2024 Doily Calendar- 3×4 cards and Onesheet

Here is your heads up – 2024 is a LEAP YEAR. I meant to mention it when I posted the first one, but forgot.

I have been beavering away on my calendars, making little adjustments that I hope will be useful. I am trying to focus on the calendars that I know people want and not wasting a lot of time making…speculative ones that may or may NOT be embraced. I have already done the most popular, the Pretty Circle CD one (find it for free here) and am now adding the next most popular, the Doily calendar. This time I am adding both the 3×4 cards and the onesheet in a single post.

Hard to see in the small sample size, but I did add this is a leap year just under the 2024 on the onesheet. Nice that it ends up centered over February, the month effected!

The onesheet version is here

The 3×4 card version is here

I have also been beavering away on my ICADs. I’ve done the four between 1 June and today. Here is the first one, which I kinda envision as a “cover,” if you will.

Mixed success on that one. I wanted to go back to the neurographic art but incorporate the words, like I did here:

The index card is a LOT smaller than that piece, and I used a thicker Micron pen so the curved areas were tricky to keep small. AND the paper of the index cards is crappy, so the watercolour markers did not perform as well as they do on watercolour paper. Imagine that…. DOH! I got annoyed and then lazy and I think there is just too much pink. I might go over the pink in the circle maybe with orange and see if I can alter it. Maybe.

I will share the rest of them tomorrow as there is a bit to say about each one and I don’t want the posts to be massive. I expect I will catch up at some point soon, where I am sharing the previous day’s cards. I do like these sorts of challenges and am getting better at sticking to them. I always seem to add in an additional layer for myself and in this case, just not buying anything especially for the challenge, and trying to:

• revisit techniques I have not done in ages
• use products I own but have been underutilized

I am not insisting this apply to every card, just that it should be the overarching theme of it all for me.

Seems like it got long anyway.

Watch for the DIY calendar coming soon. I made a small improvement that I think those who love that decorate-it-yourself one will like!

First 2024 Calendar – the Pretty CD one

Ah, this might be my oldest calendar, the first one I made and still the one I get asked for so often. People use it to make gifts and there have been some lovely examples over the years. Sadly, most of them have been deleted, because I am always trying to claw back some space. I’ll be ruthlessly culling the 2000s (other than 2024) pretty darn soon so if you want them, better grab them while you can!

I quite like the font combo on this set. Pretty but not too OTT and readable. I try to never let the pretty part overshadow the readable part!

Perhaps slightly larger numbers this time? Here is a peek back at some of the previous ones:

Anyway, I am sharing this over on Ko-fi, where I am placing most of my downloads, but as this is really text only the PDF is not huge (like some of the ones that include graphics) so I will add it here too, just for ease of downloading.

Grab the 2024 Pretty CD Calendar here!

PS I have purchased some (flimsy!) index cards so hoping to have a go at the ICAD project, which I have admired from afar for many years, Sadly 1 June is a packed day so I might end up focusing on the first few on the weekend and hope to settle in to a regular daily session after that. Wish me luck, as anyone who reads here regularly knows how crap I am at making and sticking to a plan….

LOL!

WRMK Envelope Board Measurements, for us old folk…and the strangest book.

I have spoken to a few people, both IRL or email and via comments on my previous post about how mine literally self-destructed after only 20 or so envelopes, and what seems to unite us all is that the stupidest decision that they ever made was the choice of colours for the writing on the board. I mean jeez. What were they thinking?

I mean, ok, it’s blurry cause I tried to enlarge it a bit, but FFS. I who’s world is that white writing on blue legible? No one over about 50 I suspect! So yeah, I hunted around the internet looking for a more legible version of this to no avail. Seems like maybe some of the boards (I think mostly the larger one?) have better printing on them, and back in … I think it was 2013, you could order a replacement sticker because there was a typo in the originals. That link no longer works. I still need to super-glue mine together to try to extend its life (Thank you Lyn(Spyder) for your experiences with this) but in the meantime I also took the image online and altered it to make it way more readable.

