Yep, still here. PL printables for Easter

<sigh> so busy.  In addition to completely re-painting the kitchen table and chairs, I have:

• sanded and varnished two end tables, a library table and a coffee table for the living room
• hung about 30 pictures in various places around the house (not all very well LOL!)
• hung and hemmed curtains in the living room (why can I only get ones that are too short, or 16 inches too long??)
• hung curtains in the master bedroom and my office
• made curtains and replaced blinds in hubby’s office
• made curtains for both upstairs bathrooms
• painted and decorated the dire downstairs loo – a stop gap as it really needs tearing down and rebuilding, including adding a sink and a heater and insulating
• cleaned and painted a particularly filthy bit of ceiling outside the kitchen
• painted the kitchen and the chimney
• redecorated the bathroom (including painting cheap furniture to look better)
• moved my sewing room so I could…
• …sort out the guest room

and about 100 other small jobs. Hence my absence from here for so long.

We are working on a small cyber-crop over on UKScrappers for National Scrapbooking day, which is a much needed creative task to balance out the hard work of getting the house in shape for three different sets of visitors over the next couple of months (including DS and his GF – very excited about that!) and the in-laws (also excited about THAT – MIL and I are going to dye sock yarn with KoolAid!)

BUT while waiting on the phone for something or another, I made this set of printables for Project Life – or regular scrapbooking, if you prefer, but in the 3×4 size. I had a plan to make some calendars but not had the time.

Anyway, here they are for download:

 

Pretty basic but cute, I think.  Hope you find them useful, and I will be back with a calendar or two at some point (2018, for sure!)

an iMac project, from the computer graveyard….

DD rolls her eyes and tells me how silly it is that I am such a fan of The Walking Dead.  Well this could be seen as a zombie, in that is has risen from the graveyard of old Apple stuff we hang on to for far too long.  We only just sold the NeXT we had in storage!

This project, one that the hubby has been keen to do for a long time, finally came to fruition.  We got back the shell of the old Dalmatian spot iMac on Friday and by Saturday night we had it done.  We had considered a ton of options but hubby’s concept of a standing lamp won out over my idea of a tabletop lamp stuffed with bulbs.  It isn’t set in stone YET, but as proof of concept, it works.

Obviously there are no guts inside, so I had to figure out a way to “display” something on a sort of screen.  Rummaging around in my scraproom, I found some vellum.  Both a very firm cardstock weight sheet, and a pad of thinner weight. Perfect.

Thinking back to my trusty folded corners technique (see how to make those at the link) gave me the idea for easily swapping out the images.  PS the lamp is level, it’s my photo that isn’t LOL!

 

And the ever-useful Washi tape allowed me to attach the “screen” temporarily. You can barely see it but those white blobs at the back and in the front centre?  Thermomorph!

 

The basic construction is a tripod lamp from Homebase.  The centre of the lampshade was cut away and attached to the bulb holder as normal, with the arms bent up to cradle the iMac.  The Thermomorph both covers the cut end of the shade frame and makes the arms cup the case without fear of scratches.

The case is wired to the lamp shade frame with white Artistic Wire (remember that stuff??) and the centre of the case is full of string lights from IKEA.  Oddly, we just bought these for £10 and now I can only seem to find strings for £29!  That is a huge jump in price.  Glad we got two sets.

We played around with ideas for the image – Hubby’s uncle was on the team that worked on the development of the mouse, so we thought he might be a good choice, but hi-res photos are not easy to find. This one is from the Stanford Mouse site:

Maybe a photo montage using the smaller images? We also thought old Mac desktops might be fun, and found some, the MacPaint image above, and this one, also showing the swap out using the photo corners:

And I found a couple of more colourful images we quite like too:

This one highlights the work still to be done, hiding the cord and cables.

Another thought.  Hubby’s brother does amazing art, using a method he developed and software he wrote to convert photographic data into typographical symbols.  Very cool stuff, and you can see more here.

If it was printed on vellum that might be a neat idea too.  The point is, with the corners in place, we can change the screen image whenever we like.

Now, that was fun, but there is painting and tiling to get on with.  <sigh>