tutorials

do it yourself: fun with fonts

March 18, 2013

As many of you know, I’m a big supporter of adding typography to posts/photos, as evidenced here and here {and here and here and here}. I could go on, but you get the idea. For me, it’s a fun way to play around with graphic design + adding a touch of text makes it a little more personal and unique. Up until recently, most of the text on my photos have been fonts I have downloaded {for free} from here and there around the internets. Then when I got my Bamboo Tablet, I started to experiment with writing on my pictures in my own handwriting using a stylus pen.

Yesterday I had the best time playing around with a new app I downloaded called iFontMaker, which basically helps you turn your own handwriting into a font. It’s $6.99 for any of you iPad owners {iPad only, unfortunately} and is basically THE MOST FUN ever. Worth the money, in my opinion, for sure.

It’s super easy to use, too– you only need your finger and your iPad and you’re good to go. You can make as many fonts as you want, download them for just yourself, or share them with the world. I made the four above in under a half hour yesterday, and BECAUSE I LOVE YOU (!) I’ve made them available for free download. All you need to do it click on the links above.

SO! Download away!

ENJOY + HAPPY MONDAY!

34 Comments · Filed Under: blogging, design, handmade, tutorials ·

DIY: glitter garland

November 13, 2012

WHO LOVES A PROJECT?!

Well, goodness, I think everyone loves a good project every now and again.

But the real question for this post is WHO LOVES A GLITTER PROJECT?

I DO.

And ultimately, I think you do too.

A necessary precaution: Before you start this insanity of a project that is glitter garland you must come to terms with the fact that once you commit to a glitter project, you will ultimately be committing to a lifelong marriage with glitter. Or, at least, a week-long marriage. Which is just as serious in my humble opinion.

And so, lest you forget, you must remind yourself that glitter is amazing. When you’re elbow deep in glitter, just keep telling yourself that.

Anyways, onward!

HOW TO MAKE GLITTER GARLAND >>

You will need:

cardstock
scissors
modge podge glue
foam brush
glitter (!!)
measuring tape
fishing line (or clear craft string)
glue gun

Instructions:

Step 1: Get cardstock paper.

Step 2: Figure out what size you want your circles to be. I basically just found a candle lid that I thought was an appropriate size (4 inches across) and traced it on the cardstock.

Step 3: Decide how many garland strands you want to make. I made 8 because I made the craaaazy decision to dress up my entire dining room (it looks awesome P.S.). For my project, each single strand of garland had 5 glitter circles.

Step 4: Once you decide how many glitter circles you want on your garland, cut out double that many circles. So, for me, one garland had five glitter circles, so I cut out 10 circles of cardstock. Understood?

side note: Since I made 8 strands of garland, the math tells me I cut a total of 80 circles. Which is insanity. TGFDC. (Thank God For Dawson’s Creek. Netflix, people. DO IT.)

Step 5: Take one piece of circle cardstock and paint one side of it with modge podge (only one side– and don’t skimp on the edges!), then press the cardstock to the glitter. I put the glue and the glitter into paper plates (see below) to make it easy. I also had an extra paper plate for spreading the glue onto the cardstock. Once you’ve painted one side and doused it with glitter, put it to the side to dry.

Step 6: After you paint and glitter-up all your cardstock you should have a bunch of circles that have glitter on one side. THIS IS GOOD. I got better and better with applying the glitter the more I did this. By the end, there we no white spots on my circles at all. HUZZAH.

Step 7: Decide how long you want your garland to be and cut a piece of fishing line accordingly. Mine was approx 100 inches long, or so. Maybe a little longer.

Step 8: Use a glue gun to glue two of the cardstocks together (with the fishing line in the middle!), obviously, with the glitter side facing out. Putting two cardstocks together will keep the paper from curling at the sides and keep your circles nice and straight.

Step 9: Figure out how much space should go in between each glitter circle. I put approx 15 inches between each of mine.

Step 10: Once you have all your circles glued together and spaced out accordingly, hang that sucker up! It will look awesome!

I kept going to make a total of 8 garland. It was a LOT of work and a LOT of glitter, but ultimately it was worth it.

Check it:

Tada! And the picture doesn’t even do it justice. Seriously. I should have you all over for a glass of wine just to show it off. December hasn’t even arrived and it’s getting to be so Christmas up in here it’s CRAZY. When it comes to the holidays, I don’t mess around.

Three cheers for glitter + HAPPY DECORATING!

(A note on this project. I saw this picture on Pinterest, which led me to this etsy shop, which was all sold out of this particular type of garland. And so, this DIY was born.)

24 Comments · Filed Under: handmade, holiday, tutorials ·

how I edit my pictures: a tutorial

May 15, 2012

My second tutorial ever!

Remember my first one? Those totally amazing tissue paper pom-poms?

Yeah, well one fell off the ceiling a few weeks ago and Zan rolled over onto the tack in the middle of the night. I hope you’re laughing right now because I am.

Although, to be quite honest, he definitely wasn’t.

Aaaaaanyways.

Welcome to Tutorial numero duo: How I Edit My Pictures.

(I realize this post might not be relevant to a ton of people, but I’ve gotten a handful of questions about it over the past month, so I thought I’d give it a go.)

Let me start off by admitting that I don’t know if this is the best way to edit photos, but it’s free, and fairly easy, and above all, it works for me. So for those of you that are interested in how I get things done around here, or are even maybe just a little bit curious, read on…

First off, I use a MacBook.

I totally and completely swear by all things Apple and you should too.

FOR SERIOUS.

I use iPhoto and Pages to edit my pictures for my blog:

Pages is basically the Mac version of Microsoft Word, but WAY better in my humble opinion. My MacBook came with Pages installed, when I purchased iWork with my computer.