I have the small one, so the chart is for that only. Maybe it will be helpful for someone else? I hope so!

Now, just for a bit of fun. I stumbled on this really odd little book. It really intrigued me. It is by Marina Abramović, a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Her work explores body art, endurance art, feminist art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. The book is called 100 Letters and she describes it like this:

Since I was very young, until my early thirties, I had serious problems in opening and reading any letters
I received. Letters would stay on my table for weeks before I found the courage to open them, and during this time my sense of guilt would grow and grow.…

When finished, I was astonished to see how it was possible to trace all my life just by reading the text created by all these first lines.

I love that last bit – I wonder if first lines of 100 emails would be anywhere near as telling, even if you deleted all the spam first…

Everything is fine now. We have heard from you and that is quite enough.

Well,
Send me an empty envelope with your address.

Who are you to give orders to me ?

and, perhaps strangest of all:

Respected Comrade,
We kindly ask you to make it possible for us to re-record your birds for our needs.

Huh?
😀

Online “shops” – musings

I have mentioned in the past that my Darling (Disabled) Daughter is very keen on having an online shop. She loves doing digital art, and watches loads of “passive income” videos on YouTube. Watches loads of influencers who make and sell stickers. I have been testing out places other than Etsy to see what’s what, with an idea to let her add some of her stuff. I just read so much about Etsy and some of their questionable decisions that hurt their sellers so I am just not sure if pursuing that is worth doing.

I have a Creative Fabrica … can you call it a shop? Honestly, they seem to actively discourage out-right purchases of items but encourage subscriptions. Their payment scheme is … complex. Too complex to sum up. I have 37 items in there as of today and many have been downloaded 10+ times. I don’t think there is even one that has never been downloaded. And I have “earned” the princely sum of about $18. LOL!

Of course *I* think the stuff is lovely. This is a recent one, foldable journal signatures built on vintage sheet music

CF is mostly for digital resources of printables, so not sure that will work for her. Likewise Ko-fi. Or Buy me a Coffee, or any like that. It is a handy way for people to donate (especially if, like me, certainly for the first 10+ years of my blogging life, you always just give stuff away) to say thanks. Over the years, people have always asked “Where can I send you a Thank You?” and I’ve never had that. Now I do. Got a single donation from the person who suggested it to me. Very kind of her. I have mostly been using it as a place to house large files for download where I used to add the here directly. But now I am running out of room so offloading stuff there seems better than Dropbox because I can add bigger files, offer things for sale, and show larger images of the details. I am testing out if I can add the images here by calling them from my post there. Another space saving attempt!

Looks like that works! With an eye on that, I really should be better about adding all the stuff from Creative Fabrica on Ko-Fi also. It’s a better place to call them to display here than CF is. I can keep the blog photos (and stored media) only to process shots and really save space! I’ve been hovering at 2.2mb of 3mb total for a year, but it won’t last.

So yeah, dithering a bit about stuff behind the scenes.

I really love playing with all the public domain images. A enjoy the amount of stuff I am learning, but at some point I gotta wonder if it is worth it if it is just me at my desk, spending countless hours cleaning up crappy images and turning them into something really nifty (in my eyes LOL!) and no one using them.

We are almost halfway thru the year too, so that means starting to make the 2024 versions of my calendars! I will be expecting the comments and emails to dribble in asking when I will be posting the Pretty Circle one, the DIY 3×4 ones, the Doily ones…those are the most popular and always need updating. As 2024 does not match any year I can reuse (well, 1996 when I wasn’t making calendars and 2052) so it is starting from scratch. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when I share them off my blog.

blah, blah, blah. Whine, whinge, and moan. Well, not really. More like a core dump of all the stuff that rattles around in my head as a way to clear some space. I’ll probably carry on as I have been until DD pushes harder. ATM she is super busy. She writes an article for Blackmore Vale each month, she volunteers at a charity shop, she attends a day center three days a week, has a whole host of projects and SkillShare classes she is taking on UX design, Procreate and Figma (and more!) plus works as a volunteer at a local disability social group, and of course ice skates on a Sunday a 2 hour drive away at the only UK disability Ice Skating group SPICE. She rarely has time to loll about, so until she schedules time to actually push for this, I will go on collecting info.

