Planet Nice Crafts

Hello Everyone, It is January 18th but recovery from the holidays is still ongoing. The recovery will need to wrap up very soon as next Tuesday a new semester begins. I wanted to get a post in before I am completely caught up with other tasks. Some crafting activity has been ongoing due to holiday gifting. A little bit of everything has been the order the last month or so with sketching, framing/matting, vinyl cutting, and sewing. The first project I would like to share with you is the creation of a few polar bear stickers. As with the best of projects, it started with putting pencil to paper with sketches: The ideas that spawned the sketches are not completely original, as I looked at others from searches, but with the reworking, I feel they are original now. The sketches were then sketched in Adobe Illustrator into files that were friendly to the Silhouette Portrait 2 vinyl cutter at The Workshop of the Cook Memorial Library. Here is the final produc...

In these first moments of Winter, I would like to send seasonal greetings to you on Planet Earth from Planet Nice. At the moment, there is a pause in holiday preparations to just catch my breath. What has been the recent activity here at Planet Nice Crafts? Finishing up the semester and then cleaning, lots of cleaning. It is always good to start a new season with a freshened up, cleaner setting. This cleaning extravaganza did include the craft room which alone needed sessions across three days. It probably does not look any different, but that is OK. I did attend an activity at the Newberry Library as part of Art Design Chicago called Chicago Style: Typography and the City. A year ago, I didn’t know what typography was beyond changing the size and fonts in Microsoft Word. Now, at least I know there is a design area of typography. Some definitions are: Typeface : a family of graphic characters that usually includes many type sizes and styles Font : collection of characters of...

Hello Everyone! I know it has been a long long time, and I again apologize for that. School activities tied me up as I spent considerable time in October and November sewing in the costume shop of the Theatre Department at the College of Lake County. The latest production was A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen. One of my main projects was this velvet jacket: This project was interesting to me as it was the first time I worked with velvet. Because of the necessary speed, I did not spend time worrying about matching the stripes at the seam lines, the main goal was just to cut fabric as straight as possible.  The fabric was quite stiff so we handled it as much as possible to create a little of the worn look. I had the opportunity to take these pictures but I only had my phone with me and with such dark fabric, some magic with Adobe Photoshop was required to have visibility. No progress has been made on the decided upon bean bag chair but instead some Planet Nice logo work...