I've been up to all sorts of shenanigans here lately.

Today my hubby took the kids for the morning; he walked to the grocery store with them and made dinner (don't be player hatin' ladies hehehe) while I....

...re-wired the light fixture, power cord, and disconnected the knee bar and wired in a new foot pedal on my Singer 66-16. (My phone died before I could take pics of the new cord and pedal. You'll have to believe me on this one for now until I can get a card reader for my camera up and running...)

pretty proud of myself for heat shrink wrapping a whole wack o' wires!

I got the light re-attached:

.... and put a light-bulb back in and plugged her in and BAM! We have light.

No fire. No shock. No sparks.

BOO YA.

>>insert a crazy-woman happy dance here<<

The Gorilla Glue seems to be holding the broken pieces of the socket base on the light well. For now. But I'll still be really gentle with it. If it breaks on me I'll have to think more about replacing the piece with an after-market replacement.

Now I'm working up the courage to start soldering new wires into the old motor:
... there is one wire that is completely bare (far right in the picture) and the wire that does still have sheathing on it is crumbling.

More on this soon. Wish me luck.

I didn't even really think about it, but my husband was laughing over dinner tonight about our gender role reversals. Him taking the kids grocery shopping, then making dinner, me, busy re-wiring and doing electrical work.

So. No "pink" (girl) or "blue" (boy) jobs in our house. Just purple. :)

Tomorrow it's back to him being the breadwinner and me the stay at home mom.

A nice balance, me thinks.

Hi all, welcome back to the Beautify your Blog series here at Sew at Home Mummy.