I forgot to add these!

Silly me. I forgot to add the link to these sweet freebies.

I thought they were adorable, and hunted everywhere for other similar ones that I could use to create a kit from. In the end there were none in a similar enough style or in as good quality, so I just created a single printable sheet (although it comes in both A4 and US Letter format AND as both a .JPG and a .PNG sheet) to add for free.

How did I morph into a cat person? They do get a hold of you don’t they, those sweet little fur babies (as Darling Daughter likes to call them!)

I toyed with the idea of removing the thread and the advertising, but I actually preferred them with that in place. I suppose you could add a little flower to hide it or a small label or the like, or even trim them (if you don’t mind losing a bit of the tail) and I would love you to share how you use these, if you do.

A sweet little folder

I have been really in to my folders and little hiding places for journals recently. This one is really simple but quite cute.

Really doesn’t look like much, does it? But after cutting and scoring the few fold lines and sticking the pocket in place

you make a closure from the two small cut lines

If you have a strong corner rounder for the bottom (which has the thickness of the pocket as well) you can soften the whole thing by rounding all the sharp angles and stick it in your journal to hold tags or anything like that.

I think they turned out quite sweet.

Now I am all anxious for the WOYWW anniversary tomorrow. I had thught to mail some out in advance, but then I thought what if I drop one in the post and it ends up being to my “special” swap partner, who should really get a bit of a special mailing?

Poo. I will have to mail on Thursday then, I guess.

{sigh}

Working on a fun journal addition…

…or is it? I get these ideas, spend far too much time working on them, then in the end I sometimes totally abandon them if I think they were not really so great. I am on the fence about this one.

These little foldable structures are meant to get added to a journal. Lots of uses, I think. I like to create a small stack of lined or grid papers then make that into a small booklet.

It kinda hides the pretty butterfly, although I only stick the booklet at the top edge, so you can flip it up to see that if you care to. Fold it all back into a closed square and…

I have a kit al ready to go, with four different printable squares, four backing papers to coordinate, and four coordinating grid papers. and yet I hesitate.

Thoughts?

To be fair I might just go ahead and add them, cause they are cute, and really, I feel like someone will like them. But then I thought that about the pretty Lichen-dye swatch ones and they are still totally unloved. OK, well one WOYWW friend did say she liked them but still, no one adores them like I do. I am just waiting for the old set to get removed so I can add the new ones. Sneaky peek, anyone?

A sweet little birdie freebie…

I was working on a set of journal cards, based on an old library check-out card, but trimmed with digital lace. Not sure when it will appear on Creative Fabrica, but when it does it will be here. Here is a preview:

Editing the original file took a bit of time, and it was interesting – not sure what I did or why it affected the file, but Inpainting simple did not work on some of the lines. I had to go back to the clone stamp, which felt slow and cumbersome by comparison. Anyway, another thing I was working on at the same time, swapping mentally between them, because I could not decide which one to focus on, was a set with tiny little birdies. They came from one of the printer’s sample books, from a sheet like this:

all those tiny little sweet images! Anyway, I was working on them and as the images are mostly transparent (due to previous editing, not from the original!) I found I needed to edit the lines on the cards in order to make them look right. I am sure you will have seen these exact little guys before, as stamps or printed on papers. Public domain so free for anyone (who can find them) to use them!

I was struggling with what to bundle them with, but I realized it has been a while since I added a freebie. I mean, for CF subscribers, all the stuff I have been adding is technically free, but for my blog readers it’s different. I am still hovering on the edge of being out of space, so I will add the actual download on Ko-fi here. Also still not worked out how best to add stuff there, and link it here so both the blog post and the download are live simultaneously! So if you go there and it is not live, just go back and it will be later in the day. I’ll pop them in to Creative Fabrica as a freebie as well.

I think they are very cute and I like that there are lines – my writing goes super wonky if I am not concentrating super hard as I write LOL! I like the 5 x 3.5 size, fits even fairly small journals, and the colour is quite vintage-y.

