This is a fun project if you’d like an inexpensive way to make your own “canvas print”, and you like a retro, old fashioned feel.  It makes a great gift, too (like the one used in the tutorial, a great wedding momento!)

I did this for my December post on FedEx’s Out of Office blog.  It is easy to do, but be warned it is a bit time consuming when you get to the final step of removing the paper from the canvas, so I wouldn’t go any larger than 8×10″ for this project.

The photo for this project is by the fabulous Sarah Howell, of Kimball Bates Photography (recently relocated to North Carolina, for my readers up there–I highly recommend her!)

Tutorial Summary: Retro Canvas Print

Basically, you just need an inexpensive canvas, acrylic gel medium, and a image you want to use.  For the image you’ll need it slightly larger or the same size as your canvas.  Use an image editing program to reverse the image (so you have a mirror image) and to size your image appropriately.  Then you can have it color laser printed or get a color photocopy.

You’re going to adhere the image to the canvas (face side down) using the gel medium.  When it is dry, you’ll remove the paper from the canvas, leaving just the color.  You’d definitely have areas where the color doesn’t stay, hence the weathered, retro look.  You can then cover the whole thing with gel medium for a finished look.

Full Instructions, with photos (and Lessons learned)

I’ve got all the step by step instructions up at the FedEx Out of Office blog: Retro Photo Canvas Tutorial.

Also, a few lessons learned, based on trying this a few times:

• Like I mentioned, smaller is better due to the time consuming nature of the final steps.  It can take multiple (like 6!) times of rubbing the paper off the canvas.   Let it thoroughly dry after you think you have it all removed, then you’ll see more paper fibres.  Keep rubbing!
• Try a small test piece first.
• Experiment! You might find that it’s better to let the paper NOT dry all the way, and then just try peeling the paper off.  When I’ve done similar projects before (but with B&W photocopies) I’ve found that it was much easier, and worked just as well.  But with color I think it’s better to wait til it’s bone dry, which means much more work getting all the paper off.  But, it’s worth a try to attempt some experiments and see what works best for you.
• Related to that, here’s the technique I’ve used where you don’t let the paper dry all the way: Wooden Photo Ornaments

Update: Related technique and more downloads: Ghost Portraits!

Did you know Great Aunt Gertrude was a zombie?  Or Ancient Uncle Elrod was a tad undead?  Unfortunately for my Halloween décor, I don’t really have ghouls in the family.  But we can fake it with a little photo manipulation.

These creepy portraits will look great hung on a wall, or in small frames on your serving table, at any scary Halloween party.  You can either design your own, using the instructions provided here, or you can download the set provided here.  Then just have them printed in whatever size to fit your frames, at your local print shop on on your home computer.

How to make your own creepy vintage photos

Supplies:

• Photo-editing program.  These instructions assume you are working in Photoshop.
• Vintage photo image files.  Portraits work best, and the larger the better if you want to print big versions for your walls.  You can scan photos of your own relatives, or you can find public domain photos online. [You can find photos from public archives like the Library of Congress with no copyright restrictions here.]
• Skulls:  You’ll need a transparent photographed skull image. The simplest way to get the skull you need is to use a skull themed Photoshop brush set, of which several can be found online for free.

Method:

This is how to add a creepy skull effect to your photo.  There are of course many other possible spooky details you can add.  More detailed instructions can be found below the photos.

1. Open your photo file.
2. Create a new layer, and determine what skull size and shape will best fit your portrait’s head.  Place skull in new layer.  It should have enough transparency to see through it to the portrait layer.  If not, you may need to increase the transparency of the skull layer.
3. Line up the skull with the portrait head as well as you can.  Resize and move as necessary to get the mouth and eyes of the skull lined up with your portrait.
4. Next, fit the skull to the face.  Select the skull.  Under the Transform menu, use Warp.  Drag the dots around to fit the skull to the angle of the face.  In this example, I dragged the right jawline of the skull out to better match the portrait jawline, and pulled in the left side of the skull.  I also moved the nose to match up with the portrait nose.  It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you need the eyes, mouth, nose and jaw to match up as well as possible for best effect.  Don’t worry about the outline of the skull, we’ll be erasing that in the next step.
5. Finally, erase the outside of the skull.  Use your eraser (a soft feathered brush) to erase anywhere the skull exceeds the face (like on the left side in this example) and pretty much all the edges of the skull image, leaving the features intact.  You can also erase any shading that doesn’t fit with the photo.