This week we'll be going over some more advanced ways to create a pretty blog header - specifically, using Microsoft Publisher and digital scrapbooking or clipart images. If you don't own a Microsoft Suite with Publisher included, you *can* do this with Word and/or PowerPoint. I do not own WordPerfect myself, but, I am almost certain you can use that as well. If you have and are familiar with Photoshop or Illustrator this post may have some inspiration for you, too. If you don't own any of the above, it's still worth reading through this for the learning experience. If you're just coming across this series for the first time today, please see  Week 1: this post for the series disclosure and the first few lessons  Week 2: Backgrounds and Layouts Week 3: Beautiful Blog Headers PART 1 Each of these lessons build on the previous week's. In the first lesson I suggested you create a test blog - at the end of the series we'll copy the template you have built and created over to your 'real' blog. If you're participating in this series, I'd love for you to post a button on your site or blog about it, but neither is mandatory :) here's a button if you'd like: <div align="center"> <a href="http://www.sewathomemummy.com" title="Sew at Home Mummy" target="_blank"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiblCqFhLqZ_UIdCCUiH3IM3FsRbNIlEhv62MDKyTDhHZH14vOUZVL4cO4DiTg_SeTfr6hQFzJdsbZyElHcBaE_N65wi_15YU1GW1MshdGMeKQjYFIahjm9ZN5FAGuugzNqBdDyPRaMamBi/s1600/Beautify+Your+Blog+Button+Sew+at+Home+Mummy1.jpg" alt="Sew at Home Mummy" style="border:none;" /></a></div> Now. Let's get started! Because we're building on what you've learned on weeks prior, I'm going to condense the tutorials a bit with respect to images (as you can imagine, they're quite time consuming to add to each post :) ) A Word on Digital Clip Art/Scrapbooking Elements I just want to stress that when you're using these images and elements you're abiding by the author's/artist's copyright or use limitations therein. If you have a commercial or business based blog, I highly suggest you either obtain permission from the creator or pay for the commercial use download, even if a free one is available. You don't want to run into any legal issues. If there's a watermark or stamp across the image you want to use, you're going to have to pay for it when you download it - again, you don't want to run into any issues. 1.0 Downloading Fun Scrapbook Elements & Images There are several scrapbooking or digital image hosting sites which offer free (or very inexpensive) borders, embellishments, and clip art (simple pictures and symbols) for download.  Here are a couple which I really like: Starflower Studio MissTina.com My Memories Best Free Scrapbooks I use My Memories and Starflower the most. They have a tonne of free elements and page backgrounds which you can use to jazz up your blog, create blog buttons, and use as background wallpaper. You'll have to create a free account on some of these free sites, but, it's worth it. When you download these files, they come as individual pictures which you can move around on your header, like stickers. 1.1) So I found a nice graphic that I'd like to use, so I go ahead and download this from MissTina.com {this page} saving it to my Desktop   - once file is downloaded, you may need to 'unzip' it.      - Right click on file on Desktop. Select "Unzip" or "Extract Files"        (will vary depending on type of Unzip program you're running). 1.2) Open your editing program of choice (I'll be using Publisher), and create a new document. in the top menu, select:   -  Insert      - Image (or Picture)        - From File ...and select your image from the downloaded, unzipped folder. Now it's time to create some magic. Remember: last week we discussed that you'll want your header about 3 times as long as it is tall - so long and skinny.  1.3) Create an autoshape in the shape of a rectangle: ..click and drag your mouse in the document field to create a nice long, narrow rectangle - this will be the background for your header. Select the rectangle so that you see the white circles in the border; right click, and select Format Autoshape A pop-up appears; play with the attributes in the box. For me, I'm going to set my - Fill color to "White" - Line color to "None" ** in the "Layout" tab, under Wrapping Style, select "None" Click "OK". Right click on the Rectangle and select - Order    --- Send to Back 1.4) Create a text box. Select "Insert" from the top menu.    -  Select "Text Box" A cross appears; click and drag on the document field to create a box which you'll type into.      -  Type the title of your blog. Play with the fonts you'd like, colors, etc. Make the font nice and big (I set mine at 78 for the title, and 42 for the subtitle, but it'll depend on the font you use)           -  you may want to create a separate text box for your title and your subtitle. You'll see below that I created two separate text boxes for mine. "Activate" each text box by clicking on their borders; edit the text box's attributes by clicking Format Text Box - for mine, * I removed the line on the text box, so there's no border. * I removed the fill on the text box, so there's no background to them. and this is important - for each text box you create: * in the "Layout" tab, under Wrapping Style, select "None" 1.5) Start stacking. Okay. So here's what I did. - I inserted a second image and mirrored it by grabbing the left hand adjustment dot on the border (the little white circle) and dragged it across the image to the right. This mirrors the duplicate image. - I then started re-arranging my text boxes and images on top of the rectangle autoshape which will serve as the header background. I made sure that my text and images all look centered. - I played with the images under the title, rotated them beside the title, angled them, etc. but I decided I liked this orientation best. - notice that the fonts in the header are fun, and are two colors. See our previous week's post on header fonts Week 3: Beautiful Blog Headers PART 1 So I've decided I like this layout. 1.6) Save as an image. Making sure there are no other unwanted images or text boxes on your screen, press - CTRL + A (you'll notice all of your boxes become active and this little symbol pops up:) - - Click on that little symbol (circled in red above) - - - Right click on the boxes and select "Save as Picture" In the pop-up that appears, * Save as a .png or .jpeg * If you can change your resolution to a higher standard, go ahead and do that. Now! We need to resize our header image to best fit our blog. From here on out, the instructions for the tutorial are the same as last week's (post is {here})-  follow steps: 1.1 - 1.5 (omit 1.6, you shouldn't need to crop your image) 1.7 1.10 (how to save your image) then, once your image is resized, follow the directions for uploading your image to your test blog from last week's post follow steps under "3.0: Uploading your Custom Header" Here is my BEFORE (with the header I created last week): AFTER (header from this week): I like them both! But I love the simplicity of this week's header. It's pretty. Have fun with it, and I'd love to see your test blogs, so if you're playing along, make sure to leave a comment for me with your test blog address so I can check out your progress! Next week we'll be learning how to customize your tab elements under your blog header to link to your different pages within your blog.

Happy Saturday, everyone!

What's everyone been up to?

Today my husband and I took the kids out for a nice long walk up to the UPS store (our PS3 bit the dust last year, and I just discovered that you can trade your old electronics and books, etc., in on Amazon.com for gift cards; last week we sent in our old cell phones and a text book of hubby's for some Amazon.com gift cards...every penny counts...who knows how much we'll get for all of this, but we're not out anything since they pay the shipping - woot!)

all dressed up and ready to go out on an adventure!

Anywho.

We also hit World Market (man, I freaking LOVE that store, I could spend hours in there... not only for all of the housewares/decorating stuff, but for the Canadian and British candies/foods we can get there - YUM) because I wanted to pick up some new knobs for the sewing machine table my $20 Singer 66-16 is in. I plan on refinishing the table when my mum comes back to visit in June. That kinda stuff is right up her alley. I picked up these knobs:

image courtesy of World Market.com

Image courtesy of World Market.com

for the two doors on the front of the cabinet. I love the pretty turquoise color accented with the nickel. I'm trying to stay Art-Deco-ish since the table and machine are from '41. Not sure if I'm super period appropriate with these knobs, probably should have gone with glass, but, I digress.

