I made a thank you card / happy new year card out of the circles and lines design I drew a couple weeks ago:
I did the original circles and lines drawing with ink on paper. I added the texture and color in Photoshop. The type is from the awesome family, Novecento, a few weights of which are free on myfonts.
Category Archives: crafts
LetterHeads Done Done Done!
I finished my LetterHeads poster and it is for sale at Zazzle! All profits (10%, so maybe a buck or two per poster) go to 826 Valencia, a nonprofit organization that promotes kids’ literacy, writing, and creativity. I’m making zero profit, except for the immeasurable emotional reward of knowing my poster is causing you endless joy and happiness. There are two versions of the poster, thusly:
I wanted one poster that was lower-contrast, and one that had a more contrasty oomph. I don’t know what’s going on with your decor at home, so I thought I’d better give you a couple options. Both poster options are 14″w x 24″h. The poster comes on a range of paper options. I recommend the archival heavyweight paper, which looks awesome. But even the cheaper options come out great.
My sweetie Gabe Danon wrote the excellent copy: “Welcome to the Land of the LetterHeads, a town full of shifty characters and boldfaced liars living in the margins of society. It’s a lawless town: there is not one sheriff and there is not one serif. They’re oversized, capitalized, and politicized — some are left-aligned, others right-aligned, and some fall right down the center. But in their own way, each and every one of them knows he’s justified.”
Go on over to zazzle and buy a poster! Oh, and before you do any purchasing, check out retailmenot to see if there are any promos you can use! Sometimes you can get 50% off of posters.
Please feel free to email me at andrea@plinkyplinky.com if you have any questions about the poster!
Faux Bois Father’s Day
How was everyone’s Father’s Day today? Mine was great and I hope my Dad enjoyed it too. I churned out a handmade Father’s Day card for him and got him a gift certificate to Border Grill. I also picked up a few treats from there, to have a little lunch at my parents’ place. It was delicious and great fun.
Here’s the card & envelope:
Here’s a detail shot to show the texture of the paper:
I used this great faux bois paper from Paper Source for the background. It looks like they don’t have the teal version anymore, but they do have a gold and brown version, which I also bought from them and which is very pretty too. The strip of textured, darker woodgrain paper in the middle is from a set of origami paper I got from dick blick ages ago, which I can’t find on their website now. Woodgrain just seemed to go perfectly with Father’s Day.
Thanks, dudes.
I made some thank you cards, which I based on a “thank you” type treatment I drew out. My original plan was to scan in my lettering, then Photoshop it into a nice little layout. However, I was disliking how I was losing the hand-made, organic, tactile quality of the pencil on paper once everything became digital. So I hand-drew 8 different versions of the above type and pasted them on a variety of patterned papers. It came out very well. I drew on lightly textured, cream paper and I liked how when I pasted it on top of the patterned paper, there was a nice show-through of the pattern.
A Card for Katie Because She Deserved One.
After endless hours staring at a computer screen and moving shapes around to make pretty things, sometimes it’s nice to sit at a desk and move tangible shapes around to make pretty things.
Done with origami paper, and some awesome origami mesh paper.
Thanks, Guys.
I made a thank you card for the people who gave me stuff for Christmas.
I like hexagon patterns. The big white hexagon on the back is for writing my thank yous with a brown gel pen.
I did everything in Illustrator. The typeface is the awesome Museo. Three weights of the family are free at myfonts.
Merry Christmas. Time for Crafts!
Merry Christmas Eve, everybody. My family does a Secret Santa gift exchange and I wrapped my presents this morning. I used brown Kraft paper to wrap, then I freehanded a design in pencil on the smaller gift. Then I colored in the lines with a silver gel pen (purchased from JetPens.com) and a thin-tipped Sharpie. Start:
Finish:
I taped this awesome textured red-and-black origami paper on top of the larger box on the bottom and then stacked the smaller gift on top.
Gotta go make some pierogi and drink some egg nog. Have a great day, everyone!
