Baseball Ticket Transformed

Like most designers, I collect digital images for references. I have hundreds (thousands?) and they keep me inspired and motivated, and give me ideas when my creative well has run dry.

This baseball ticket is another example of a great original image, a thing of vintage beauty.

My version is below. I call it A Ticket to Life.

Quilt Label Sighting - Modern Yardage Meets Modern Patchwork

Quilting is alive and well, a great hobby and timeless art form. 

 Modern Patchwork magazine keeps quilters up to date on what's new and classic, and has an ardent following of quilters, DIY-ers and sewing enthusiasts.

I was happy, then, to see Modern Yardage quilt labels were featured in a Hot Picks review in Modern Patchwork magazine.

One of the labels shown is mine, the one with the little birds in the lower left.

See it here at Modern Yardage.

And below.

Halloween Sewing Projects: Trick-or-Treat Bag and Bunting

I'm posting this again, because there's still time!!!

Halloween Trick-or-Treating is just around the corner, so get busy!

Buy the panel here: Trick-or-Treat Bag Panel

Download the complete-with-photos instructions here: Bag Instructions

Here's what you'll end up with! It's a great size, pretty much the dimensions of a plastic grocery bag.

And you can also make a Halloween bunting with my Spookalicious fabric collection.

Colorization = Fun for Tracy

All that clipping! All those paths!

But, yeah, I love the process, the HOURS it takes.

Some people play video games. Others work crossword puzzles.

Me? I pick apart a black and white image and colorize it.

Of course, I have to add my patterns to the mix.

And then make a collage out of the results in the form of a postcard-style greeting card.

Vintage Image Birthday Card

My last post showed my before and after of lady from a fashion plate that's in the public domain.

I spent a weekend turning her and a few others into birthday cards.

Again, I have used my own patterns for the dresses, backgrounds and upholstery, and used a secret recipe to rough it all up.

This is what I'm doing with my life.

Old Vintage Fashion Plates

For recreation, I design all kinds of things just for fun, knowing they likely will never be a product.

I recently came across some fashion plates from the early 1900's that were fairly high res, AND in the public domain, I downloaded several dozens of them. (You never know when they might figure into a design project.)

But, they also fed right into my ongoing search to find things to apply my repeating patterns to. So, I opened a fashion plate in Photoshop, extracted the black outline, copy and pasted it into Ai, and used Live Trace on it. Live Trace almost always needs quite a bit of cleanup to get rid of its distinctive weirdness, and this time was no exception.

But when I was done, I filled in all the negative spaces, and viola! 

Here are two samples of the 5 I did, showing the before and after.

The Research is In!

Just for fun ...