Speaking of the Singer 66, I've had a fabulous response from all of my readers about my shenanigans with respect to my refurbishing project, which I really appreciate.

I would say that about 65% of my readers are around my age (thirties and forties), and it makes me really excited to be so very encouraged about fixing this 73-year old machine up by a generation of sewists and quilters who have electronic computerized machines (myself included!) which cost more than my first car (true!) and do everything but wash the dishes.

I'm proud of myself for doing this. How many women own their own soldering guns? know what a commutator is? know how to wrap a wire with polyolefin 2:1 heat shrink tubing?

I do. Because I read a few manuals, did a bit of research, spent a few pennies, and I'm getting my hands a little dirty.

I may completely, 100% fail at this project, but at least I wasn't scared to try. And hopefully in the process I saved a beautiful machine from an untimely demise (because who knows what would have happened to her if I hadn't been lucky enough to find her on eBay).

And who knows?

Hopefully this beaut will be around another 73 years, and my daughter (or future daughter-in-law) will be sewing with it long after I'm gone.

I'll continue to blog about this, and will try to update weekly about it. But the point of this little tangent is this:

if I can do it, you can do it. :) And thank you, thank you, thank you! for all of your awesome emails and comments with respect to "The Singer 66-16 Project" here at Sew at Home Mummy.

So! On that note: a little update.

I wish I had taken a picture of these light pieces before I took the medical tape holding them all together apart. And the sticky gunk that was left behind was unreal; pulled out the Goo Gone.

(blue painter's tape is just to hold the pieces together while the glue dries).

My new wiring came in the mail yesterday from Sew Classic (I bought 18g SPT-2 for the light, electric cord, and foot pedal cord, and 18g SPT-1 for the motor re-wiring). Just waiting for my ring terminal ends to come in the mail so that I can start re-wiring stuff.

the Singer 66-16 Project is to be continued... stay tuned...

Now! I have a question for my readers, and need your help.

Do any of you have a quilting frame for your home sewing machine? Not a long-arm?

And by a frame, I mean one like this (only as an example, I know there are other brands out there, but this one seems to be the most popular in my searches):

image courtesy of The Grace Company

does anyone out there have one of these?

As some of you may know, money is super tight here - we're trying desperately to save for a house on a single income. As such, we have a tight budget for things, but, we do allot ourselves a small amount of spending money every paycheck. So for big things, I need to save for a while...and this would be a big purchase.

If you have one of these quilting frames for your home machine, I'd love to ask you some questions about it; I can't seem to find much info or more than one or two bloggers whom have written about the frames.

I feel like if I'm going to try and save this much money over the next year or two to buy one of these frames I really need to research it because I'll be really peeved (< editing here) if I buy one and it's a pain in the tookish to use or doesn't work well, etc.

Thanks in advance to anyone who may be able to help me out on this one!


please note that this post contains affiliate links (to Amazon.com) and in accordance with FTC law, I must disclose this.

1. Winner of the Sew at Home Mummy giveaway (Denise Schmidt Chiccopee charm pack) for the March Classic meets Modern block, by Random.org, #4:

see the wire far right? it's lost all of its insulation over the years. EEP!

 Problem is, if a bare wire touches the metal of the motor casing or machine, it electrifies the entire machine (since they're cast iron) - which could shock the user if they touched the machine.

I've got everything dismantled, all ready to clean up and re-wire. I ordered some replacement wire, soldering supplies, wire terminals and heat shrink tubing...everything I need for my first re-wiring job!
 The 73-year old wires are just falling apart to the touch...
 ...the power cord needs to be rewired too (bottom zip-loc below).

The light (top ziploc bag below) I thought was a write-off since the Bakelite base is cracked and broken; I removed all of the (medical!) tape that was holding the pieces together, took a better look at it, and I think once it's Gorilla-glued back together, tape gunk removed, and rewired, it'll be just fine. And doing it this way will cost about $1, vs. $16.

And this way I get to keep the light original, with the gorgeous "SINGER" decal on it.

top row: Out N' About Olive Green Highway Signs  | Michael Miller Loden Cotton Couture Solid | Kimba Tan and Green Bubble Dots  bottom row: In My Room Green Shade Tree  |  Sweet Things Lime Large Tonal Dots  |   Green Large Chevron

... or how about a bundle with some Kaffe thrown in, inspired by a Pantone color report?

