Month-long Food Challenge

For the month of June, I’m attempting to: eat less red meat (we typically eat meat almost every night; I’m going to try for no more than twice a week) buy organic food whenever possible, as a financial experiment We went shopping last night and started the challenge “early” by purchasing organic blueberries and milk [...]

Making Personalized CD Envelopes

Problem: Making a mix CD for a friend, don’t have any spare jewel cases or CD envelopes. Solution: Make my own artistic CD envelope! Read on to see how I combine Photoshop, photos, and a color printer for a “low cost” solution. (Low cost, that is, if you already have Photoshop.) Photoshop file download below!

Weekend fun: Cake Concert

My husband surprised me with an overnight trip to Reno to watch Cake at the Nugget casino. It was a smallish venue, and we got in line early and ended up standing four feet away from the stage with just one row of people in front of us. It was awesome! Cake’s music is fun [...]

Running out of room in the book box

I am picking up too many books from the library and not bringing enough back, so I may need to forgo my weekly library trip this week. Finished this week: Mommy Millionaire by Kim Lavine – The personal story, including many “tips and secrets” for starting your own business, creating your own product, and becoming [...]

Baby carriage baby shower invitation

I finished up the baby shower invitations: I purchased a vector illustration from istockphoto of baby carriages. Here’s what the original artwork looked like: Based on this graphic, we liked the bottom left blue/teal/lime color scheme. Liz, Queen of Decor, said that she had some napkins with a similar color scheme and brought one to [...]

Using Basecamp to organize a small event

I’ve mentioned in my baby shower planning post that I’m using Basecamp to help manage the baby shower details.  This is partly because there are six people helping to throw the party, and keeping track of email threads and other information can get unwieldy. Basecamp is free if you are only using it to manage [...]

A week worthy of a party!

Another positive weekly update! Running: Checked off 25-minute mini-milestone! Fruits/veggies: Completed this milestone by eating all my fruits/veggie servings this week, bringing me to 4 total for the month. Am doing pretty well at eating more veggies on other days of the week, too! (Although I think I canceled out any health benefits I may [...]

Using Envelope Distort in Illustrator for Fitting Words in Shapes

In my t-shirt design, I’m using Envelope Distort in Illustrator for tweaking the shape of the words. Envelope Distort is awesome for getting words to fit into weird shapes. There are a few ways you can use Envelope Distort in Illustrator CS2 — I’ll show you what I did for the t-shirt design. Then, I’l [...]

T-shirt Design Ideas

I’m working on a t-shirt design idea for my church’s annual Labor Day weekend campout. I threw together two rough ideas yesterday: The organizer(s) liked the second one better. I then worked on tweaking the design a bit more. Veerle’s recent tutorial on making cool abstract shapes using Transform Again in Illustrator came in handy. [...]

Harp audio clips

I’m still trying to work this thing out. Hopefully this will work! Recently recorded harp audio from 5/17 (if you listen carefully, you can tell where I have to turn pages!): Les Pifferari – I love, love, love this one! I’m playing it at about half the speed it should be played (and make a [...]