KParker Design

Wow, it’s been too long.  I got sidetracked with other stuff and had some small web design projects that needed to get done.  I got them knocked out in no time this morning though.

For Greyhounds Galore, I got their newest newsletter added to their website.  It’s sent to me in Word format, so I convert it to a .pdf and upload it to their site.

Savannah Freightliner Sterling has monthly parts specials that they like to advertise on their website, but the tri-fold brochure they mail out is too big and has stuff they don’t need on the website.  I take their .pdf brochure and crop it down using Microsoft Publisher.  I can save it as a 2 page flier with the relevant sections and re-save it as a .pdf.  They have a company called TruckPaper that hosts their website, so I email the final product to my contact up at TruckPaper and they get it inserted into the actual website.

Last, but definitely not least, Linda Sanchez, our Realtor when we lived in Savannah (and my very first web design client) had some pictures that she needed added to a property listing on her website.

Fun way to get a morning started!

Brodie went and spent a couple of weeks with my parents in June 2006.  While he was there, he got to play t-ball with his new buddy Coach Danny.  He was barely 3 and it was a league for 5 and 6yr olds, but he really held his own!

I had a hard time focusing today and wasn’t really “into” it, so I’m not very happy with what I came up with.  I hate it when that happens!  Shouldn’t scrap when you’re in a bad mood apparently!

Next I need to work on 2007 t-ball.  I have all of the small versions of the files but for some reason, I have lost the large versions.  Luckily, we have an external hard drive that I back everything up to, so the pictures SHOULD be on there…..

Speaking of, it’s a good time for me to back my stuff up now, I think it’s been since last October.  Yikes!

As mentioned yesterday, here are the pictures of my red, white and blue fireworks beads and the earrings I threw together in about 5 minutes.  I absolutely LOVE how the beads turned out.  I love the colors.  I used red and white as they came out of the package.  For the blue, I tried using the blue pearl, but it was a little too light, so I mixed in some of a darker blue.  The pearl in there is why you can see the pearliness in the pictures.  The purple is a mix of the red, white and blue that I had left over and from the ends of the cane.  I like the purple, but think a nice DARK blue might have looked better.

If you are thinking about doing a spliced cane, Spliced Cane Tutorial is a great tutorial.  What Iearned is that I think the skinner blend rolls should be different.  One should be rolled from light to dark and the other should be rolled from dark to light.  Since it’s the center of the canes that are all touching, it gives it a really nice contrast.  So, in my fireworks cane, for example, I rolled one with the white on the inside and one with the white on the outside.  I also think the canes look cool if you place the triangles so that the lightest color is on the inside - makes more of an explosion, flower, snowflake look.  I think this would be gorgeous with sliver, navy and light blue or even maybe a teal color for some snowflakes.  Red and green would make nice poinsettias.  *I* personally like the color striations in the beads so I leave my skinner blend relatively thick.  If you want a smoother gradient, you will have to roll your skinner blend sheet as thin as possible.

Without any further fuss, here are the final results:

I hope you enjoy the pictures and keep en eye out on my Etsy site because I’ll be making jewelry out of these and my other new beads shortly.  I also might offer some of my beads for sale just as they are because I have a LOT of them and don’t think I could possibly make jewelry out of ALL of them!

A day late and a dollar short, I guess but isn’t that how it goes sometimes?!  I got the coolest idea, and thought that the new spliced can I’ve been working on would make some really cool fireworks beads - in red, white and blue for the 4th.  Of course, I didn’t even START on them til this morning.  Got them done and I am SO happy with them!  I made some other tube beads from the scraps and ends and whipped up a pair of earrings (and a ton of other beads for earrings and necklaces).

We’re late, on our way up to Sanford, NC for the 4th festivities up there.

Happy 4th of July everyone!

PS - I will take pictures and post them when we get home!

