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!

Jacob has so many ideas! I love it when I can help put one in action with a little logo. One of his recent creations is a word unscrambler. It, well, unscrambles words.  Perfect for those newspaper puzzles or other word games.  I decided a fun logo could involve using common word games like crosswords or boggle.

The finished product came from a lot of back and forth between Jacob and me about details and colors and fonts.  But it is so much fun being able to focus on something like this.  Entire webpages intimidate me because of all the different aspects and things that could go wrong.  Logos are fun and can have so much personality in such a small area.

My sister-in-law has a fashion blog. Jacob has been helping her out by hosting it and fixing her bugs. This month she asked me to help redesign her logo. I’ve been helping Jacob out with some simple logos, nothing that’ll knock any socks off but creations that give a bit more uniqueness to a website that a simple text title. So he suggested that she ask me for some help.

Her original logo:

She like the background so I worked with it and just updated the look. I think this fits perfectly into her so posh style and it was really great to go back and forth with different ideas and get a customer’s feedback.

Now it is Jacob’s job to match the all the links and stuff to my design. I’m just so happy my first customer was pleased 😀 woot.

Jacob and one of his coworkers were talking about how they thought superman was “allergic” to kryptonite like some people are allergic to peanuts. He came home rambling about it and then would bust out all through dinner, while cowering dramatically, “OoOooooh nooooOo, peanuts!!!” So then we joked around about how Mr. Peanut would be that poor allergic person’s nemisis.
For your veiwing pleasure, we created that monstrous Dr. Peanut, enemy to allergic people everywhere, maybe even our own Superman-equivalent on some ant planet or something.

The Cracked Dr. Peanut

For our last lesson as CTR 5 teachers at our current ward Jacob and I taught lesson 14 out of the CTR A book: Dare to Choose the Right.  I thought it would be fun to make a little coloring page for the kids with a CTR shield on it.  But I struggled finding a decent image to use.  I did find one image that seemed sufficient and traced it in inkscape.  I love the bitmap trace tool in inkscape, vectors always look so good compared to pixelated images.

This is a really good image to color, and I can resize it to be a whole page large or just a little icon.

Great for Coloring

However, I decided that it wasn’t really true to the style I grew up with and decided to make my own, inspired by my CTR ring.

Choose the Right

I can’t help but feel this one is so much more genuine.  What do you think?

I’m graduating from college in one week!!!  Woot.  I sent out my announcements a few weeks ago and began to receive gifts soon thereafter, double woot.  I also celebrated my twenty first birthday on Friday.  My sister and her fiancé gave me my wish of a tablet.  TRIPLE WOOOOOT!  This perfect storm of amazingness required an entire Sunday devoted to creating the perfect thank you card.  So here is a tribute to W&M with the added bonus of having created it using my new toy, ahem, tablet.   (I just hope my family appreciates my fine handiwork, haha).

Wren-Inspired Thank You Note