In April of 2016 I took pictures of my kids against the strong light of a window to get an image of their silhouettes. I then digitized the outlines and used my Cricut cutter to cut colored cardstock. My favorite result was where I layered the two cut outs on some beautiful hand marbled paper my sister gave me.
I really admire the people with the skills to cut out silhouettes free hand. I leaned heavily on technology for this setup.
I needed to upgrade my phone, which I hate doing and always wait until the end of updates looms. I do all the protective things for the new phone, and this time I purchased a clear case, and found a PopSocket with green, a cat, and dragonflies. Finding a design that had cats, dragonflies, trees, music, and fiber arts was a big ask, so I designed my own and cut shapes from removable vinyl with my Cricut cutter and stuck them to the inside of the clear case.
Now I feel that there is no mistaking the phone for anyone’s but mine.
My chorus had a couple old signs in storage that had old versions of logos and were in need of some TLC. The flexible vinyl sign had been stored folded and had some tape residue.
Goo gone removed the glue spots and some time with a hot hair dryer smoothed out some of the creases. We are now going to store it rolled up, rather than folded.
We updated our main logo recently to add a white star inside the two gray stars, which gives it a nice pop. My Cricut cutter can’t cut quite big enough to make a white sticker star, so I masked off the star and painted it with four layers of white acrylic paint. My cutter could do the new Sweet Adelines International logo and our website address.
We also had a rigid plastic sign that had an old SAI logo and slogan. I used white adhesive vinyl to go over the whole top of the sign, and used my Cricut cutter to cut out the new version of the logo.
My chorus uses a cheat sheet for performances: a piece of black poster board folded over the director’s stand with the songs we are going to sing, the key pitch, and helpful reminder words. I ran an interesting experiment with fonts, making the same set up twice, one with a standard serif font and one with OpenDyslexic font. I numbered photos and put a poll out on our members only site.
The chorus response was overwhelmingly for the OpenDyslexic font as the easier option for quick and easy reading. Is it a pretty font? No, but for something you need people to actually read and not get lost in, font choice is key. I do really like the bottom weighted font idea, and that the letters are all unique and can’t be flipped or mirrored to make a different letter.
I bought expresso from The Full Cup coffee and book store back in August with the intension to paint more coffee art. Life happened, and the expresso stayed in a bottle in my fridge for nine months. I finally pulled it out and did some paintings on cotton fiber paper.
I digitized the paintings and made greeting cards that I took back to The Full Cup to sell.
Expresso has a more intense color than American drip, and works similar to water colors. I can “erase” by adding more water, and everything looks different when it dries. The image below took many cycles of painting and drying over several days.
My plan is to have a whole series of these small paintings, which will be digitized for greeting cards.
Critters and Craft 