I finished the sig items for my geocaching!  I used Sculpey III polymer clay.  the color in this picture is a bit off.  I had a lot of fun with these and will definitely be making some more.  Maybe I’ll work on getting my username into them, but I think that will take quite a bit more practice!

I used up all of Brodie’s orange clay the other day, so I let him get another pack at the store yesterday.  He chose silver.  I am going to see if play doh will go through the pasta maker without gunking it up too much b/c we have a ton of play doh and I don’t really want to be spending $2 a pack of clay for Brodie every time I get some!

I have done a few different digital scrapbooking projects so far and LOVE the format.  I use JASC (now Corel) Paint Shop Pro XI.  I have been tempted to switch over to Photoshop Elements, but I am very familiar with PSP and it just works well for what I do.  The only hitch is that it is SLOW and very cumbersome on my computer (not that I know if PSE would even be any better!).  But it works.

Last year, Brodie started really playing sports.  Spring 2007, he played t-ball and soccer through the YMCA back in Savannah.  I can’t remember where I got the idea, but I thought it would be a neat idea to have a scrapbook of JUST sports pages.  I think the original idea was to have a different album for each sport, but Brodie’s got such a wide range of interests that I didn’t want to have 10 different one page albums so I am just doing one album for each kid.

I actually completed these layouts a week or so ago, but was hoping to have more to upload before I posted them.  However, it’s been a week or so and I haven’t gotten back to it, so here’s what I’ve got so far:

I need to do pages for 2007 t-ball (Memphis and Savannah) and now 2008 t-ball.  I am glad to be starting this project early rather than having to play catch up in a few years (I am just starting Mason’s baby book!).

Yes, yet another hobby. …and like all the others, my mom is to blame for this one, too! One time when she was visiting, we went to the store because she wanted to pick up some clay to show me some projects from a class she had taken. I thought it sounded like fun and so I got a few blocks as well. I was hooked. Temporarily, til I set the bag aside and forgot all about it.

In addition to random arts and crafts, I also love geocaching.  One of the threads on the geocaching forums was about handmade signature items, and what different people were using.  There were some wooden nickels, geocoins, clay coins, pressed pennies and MANY other fantastic sig items.   Then, I stumbled on some amazing polymer clay tokens and thought “Hey, I can do that!”  Yeah right :P  They were GOOD.

In any case, I was hooked again.  I dug out my polymer clay bag and went to work.  I have a couple of books with some basic techniques and I also found a great compilation of tutorials at beadyeyedbrat.com.  I knew that I wanted something that reflected a little bit about me, and where I am.  I decided the perfect thing would be a pine tree!  I was going to do a pine tree in a white background surrounded by stripes from a banner cane made of the geocaching colors.

One of the problems I’ve always had is not getting my canes to come out right, and my first attempt at this pine tree cane was a disaster.  I was thinking about it some more, reading up on it some more and realized I was starting off too small.  By the time I made the cane, it was too small to reduce any.  I solved this by #1, using more clay and #2, making the cane shorter and thicker than I had been previously.  I found a Christmas tree shaped cookie cutter I had in my bag (on sale for $.50 at Michael’s if I recall) and realized it would be perfect.  So I took that and rolled out some clay and made the cut.  I did this a few times and stacked my pine trees up til the stack was about 1″ tall.  I filled in the white and then added the banner cane strips. I reduced the cane down and for once I was pleasantly surprised that what I had tried had actually worked!

My other favorite new cane that I learned how to make is the Spliced Cane, which is super easy yet looks very difficult and complicated.  The first one I attempted turned out well, in spite of my poor triangle making skills.  The second attempt ended up having to be scrapped.  My triangle was much better, but the colors didn’t have enough contrast and there wasn’t any real definition in the shapes.

Now I have blown through about 10 packs of Sculpey III and am innundated with beads!  I am going to make some into my geocacahing sig items (keychains/zipper pulls with a Shrinky Dinks tag that has TFTC, parker313).  I think I might also look on Etsy and see if there would be a market for selling some of the beads and of course I’ll also make some earrings and bracelets.