Once you have your final files, just take them to your local FedEx Office and have them color printed in whatever size you need to fit your décor.

Download the Files

Want the look, without the work?  Click here to download a zip file of the images featured in this post, plus a few extras.

Summer Inspirations – Cool things to do this summer…

[prw username=”dorsner” boardname=”summer-inspirations” maxfeeds=”9″ divname=”myList” printtext=”0″ target=”newwindow” useenclosures=”yes” thumbwidth=”170″ thumbheight=”170″ showfollow=”medium”]

Direct Links: Citrus Vodka |   Personal sized baked oatmeal  | Little Monster Birthday Party – Watermelon Fruit Monster | Pop Rocks Rimmed Cocktails!  | Oreo Popsicle Recipe | Edible Cookie Dough Bracelet! | Beaded Crochet Bracelet Tutorial | Strawberry chocolate jello shots |  Guiness Ice Cream Car Bomb Sundae

How to add a Pinterest Pin Board to a Blog Post (WP)

This was not overly obvious, and required a bit of research, but basically there is an RSS feed for any of your pin boards on Pinterest.  Example: http://pinterest.com/dorsner/summer-inspirations/ board’s RSS feed is http://pinterest.com/dorsner/summer-inspirations/rss . Once you know that you have a feed, you’re halfway there, and there are probably multiple ways to handle it.

I took the quick way out and snagged the Pinterest RSS Widget plugin so I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel.   Conveniently enough, not only does the plugin allow you to add a widget to your sidebar with any Pinterest feed, they also include a shortcode that makes it super easy to embed the pin board directly into a post.

So for the board above I used the following shortcode – replace the curly brackets } with square brackets ], obviously.  The syntax is pretty self explanatory, but the explanation for each field is here.  The username is your Pinterest name, the boardname is the name of the board.  Max feeds is the number of posts you want to show.   The divname is for styling (I didn’t worry about that here).  Printtext determines if you want to include text- I didn’t.  I set the thumbwidth/height to 170 to make 3 across, nicely spaced.

{prw username="dorsner" boardname="summer-inspirations" maxfeeds="9"

divname="myList" printtext="0" target="newwindow" useenclosures="yes"

thumbwidth="170" thumbheight="170" showfollow="medium"}

And that’s really all there is to it.  It was easy to do, so I will probably do it again sometime, as a good way to collect links.  I know there are mixed feelings in the crafty blogging world about Pinterest, and I’ll admit I haven’t really done much with it yet, but I do think it does have some excellent potential.

It’s a really neat technique that just uses acrylic gel medium from the art store– no toxic chemicals or anything like that.  The toner from the photocopy remains on the wood, so the white areas of your photo become wood colored, which is a really nice natural effect.   I’m planning on make a bunch using some wood veneer cards to use as keepsake gift tags for gifts this year.

For the tutorial I used one of my squid watercolors — in the example above I used a photocopy of a photo of The Boy, perfect for grandparent gifting! And it’s easy to do, though I will warn you it does take a little practice to get the timing exactly right, so plan on practicing on some scrap wood first.

I didn’t really go over how to use photos for the ornaments in the tutorial, and there’s a few things I’ve learned.  Pick a photo with a lot of contrast, and ideally use photoshop, or some other photo editing software, to turn it black and white and bump up the contrast.  In Photoshop, use play with the layer Levels to get a good effect.  Remember to reverse it, especially if you add text!  Make a bunch of copies on the same page (try different sizes). Then print it out, and photocopy.  For the ones shown here, I actually printed out the text separately, and put in on first, then put the photo on top of the text, so I get the ‘white’ background behind the text.

