52 card pickup

This post has nothing to do with cards, other than it's the 52nd challenge.

Challenge 52: Work upside down.  Create something in such a way that you have to rotate it 180 degrees to display/see it when it is finished.

I sat on this challenge for a week and nothing came to me.  I'm not going to feel bad about it, but I want to have something to post so here are a few things I've come across recently that I can share with my faithful readers in lieu of the results of this challenge:

Animal clothing hangers.  These are hilarious!  Brought to you by the quirky Urban Outfitters.

Then, there's this fabulous blog post on Yes and Yes by Sarah Von Bargen on How to Buy Happiness for $5 (or less) - which I found to be really fun and inspiring.  I can get stuck in a rut sometimes and know that a little jazzing up of my routine can make a huge difference in my attitude.  

Finally, I present this helpful list of craft adhesives and what how to best use each one.  Included are E6000, Mod Podge, Gorilla Glue, hot glue, and many more.  I often don't know which adhesive to use on crafts and tend to go with a trial and error method, so this guide will really help me out.

That's it for today!  I hope you enjoy looking at the stupid cat hanger as much as I do (it's soooooo stupid, I love it!).

Day #2

Challenge:  What's your favorite animal?  Use it as your inspiration today.

Ok, so, this challenge is a little bit of a departure from my overall theme.  I can't honestly say what my favorite animal is, but I own a pretty adorable cat, so I decided to use her as my inspiration.  Meet Lola:

Lola recently turned 9 years old.  Just look at that tough old broad.

So I think that photo silhouettes are kind of hilarious and my parents never had those made for us when we were growing up, so I figured that I should probably do it for my "kid".  Basically, I printed a copy of this picture of Lola onto regular computer paper, cut it out with fine scissors, traced the outside onto another white piece of paper, and colored inside the line - though I didn't have a good black marker handy, so I had to rely on colored pencil and pen.  This is the result:

Not bad!  A little smudgey though.  I played around with my minimal photo editing software to create a couple different takes on the finished product.  This is just a basic inversion and a little playing around with brightness and contrast:

I'm thinking, Kitty in Space!  Then there's this one:

And all that one needs is a bunch of hearts or a unicorn somewhere to make it truly magical.

Again, I came up with my idea for this project and executed it fairly quickly.  Ideas come so much more naturally to me when I have somewhere to start.  I think that the overall effect is nice, but the photo silhouette effect might have turned out better if I was working only with profile detail from the chest up.