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 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!

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.

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.

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.

Mother’s Day is an annual celebration. This year, I made my mom a mix cd of songs I thought she might like. I made liner notes; the proof of which is below:

I made these using Photoshop and Illustrator. The script font is Emily and the font used for the song list is ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

Our special mother’s day activity was going to see Star Trek on its opening weekend. In honor of this sacred and special event, I made a commemorative mother’s day card:

It was a one-sided deal. I made it all in Illustrator. The font is Huxley Vertical. I harvested the art from House Industries’ Vectagrams, part of the House 3009 font family.

A couple other headlines for the card that I considered:

“You boldly go where no mother has gone before!” (Sounded dirty)

“Mhaaaaaam!” (Too obscure?)

Star Trek was awesome, by the way. A perfect mother’s day treat.

I can’t stop making collages!

This one’s about four friends who are planning on taking over the world, for nefarious purposes. Their plans include: making everyone bake them cupcakes every day, drinking up all the tea, and forcing people to listen to Randy Newman all the time. This is the scene where they’re walking down the street in slow motion.

How: Collage and pencil on paper, colored in Photoshop, with little graphic bits added too.

The collaging just did not stop this weekend. Gab and I worked on some more cutting and pasting yesterday evening.

And here’s Gab’s:

He let me do the background. The finger fangs are genius.

How we did: collage and pencil on paper, with some color and stuff added in Photoshop. Post title pun courtesy of Gab.

Oh what a lovely Saturday! It involved some collaging. I cut up some lady-type magazines and got a little crafty. So these three girls arrive to a party and they’re kind of nervous and they’re about to say hi to the hostess and then get their first cocktails of the evening. But first, they’re greeted by a little lamp deer and a flying pink hotdog. It’s gonna be a good party!

How I did it: collage and pencil on paper, with some additional graphic stuff and color added in Photoshop.

Happy new year, everyone! I hope 2009 brings you everything you’re hoping for, including: free jars of icing, lots of radio listening, millions of mars daydreams, kindness from strangers, smiles from doggies, and finding hidden candy corn.

Here’s the thank you card I made for everyone who was especially kind to me over the holidays:

Exciting close up!!!!:

Based on the little faces doodles I did a little while ago, which I drew over and colored in Illustrator. Then mounted on blue card stock.