Wanna do it yourself? Go get the instructions…

(Past ornament tutorials: Resin Stars, Easy Gift Card Holder, Champagne Chairs, Sweater Photo Frames, Shrinky Dinky Santa)

One of the most creative people I know, Colleen (of the great indie online fabric store Some Art Fabric & and the brand new Sloth Craft) has gifted us with this fabulous blue jean remake tutorial.  Born of a wrong sized thrift store purchase for jeans for her daughter,  this is a great example of how to take something ordinary and turn it into something way cool!   As always, we LOVE our guest posters!  Hope you enjoy this great tutorial as much as I did!  — Dot

Blue Jean Remake – by Colleen

I sew. Sewing defines me as a person and as a crafter. I don’t remember learning to sew, I know I did not spring from my mother’s loins with the skill. My dad taught me some time between yesterday and forever ago. I had my first job sewing before I was double digits, child labor was not an issue, since I worked for my dad.

Sewing lead me down the wicked path of fabric and fabric brought me to where I am now, someone who owns an online fabric shop, Some Art Fabric.

I also love thrift stores, I purchase most of my kids clothes there, as well as supplies for much of my craftiness. Recently I went shopping sans children. I found some jeans that I thought would fit #1 child. I was wrong. So I decided to deconstruct the jeans and add in some space so that they would fit. This tutorial is an idea, and assumes that you have made a pair of pants before or at least worn a pair enough time to be able to figure out how they go together.

If it don’t fit! Alter it!

Colleen has lovingly prepared the tutorial as a pdf.
Download the 5 page tutorial: Jean Remake

Hope you enjoy!
As always, we’d love to see it if you try it!
And if you want more inspiration from Colleen, be sure to follow her blog, Some Art Talk!

This is a quick method I use for coloring more ‘cartoonish’ drawings… I sketched the drawing in pencil, then went over the line work in ink.  However if you draw your pencil lines dark enough, this method will also let you create an ‘inked’ looking drawing from the pencil sketch.  I use both Photoshop and Illustrator (still on the old CS2, sigh) for this technique.  Click on the illustrations to see them larger.

Tutorial – How to take Line Art to Finished Color Cartoon

Step 1: Scan

Clean up the worst of the stray pencil marks, and scan in your drawing.

Step 2: Levels

Create a new Levels adjustment layer.

Move the white arrow to the left  and move the black arrow to the right (see the Step2 image) until you have a white background and black lines.  This will take a little trial and error, but get it as good as you can.  (If you made any mistakes in your inking, and want to fix them, do it now.)

Step 3: Clean up the Lines

For this illustration, I wanted smoother lines.  (You can skip this step if you like the look of your lines.)  Save the .psd and open it in Adobe Illustrator.

Click on the image, and choose Live Trace.  Check out your lines.  If you want to change them, try other settings from the dropdown box (like Comic Art) or play around with the threshold and min area settings at the top (see step3 image).

Copy, and paste back into your Photoshop image.  (I paste it as a smart vector.  Since it’s now vector, you can resize it if you want it larger, and so forth.)

Step 4: Create a Line Art Layer

I got this technique from the awesome Tom Richmond – Go read the whole thing, but here are Tom’s basic steps:

Yeah, all that is a lot of work, right?  I do this all the time, so I recorded it as an Action in Photoshop, so I just click one button and it’s done!

Step 5: Paint the Color Layer

Now I set up my layers.  I have a WhitePaper layer that is just a solid white layer.  I put all my old layers that I’m not using any more under that.

Next layer up is a blank “Under Color” layer, then a blank “Colors” layer, then my Inks layer, then an “Over Color” layer. (You can see the layer setup in the final image below)

Select your Colors layer.  For quicky coloring, I use the magic wand tool (Sample All Layers checked) to select all of the sections that I want to paint a certain color. Then I have another photoshop action recorded that 1-expands the selection by 1 pixel, and 2-fills with the foreground color. (see step5 image)

Step 6: Paint the Under and Over Colors

You don’t have to do this, but I find it easier for the really small areas (like the suckers on the arms) to just paint on the Under Colors layer.  You don’t have to be neat. (see step 6 image).  I use the Over Colors layer for when I want to paint over the black lines.  Some of my suckers ended up like black dots, so I just painted the green suckers on top!