Pantone image courtesy of aboveallbetrue.blogspot.com from top left: Sweet Things Lime Blossom  |  Kaffe Fassett Collective Green Kim  |  Sweet Things Melon Teeny Tiny Donuts  |  Paint Box Red Wicker  |  Kaffe Fassett Collective Blue Crackle  |  Sweet Things Lavender Large Tonal Dots

Hi all, and welcome back to the third installment of the Sew at Home Mummy "Beautify your Blog" series! This week we'll be going over some simple ways to create a pretty blog header. If you're just coming across this series for the first time today, please see  Week 1: this post for the series disclosure and the first few lessons  Week 2: Backgrounds and Layouts Each of these lessons build on the previous week's. In the first lesson I suggested you create a test blog - at the end of the series we'll copy the template you have built and created over to your 'real' blog. <div align="center"> <a href="http://www.sewathomemummy.com" title="Sew at Home Mummy" target="_blank"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiblCqFhLqZ_UIdCCUiH3IM3FsRbNIlEhv62MDKyTDhHZH14vOUZVL4cO4DiTg_SeTfr6hQFzJdsbZyElHcBaE_N65wi_15YU1GW1MshdGMeKQjYFIahjm9ZN5FAGuugzNqBdDyPRaMamBi/s1600/Beautify+Your+Blog+Button+Sew+at+Home+Mummy1.jpg" alt="Sew at Home Mummy" style="border:none;" /></a></div> Alright! Let's get to it. This week we'll be looking at making custom blog headers. A blog header is the title image at the top of a blog. I thought I'd cruise the quilty bloggosphere to find some really pretty inspiration among our peers. Please note: These are just examples, not meant to be 'copied' but to be used as inspiration :) Things to consider when you're looking at these examples (and my blog, if you so like): Size. The header should be nice and long, to the edges of your posting space (or thereabouts). If you adjusted your blog width in Week 1 to about 1200px wide, your header size will probably be around 1000px wide. Note in all of the examples below the headers are long and narrow; in general, you're going to want to keep the height of the header to about 1/3 or even 1/4 the length in order to avoid it impeding on your posting space.  So, if the width is 1000px, your height should be around 300px or so. I'll show you how to size your images optimally below. Color. Remember last week we went over color schemes, and I said to remember the acronym K.I.S.S.: Keep It Simple, Sewist! Try to stick to 2-3 dominant colors in your header at most.  Font. Font = text type. Pick a commonly occurring color in your header images for your font (text) or, go with a color which matches the background you chose. Something that makes 'sense'. Pick a font which is easy to read, but, this is where you can add a bit of personality. You want to avoid using 'fancy' fonts in your posts and post titles, but, with your header, you can definitely get creative. Fancy fonts in your posts are difficult to read and take longer to load on the webpage. Stick to a maximum of two fonts in your header.

image courtesy of Quilt Matters A close-up of one of M-R's quilts and a simple title head her blog. Notice her simple background, and dark purple color scheme. single font. Notice: long and skinny header.

image courtesy of Cut to Pieces Angela's clip art collage in the header is totally awesome two fonts. Notice: long and skinny header.

image courtesy of Diary of a Quilter Amy's gorgeous collage of quilty goodness is really eye-catching. two fonts. Notice: long and skinny header.

image courtesy of Pretty Bobbins. Gemma goes with a simple collage of work, with a pretty blue title. single font. Notice: long and skinny header.

Image courtesy of Stitched in Color Rachel goes for a simple look here with a gorgeous shot of one of her quilts and a custom font title. single font, two colors. Notice: long and skinny header.

Image courtesy of Canoe Ridge Creations Megan goes for really simple, but very stunning. single font - and I would consider this two colors - grey and rainbow. It works because the header is so simple - no graphics to compete with. Notice: long and skinny header.

I'm going to show you two ways to make a custom header today.

1.0 Simple Single Image Custom Header:
If you have a photo of a quilt or an image you'd like to use as a background for your header, here's how to do it.

1.1. First we need to find out how wide we need to make our header image. Go to
Blogger.com Homepage
 - - - - click "Layout" in the dropdown menu beside your Test Blog title
 1.2. on the Layout page, select "edit" in the "Header" box


1.3. A pop-up window appears. At the bottom of the window, you'll notice the following phrase:
"Image will be shrunk to _____ px wide"

Take note of this number - we'll need it later.

