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.

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 wrote up a tutorial on how to make a quilt I made almost a year ago.

You can find the tutorial here.

I made this today…

I also wrote a tutorial on my brand new blog, so if you want to make your own rings, read up there…  http://caseyacrossthepond.blogspot.com

This one’s not for sale because it’s not as perfect as I’d like it to be, but I’m putting more up in my shop soon!

…regarding my previous post. 

I did work from a photograph as a basic reference, but I took artistic liberties. I didn’t grid up, and I’d never, ever trace. I prefer old photographs of anonymous people who look weird in some way. Victorian and Edwardian photos are great because the subjects pose as if they are posing for a painting, and the lighting is arranged as if the subject were to be represented in a 2-dimensional medium…hmmm. (which is my way of saying that flash sucks).

There is a skill in converting a photograph to a drawing, which I dabble in, but am nowhere near mastering. It’s important that realize that traditional art can only be superior to photography if the artist interprets rather than records. You have to rearrange lines to avoid tangents and give the appearance of overlapping, curve lines that are in reality straight to give the illusion of form, invent shadows where there were none, and delete shadows where there were. A working knowledge of anatomy as it applies to the drawn form is paramount…as I said, I only dabble in this, I have friends who could take me to school and beat me up for my lunch money over drawing.

I wrote up a tutorial on how to knit and felt a bowl, and got it published on one of my favorite design blogs, More Ways to Waste Time. Even if you’re a beginning knitter, there are links to a great video site to help you get started. And felting covers up a myriad of mistakes!

I was getting some really great responses about the notebook I made, so I made another today and created a tutorial about how it was done.
Here is a link to the tutorial at my blog!