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Showing posts with label Free digital downloads. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Free digital downloads. Show all posts

Monday, July 27, 2009

Organizing Fabric Remnants

Above, an excerpt from the 1952 book “Sewing Made Easy”, by Mary Lynch.

Over the weekend I did a bit of destashing of bins and bins of fabric remnants that I had let pile up in my craft shed and barn. I will be filling up my Suburban with the unloved fabric to donate to The Legacy in Sebastopol, one of my favorite shopping spots. Most of the fabric I saved is vintage and it desperately needed organizing.I like to roll and cigar-wrap my remnants, but rarely take the time to do that. On Sunday, I designed some wraps to print out to motivate me to get ’er done. And of course, I made them for you, too. For free PDF downloads of the wraps to print out, click HERE for the shorter ones and HERE for the longer ones. I will keep extra wraps on hand in my sewing nook to wrap remnants as I get them from now on.I cut along the margin edge of each sheet to remove the white non-printed section (so when the bands overlap, the image blends onto itself,) then cut between each graphic to make the strips.Before rolling my fabric, I measured each and wrote the dimensions on the label of the wrap.I placed a 12-inch piece of tape on the table as a folding guide so that all my rolls would be uniform in length. I folded each fabric piece to that width, folded back the raw edges and jelly-rolled, folding in the end raw edges before finishing the roll.I wrapped the roll with the band and secured with clear tape.I’ll be storing my remnants in vintage non-smelly luggage.

Friday, July 24, 2009

Vintage Digital Weekend

I wish I had a nickel for every blog comment that reads, “I don’t know how you do it all...” Seriously, folks, you really should see my laundry room. Oh, and my bedroom closet. Did I mention the garage? The barn? Things do get neglected when I spend so much time blogging. So this weekend I am going to take a break from posting to my blog and start my Spring cleaning in July.
Of course, I’m positive that your house is in order, so I’m leaving you with some free digital images of beautiful calling cards and trade cards that I scanned from my collection for you to craft with this weekend. And I figure calling it Vintage Digital Weekend sounded much classier than Cathe Needs to do Some Housework. These ought to keep you busy until I get back, now, go make something! I’ll be checking in should you want to post your ideas for using these graphics.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Three Word Thursday

Free Digital Images!

Add a “Three Word Thursday” to your blog or leave a comment with your best three for the day.

UPDATE: For my metric friends, the other side of the ruler:

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The White House Cookbook: Free Meat Cuts Images

I’m always flipping through old thrift store books for images. Sometimes our local library has wonderful book sales and there are some pretty cool oldies. I do my best to research the copyright expiration in hopes of confirming the work as public domain so that I can share the images for reproduction. Recently I came across this very grungy old cookbook found at the recycle area at the dump for a quarter. The White House Cookbook of 1887 by Mrs. Fanny Lemira Gillette.Barely clinging to its spine, it is tucked full of coupons, clippings, and handwritten recipes. Digging further, I found pressed flowers and clover. Clearly this was someone’s treasured homemaking sourcebook as well as their scrapbook. I have to keep it tied together with twine. In the front of the book are pages of information on cuts of meats with fabulous illustrations. If you’re a vegetarian, I’m sorry, I’m sure you won’t find this charming in the least. But I couldn’t help but think how wonderful these images would look on a bib apron.These would also be great printed to printable fabric sheets and appliquéd to a pillow for your kitchen seating area, or onto T-shirt transfer sheets and ironed on to muslin for making decorative dish towels. You can get a little crazy and embroider the image once you’ve transferred it. Or, print to paper and trim out to Mod Podge to canvases for kitchen decor, and so on.
Click to enlarge and save the scans of these book pages.The pages show through a bit from the other sides (which I don’t mind much at all,) and aside from hours of Photoshop work, that’s how they’ll remain for my versions, but I am also including a set of images that have been outlined in Adobe Illustrator as vector graphics that you can manipulate in your own software. Click on that image for a PDF download file.There’s much more than history and recipes in this book, so click HERE for more information on The White House Cookbook, or HERE to download your own PDF version of the entire book!