Close out that window.

1.4. Now, we need to crop and resize our image we'll use for our header background. Since any picture you will have taken of one of your quilts won't be in the correct proportions, we'll need to both re-size and crop your pic.

Again, I'm going to use Pixlr.com/express

1.5. On Pixlr's website, select "Browse". Select your image to upload.
This screen appears:
Now we need to crop it.

1.6. Select the "Adjustment" tab. Select "Crop".
Now. We need to crop the image to be about 1/3 (one-third) the height for the width. So long and narrow.
Click "Apply".

1.7. This window appears:
Now we need to resize the image.

Select the "Resize" button.
This window appears:
Circled in orange above are the parameters we are going to need to change.

Note the width number - mine says 1600px - I need to change this number to the number we determined in Step 3. For me, that was 1020px.

Note that when you change the width, the height automatically changes because the "Keep proportions" tab is selected.

My height automatically changes to 351. Remember how I said we wanted the image about 300px tall? So I'm happy with this. I'm going to go with this - but if your pic was 250px+, that would be okay too! Once you're happy, click "Apply".

If your height is still too big, go back and re-crop your image, or, adjust the height manually by de-selecting the "Keep proportions" tab (but be wary here - it'll distort your image doing it this way).

1.8. Once you're happy with the size of your image, you can play with the editing functions in Pixlr. For me, I'm going to lighten this image up a bit.

1.9. Now let's add some text.
Select the Type button, and pop-ups of different type choices pop up. Choose the style you'd like to go with; type your blog title in the text box (circled in red below). Use the little white dots on the pop-up to change the size of your font, and grab the box frame your text is in to float it around. If you want two different fonts in the image, repeat this process twice.

you can edit the color using the color-chart (circled in orange) change the justification (circled in green )

1.10. When you're happy, click "Save". When saving, save at highest quality image (slide the bar all the way to the right):

Here's what I came up with:

2.0 Collage Custom Header:
2.1. In Windows, open Paint program.
See these little blue dots on the edges of your paintboard?

grab them and drag the paintboard out nice and wide and nice and low, like this:
then, save the blank canvas to your desktop. (Click File - Save and save as a .jpeg)

2.2. Head over to Pixlr.com/express.
Select "Collage".

This screen appears:

Now, we can select our layout and proportions for the blog header and adjust them accordingly to fit our needs. Remember: We want the collage to be long and narrow, so maybe something like this:
I changed the layout (circled red), spacing, roundess and proportions (circled orange) and the color (circled blue). Have fun with it, play with modifying multiple collage layouts, but keep it long and narrow.

2.3. Start adding images. Hover on each of the collage pieces so that a '+' sign appears, click, and add your quilty goodness to the frames. To the top frame, I'm going to add that blank white image I created in Paint (this'll be where my blog title will sit).

You'll notice that if you hover on your added images this little pop-up appears:
Select the paintbrush to edit your image, the arrows to rotate, and the 'x' to remove it.

You can also grab and drag your images from space to space.

To add my blog title to the image, I clicked on the paintbrush in the top frame and added text as we did above in step 1.9.

Here's where I'm at so far:

2.4. Re-size your collage:
Once you're happy with your collage, click "Finished".

In the screen that follows, click "Adjustment", then "Resize", and follow the instructions laid out above in 1.7, resizing your image to the pre-determined required width.

Click Save. Save image at maximum resolution.

Here are some collage headers I made up using this technique as some ideas for you (please excuse the image quality of the quilts - I was rushing and didn't edit each individual image like I would in real life, but you get the picture):

here, in Paint, I used the paint bucket tool to color the whole canvas black, then saved it as a .jpeg, then uploaded it as I would any other image.

3.0 Uploading your Custom Header: 

To upload your custom header:

3.1. In your Layout page, click Edit in the Header box. A pop-up appears:
Select:
Instead of Title and Description
DEselect:
Shrink to fit
THEN
Select:
From your computer (and upload your saved header image).

Click, "Save".

And here's what the all of my options would look like on my test blog:


I think I'm going to go with Option #3 for now :)

Next week:
Part 2 of the header series will be a bit more advanced. I personally use Microsoft Publisher and Adobe Photoshop Elements to do much of my work - next week I'll be talking about using Publisher to create a header using digital scrapbooking elements. I apologize in advance if you don't own Publisher or the like - it can be done in Word with the help of PowerPoint, but that is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Today's tutorial should get you started though!