Saturday, October 4, 2008

Wordle and Spoonflower


Here I am again. Still Saturday. I can't tell you how fascinated I am by all the ideas I have found on blogs! One thing leads to another and you can go from one blog to another blog to another and easily get lost. Well, I found this great idea at this last blog. 

Have you ever heard of Wordle? I played around with it in August and had a lot of fun. I showed it to a former colleague who wanted me to make a poster for her for an upcoming school event. Time passed and I forgot about Wordle till now.

Enough suspense already. Go to this web site and play around... Wordle. I suggest you leave out unnecessary words to arrive at the best looking design. Words like... and, to, the, but, etc. If this kind of fascinates you, read the directions they provide which will show you how to change fonts, colors, direction, and more. 

When I was happy with one of my 'designs', I took a screen shot of it to save it to my hard drive. Mac users can hit the Shift-command-4 keys to select the area they want to include in the screen shot, or, you can hit Shift-command-3 to obtain a shot of your entire screen. PC users: you have a key on your keyboard that says Screen or something like that. 

So, on with the cool idea I came across. This pillow image comes from jcaroline. Check out what she has to say about using a Wordle design to create cool things. Her blog is really interesting and she has an online shop that has decorator and other fabrics and goods. I am still discovering all that she has on her various sites.

In order to get a usable Wordle image you will capture your favorite design online and then print it out on fabric sheets using your inkjet printer. I can see lots of possibilities for this. If you make a Wordle project, will you take a photo and send it to me? I would love to see all the creative ideas people could come up with. 

Spoonflower: I mentioned it in the title for this blog. This is an amazing new fabric design group that offers all of us the opportunity to have our designs printed on fabric, and not by a home style inkjet printer. Go to their site and read what they are all about. They are still developing the process and are in beta testing thus far. 

Today's sports news... Notre Dame won handily and now I am watching the Dodgers wipe out the Cubbies. As a big sports fan, I am in heaven. USC took care of Oregon, avenging themselves after their loss last week to Oregon State and last year to Oregon. I'll have to check on UCLA and see how they are doing. Not a big year for them thus far.


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