Bathroom by Kate

Here's a fun idea--kids' drawings turned into vinyl!

Kate drew this shark back in July (from the Ed Emberly animal book, though his version is rather more elongated). I thought it was just wonderful and got the idea of having it made into a vinyl wall sticker for the bathroom.

I converted it to vectors using Adobe Illustrator's live trace feature (which does not require any actual knowledge of vectors and really only minimal knowledge of Illustrator). I emailed the file to Scribble It, along with my flourish, and got it cut in navy blue vinyl.

I did have a little trouble with bits not wanting to un-stick from the backing and stay on the wall, but I found it helped to pull the paper back at a really sharp angle.

I was really pleased with how it turned out, so I thought the shark should have some company.

When Kate drew the shark, she also drew this whale. At first I wasn't sure if I could use it, since she also drew a snake playing in the spray. (Kate's snakes often have legs. I'm not sure why.)

I was successful in removing the snake.

Later I got her to draw these other fish for me. This took some patience, as she's not always in a mood to take requests. (I ended up not using the one on the side.)

I converted them to vectors and flipped the one fish so it was facing the other direction.

Scribble It is quick! I emailed the files and had them on the wall within a week.

The whale is over the towel rack on the opposite wall. (These were the best pictures I could get, with cramped quarters and bathroom lighting.)

It's so fun to go into the bathroom and see Kate's fish on the wall. They're so cute and expressive. (It's the eyebrows--don't you think?)

Update: we've been featured on One Pretty Thing. How cool is that?

Veni, Vidi, Vector... Vinyl!

Back when I was designing laser-cut frames for Griff's Shortcuts, I got really good at working with vector graphics in Corel Draw. Vectors are quite a different animal from bitmap graphics, and very cool.



So now I'm trying to learn Adobe Illustrator. It's a real workhorse, but coming from Corel Draw, I'm not finding it particularly intuitive. I know it'll do everything that the other program did and much more (the version we got was a bit outdated even then), but figuring out how it does it can be a puzzle. I have managed to create a few things, with a lot of futzing around and using the Help function. The most frustrating thing is that I'm so used to zooming in and out with the scroll wheel on my mouse, in Photoshop, but in Illustrator the scroll wheel makes the image scroll side to side. Ack! You can use it to zoom, but you have to hold down the alt/option key at the same time. I suppose one can get used to this, but I don't understand why it's different in the first place. You'd think something so basic would be the same across the Creative Suite. Fortunately it does work on my graphics tablet, zooming with the touch strip.

I really need to just take some time and concentrate on Illustrator for a while, until my fingers know what they're doing without having to look things up all the time. Maybe after Christmas. (I'd like to learn to knit, too, more than a basic rectangle, but I don't see that happening any time soon.)

The coolest thing about vectors is that you can use them in conjunction with things like laser cutters and vinyl cutters. This is a little flourish that I made and got cut in vinyl. I looked at a lot of designs online and ended up making my own--I wanted something kind of loose and doodle-y. (I love those smooth tapering lines. You can set up the brushes in Illustrator to do that automatically. It is so cool.)

Emily Kate, who made my Korean proverb, isn't doing vinyl anymore, so I sent the Illustrator file to Scribble It and they cut it for me. I got two, and the plan is to put them up flanking the three-photos-in-a-row of Kate and Andy over my computer desk (which I still don't have--the photos, that is--though my new monitor came on Wednesday, so I guess I should get to work on those).

Some day I'd like to have a house I can paint. For now, vinyl is a fun alternative. Stay tuned to see what I did in the bathroom!

Wall Words

We still don't have everything unpacked and put away, but our kitchen window is now sporting this extra accent. I got these vinyl wall words from Emily Kate Designs (Edit: looks like she's not doing vinyl anymore). It was very quick and not expensive, and easy to apply, and fun! It's a Korean proverb that I loosely translate as "Before we climb the mountain, let's eat first." I've kind of adopted it as my food motto. When my blood sugar gets low I get cranky (and sometimes downright irrational and hostile) so in order to keep on top of things I really have to plan and start cooking before I get hungry. It's taken a long time to learn (and still doesn't always work out right). This was a particular problem when I was serving as a missionary in Korea, and things were often busy and pretty stressful, but by learning to plan ahead I was able to keep meltdowns to a minimum. And of course, it helped that I like Korean food, too!

The woven straw scoops are from Korea, too. I'm not exactly sure what they're for. In my last area I was serving in Sunchon and a lady came to the door selling them. My companion, Sister Kim Su Gyoung, bought them for me. She said they had something to do with the date, and I think she even said they should be hung up in the kitchen. (I'll have to find someone who actually knows, to tell me more about them.) I've been carrying these scoops around with me for almost 14 years, and I figured it was time to finally do something with them.

Despite all my artistic interests I've rarely done much in the way of decorating. Whether it seemed like too much work, or I wanted to but just never got around to it, or the places we were renting just seemed too small and utilitarian, I can't say. But it's been kind of fun dressing up our kitchen window. Now when I'm in there cooking I can enjoy our pretty white curtains and my Korean motto, and remember to eat before I go climbing any mountains.