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Free Digital Images: Vintage Floral Soap Cards

It is so neat to find vintage images in sets. I found these embossed, 3.25" x 5.25", circa 1880 soap trade cards at the flea market last weekend.
Click on the set of 4 image to enlarge and save for yourself.
I’m including a set with the lettering Photoshopped out should you want to add your own.
Let me know if you make something with them, I’d love to see it!

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Custom Wooden Nickels, Poker Chips & More!

This is one of those fun projects in which the possibilities are endless! Transferring images onto little round discs. I had planned on simply making some custom wooden nickels from craft-store wood discs, until I happened upon a vintage box of plastic poker chips with nice smooth surfaces.
You can also customize Scrabble tiles and all kinds of other objects for cool and unique tokens, pendants, keychains, and more, yeah- even fabric! In vintage style, I designed my wooden nickels in black and white. You can also go full color!
Besides the wooden discs, chips, or other pieces you’ll be transferring to , the two key materials for the success of this project are:
1. A Chartpak Blender Pen, found in most art supply stores or online HERE
2. Laser-jet prints or photocopies (must be powder ink, not wet ink.) I had to drive to the copy store for my copies as I only have an ink-jet printer. BE SURE TO FLOP YOUR IMAGE! (mirror image of your artwork.) When creating my designs, I added a faint circle border the same size as the discs I would be transferring to for a positioning guide.
I purchased 1-1/2" wooden circle discs at the craft store, and the same size poker chips at the thrift store.
I had photocopies made of my own designs and cut them apart. I added a top center mark on each for 2-sided positioning so the art lined up somewhat front to back.
Line up the disc to the positioning circle and tape to the paper in a couple of places. This helps keep the art from shifting when transferring.
Turn the disk and paper over and with the blender pen, simply stroke across the back of the paper. Once is usually enough, too much and you can turn your image to mush.
Remove the paper and repeat the steps for the other side, lining up the top center (or bottom, which ever you prefer.) Again, stroke over the paper with the marker.
For another fun effect, you can stack up some of your discs or poker chips and stripe the sides.
These nickels are great for little give-away promotions, tokens of appreciation, birth announcements, even allowance tokens (I never have cash on hand at the end of the week.) Drill a hole and use as a pendant or keychain. Make a lucky poker chip token for your favorite online poker enthusiast. Make some Pay-It-Forward coins to share.
Just for fun, I made some extra wooden nickel images that you can customize yourself.
For the PDF Digital Download, click HERE.
For the flopped PDF file, you can click HERE.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Free Antique Album Images

A few years ago, my antique dealer friend, Rose, acquired an 1800s photo album that I insisted she let me scan before she sold it. I just remembered today that I had these images hiding in my computer files. I pulled them out and filled in the photo areas to remove the portraits. Enjoy these digital images free of charge and make something beautiful!
NOTE: You may notice that there are two duplicate floral designs, but each were scanned from different pages of the album.
Here are just some ideas you do with these great graphics:
  • Use as mats for photos before framing.
  • Use as a frame for a beautiful poem.
  • Create a unique birthday card for a friend.
  • Add photo or wording and print onto fabric to create a family quilt or photo pillows.
  • Add photo or wording and decopage onto a serving tray.
  • Add photos or wording, adhere to cardboard, tape or stitch each together creating a freestanding accordion-fold piece
  • Crop floral images for use on many projects including blog headers, greeting cards, scrapbooking and collage.
Leave more ideas in the comments section!
Click on any image to enlarge.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Elephant Corners

Could this be any cuter? Uhm, I don’t think so. From the jacket of a very, very old book, this image would be darling for a birthday invitation, scrapbook image or as the matting for a picture frame. {Free for you to use!}

Counting and the Alphabet

These wonderful images were taken from turn-of-the-century children’s encyclopedias. Click on the images for free PDF downloads. What will you make with them?

Ephemera Hunter-Gatherer

For some reason I’ve been on a kick for fun ephemera, so I scoured a few shops, have been digging through my stash, thinking about venturing into my craft shed, all in an effort to share some great vintage graphics with you.

Click to enlarge.
Here’s the first of several I will be posting over the next few days. It comes from a childrens’ book, circa 1920. I love the colors. No doubt crafty moms will find something wonderful to do with this image!