Here are some pictures of what I made over the past couple of days:

As a plus, Brodie, my 5yr old, was happy to sit with me for LONG stretches of time and roll and re-roll and re-roll his pack of clay that I got for him (orange, of course).  I also got a pack for Mason, the 3yr old (yellow, of course) but the clay was too stiff for him to work.  I got out the play doh and he was very happy to sit with Brodie and me.  Brodie LOVED rolling his clay through the pasta maker and adding in scraps of clay that I was done with to watch the new colors it made.  We appropriated the dining room table for a couple of days and had a blast.  Unfortunately, I am not out of clay, so we need to go to Michael’s again

Oh, I am so happy with how the birthstone bracelet turned out!!! I just love it. I’d never used Swarovski crystals before and they are SO pretty. The light just reflects off of them so well. I liked it so much, I turned around and made a bracelet for myself as well, only I didn’t have any more alphabet beads, so I just used more of the pewter beads. I was on a roll, so I got a couple of pairs of earrings made, including a pair made out of the March and June crystals to match my pretty new bracelet.

Amy’s Bracelet:

My new bracelet:

Matching Earrings

This is a bracelet I made as a custom order for a friend. The beads and clasp are pewter and the crystals are Swarovski - Aquamarine and Garnet for March and June. I am posting this here so she can see if she likes the layout or would like to request some changes. Hi Amy!

I am HOME. I had a wonderful time in Memphis with my parents. I am HOOKED on glass fusing. Oh great, another project!!! “Luckily”, even the table top kilns are out of my price range, so my dear husband is spared my bringing another hobby into the house! However, the torch projects look interesting too…then I’d just need a blowtorch.

Anyway. Right before I left, we finally got my different projects out of their final firings in the kiln.

Beads:

What I learned from making the beads is that you really do have to fill the molds to full. It felt like I was wasting the glass to fill the molds all the way up. The problem that I ran into is that when glass is in its regular form, it causes air pockets between the different pieces. As the glass fused together, there were no more air pockets and in a couple of instances, the resulting glass wasn’t even enough to fill the bottom of the mold. Also, there didn’t seem to be quite enough kiln wash on the mold and I had a couple of beads get kinda stuck. Overall, I’m very happy with my first project. I am currently trying to decide if they are good enough to make “real” jewelry out of. They don’t have bead holes, so they would have to be wire wrapped or used as cabochons. What I think would be really cool is to use colored glass on the bottom, topped with clear glass which would result in a cool domed look. My favorites are the clear/orange/brown square beads. Instead of buying frit, my mom just saves all of the scraps, even the tiny shards, from her other projects. Hey, a hobby where every TINY piece is useful and not trash? Man, this is right up her alley!

Flag Windchime:

I am pretty happy with how this turned out. My mom had some windchime project sheets that I thought looked cool, but was looking for something that was simple, yet still took advantage of actually FUSING the glass together. So, instead of just using the solid blue background, I used 3 different colors - the top left is actually iridescent black. On the stripes, the base red did have cool striations in it, but it doesn’t show on the final piece. For the white stripes, the brown slashes were in the actual glass. I laid clear iridescent glass on top, but you can barely see it at all. I also didn’t pay attention to the width of the stripes, so now I am going to have to be creative with the final assembly…

I love this thing! I decided to see what would happen with a square piece of glass in a round slumping bowl. I measured the diameter of the bowl and made a square paper template with that as the diagonal. That worked very well. The slumping bowl had an inch wide lip on it, so my intent was for the corners of the glass to hang there and then the rest slump down in. Worked just like I hoped. For the glass design, this was my very first project to even lay out, so I had NO idea what would work well. I tried just laying out chips of pieces in my mom’s scrap bins. I am happy with how this turned out as well Looks like the requisite ashtray (Everyone in my college ceramics class seemed to make an ashtray as their first “real” piece)