An interesting point. I felt like I could position the birds so it looked like they were sitting on one of the lines, but when I did, it looked more like they were floating. Leaving the existing line (wire?) hovering just over the line on the cards really makes it look like they are sitting on something. Optical illusion? Don’t know, but I know what I like…and I hope you like them too!

Why are blend modes such a challenge?

IS it blend modes, tho’, or is it my indecision??

I have been working on a set pf journal signature printable pages that will work nicely with a previous design,and when it came to the final edging, I spent far too much time working thru the long list of blend modes and struggling to identify which one I liked best. Some of them are so close, you can barely pick between them, and some are really different but still appealing in some way. I tried to work out the best way to capture them and this is what I came up with.

So Negation and Add (at least on my monitors) look very similar. There is also not a ton of difference between Pin Light and Hard Light (and that I find to be true for most things, but not all)while Difference is much more on the grey scale and Colour-dodge much more on the brown. Linear Light is warmer and Glow is more … beige? Arrgghh! I mean, how do you decide? and as I probably too casually mentioned, this is MY monitors, with it’s own colour sync and settings. I wonder what it looks like on your monitors?

I feel like I have narrowed it down to Linear Light, Glow, and Add. To be fair, some of that decision is based on the bits of the piece you can’t see, cause I’m not done with the set yet. In fact, even now I think I am mentally discarding Glow. I feel like Add ties in nicely with the already blended damask colour-wise, while Linear Light offers a bit of warmth, which could easily be amped up with some inked edges in a darker sepia tone. Although maybe the warmth is the problem cause the background is cooler maybe?

Arrgghh!

I will share a page, as I am confident I will have finished and added the set before this publishes. I love it, overall, and think it will work so well with the other colour-wheel set. So much so I may have to make a journal with it myself.

It happened again!

{sigh} Times change, and what was once ok sometimes is not ok anymore. Sometimes it’s more of a perception thing, and sure as anything, if there is offense to be taken, someone will be offended. Why leave yourself open to that sort of thing if you don’t have to, right?

What is she on about? you wonder. well. I was looking at some old kids books, Primers and Readers, and the like, looking for something to make into cards. I found a book that had some kinda cute alphabet pages, that I thought could be made into something cute. I liked the fact that the letters were all associate with name – A is for Albert (which was my Grandfather’s name) B is for Bertha, etc etc. They were all kinda old fashioned names, but some of them are making a comeback (maybe not Zerlina, but…) so they could have been fun. Two of them stood out. Gave me pause.

OK so Q is a queer looking boy isn’t inherently bad, just an old-fashioned use of the word. In fact in the olden times they would never have used it the way some people do today – some who embrace it, some who use it as a slur. It could have easily been Quincy a boy in the snow, right?

And saying X is a cross little daughter kinda peeved me. Why couldn’t it have been a cross little son? The X could have been a cross little cat FFS. I have one so I know! LOL! I guess the point is the both of them just felt like not what I wanted to make. Not sure my skills are up to editing the text in a seamless way IYKWIM. I moved on.

And of course, further hunting produced something that ended up being a lot better!

I ended up making these into two useful items. The 3×4 cards are made from the book pages, which have a 4-patch of letters in a block. The sheet above is each of the letters carefully extracted as a small 1.25×1.75 inch block. I think they are super cure and very useful indeed. The small blocks could be mounted on a scallop-edged block to make a kind of postage stamp or layered in a cluster. They are charming and old-fashioned and vintage without being unrelentingly brown. The original book was made from linen so there is a bit of the fabric texture in the images. All in all a better choice, right?

I may not give up on the whole book, yet, as there are some bits in it that might be worth working on. Not sure. And there are 100s of other Primers/Readers thru the ages that might end up being better choices. Even looking at a few, the colourful ones from the alphabet set are definitely the exception. B&W is the norm, so I should have plenty of choices!

I need to be looking towards my June journal too, so I might have to drag out the old gel plate and do a PMAS colour challenge sometime soon…