silo day 5

Silhouettes lend themselves beautifully to all kinds of paper goods. I love making them into personalized cards. I prefer to leave the silhouettes in black, and use some color for the type. A colored envelope is a nice touch. I'm a big fan of thank you notes, and personalized ones with Bee's silhouette were perfect for Bee's birthday party.

A family of silhouettes makes a nice notecard. I'm hoping to send a set of these to my brothers and sisters when their birthdays come around. (Get ready, little brother!)

A cute anniversary card can be made by printing two silhouettes on a gatefold card. This one opens up to a heart that says "Happy Anniversary!"

silo day 3

It's nice to see a whole family in silhouettes. I love seeing how dad's chin got passed on to little Johnny or how mom has the same profile as each of her daughters. We actually used silhouettes for our own holiday cards three years ago, which you can see above.

Last Christmas I made a card for a friend showing her family (the parents and their four children). I love how the personality of each child comes out in their silhouette. I was inspired by a piece of artwork which I saw in the article Martha Stewart Living ran about stylist Rebecca Robertson's home which shows mom + dad = child. (Rebecca was a stylist when I was an art director at Martha Stewart, and she is as lovely as she seems).

As a gift to my little sister for Christmas, I made a print of her little family and framed it in a simple black wooden frame. (I love these ones, and they are on sale right now!)

silo day 2

Silhouettes look great on t-shirts. I've done them in different colors, but for my boy, I prefer them in black. Make sure you use a 100% cotton t-shirt, without any ribbing or texture (I once made this mistake with a tank top and it made for a very messy silhouette). Once you have drawn your silhouette shape, these t-shirts are easy to make using a freezer paper transfer.

If you happen to be using Illustrator or another computer program, you can print your silhouette directly onto freezer paper if you have a standard inkjet printer. Cut your freezer paper down to 8.5x11, and feed into your printer just like you would any other paper (just make sure it's printing on the non-waxy side of the freezer paper). Then you just cut out the shape with an exacto knife, iron the waxy side onto your t-shirt, and paint with black fabric paint. I like to put another sheet of freezer paper inside the t-shirt in case the ink soaks through. For more detailed instructions, see here.

If you are drawing your silhouette on tracing paper, you can trace your paper cut out onto the freezer paper and proceed from there.

silo week

Thank you for all your sweet congratulations on our recent news. We used a family tree made of silhouettes to announce we were pregnant, so now that I have silhouettes drawn for everyone in my family, I've found they come in handy for lots of things. So I've decided this week should be "Silo Week" and each day I'll be sharing something new I've made with the silhouettes.

Today I'll share the valentines I made this year for my husband (above) and my kids (below is my son C). Draw or print the letter "I" (the font I used is American Typewriter) and a big red heart, and then add a silhouette.

Many of you have asked how I made my silhouettes, and I used Adobe Illustrator to draw mine. The first step is to take side profile shots of the people in your family. I did this when we were all gathered together last summer during a family reunion. A few tips:

-Pick a simple background, like a light colored wall, and have each person stand sideways, looking straight ahead. Babies can be held up (it helps to have someone they can stare at a few feet in front of them).

-Watch for shadows. I prefer shooting silos outside, in a shady spot so you don't get harsh shadows which make the shape of the head hard to see.

-Have girls put their hair up. Ponytails, pigtails, buns, etc. all make for a more interesting silhouette than long hair. Include as much of the texture of the hair as you see fit. (Sometimes I simplify the shape of a ponytail or a bun when I'm drawing it so it's a bit more polished.)

-Have your subject smile. You can see the expression more than you might think, and smiling silhouettes are better than sad, moping ones.

-Include the top of the shoulders. It's nice to see the shape of a collar, or the neckline of a t-shirt. I often use the neckline to draw a nice curving bottom to the silhouette rather than just cutting the neck off in a straight line.

-Add an eyelash where it's appropriate. Eyelashes usually do not naturally extend beyond someone's nose so technically you shouldn't see them in a silhouette, but I think it's nice to see where the eye falls and it helps to add in a little eyelash.

Here is the side shot I did of my nephew, and the resulting silo.

I realize that not everyone has access to Illustrator or other vector based drawing programs. Here's a good tutorial from the talented folks at Three Potato Four where you trace a photo using tracing paper and then cut your silhouette out of paper.

Stay tuned this week for a new silhouette posting each day!

our news

I mentioned we had some news that we shared with our friends in our new years card (and a special thank you to our patient friends and family who actually sat down and de-coded the card!). We wanted to share our big news with my parents and our children Bee and C on Christmas morning, so we decided to tell everyone all at once.

I offered to help my parents with their Christmas card this year and decided to do a Family Tree showing how our family is growing (there were 3 new babies in 2009). My parents have six children (I'm the fourth) and between my siblings and I there are 14 grandchildren. While I had everyone together this summer for our annual family reunion, I asked each person to stand against a wall so I could take their photo (mug shot style, with a sideways profile..).  Later I traced the photos in Illustrator to make silhouettes of each person in our family. The result was a family tree chart that we printed on 10x14 sheets of paper and folded in fours and mailed out as Christmas cards.

For a gift to my parents I printed a large poster size version, framed it in a simple black frame, and wrapped it up for them to open Christmas morning. My mom unwrapped the gift with Bee and C sitting next to her. Immediately Bee and C wanted to know where they were in the chart, so my mom pointed to their silhouettes. And that's when she realized that this chart had a new addition (fourth row).

