I found some cotton yarn in my yarn stash and have been using it up knitting these dishcloths. They are a quick and easy project and great for keeping busy while watching episodes of Being Erica on CBC. A little set of them would make a nice housewarming gift for someone, don’t you think?

Can’t wait to try them out!

Needless to say, I think this Tetris dress is totally awesome. And of course I had to know where one would find such a fabric. The answer is as wonderful as the dress. Mix Etsy and Spoonflower and great things can happen. It’s an amazing world we live in my creative friends, not only did those talented folk work together to get that fabric made, it’s also available for use under the creative commons. So if you’ve always dreamed of a Tetris dress of your own, it’s within your reach!

In addition to the download, you do need Microsoft Word and some blank printable label sheets, I used the small 80 labels per sheet kind (Avery 5167).

If anyone else knows of some cute free Holiday label templates, please share!

I hemmed and hawed trying to decide which one to use. I found the MyPublisher software really easy to work with, they offer lots of great photo layouts that suited my purpose and didn’t require any customization. The downer however was their lack of cover options and the extra charges that were adding up fast for every page over the 20 that are included in the base price.

Blurb has more interesting propositions for covers, particularly the image wrap option which is what I was really after. However their photo layouts all sucked and while their free software allows the creation of custom layouts, I didn’t feel it allowed me enough precision to satisfy my neurotic perfectionist tendencies. They are more generous with their pages, the base price includes up to 40 and that was definitely a plus. Eventually I was enticed to go with them thanks to a 20% off + free shipping coupon. The coupon’s looming expiry date was just the kick in the butt I needed to get my book made.

Since I had to create the page layouts from scratch I downloaded a trial version of Adobe InDesign. With the help of this Adobe InDesign Photobook Tutorial I powered through a laying out marathon one Saturday and put the whole thing together. It was time consuming but the results were well worth it. Blurb also makes it very easy to create a book that way, they have an option to upload pdfs of your cover and pages and it all worked very well. I also made sure to splurge for the premium paper since there were reports that their regular paper is a bit on the thin side.

Overall I’m quite pleased with the result. It’s pretty satisfying to be able to hold the finished product in my hands and now I want to make more books!

I’m also totally amazed at the leaps and bounds in improvements wordpress continues to make. As a serial blog starter it never ceases to amaze me how much easier it gets every time!