Now, if you don’t have Pages, I guess you’re straight up out of luck to try it my way. I think you can do more or less the same thing on PicMonkey, although I don’t believe they have a collage feature yet, and iPiccy is another online photo editor I just heard about, which apparently does have the collage feature. There are probably more out there, but they haven’t crossed my radar yet.

Okay, okay, I’m about to start this crazy tutorial, so I hope you’re ready.

Basically, I just go into iPhoto first, into my events, and choose a photo:

Let’s get one from Fenway Park, okay?

Then I do a little editing right in iPhoto:

Now I’ve been trying to shoot my photos in manual mode for a few months now. I’m really loving how they look, but I often find they are just a liiiitle bit too dark. I just play around with the exposure a bit until I get the photo looking nice.

You can also play around with cropping here too. And touch-ups, and red-eye, and the like. Go to town on your photos! You really have the chance to make them look like gold in here.

Now quite often I filter my photos and that gets a little more complicated. Basically, I email myself my photos to my phone and filter them through Instagram (in airplane mode), then email them BACK to myself and open them up again, filtered this time, on my computer. It takes some time, but not that long, and I often like the filtered look for certain posts.

(You can also filter online at PicMonkey, which is fairly easy as well.)

After you have your photo the way you like it, you’re ready to move into the graphic design part, which I do in Pages. Pages is technically a document program, but I’ve figured out how to do a LOT more with it, and it’s easy too.

Okay, let’s do this:

Now you’ll be working strictly in Pages. This is the fun part:

Fonts are my favorite thing EVER and you can download so many for free!

I’ve gotten a bunch of mine from Going Home to Roost and In My Own Style.

Also, Pinterest is perfect for this sort of thing. Just type in free fonts and loads of links will pop up. So awesome.

From here, you basically just take a screen shot of your final image:

To take a screen shot on a Mac you just need to press SHIFT, COMMAND and the number 4 all at the same time. Then you just drag the curser over the image and in saves the images automatically on your desktop.

EASY PEASY LEMON SQUEEZY.

And… TAADAAAA:

Done and DONE.

Oh, wait, you wanted to know how I do collages too, right?

So remember when we dragged that photo from iPhoto into Pages? All I do is drag as many photos as I want into Pages and then resize them and rearrange them as I please.

You can do anything from instagram pictures, to regular camera photos too.

Here’s a little collage I just whipped up:

Oh, 2004 World Series, I will never forget you.

And so really, that’s that.

I don’t know if it’s the best way, but I have a lot of freedom with it, which is something I don’t find on many of the online editing sites. Also, at this point I’ve gotten so familiar with the whole thing, that it takes me probably around 25-30 minutes to edit a bunch of pictures for a post. Not too shabby.

So there you have it. THAT is how I edit my photos. I hope it entertained you a little, and if I’m lucky I might have even helped a few people out.

Feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email if you have any more questions! I’ll try to get back to you if I know the answer, but really, like with anything, the ease of it comes with just a bunch of trial and error. I do think I’ve found something that works well for me, which I’m happy about. And maybe, hopefully!, it can work for you too.

Do you have a different way of editing for free that you like? Care to share?

And now, I will gladly announce that this is THE END of this incredible long and likely confusing tutorial.

Adios for now, friends.

I’m out!

18 Comments · Filed Under: blogging, tutorials ·

tissue paper pom-pom tutorial

November 30, 2011

My first tutorial.

Yeeee-haw.

I hope you’re ready for this. It IS pretty much the holiday season and all so you might want to make these soon.

Red and green?!

You definitely want to make these.

Yes, yes. You do. They are super easy and super cheap.

Let’s not forget SUPER Martha Stewart and insanely adorable.

Here’s what you need:

colored tissue paper (your preference)

scissors

a tape measurer

floral wire

First, make sure you have 8 pieces of tissue paper. Then, you want a reasonably sized width of paper to work with. I made mine around 13.5 inches. There is no significance in this number, I just wanted some different sized paper balls, so I made my widths random.

Length should be around 20 inches. Give or take.

After you get the width you want start to fold the paper accordion-style.

I made my creases about 1.5 inches. I though this length worked fairy well.

Fold that paper up real good.

Like that.

Fan yourself for a minute. The hard part is over.

(not really, but fan yourself anyways for fun.)

Find out where the halfway mark is and get your floral wire ready.

Place the wire around the middle.

The next bit I’m about to write here is optional.

Cut the ends of the paper so that it’s either round or pointed. Or don’t cut it at all. I did a variety and they all look pretty much the same. There is a slight variation, but nothing crazy.

It’s actually rather annoying to cut, so if you don’t want to get frustrated (which I did, I lied about the first part being the hardest) just forget this part.

If you do decide to trim the ends, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Then you spread open your fan. All the way so that it forms a circle shape.

Then comes the fun part.

Start separating the paper.

Careful! It rips easy!

Pull the paper up towards the floral wire.

Keep fluffing until it looks like this:

Sweet!

Awesome!

Terrific!

Now, start all over from the beginning and do exactly the same thing again.

For reals, every single step.

Because you need 2 fluff balls if you want the real deal.

After you’ve got 2 parts, cut some more wire. About a foot.

Then you’re going to want to push the two half-balls together and string some wire around the middle so they’re connected.

It’s tricky because there’s a lot of fluff happening.

But you can do it. I believe in you.

Last, but not least, you need to hang this beauty.

Cut some wire that’s about the length you want it to fall from the ceiling. First, connect one end to the center wire by twisting it on, then poke the other end into the ceiling with a push-pin.

Voila!