More Vinyl than any one wall should have

A couple of months ago, right in the middle of my busiest month substituting, my husband asked me if I would be willing to do some vinyl work for his bosses.   They were putting in a second office and wanted an inspirational quote wall.   Not just a couple of quotes, but as many as I could fit on the wall.

This is what I ended up with:

The final design is approximately 11'x6' with ten different quotes.  I used Oracle 358 because the wall is textured and I wanted to be sure it would stay.

Hanging a wall like this is a huge undertaking and I learned a lot doing it.  If I could go back, I probably would do a few things differently.  Things like I pieced more than I had to because I was worried about making sure the quotes were spaced properly.  I would try harder to not piece in the middle of words.  Some of those black boxes are in three pieces and took some clean up time with an Xacto knife to get them looking like they should.  I might even have gone to full outdoor rated vinyl as well.   Textured walls just don't like vinyl.   It's hard to get it to stick.

 The design was a challenge, but I'm very happy with how that came out.  I looked for inspiration for quote walls on the internet but just about everything is plaques or only has one or two quotes on it.   There just wasn't anything like this out there.  I could have used more quotes, but I wanted the letters to be large and have a big impact.   The boss said to "use lots of fonts" which is customer speak for "make it interesting, please."  You might notice there's only two fonts here, Playball and Potterybarn.  I added visual interest with the black word boxes.  Playball was a dream to work with.  Loved it.  Potterybarn looks great and paired beautifully with Playball but those serifs drove me nuts.

I enjoyed this job.  It was a challenge to do the physical work, but I loved best getting to exercise my creative muscles.  I love working with fonts.  It's amazing what beautiful things you can make just with text.   Words are lovely, aren't they?

Family Rules--Geek Style

Yeah.  I don't do cute, overly sentimental sayings.  It's not my style and it's also not my style to have my wall say things everyone else's wall says.

What I do enjoy doing is making sure our home reflects us as a family.   We are a geek family.  We love Douglas Adams and Tolkien.  We spend way too much time playing Minecraft and Zelda and lots of other video games.  We do not choose between Star Trek and Star Wars.   We are a dual Star loving family.   Agents of SHIELD is appointment television here for everyone.  And if we have a couple of hours of time on a Sunday, we may just be playing board games.   

So I made a sign that is all us.  I had the the kids help me come up with the rules so it reflected everybody.  I love it, even though it was the biggest pain to make.  The vinyl didn't cut cleanly.  The board warped.  The stupid clear contact paper stuck too well to the vinyl when I tried to transfer.  It was a mess.  Honestly, I should toss it and start over, but after spending hours on a project that should have taken me 30 minutes tops, it's a victory just to have it done.  So enjoy, wonky letters and badly made font and all.  

Then make your own Family Rules.  What does your family love?  Sports?  TV? Movies? Books?  Board Games?  Make your rules about you.   Have fun, and I hope your vinyl cuts properly and your transfer sheets work right.  Also, the font Episode I is badly kerned.  Skip it even if your family loves Star Wars.  

Geeky Christmas T-shirts For All!

Well, all of us except my husband and myself.

This year for the home made gifts for the kids, I did t-shirts.  I've been having a lot of fun cutting heat transfer vinyl on my cutting machine.  It cuts beautifully and I can make those specialty geek Ts that sell for so much in the online stores.    This year we have two Doctor Who t-shirts (the girls on the end who are my biggest Doctor Who fans. Oldest girl's shirt says "Souffle girl" with a Dalek;)  a Batman t-shirt that says "Because I'm Batman and I can say stuff like that."; a Ravenclaw T for my Potterhead; and two Star Trek/Japanese Ts.

The Batman shirt is a phrase that our 12 year old says all the time.   It's his own catch phrase he just made up because he thought it sounded cool.  More than half the time he uses a gruff movie Batman voice.  It cracks me up.

The Japanese Kanji shirts are supposed to be "live long and prosper."  The shirt in red reads correctly from right to left.  The one in black I did first and then remembered that Japanese reads from the other direction.  oops.  Good thing the boy with the right T is the one that is actually learning Japanese.   (He's our oldest girl's boyfriend.  They were friends in high school and both went to the same college.  They started dating this fall.)

I also sewed four of the five pj's pictured here.  I didn't make the Batman fleece ones.  The others are mine.

I kept things easy on myself this year.  I had visions of great projects and super gifts, but halfway through the month I realized that I was working way too much to be able to follow thorough.  I scaled back and I'm so glad I did.  I was stressed, but I only had one bad emotional day.  Letting go of the big dreams and doing less was absolutely the right decision this year.

I hope you all had a Merry Christmas.  We were able to find some great deals and everyone ended up happy.  That's always a good thing.

We Live In a TARDIS

So things have been crazy this fall.  I've been doing crafty stuff, but of course, not posting any of it.  I did want to get this up though:

My kids are crazy Doctor Who fans and none more so than our oldest.  As one of her Christmas presents we decorated it to look like the door of the TARDIS.  To say she was happy with the change is a bit of an understatement.  She was speechless.  :)  

Here's a full on picture of the door:

The blue is paint and the rest is vinyl cut on my Cameo.   I layered the black and white to get the lettering.  It would have been easier to do the smaller white sign if I had printable vinyl, and as you can see we don't have a completely updated TARDIS because we are missing the St. John's sticker.  I couldn't get a good trace on it for a cut.  If you wanted to do one yourself, I would recommend the printable vinyl for that.  

