An (as of yet) Undeveloped Skill

Some day I'll be bringing back the lost art of hand-lettering.

Obviously I need to break out of my shell a bit; these are both so straight forward. Simple horizontal lines. Not very exciting at all. Some day, my friends, some day...

Anyway, these are two hand-made posters I created last March (near the beginning of a period in which I didn't have access to my computer, much less the program I use to make typographics).

Meh. Some day I will have more skills with such things. Practice practice practice...

HAPPY DECEMBURRRRR!!! (Minus the bur, 'cause it hasn't been too cold yet.)

-rose t

Terrifying Myself into Action

So you know in my last post how I showed you this poster I made? Well, I've made a whole series of them that I've been posting onto a tumblog to count down the days until The Fault in Our Stars is published.

That's been going on for two or three weeks, but it was pretty scattered at first; I missed several days.

This past week, though, I started posting them more regularly, and by Wednesday I think I had around 30 or 40 followers, which, really, isn't that much in tumblr terms.

That day, in honor of Doctor Who's 48th anniversary, I posted this one:

see on tumblr here

Thursday (Thanksgiving) morning, I checked the site. I suddenly had nearly 300 followers, and that post had quite a lot of love. I was pretty psyched, but I thought it only got the extra attention because of Doctor Who.

SATURDAY MORNING, I checked it again. By now I've gained nearly a hundred more followers, and I, curious, innocently-minded, nonchalantly started looking through the notes on Wednesday's post to see who'd been showing their nerdy pride.

I saw that some people had been reblogging it with new comments suspiciously directed towards John Green, the author of the book (who, for the record, is flippin' amazing.) So I decided to look through John's blog, which I hadn't done in a few weeks, and is always good fun.

Lo and behold, there, still on the very first page, I saw that he had reblogged my post from Wednesday, and seemed to approve. :)

And this is what he said:

This tumblr counts down the days left until the publication of 

The Fault in Our Stars. 

I follow it to TERRIFY MYSELF INTO ACTION.

And so then I started hyperventilating, jumping up and down, and telling my tale to anyone who would listen. 

He (John Green) also seemed to vaguely mention that post in his last video, during which he reads out loud the second chapter of TFiOS, which I am growing more and more excited about every waking second.

And now we're here. And life is good. And I'll have yet another curious story to tell John Green if we ever meet. :)

If you want to count down the days until The Fault in Our Stars is published, you should check out my tumblr!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! One thing, among a great deal of other much more important things, which I am very thankful for is that, with all the modern day technology, it's so easy to interact with people. There are so many things that are available to us that make us more relatable to each other. Like the internet. So many people have access to it, and it's a bond. True, it's not so cool for people to be exactly alike. Clones and droids are only cool in Star Wars. And if we all had access to the exact same set of things and ONLY those things, well, I'd imagine it would be a bit boring. But it is important for us to have things in common, things that make it easier to communicate with each other (things that somehow, radically, keep bringing John Green and me together!?)

The universe is a straaaaange place, but I must say, I grow fonder of it every day.

-rosie:)

Typography [EDITED]

Did I mention, ever since I had ears and eyes, I've been becoming more and more fascinated by words?

( go to my flickr to see ^this^ full size. Feel free to use as a wallpaper, as with any of these!)

check it out in HD here!

*cough*... you can see ^this^ here

I feel like that one is a little messy. I may try to redo it sometime. (see in detail here)

These two are kind of just me fangirling... I feel like I could have made ^that^ one with a clearer color of text.

If you understand this, then good on ya. :) want to count down with me? go here - http://xxgothedays.tumblr.com/

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed these. I'm just doing a lot of experimenting with typography and the program Corel and having fun with it. :) 

Hope you're having a lovely November!

-rose:)

Jewelry

I could TOTALLY be a jewelry designer/maker. Well, I guess I already am and have been for a while... but, I mean I could do it professionally. I've never sold any jewelry, nor have I tried.

Recently I met someone with a necklace rather like the one I'm about to show you. She said it was a gift someone brought her from another country, and that the beads were made of rolled up magazine paper. I thought that was quite a brilliant idea, and it's been on my mind ever since. Yesterday, maps were also on my mind. I was going to make something like this gorgeous thing, but I didn't have a big enough map of Virginia at hand, nor did I have the means of printing one. I will do that someday, though. :)

What ended up happening instead was a moment of brilliance - but I'm sure by now you can guess what it was: I made beads out of an old map I had on hand (of Ohio/West Virginia). I think most of them turned out pretty well!

What I did was I cut tapering strips of the map, rolled them each up on toothpicks using Mod-Podge (wonderful stuff), and let them dry. note for next time: take them off the toothpicks BEFORE they dry. duh. it wasn't TOO bad, but some of them were pretty stubborn. 

So that was mark 1. I have other ideas for using the same basic concept... and I think in the future I'll make them all the more duo-cone shape (there's gotta be a name for that?!) rather than just cylindrical. Seems to work better and look nicer that way. 

I love old maps and globes and atlases. They give me such a wonderful, euphoric sense of wanderlust and adventure. :) I'll be doing some serious traveling in my life. :)

School is starting, fall is coming... I wish you well during this time of change. Enjoy the lovely weather! :)

-rosie:)

Wedding Invitations

So, my brilliant idea for the week is that I could totally design and create amazing wedding invitations.

I made two earlier today...

I like this one better. The boat and the couple can both move around in the water. 

 This one is like a book.(it's a little bit sloppy.) Flip the pages of the heart to find out more about the wedding. :] The yellow background is simply that - a background. It's not part of the invite.

None of the names, except when citing, refer to actual people. except for a dedication to freaks and geeks. None of the places are, as far as I know, real.

Yeah. Just an idea, for now. But, if you want, it could become a business. It could happen. :]

-rose