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.  

A t-shirt for my Star Wars fan

My son has Constitutional Growth Delay.  It's not a syndrome.  It's not a disease.  It's basically what we used to just call being a late bloomer.  He grows more slowly than the average kid his age,  but for my son it's a bit on the extreme size.  He looks like a nine year old but he's actually 12.  Needless to say, he gets twitted about his size a lot.  A lot.  Older girls squeal and say things like "he's so cute!" but the boys tease and no one takes him seriously.  It's hard being 4'10" when your best friend is 5'8".

So one of his heroes is Yoda.  Of course.  Yoda is awesome and the fact that he's small makes no difference whatsoever.  He also has some awesome things to say about size.

Matt designed the shirt himself.  He chose the quote and I helped him work out the design.  We had a lot of fun with it.  And he loves it!

He was so excited to wear it to school today.

The design itself was so easy to do.  First I found a picture of Yoda on Google image.  I used this one because it gave me a great silhouette of Yoda and the extreme ears really worked for me. I imported the JPG into my Silhouette software.  Then I traced the image and chose for it to just trace the outer edge.   That was the shape of my letters.  Then I used pretty much the same technique as you would to make a circle monogram.   I stretched and shaped the letters to fill the shape and then used the crop tool.   It's a really fun technique to use and it would work for just about any shape.  I can't wait to use it for other quotes.

I'm really happy with this project and Matt has already come up with another design for me to do.

Our very own Weeping Angel

My daughter got married on Saturday.  We did just about everything ourselves and yes, that's where I've been for four months.  I've done a lot of crafts but I haven't had time to post any of them.   

One of my favorites was a spontaneous thing.  My husband and I were looking around a local thrift store for things to use as table decor for the wedding when I happened upon this lady:  

Isn't she just horrifically tacky?  That Iron Man-esque outfit, the vines picked out in green, she's just crazy.  But she's also perfect for a weeping angel.  See how her hands are posed and her head is tilted down like she's just barely uncovered her eyes?  Scary.  

So I bargained the thrift store lady down to $15 and brought her home.  We turned her into this:

The paint job was pretty easy.  We started with a flat spray primer in medium gray.  Then I painted her all over in a light gray acrylic paint.  Using a dry brushing technique, I added shadow and weathering with a deep charcoal grey mixed with a bit of chocolate brown.  It's pretty easy; you just want to lightly load the brush and then brush some paint off on a scrap of paper.  Then lightly brush the paint in the creases.   I paid special attention to all the places where rain would drip down and turn the stone darker.  I think her eyes could have used more attention, so I may go back and fix that later.  

The flecks of paint were added by dipping an old tooth brush in cream and chocolate brown and charcoal and then flicking my fingers over the brush.  It got a bit heavy with the white, but the tiny flecks really give it a stone look.

It may have been easier to just buy a can of stone finish spray paint, but I prefer the custom, varied appearance of the hand painted look.

She's one of my very favorite things we did for the wedding.  She stood guard next to the gifts and not one was stolen all night.  I think I may have heard of a guest that disappeared unexpectedly, though . . . .

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.)  

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.