Pinterest – A Smith of All Trades

Umbrella shower light fixture

May 1, 2013 Jessica Smith

My coworker Rachel gets married a month from today, and yesterday we threw her a surprise bridal shower at work. I was in charge of gifts. I also had to make an umbrella light to tie in with the shower theme. My other coworker found the idea on Pinterest and showed us at a secret shower planning meeting. Another coworker even had the busted umbrella.

I’m embarrassed to admit that even though I’ve been blogging for more than a year now and totally know how this whole before and after thing works, I TOTALLY forgot to take a picture of just the light. I was too excited about the surprising.

Anyway, to make your own umbrella light, you need an umbrella. And lights.

Carefully remove all of the fabric from your umbrella so it’s naked and rather dangerous-looking.

Spray paint the heck out of your umbrella. I went with white because my lights had a white cord.

Let your umbrella dry and touch up any spots that didn’t get adequate coverage. Be careful because those spokes can be dangerous!

Next, wrap your umbrella with lights however you please! You can see the light hanging from the ceiling in the upper right corner of the photo.

And again, in the middle of the photo.

I think it would look even cuter in a rustic sort of setting and not a stuff conference room.

Rachel loves chocolate, so we had a ton of chocolate goodies: Fondue, brownies, mousse…. we even had Dana (Little King’s Confections) make a chocolate cake with strawberry filling. How pretty?!

Rachel was DEFINITELY surprised — especially since she thought she was wayyyyy late for a staff meeting.

Rookie move not getting a picture of the light by itself, but here’s another photo of the light, the cake and the bride-to-be.

Congrats, Rachel! Glad we were able to totally surprise you 🙂

Graphic Design

Stand Tall printable

November 2, 2012November 2, 2012 Jessica Smith

I love to play around with the Adobe Creative Suite because every time I do I learn something new. For this printable, I was inspired by a tattoo I saw on Pinterest. Here are screenshots of the project as I went along.

I like to start any project with words or a quote by simply adding my text to the page and fooling around with different fonts until I find one that is just right. You’ll probably notice two different fonts between these first few images and my final image — I exed out of my original design and lost everything I had done so far so I had to start for square one again. Whoops.

After the text is on the page, I start manipulating it, sometimes adding different parts of the words into different text boxes altogether. For example, the “s” in “stand” is in its own text box, while “tand” is in another. This allows you to maneuver your text exactly how you want it. Since I wanted the “S” lower and in a larger font, it was easier to create a new text box for it than to leave it with the rest of the word. In that same vein, each letter in “tall” has its own text box.

After I squeezed, stretched, angled, shrunk, etc. my letters, I started adding the rest of the picture. I used the pencil tool and the smoothing tool to add these lines.

Notice the switched fonts? It worked out for the best I think.

With the InDesign portion of my printable done, I grabbed the vector image I created and dropped it into Photoshop.

On many different layers, I tinted the background, added the paintbrush texture, added giraffe spots and added the grass border. I had to play around with the opacity of each layer, but once I messed around with it enough I think I got it just right.

What do you think of the final product?

Craft Projects, Quick and Easy Crafts

Clothespin Candles

October 4, 2012October 4, 2012 Jessica Smith

Pinterest is amazing, huh? I see some of the cutest stuff on Pinterest and I love when I get around to trying my own version of these creative ideas. One idea I’ve been wanting to try is making a candle holder out of a tuna can and clothespins…. except I think using a tuna can is sort of icky. Don’t get me wrong, I love tuna — but I think I would forever convince myself my candle would smell like fish, so that is a no go.

I made a project out of a mason jar that I haven’t shared with you quite yet ( it needs one last thing that I can’t seem to find anywhere!), but because of that project I had an extra lid lying around. Perfect!