Fish Eye Squares

A twist on an old classic. This week's freebie features a traditional pattern - moire-like dots that get larger nearer to the center. A centuries old trick to fool the eye into seeing patterns of light and dark based on how close together and how large the dots are. This flavor however, uses squares rather than dots. Enjoy!

FES

Garden Plot

Mother's Day, May Day, and spring officially arriving. That's what's on my mind at the moment. Also, so much for my goal of posting once a week. It turns out that it's closer to twice a month or so. It just takes up a lot more time than I thought it would, and I have less and less of that lately. So, as I've got other things taking higher priority for the time being, I'm scaling my goal down to posting 2 times a month. Means I need to get back on the horse again next week.

Meanwhile, I hope you all enjoy the new header. In keeping with scaling back, I've updated the DS theme to something that will last longer than a month - spring! My garden volunteered 6 garlic bulbs, several parsnips, and (weird) a couple patches of leaf lettuce. Can't wait to go shopping with my mom for seedlings for this year's veggie garden! With that on the top of my brain, I have whipped out a little doodle for you. Hope you like it, let me know in the comments!

Descending V's

Today's freebie looks very simplistic, so I thought I'd give an example of a blog design to show how this one can shine. Sometimes simple is better. I think you have a lot more options and freedom of choice with a simple design. So without further ado...

Art Deco

Well, some health issues have kept me from my goal of (at least) once a week posting. So, to make up for lost time, I've decided to post several Art Deco designs I've finished. I'm not terribly crazy about Art Deco in general, but these ones pass the muster. At least for me. Hopefully, I'll be back to posting regularly after this.

Concentric Circles

A cool optical illusion inspired freebie is here this week. Concentric circles! I like this one so much I mocked up a totally cool new theme for my website, but haven't committed to switching over to it yet. Bees, my favorite! The pink is awfully feminine, but fitting for the month of February I guess. Take a peek and let me know what you think!

Ana's Cross Stitch

All right, this one isn't mine, but I helped, so I'm putting it up here anyway. My daughter has recently joined Girl Scouts. The other day, she begged, whined, and wheedled her way into this project. She wanted to do some 'stitching'. Does this have anything to do with joining Girl Scouts? Maybe not, but I'm sure she can get a badge or something for it. Anyway, she knows paper is my medium, my motto being 'I hate sewing!' That doesn't mean I never do it; on the contrary, I keep trying to get into it, but not finishing what I start. So when I dug into my fabric project chest, I was able to find this cute counted cross stitch kit. She loves this project to pieces, but has set it aside for the moment. (A lot like her mom? I swear I didn't do it!)

What she has done so far she completed in 2 days. With some help from mom. I thread the needle, I tie the knots (yes I know, I showed her how to sew the ends of the thread under, but we felt knots were going to be easier). I help her counting, and show how to read the pattern. So she gets lots of support, but it's still mostly her making x's - mom does the rest. :P Still, she's proud of what she's done, and I am too!

Nick's Birthday Invites

This year we're getting the invites out late. Oh well. I had Nick design his own card, and after he had the idea all mocked up, I did it up in Illustrator on the trusty Mac here. He did a really good job I think, and only needed couple pointers. So I made him make the letters all capital (capitol?) but otherwise, he had very clear idea how to make the letters, and the rest was pretty easy. Love it when a 'client' knows what they want - no guessing! Anyway, I thought I'd share the finished product, and if you like it let me know in the comments.
So printing this didn't go exactly as planned. :( I burnt it off to disk, but left the files in AI (native Illustrator) format instead of a PDF. We have a color printer, but I have learned the hard way that printing color in any sort of quantity (these cards are 2 up, front and back, and we needed 26 finished pieces) is fairly expensive because of the ink. So I decided to take my disk to the public library and print it out there - which I have done very successfully in the past. So... I after getting out of bum mode (shower, shave, dressed, etc.) I run some errands and then go to the library media center, which has been relocated to the mall ever since The Flood Of 2008. However, it turns out that I have a hefty fine from a book that I lost, and I can't even log in. So I go up to the counter to take care of that, and after waiting behind some clueless Lutherans for 10 minutes or so, I get up there and pay for my book, then go back to the media center. Whereupon I discover what I have on my disk is a bunch of AI files. Fortunately for me, the library uses Adobe Reader 9.x, so it has no trouble opening up my files. But then I find out they only have one printer. GRRR! It's black n white. They tell me to try FedEx/Kinkos just down the way a bit. So after another errand in between that's where I go. Just the one manager guy there, but he's very nice. I ask him if they can work with AI files I have, he says yep, printing in color on cardstock is close to $2.50... PER SIDE. That is so not doable. Regular paper it's still $1.xx per side. So he suggests printing b/w on colored cardstock. That was $0.40 or so. So I pick out red paper (Nick's fav color) and he was nice enough to give me a proof copy before doing up the rest of them - my gigantic run of 12 more copies. So even though it wasn't exactly what we wanted, it turned out pretty well. And got some nice colored paper which wouldn't have been possible at the library. Ended up costing about 4 bucks. Used their gigantor paper cutter (free) to cut em all up while I was there too. They turned out really well for not being designed for b/w, and the manager guy I think liked them too. We chatted just a little, told him my son came up with idea for the alphabet. He was very personable, but I think he was just lonely all by himself there, not polished customer service kind of thing. Anyway, got them off to school, and they're all delivered, so now we're just waiting for the calls.

Alternating Lines Zigzag

So this week's freebie is a little later than I would have liked, but here it is, one of my more favorites, though I do like them all. This one also was inspired by a Dover book. I might wish for more creativity to come up with these all on my own, but everybody needs a starting point, and those Dover people make some of the best stuff ever.

Alternating Lines

Today's freebie is a simple optical illusion design I created from inspiration in a Dover book. It's quite simple, and was easy to create in Illustrator, my creation tool of choice. Check back next week, I will be posting more designs later on.