Jacob and I have been thinking about sharing some of my patterns with the world in a website.  In trying to come up with something fun for the name “Beeswaxer”.  We’ll see how it goes but that it has inspired me a bit to make this honeycomb of a background:

My journey through seamless patterns has definitely been a learning experience. I’m so excite to share a little about what I have learned in this little series.

This next background I did get the image from The Graphics Fairy.  The original image was from an 1895 hardware catalog:

I think that is just so cool.  Not exactly the kind of door you could find at Walmart, eh? I love the design but no doubt a hand-drawn image is never a seamless pattern from the beginning.  Jacob showed me how to straighten a picture, which was crucial for the side bars to be exactly up and down.  I used the ruler tool to pick a point at the top of the picture and at the bottom of the picture that I wanted to be aligned, for instance the right side of one of the vertical bars in the image.  Then Image>Image Rotation>Arbitrary will line up those points.  I had to do a lot of hand editing on this one.  The realignment left holes on either side of the pattern and the top didn’t match up well to the bottom but I added some extra bars and hand drew the bands with the pencil tool.  I put a lot of time into it but it is probably my favorite background I’ve made, out of like the six or so I’ve made so far.

As I uploaded this I realized how Orvis-y the tan background color made this pattern look. This image came from the wonderful graphics fairy. I cleaned it up and arranged it to make a calm pattern. This is the pattern I used for my sister‘s blog.

In the current redesign of my blog as well as my sisters, I’ve been figuring out how to make new original backgrounds. I can’t wait to share them all with you. I’ve just been so intrigued with how to make seamless tiles that aren’t lame. Jacob is thinking of making a website for some of them so that you can give them your own colors and download the tile 😀 That would be awesome.

The Graphics Fairy is a great place for images in the public domain.  I’m totally inspired by some of the patterns I see in the graphics found there.  I clean up the images and give them a transparent background.  But the hard part is lining them up to be repeats.  The final image is totally worth it though.  Enjoy!

Jacob lives (and by lives I mean blogs) by wordpress. It is quite easy for him to host it and edit it yada yada. Well, I, on the other hand, began my blogging adventures in the blogger-sphere. I can’t say I’m proud but it was just easier. But editing a theme was killer. Who seriously remembers HTML from their web-site building class in middle school? Other than my husband that is… Anyway, they just loaded a template editor which is very blogger-friendly even if you don’t know code. Lots of pretty colors and backgrounds and completely customizable. And I realized (as Jacob showed me) that CSS isn’t that difficult to edit in. So I learned a few bits and pieces of code and off I went. Like a madwoman.

I whipped up a quick background but Jacob demanded that I make a new header. “Anything is better than naked helvetica.” And so it is.  So I put up this header.  Go check it out at awkwardsheturtle.com.

Jacob put the finishing touch on by making me a favicon. I love my new blog!