. I just added an vignette filter (darkness around the edges) and I think it looks nice.

This photo I turned to black and white. There were so many options and varieties of “black and white” styles that it took some time to select the right one. But I think I got it with this one:

I wanted to make some sort of Aspergers related design so this is what I came up with for now.