Heidelberg

I'm working on a last Heidelberg postcard. We moved from Heidelberg to London, UK at the beginning of August. A new country, new home, new job / work circumstances is not always easy.

I've been working on a design for quite a long time. Usually I don't take this long with one design, but I want to get this one right and make it the way I see it in my head. Its a postcard from Heidelberg in that the design features the houses along the river in Neuenheim. Kind of like these postcards from last October. In fact, that's one of the photos I used as inspiration.

Here's a progress update, since it isn't finished yet, and since I haven't written here for so long. Not quite ready to move on to postcards from London I suppose?

I want to use the design for making fabric, but I also want to use the design in an upcoming spoonflower contest for tea towel calendars. So this evening I'm working on watercolour letters for the month's names. Here's June.

lemon tarts

In the midst of thesis madness (one week to go!) I entered this week's contest on spoonflower. The theme is citrus fruits and I decided to draw some lemon tarts. Yellow looks good with turquoise, so they're sitting on plates on a lace table cloth. Here's the design with two coordinates.

I love how the crocheted lace turned out. I've tried to use it in a design before, but this time the repeat worked better. My great aunt crocheted it as a table cloth. I used the table cloth to make this little plate.

Voting has started, so if you like lemony and limy designs, take a look.

noodle machine

I got a noodle machine for my birthday and tried it out today. Very fun!

baskets of berries

I had a bit of time last night to design, so I worked on an entry for this week's spoonflower contest with the theme farmer's market. I like the theme, it conjures up images of stacks of vegetables and flowers, sunlight and cheese and coffee (thats what the market close by is like). I decided to draw some little baskets of berries. I usually start with a pencil sketch, then draw the outlines with a pen, erase any pencil lines and take a picture. This is how it looks:

Then I trace the image in inkscape to make it into a vector image, and play with colour and placement. I've also recently starting painting bits of the image in gimp, to give it more texture. This is the final design:

update: you can see the other designs and vote here

noodles

I recently learned how to make noodles. It really is one of the simplest and fastest recipes!
1 egg, 1/2 cup flour = noodles for one person.

inkscape tutorial - put text on a path

This week's contest on spoonflower is birthday-themed wrapping paper. For my entry I used a design I made a few weeks ago but added the text happy birthday. I wanted the text to follow the lines of the vines and flower stems. This tutorial shows how to put text onto a path using inkscape.

1. Write your text, choose the font you want to use and size it so it will fit where you want it to go.

2. draw a path using the bezier curves tool, curving it to follow your line. I first drew the line in black,

3. and then made it invisible (unlike the clip function, with this function you still see the line after you put the text on the path, so if you don't want to see it, make it invisible). Then select the path and your text.

4. Text - Put on path

5. and your text curves to follow the path! If the text doesn't quite fit (it starts at the beginning of the path and gets cut off at the end) you can undo, resize and try again.

6. Basically thats all, but I wanted the text to take the place of the existing lines, so I had to remove the vine where the text was. For that I selected two nodes and clicked on "break path at selected nodes".

7. Then I could move those nodes, do the same at the other end, and delete that section of the vine.

8. The text fits perfectly!

Here's the finished design:

You can see the fabric here and vote in this week's contest (and see the other entries) here until Tuesday evening.

Sunday afternoon

I have a lot of projects simmering in my head that I want to share here. In fact, one of the projects has been spread all over the living room floor the last few days making me feel a bit antsy (I will clean it all up this evening!) But I want to rather share three pictures from right here and now. Sitting on the balcony in the evening sunlight with a big mug of milky tea, my embroidery and a book. It's a nice way to end a rather quiet weekend.

 

Here's a close up of the embroidery. Its a bit kitschy but I like it (others don't :-))

And a glance out across the trees and houses. Its nice to hear bits of activity around me, see people eating supper on their balcony, hear a ball bouncing somewhere and a neighbour listening to the radio.

I haven't planted anything yet this year. I want to buy some flowers this week. The purple ones I got from my neighbour yesterday as a thankyou for watering her plants. The strawberry is back in its fourth year and already has lots of little mini strawberries growing, I'm impressed! I think the rose is also four years old. This winter I didn't cover it but it seems fine. Not like my hydrangeas and lavender which all died. I was surprised to see a forget-me-not plant growing, it also survived the winter.