Category Archives: tools

Pixel Art & Book Club Books

  By Simone | February 9, 2009 - 8:59 am | , ,
4 Comments

Pixel Art

I just wanted to share our family’s newest obsession with you. Lately my daughter has become fascinated with pixel art. The idea is that you draw in a 100×100 pixel sized square to create these mini-pictures. She is using an old version of Photoshop, but there are quite a few free graphics programs out there one could use. You can find a list of them at about.com. On initial perusal I would probably try out paint.net. If anyone is using it, let me know what you think.

Book Club

As to the book club, we have a tie between Sew Darn Cute and Re-Creative. Since we had two sewing books in a row, I’ve decided that we’ll discuss Re-Creative: 50 Projects for Turning Found Items Into Contemporary Design, Steve Dodds on March 25th to be followed by Sew Darn Cute–30 Sweet & Simple Projects to Sew & Embellish, by Jenny Ryan on May 6th.

TAD Swap

If you’ve been on the fence about joining the TAD swap, tomorrow, 2/10, is the last day to sign up.

Boy, that was a lot of housekeeping.

Tweet, Tweet, Plurk

  By Simone | January 20, 2009 - 1:50 pm | , , ,
1 Comment

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year is to push my store and make it more profitable. To learn more about marketing methods, I’ve been lurking in the Etsy business forum where I followed several discussions about Twitter. Twitter is another social networking scheme. Once you’re set up, you can send out 140 character messages to anyone who is signed up on your Follower list. You in turn select other people to follow and you can read their messages. You receive these messages on the web via your Twitter account, and you can also get them as text messages on your phone. Each message is called a tweet. From a marketing perspective this is considered useful because you can let your followers know when you put new things in your shop, have giveaways, and so forth, and just generally spread the word.

I had signed up for Twitter last year, but didn’t really know what to do with it. So last week I started twittering for real. I followed a few people from Etsy, loaded up my address book and found a few more people I could follow, and then I added the NY Times to my twitter list. To become a professional Twitterer I activated my phone link.

Here is Day 1

Mommy
Yeah
It’s Twitter, can I read it?
Okay
It says:”Going to lunch.”
That’s nice.
Mommy, it’s Twitter again.
Mommy, it says the U.S. crashed into the river.
Mommy, how can the U.S. crash into the river?
Let me see that.
Mommy, your phone is ringing again, is it Twitter?

On Day 2 I sorted out some of the Twitterers who graciously informed me every hour of a new item they had in their store.
On Day 3 I changed the settings on my account to only tweet from 8 am to 8 pm.
On Day 4 I figured out how to use my phone to turn twitter on and off.

Today I feel fairly comfortable with my new “friend.” Once a day I will tweet about a tutorial I found on the web. A few times a week I’ll let people know that I’ve posted a new blog entry either here or as a guest blogger. And every once in a while I’ll announce a store promotion. Sometimes it just comes over me and I will have to share something profound like “Second Grade is hard;”  a sentiment caused by my daughter’s convoluted homework instructions.

In turn, I’ ve found some interesting twitterers to follow like Fave Crafts and plaincraft that introduce me to other crafters and new projects. So, if you choose to follow me on Twitter click here.

“What about Plurk,” you ask. Same idea, different interface, more dialog, no phone from what I can tell, but you can visit me here.

How To — Use Artopik to make Perler/Hama Bead Designs

  By Simone | November 13, 2008 - 11:20 am | ,
9 Comments

After all this bead surfing, I had to figure out how to make my own templates. While I found lots of examples of Mario, Pikachu, and Kirby sprite bead reincarnations all over the place, I couldn’t find a step-by-step tutorial of how to get these images onto a grid template that I could just put under my pegboard and follow. Then I remembered Artopik, some freeware for cross-stitch embroidery I had reviewed a few weeks ago and it all fell into place.

Step 1: Find your image

A sprite is a 2D rendition of one of those figures you find in video games, like Mario or Pikachu. I searched for “pikachu sprite” in Google and found the Pokemon Database site. Here I picked Pikachu from a list of pokemon and saved the image to my desktop.

Step 2: Resize your image–Photoshop

I opened Pikachu in Photoshop and discovered that this image was 80 by 80 pixels small.

Since my pegboard has roughly forty pegs, I resized the image to 40 by 40 pixels and saved it as a jpeg.

Step 3: Import the Image into Artopik

Next I opened Artopik and imported the smaller image into the program (Embroidery -> Import)

Step 4: Print the Image

And that was pretty much it. I selected print and set the grid to 5mm.

Changed the grid colors to make them more obvious and printed it.

Step 5: Start Laying out the Beads. . .

The Artoptik grid ended up not matching the pegboard exactly, but it was close enough to follow fairly easily. If your board isn’t clear or you want the beads to match your template exactly, you can always count out the colors just like a cross-stitch pattern.

And here is Pikachu in its bead incarnation.

For a list of fusible bead related resources check out my previous post Nerdy? Retro? Just Plain Fun.

P.S. The previous Artopik link is now here http://www.old.rksoft.sk/download.htm