Brenda's Afghan pattern

Here you go! I've written in in plain English, Crochet abbreviations and a chart at the bottom. Feel free to text if you have questions.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/uyynvriow3dydqv/Brenda.pdf?dl=0

Cyber-Monday Goes Retro!

I noticed, and you might have too, that my last few images utilized a black background. While I'm not opposed to black, I felt like I was getting stuck in a rut. When I needed a Cyber-Monday theme I started perusing Christmas movies for some inspiration.

The movie that stuck with me was "A Christmas Story" which came out in 1984 but is set in the 1940's. Both eras make me think of argyle patterns and classic, round lines and slightly muted versions of favorite classic Christmas colors. With that in mind, I created this argyle background and used large banners to set text apart with a rounded sans-serif font. I was pretty pleased with how this turned out and I saved the background image for other (personal) uses.

A Busy Black Friday Sale

Black Friday sales this year included 2 full images and a Facebook cover. The owner decided to hold the Black Friday sale early so she could give herself time to fill orders and not be competing for dollars along with brick-and-mortar stores.

The first image I did went out only in the newsletter. This image didn't contain the website address. Normally I would put the website address in the image so, if the image info would get shared, people would know what web site to go to but the most likely way to share the "sneak peak" image would be to share the website newsletter.

The hand and lips were drawn and colored in Gimp thanks to the Bamboo tablet. Everything else was pretty straight forward.

Mr. Turkey was a file I owned and I used a slightly italicized font. This, along with noting the web address at the top of the photo make this simple and effective at getting the point across. This graphic was designed to work on Facebook. Below is the corresponding cover photo.

Spooky Halloween!

The owner of Decorate the Cake is a big Halloween fan and is always working on new molds for cake decorators. When she came out with a set of fangs I knew I had inspiration for the Halloween sale graphic!

The title text effect was done in Gimp. The effect is technically called "Wind" and involved some rotation and layering to get the bloody look. I also love the low-slung bubbly font, it reminds me of "The Munsters". The fangs file is modified from a scrapbook cutter file and the tombstones were skewed to look like they came out of the Earth. It's not a terribly complex image but I think it works and the pops of red keep it from being too bland.

Fall is in the Air

The owner of Decorate the Cake asked for a sale graphic to hit at the end of September. Holidays and occasions are few and far between at that point in the year. Labor Day is over but Halloween isn't quite close enough. After racking my brain and Googling a myriad of nonsensical holidays I decided to go with fall for a theme. This was a smaller sale offer so we didn't end up with a Facebook cover photo.

I really love the color pallet for this with the fall leaves, oversized acorns and heart on the tree. I could see using this tree in other applications or recoloring the leaf canopy for any time of year.

Labor Day Sale Graphics

I was asked to create a graphic and cover photo for Decorate the Cake's Labor Day sale. For this sale I'm a sucker for clean lines and patterns. I went with a monochromatic star background and the words used drop-shadows in blue or white. Simple but the words popped like I wanted without being cluttered.

The Facebook cover photo contains the same information but in a long horizontal orientation. The sale information is justified on the right to leave room for a profile picture.

Christmas In July Graphic

My friend is gearing up for a big Christmas in July sale and she needed several graphics. I created one graphic in Inkscape and manipulated it for her Facebook cover photo. Almost all the graphics I do are either optimized for Facebook cover photos or close to square in shape since that's how Facebook crops photos. The owner uses MadMimi for her email marketing which accommodates square images pretty well too.

For this, I came up with a background gradient, created the road sign in Gimp, Santa on his sleigh was a coloring image and the clouds were a redesign of some earlier ones. Then I wrote the poem. Usually when I get a project like this my first thought is the theme I can build around and what kind of tone I want the graphic to have. This was a "Night Before Christmas" spin-off.

Below is the Facebook cover photo I created to match the sale image. Notice there's no poem and the really important info is on the bottom of the image since Facebook tends to cut off the top of a cover photo at first glance.