Below is the final image with the layers.

April is officially STASH BUSTER Month, per one of my favorite blogs Crafting a Green World.

What, you may ask, is a fabric shop owner doing participating in such an non buying event?

WELL, I am an extremely talented hunter and gatherer of wonderful fabrics. I am there, I love fabric. Now I own a shop full of it, BUT what do I do with all the great fabrics that are languishing unused in my sewing room. Well, one thing for sure, I can’t use them for shop samples, I did that ONCE and I finally took it down after explaining over 100 times that NO we did not have that fabric. So this month will be about sewing for me, my family and maybe for craft shows next November & December.

TRAVEL TISSUE Cover:

I started this tutorial about a week ago by searching for other folks’ tutorials, there are a bunch out there. After reading a few of them I found I needed to change them, so here is my version of how to make this super simple gift.

Read the Whole Thing!

One of our guest contributors did a great writeup on how she made her Marshmallow Chicks (commonly known as Peeps). She claims they aren’t very pretty, though, so we’re challenging you to do better! Melissa provides the instructions, plus tips on how to make yours better, over at Foodwhirl!

Here’s a few tutorials to start you on your way!

Kids Refashioning Tutorials:

There are a ton of these out there, these were just a few I had saved in my ‘to write about’ file!

• TUTORIAL: Boy’s Sweater Vest (from a Man’s Sweater) at MADE (via OnePrettyThing)
• The 15 Minute Dress (made from Bandannas!)
• Another cute sweater vest idea, this one for a girl from an accidentally shrunken sweater
• Make baby leggings from a scarf.

• Here’s another idea – Baby Legs from socks!
• So cute! Kid’s pants from shirt sleeves.
• Also from Indie Tutes, a child’s dress from an adult T-shirt (great use!)
• A girls sundress from a men’s shirt.. too cute!

• Or a girl’s dress from a fun T-shirt!
• An oldie but goodie, with Easter around the corner: A bunny hat from a kid’s t-shirt! (via Craft)
• T-shirts make great materials : Make Baby Sleep Sacks or Make a cute baby hat!(via Little Birdie Secrets)
• Toddler Lounge Pants from old T’s – comfy and stylin’!

• Toddler Ruffle Skirt from T-shirts a Sew Much Ado
• Girl’s Jean skirt with flower trim made from (duh) old jeans.
• Mom’s old skirt becomes a cute girls dress.

And some for the adults

(sorry guys, this are pretty much all for the girls — someone find me some good men’s refashioning and i’ll post it!)

• fancified cardi at Angry Chicken
• Cute belted skirt from a men’s dress shirt at CraftStylish.
• Men’s Shirt to Dress at Clevergirl

• Another men’s shirt to ladies shirt refashion
• Another one, via Whip Up, cute peasant top from a men’s shirt.
• Ugly Mom pants become a flouncy skirt!
• Pretty flower necklines for t-shirts

And a few that were published right here on Dabbled!

• Winter’s not over yet, has your little kitten lost his mittens? by Heather from Dollar Store Crafts
• Turn two outgrown shirts into a new long sleeve Tshirt by Me!
• Give old girls jeans way cute new life by Colleen from Some Art Fabric / Slothcraft.

(Got a cool refashioning project you’d like to see published on Dabbled? Email Us- dot[at]dabbled[dot]org!)

Featured here? Be sure to grab a Button!

Katie has given us a great step by step with pictures, but if you have any additional questions, just ask!

Making a Baby Sling

An older baby should sit comfortably on your hip. You only need to fold the sling in about ¼ of the way with an older baby, taking care to keep the 28.5 inch side closest to your body, so the sling makes a pocket.
If the sling is too big, you can easily shorten it by turning it inside out laying it flat and sewing a straight seem at the top to take it up. You can do this in ½ inch increments until you get to a size you like.
It can be helpful to leave the excess fabric when you take it up because it helps you find the top when you are trying to put it on. If you choose to cut it, you will need to sew the seam four times with a zig zag stitch to make sure it is sturdy.