The Moles – Layout for Printing Your Own Mini-Comic on One Sheet of Paper
As promised, I’m including here a layout of The Moles so that you can print it out on your home printer and make your own mini book out of one sheet of paper to carry around in your purse, backpack, or satchel. Click on this image to download a pdf of the layout:
Check out the individual panels in my previous post, The Moles – All Done!
And here are the instructions for making your own The Moles 8-panel book from an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper:
Step 1: Print on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper
I printed on my home inkjet printer, using some semi-nice matte paper. Don’t use anything too heavyweight, otherwise the book won’t fold well. The pdf is 8.5 x 11, so print at 100%. Your finished mini book will be 3.25″ x 2.5″.
Step 2: Trim
(I’m using a blade, but you can use scissors for all the cutting too)
Step 3: Fold in half lengthwise
Step 4: Fold in half the other way
Step 5: Fold in top and bottom to the middle fold line
Step 6: Cut a line in the middle of the paper, using the fold lines as guides
This is what you should get:
Step 7: Fold stuff, making a kind of diamond shape
Step 8: Voila!
Use this technique for making your own mini-books, too. It’s eight panels worth of fun, which is just the right amount of fun for me.
New Old Chairs – Let’s Reupholster Some Ikea Chairs!
I have four chairs from Ikea that I’ve owned for 2 years now. They’re looking a little ratty and boring. The rattiness, I think, is attributable to the fact that many butts have been put upon them. The boringness – attributable to their abysmal taste in film and literature. Unfortunately, I can’t recall what model these chairs are and I don’t see them on Ikea’s website anymore. One of the four chairs in question:
That is one ratty, boring chair.
Gab and I, therefore, hatched a plan to reupholster the hell out of these babies. We went to Mood on the corner of La Cienega and Pico and picked up 2 yards of wool, plaid, heavy-weight fabric.
There are two fabrics above. The first has a predominantly yellow pattern on one side and a predominantly blue plaid on the other, with accents of yellow. The second is the same way, but with green. Thusly, we have 2 fabrics, but four patterns. Haha, we sure played you, Mood!
Gab and I do not know anything about this upholstering business. I don’t think either of us even researched this online. It seemed pretty simple, though.
First, Gab unscrewed the stuff that was attaching the seat to the chair frame. He then skinned the seat by cutting off all of the fabric with a box cutter, right against were it was stapled to the underside of the chair. He said, “This is just like doing surgery!” I thought, “Gab knows what doing surgery is like?” I didn’t ask him about it, because it’s nice to have a little mystery in a relationship.
He started with the yellow fabric and cut it to 22 inches by 22 inches.
In the image above, you can see how Gab just cut off the old fabric, leaving the staples and the hemmed edge of the old fabric. Once he cut the new fabric down, we figured that we’d have to cut the corner so that there wouldn’t be way too much fabric at the corners.
Here, the edge is folded over and Gab has stapled the new fabric onto the bottom of the seat, over the edge of the old fabric. He just kind of folded the corners up and stapled it. It ended up looking pretty darn clean.
Wowza, hey there, little yellow plaid chair.
Gab, fortified by such a successful first attempt, plowed through one more chair yesterday and finished the last two today. He had started out by cutting the fabric to 22 by 22, but for the last chairs, he cut the fabric to 20 inches by 20 inches.
One two three four cute plaid chairs! They all look incredibly awesome and butt-welcoming.
Three of the four chairs in their natural habitat, around the kitchen table and reading ask.metafilter.
The fourth chair in its spot: at my desk.
We did not need all of the 2 yards of fabric we got. We knew this, but planned to have extra, in case of future projects. The most painful and difficult part of the project was, by far, interacting with all the folks at Mood (thanks, Mood!). Cheers to Gab for being so handy and clever. I’m so pleased with how this came out.
A Stripey Birthday is a Happy Birthday
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I made a card for my Uncle’s birthday. I was in a clean, summery mood, so a made a super-simple and bright birthday card. Here’s the front:
And on the back (leaving room for writing, which I did with a brown gel pen):
Done in Illustrator, with ITC Avant Garde Gothic. Happy birthday to my uncle! And yours too, whenever his is.