December 2008

Wordle: Extract popular words on your blog to make a word cloud

I love my husband. He’s my best friend in the world and he always finds cool things for me from other parts of the web that I don’t frequent. If I had my druthers I’d look at pictures of pink balloons, frothy dresses, hand-made letterpress cards, patterns of dogs, t-shirts with animals and mustaches on them, and revamped dressers all day.

Thanks to him I learned about Wordle. It’s so much fun. You can enter a website and it will find the most frequently used words and make a word cloud out of them. Then you can change the fonts, the shape of the cloud, and the colors. I love my Maquette word clouds. It was not shocking to learn that “macaron”, “paper”, and “loves” were popular words on my blog. If you have a blog you should try it, or enter the url of your favorite blog and see what kind of cloud you come up with.

mini goldleaf journal collection in 8 simple steps: The perfect (easy) handmade gift

Mini journals as I like to call them, or pocket journals are the perfect gift for a friend or loved one. Give them a little collection of 3-5 journals that they can keep in their bag (s) and write down any brilliant ideas that they can refer to later (or just a shopping list or cell phone number). These are so easy to make and such a lovely gift.

In the past I’ve shown some tutorials that require sewing or hot glue. This time all you need is a stapler, glue, paper, and gold leaf. Here’s how to make these journals in a few simple steps (if you want to be a little fancier follow this journal making how-to and then just follow the gold leaf steps below):

1. Cut a piece of oak tag into the size journal cover you want and cover with kraft paper or brown paper bag
2. Cut a pretty piece of paper the same size as the cover for the inside cover (I like origami paper, or metallic paper)
3. Cut plain paper a little smaller than both the cover and inside cover paper (this will be the pages so put in a nice bunch so the journal lasts a while. Throw in a sketch or a secret note into the middle so when your friend gets to it, they’ll smile)
4. Glue the fancy paper (with a glue stick) onto the inside cover and fold in half once glued to make sure it fits (I cheat but trimming them both together at this point. I like rounded edges so I do that by eye)
5. Staple the little inside pages together and into the cover on the binding (I like a long neck stapler for this so I can staple on the fold. You can punch holes and tie with ribbon if you don’t want to staple or if your stapler is too small to reach the binding)
6. Put some Elmer’s glue or any glue you have into a little cup and with a paint brush or your finger tip, paint a little design on the cover (not too thick)
7. Apply gold leaf (making sure it’s attached to glue)
8. Let dry and rub off extra and the spots where the glue was will have your gold leaf design (I do this really haphazardly, I think it’s fun and easy. You could take your time and make something a little fancier)

*I recommend tying them up in a ribbon like a little gift or old fashioned school books in a bundle.

Materials: gold leaf (powder, flake, or paper), glue stick, Elmer’s Glue, oak-tag, metallic or origami paper, printer paper, stapler