how to use your cutting mat to cut equilateral triangles

 I mentioned in my goals post that I would keep plodding on with Sophie's quilt, but I'm already at the sewing stage! Much quicker than I planned to be, so I'm on the hunt for a new craft group project this week.

I cut my first pile of strips of fabric, and was chatting to the girls about the tutorial I was going to follow to cut my triangles, when I happened to glance down at my cutting board and notice the triangle marked on it (in the dashed lines)

It took a few more minutes of talking to wrap my brain around how to actually get the right measurements for the triangles. Measuring from the tip of the triangle was the answer! I had already cut my strips to the right size, so I just lined one edge up with the tip of the lines.

 I lined my quilting ruler up with the dashed lines on the mat, and cut away.

When it came time to move the fabric, I just lined the bottom tip with the cutting line, and made the next cut. So I was making two cuts on the fabric, before moving it along for the next pile of triangles.

A sharp rotary cutter (borrowed from one of the ladies) made light work of all the triangle cutting, and I managed to cut 90 triangles in two hours (Sophie and Riley were bother pottering around playing), and I managed to get the rest of the triangles cut at home over the weekend - now on to the sewing.

linking up with Love Happy Daily for #BlogEveryDayInMay

HOW-TO make photo labels in photo shop elements

I've been seeing lots of photos around lately with a label strip across the photo with text inside the label. It's super on-trend, and I stumbled on how to make it by accident, so thought I'd share my newly-acquired knowledge.

Start by opening your picture in photoshop elements. Resize it however you want.

Select the rectangular marquee tool

Select the area you would like filled

Along the menu bar, click "edit" then "fill..." Choose your colour and opacity. I like 50% transparent, but solid colour seems very popular, too.

Place your text where you want it

One last trick - to make your text stand out, add a glow. To do this, make sure you're on the text layer, but not editing it. On the tool bar, select "layer", "layer style", "style settings", then tick the box for glow. You can play with the level of glow, I usually like a 1 (like on my new sidebar buttons), but I use a 5 on my business cards.

If you use this tutorial, let me know so I can see what you create!

tutorial | adding folders to iBooks

You may or may not have heard my excitement recently about aquiring my very own iPad. Yes, we're big Apple-lovers in this house, so getting my own iPad that is kid-free, was super-exciting, and a couple of months later the excitement hasn't worn off yet. In fact, Steve commented last night that it is always beside me wherever I am in the house (he probably didn't notice that it spent all afternoon downstairs yesterday while I was upstairs with him, finally watching Game of Thrones)

One thing I'm loving about it is the ability to put PDFs onto it, and read them while sitting in front of the tv. In the past, when I've taken, say, a Shimelle class, I've printed the notes, filed them in a binder, and never looked at them again. Now, my iPad is full of Shimelle class notes, BPS class notes, Masterful Scrapbook Design seminars, Scouts Australia Policy and Rules documents, and a whole host of others. You can imagine how messy it is, finding anything! But, it is possible to make folders withing iBooks! Here's how:

This works for both books and PDF collections. Open your collection, and click edit on the right hand side of the screen.

Tick boxes will appear on the left hand side.

Select the folders you want to move. For this demonstration, I selected the notes from Sassy Scrapping by Shannon Tidwell at Two Peas in a Bucket.

Click the move button up the top. This drop down menu will appear. Click new down the bottom, name your folder, then click done.

Now select the folder you just named. Your files will move to that folder. I'm slowly creating folders for everything - and it's so much easier to find things now!

tutorial | how to add the pinterest bookmarklet

If you live under a rock, you may not know about Pinterest. You may not be aware that pinterest has changed the way the everybody collects ideas and shares them. You can imagine my surprise when I went to the blogger's meet and greet ealier this month and discovered that some bloggers only browsed pinterest, because they didn't know about the awesomeness that is the pin it button!

You can see from my toolbar that I have several buttons on it. They all make life so. much. easier. when I want to share something on pinterest or facebook, or I find a blog I want to follow that doesn't have google friend connect (which is being removed from all non-blogger-blogs from teh start of much, so you need to know about this button!) I also have a button from Print Friendly up there, handy when I want to print a blog post or create a PDF to save it to my computer.

 To add the pin it button, you need to go to the "about" drop down menu, and click "pin it button" This is slightly misleading, as it doesn't take you there, but we'll go and have a look at what's available.

ETA - I've just visited the link on pinterest and the "pin it" button has been moved to the top of the page below. Just grab it and drag to your tool bar as outlined below.

You'll come to the "goodies" page. There you'll find a link to the app for iPhone (if you don't have it yet, get it, great for those times you're waiting for something)

Next is the coding for adding a "follow me" button to your side bar. Just choose the button you want, and copy and paste the code (on blogger, you add a HTML widget, and paste the code into that)

Next up is the code for adding a "pin it" button to the end of every bog post (or the beginning). I haven't done this yet, but I believe it's just a matter of copying and pasting the HTML code into the code screen, and that's it. There is also a way to embed the button into your blog coding (so it appears on every post), but I'm still working on figuring that one out.

Last up is a series of downloadable files of the pinterest logo. I used them to make the pinterest button in my side bar.

A word of warning - I used the PNG file, and it is enormous! The canvas size is over 100 inches long! When I created my 250px button, I had to reduce the size before dragging onto my new canvas.

Now we've seen what's available, let's add that button to our toolbar.
Start by clicking the "Add +" button

This funny little window will pop up. You want to click the link that I've circled above.

Now click and drag the button up to your toolbar. It will be available wherever there is space, but you can rearrange your buttons just by dragging to the end of the toolbar (and then they will slide up one place)

Pinning Etiquette
There are lots of posts about pinning etiquette. Pinterest even includes a guideline on their about page. In broad terms, don't pin your own posts; add a good description of the pin if it isn't obvious; wherever possible, pin from the source, not a search. I'll show you what I mean.

Bad pinning is when you pin an image from the blog (or website's) main page. If someone decides to follow the link, they will only come to the mainpage, not the postthey're interested in.

Good pinning means clicking on the title of the blog post, and pinning from the permalink.

You can see that when I clicked on this post, that the only images brought up were the ones in the post (and the HTML coded widgets)

How do you see posts?

I just learnt a couple of days ago that if you click once to bring up the window above, then double click, it will take you to the permalink for the picture. Or else you can click the URL just below your name at the top of the screen. (I forgot to add an arrow to this picture)

Tips & Tricks

• see this post from the Blog Guidebook  if you DON'T want anyone to pin from your blog
• I often don't see new pins in my feed. This usually means that I'm following too many boards. Now I'm more selctive about which boards I follow - instead of "following all", I pick the ones that have titles (or images) that interest me. And I regularly cull the people I follow (I find less than 50 is the best number for a good variety of images)
• browsing "everything" is also a great way to see what others are pinning, and giving me ideas for the things I'd like to search for on pinterest.
• browse your "liked" pins regularly. You can unlike by clicking again, or repin to your boards if it still interests you.

I'm going to edit some boards today (I have 85!). Happy pinning!

Share a link to your Pinterest boards below

And Sew We Craft | procrastination buster

I'm sharing the results of my kick-up-the-bum procrastination buster at And Sew We Craft today.

click the picture to see what I did

And Sew We Craft | contact cards

I'm posting at And Sew We Craft today - check out what I made for my contact cards! Click the picture to be taken there.