When researching for mine I found a lot of people with interior TARDIS doors.  Most were awesome painted doors and a few did the vinyl like mine.  There are a lot of really creative Doctor Who fans out there.  Love it.  

We have gotten some great comments about it already.   One student at school asked me "what's up with your door?"  He thought it was cool once I showed him pictures of the TARDIS on my tablet.  Most of the comments have been from people who know the show and of course, they like it too.  

The thing the kids love about it is it fits so well with our house.  Our home is 60 years old and was originally only 800 sq ft.   Before we bought the place a 1400 square foot addition was added to the back.  You can't see the addition from the street, so most people who see our house for the first time just see a tiny post war bungalow when they first pull up.  However, when you open the front door you can see all the way to the back of the addition and down the stairs to the basement family room.  We often get comments very similar to "it's bigger on the inside!" 

(Yes, the exterior of my home is rough.  So far our remodeling money had been put into the interior sections where we live every day.  The exterior is on our list and will be done as soon as we can.  I know it's ugly, so try not to comment on that.  There isn't anything I can do about it right now, unless you'd like to finance the $20k siding project.  Thanks.)  

Quick Vinyl Project--Guitar Fret Markers

Got a kid learning guitar?  You might try this:

My husband gave a guitar lesson to our youngest son's best friend this evening.  The boy was brand new to the instrument and his guitar did not have fret markers on the edge of the neck.  A five minute session with my Cameo fixed that little difficulty for him in a way that would not permanently mark the guitar.

The numbers are Ahoroni font and I believe that one comes with the program.  They are about 1/4" tall.  I was surprised how well the Cameo cut numbers that small, but it was super quick and they came out great.  It took just a couple minutes to apply and a quick hit with a warm blow drier and a credit card will get them off quickly and cleanly when the boy learns his chords.

Teenager Tshirt

I've been hard at work with Prom Dress 2013, but there comes a point where you can only do so much sewing.  There are also those moments where you have to rip out all the seams on the muslin so I could create a new pattern from it.  And then cut it out. 

It's moments like that that get me looking for a new project.  I try to keep the new projects just a quick break so I can get back to the big project.  This week I made a shirt for my oldest son.  I used fabric paint and contact paper as a mask.

It was pretty easy to work with, but I do wish I had done it with black iron on transfer rather than the paint.  I found the paint a bit messy and I had a few spots where the paint bled under the contact paper.   Joshua loves it though and he says his friends did too.

I'm enjoying the t-shirt projects.  They are super quick and easy.  We've got a few more ideas for t-shirts.  The kids are loving coming up with their own ideas and have a whole list of projects for me.

Just one more . . . .

I know.  They are just so easy to make.  I've wanted this one over our bed for a year now, though, so I'm too excited to not show it off.  The phrase is my own.

Cameo fun times

So I've spent quite a bit of time playing with my Cameo, but I promise this blog isn't going to become all Cameo all the time.  I did want to show off the present I made for my husband, though.   I cut a 12x24 rectangle out of 1/4" plywood.  Personally, if I had to do it over again, I'd use either 3/8" or 1/2".  The 1/4" is inexpensive, but it just doesn't quite have the heft of the thicker sheets.  1/4" is what my husband brought me home for another project and 1/4" is what I had leftover in the lumber pile.  (What?  You don't have a lumber pile?)

Anyway, for a couple of years now I've been telling my sweetie "You're my favorite."  He often teases me and says "Favorite what?"  So I made him an answer:

Not bad for a budget Valentine's Day gift, huh?  I think he's going to love it.  And just so we don't embarrass any unsuspecting, naive family members, this will be hanging in our bedroom.  Unsuspecting, naive family members shouldn't be looking in there anyway.

In other vinyl news, I needed a wedding present recently for one of our former babysitters.  (I can't believe how old I'm getting.  When I met this girl she wasn't even old enough to babysit yet and now she's married. sigh.)  I totally forgot about it and had to run out at the last minute to pick something up.  I found this picture frame and it was just calling for some custom vinyl.  I wanted something simple and unique without going overboard.  I thought using the infinity symbol was the perfect custom touch without being all cutesy.  BTW, I haven't the slightest clue where to find an infinity symbol, so I just turned an italicized number 8 on it's side and stretched the dimensions until I liked it.  Easy.

So that's part of what I've been up to.  I've also been doing some sewing.  I'll show off that soon, including my daughter's 25 cent skirt.

What does a geek family do with a Cameo?

This!

That's a Rebel Alliance flag (Star Wars) made with heat transfer cut on my Cameo machine.  I used the SVG file I  found on Wikipedia.  (A quick Google image search brings up lots of options if that one is not your cup of tea.) I did lengthen the black stripes a bit and enlarge the entire image to fit how I wanted it to look on my husband's shirt.  My whole family is clamoring for one of their own, but daddy gets the first one, because he bought me the new toy for Christmas.  Now I need to order more black heat transfer vinyl so I can do everyone else's.  

I have really enjoyed my Cameo.  My favorite part has been converting files from my Dover Pictura books I bought many years ago when I designed scrapbook paper.  (Just one line from a very small company. But it was really fun while it lasted.)  I have several books and many of them have files that convert beautifully to cut files.  I still need to work on print and cut  and sketch files for a few others.  It's the main reason I wanted a Cameo:  freedom to design for myself.  Love that so much. 

I've done other stuff that I've been wanting to post, but I'm really thinking through this whole blogging thing.  What I want from it.  How I want to do it.  What is it's purpose, etc.  I may write a long, thoughtful post or I may just jump back in posting when I can and let you figure out what I decided.  Depends on whether I can make my thoughts interesting.