A new little baby for our family. It was perfect. My mom screamed, and the children literally jumped for joy (they've been asking for a baby for over a year now). It might be the happiest Christmas morning ever.

how a logo is made

The past few weeks I've been working on a redesign for one of my very favorite clients, the lovely girls over at Purl Soho. If you haven't heard, they are moving their two sweet knitting and sewing shops in New York City into one HUGE store over on Broome Street.

Now that the two stores (Purl and Purl Patchwork) are combining, they needed a new name and a new logo. The new store will be known as Purl Soho.. and there is a great post up on the Purl Bee explaining how the new logo came to be. I had to break out my trusty tracing paper for this one (sketches can be seen above). It reminded me that though most of my design work is now done on the computer, sometimes you need to take a break from the keyboard and pull out your pencil and just draw.. and draw.. and draw.

nina's book

Part of the festivities honoring my grandmother on her 90th birthday was a book full of all the things we love about Nina. Of course I forgot to take any photos of the book before I handed it over to my grandmother, so you'll have to make do with my PDFs. The cover was simply green with a big 90! on the front.

After checking out several printing options, we decided to go with blurb. I have made photo books with Shutterfly in the past, and have been pleased with the overall quality, but Blurb allows you to print directly from a PDF. Because I design books for a living, I can create the book using InDesign (a program I am very comfortable with) and then just upload the final PDF, instead of using one of their available templates. This gives me a lot of freedom with the design. I give Blurb a big thumbs up!

My grandmother has 10 children, over 30 grandchildren, and over 40 great-grandchildren so I wanted to do a book that counted from 1 to 90. I figured between all of us and our spouses, we could get 90 different memories or thoughts gathered. Luckily, several people contributed more than one memory.

Some comments were short and sweet, others went on for several pages. Some talked about a favorite memory (like my Aunt Penny above, remembering a trip she took as a newlywed with her mom and dad). Others talked about something they admire about grandma: the way she always makes Christmas special, or what an efficient household she ran, or how she makes the best strawberry-blackberry jam.

It was a pleasure to put this book together (though I admit it took longer than I thought!). It gave me a chance to see my grandmother in a different light. I now can see her as a young mother, trying to make ends meet. Or later in life, as a devoted wife taking care of my grandfather. I see her making dinner in the kitchen with her young daughters helping. I see her dancing with my grandfather to the music they loved. Or double checking that all the Christmas gifts for each of her children make it under the tree.

Of course I also still see her as my sweet grandmother... the one who sends out a family letter to each person in her large extended family each month. Who crochets a blanket for each new great grandbaby and never misses a birthday. She still makes it to the cabin each summer for our family reunion (she's the one passing out the toffee nut bars and making sure the great-grandkids have enough Otter Pops.)

90 years and going strong. Happy Birthday Grandma! I have no doubt we'll be celebrating your 100th birthday in no time at all.

a new years card

I love sending out holiday cards and each year we try to come up with something new and different. I have to give credit to my husband for the idea for 2009. "We should do some kind of decoder - like in The Christmas Story." I knew exactly what he was talking about, Ralphie holed up in his bathroom with his secret decoder trying to figure out the message from Little Orpan Annie.

For our card we came up with a series of four statements for each person in our family, for example "Was Bee Captain Hook for Halloween?". (As always, I have changed my children's names to protect their privacy, my 5 year old son goes by "C" and my 3 year old daughter goes by "Bee") Some of the statements are true, and a few are false.

Each statement has a green number at the bottom of the box. If the statement is true, you grab your decoder and set the arrow on that number, and then write down the letter that appears in Bee's circle. (If the statement is false you won't see a number, but a red dot to let you know you have that answer wrong.) After decoding all the statements, you end up with 13 letters. The letters are in no particular order, so you still have to figure out the word jumble to figure out the four word message.

Figuring out the exact placement of the dots and how to perfectly place each letter of the alphabet was a feat in itself. Thankfully I have a very patient husband who worked out all the logistics of how this card worked, and then I just had to make it look good.

I really like the idea of making a holiday card more interactive, and it's just made it more fun to hear back from our friends as they solve the puzzle and email us to share the answer. John really wanted it to be difficult, he wanted people to have to take a little time to work it out. (Although several of our friends have told us that we made this a little TOO hard..) The puzzle is a bit of news about our family and what is to come in 2010, and we are still waiting patiently for several of our friends to solve it.

I'll share the answer with you in a few weeks, I don't want to give it away just yet!

a collection a day

You may remember my love of collections. I especially like odd collections of things people usually don't collect, like playing cards found on the street, produce stickers, found leaves, etc. When I guest blogged at Black Eiffel last year, I shared some of my little "Collections of Nothing".

So you can imagine my delight when I saw one of my favorite artists Lisa Congdon has started a new blog this year, called A Collection a Day, where she'll be sharing her own collections. So far her collections have included erasers, paintbrushes, and pencil lead cases. It's only the 5th of January and I can't wait for the rest of 2010!

happy 2010

If you haven't been following Maira Kalman's illustrated column The Pursuit of Happiness over at The New York Times, you've really been missing out. I'm terribly sad to see Ms. Kalman's column come to an end, what a treat it has been all this year.

What is happiness?, she asks. And her answer in yesterday's column ".. I will sit and draw and eat a meringue and savor the moment." Now that's a resolution I can get behind.