<------  Look left!  I have 4 new buttons I added so you can easily find my Facebook Fan Page, email me, subscribe to the blog's RSS Feed, and quickly find the "about me" section I added last night below. Besides, who doesn't love simple, clean, direct graphics?

Stay tuned...lots more exciting changes happening!

I'm a transplanted New Yorker living in Orlando, Florida since 2006.  I love the warm weather, I love the sunshine.  Sunshine = happiness.  I miss my family and best friends in New York but am so lucky to have awesome co-workers and some really wonderful friends here.

I photograph.  I scrapbook.  I bake.

I love emoticons :-) , acoustic music, dessert, and the feel of an outdoor breeze on a gorgeous day.  I love my friends and family and would do anything for them. 

I stay up way too late.  I go off on tangents.  I make lists.  I have used a Filo Fax organizer every year since 1996.  I follow through with my commitments.  I am organized and detailed oriented.  I am crafty and a do-er who's always busy.  I believe in good energy and am intrigued by chemistry between people.  I am sensitive, caring and loyal, sarcastic, bubbly and blunt.  I am not shy. 

I love being in love and seeing others who are in love.  I am selfless.  I love making other people smile.

I believe that 8 years of sleepaway summer camp, amazingly honest, loyal and loving family members, artistic talent, living far away from home, and the ability to self-reflect/self-evaluate have had integral roles in shaping me into the person I am today and the person I will become in the future.

Please check out their website, here.  They're such great photographers!

And thank you to Tim and everyone else involved in the meeting, especially getting us all to Ember, in downtown Orlando, afterwards!  Tons of fun and I'm so jealous most of you will be in WPPI in Vegas in a few weeks!  Oh well. I suppose it's something to look forward to next year!

In the immediate future, however, I look forward to staying in touch with a lot of you!!

Sweet dreams!!!

I truly didn't want this from the start however after I developed and created them I fell in love with them!  Sometimes not having the money to spend to do something is a blessing.  I really wanted a plastic business card but after pricing them out I just couldn't afford them.  For a relatively think thickness card with 2 colors, front printing only, it was going to cost me around $250 for 250 cards!  Eek!  So I had to get creative!

So how'd I do them?

Supplies for what I created:

1. Printable Business Cards
2. Duct tape (yup, duct tape!)
3. Sewing Machine
4. Craft Knife
5. Computer/Printer
6. Corner Rounder Craft Punch

Step 1:

• Buy a pack of Printable Business Cards from an office store.  I actually realized I had purchased these a while ago and just never had the motivation to print the cards.  I believe it's about $15 for a pack and it contains 160 cards.  You can print on both sides of these cards but I chose to simply print on the front.  Alternatively, you can print on cardstock, heavy weight paper then cut it up into business cards but time is money...and I like having time!  The perferations are wonderful and after you print them it's super easy to divide them into individual cards.

Step 2:

• Design your business card within the dimensions of the cards you're using.  I use Photoshop all the time so I designed them in Photoshop however you can design your whole card in Microsoft Word (where the card template is) if you want.  For those interested in how I designed the card I'm posting it.

• I knew I wanted something simple, clean, and unique.  What did I want on it for sure?  My logo, my website and my email address.  After some conversations with friends I decided not to put my phone number on it.  If people want to contact me there's 2 wonderful ways to do so on the card.  Plus, there will be a "contact me" section of my photography site when it's up and running.  So what else?  I wanted something that said I do baking/cakes, photography and scrapbooking.  So I came up with three simple logos to communicate that.

• I designed my icons in Adobe Illustrator because you just cannot beat Illustrator's amazing abilities to help you create clean line images.  It's because it works off of vectors and not rasters (Photoshop works on a raster platform whereas Illustrator's on vector) but that's another conversation for another day!  See below for an image of my screen shot while I was designing my scrapbooking logo.

• I then finished up the camera icon and, lucky for me, I actually designed the cake slice logo in June of 2008 for a t-shirt design.  So then I had all three icons!

Step 3:

• Finish laying out my card.  I chose the font I wanted, kept the colors at a minimum to adhere to my "simple, clean, unique" goal and added my logo (my logo was previously designed for my digital scrapbooking business). 

• I actually printed the card horizontally first then decided that a vertical card was going to work better for my design.  However it was easier for me to add a horitzontal image to the Microsoft Word Avery Printable Business Card template so I simply rotated the image in Photoshop and saved it.

 Step 4:

• Add the image to the Microsoft Word document. 

• Open Microsoft Word, go to "Tools" on the top toolbar, then "Envelopes and Mailings."  A window then pops up with 2 tabs.  One is "Envelopes" and the other is "labels."  Click on the "Labels" tab.  Click on the "Options" button on the right hand side of the window.  Then find your template number, highlight it, click "okay" and then press the "Open New Document" template.

• Alternatively, simply look at the instructions in the package of business cards you bought and it will tell you how to get the template for the cards.  Avery has many templates on their website too if your Microsoft Word doesn't already have the template number on file.

• The best thing about adding my already-created image to the document was that it was all I had to do!  So I simply did, "Insert," "Picture," "From File," found my file, clicked okay and Voila!  Then I just put the image on all 8 cards on the sheet.

•  Maybe I could've made the page setup "landscape" instead of "portrait" and not have rotated my Photoshop jpg image, but hindsight's 20/20, right?  Oh well!

Step 5:

• PRINT!  WORD TO THE WISE: Do not feed more than 1 sheet of this paper into the printer at a time.  I made the mistake of doing that and if it gets jammed and you need to pull it out of the printer the paper will come apart!  Why?  It's perferated so if you pull on it it comes apart easily - they're designed to do so!  So one page at a time!

Step 6:

• Separate the cards!

Step 7:

• Round the edges with a corner rounder craft punch.  I really like the look of round edges so I chose to do this.  Again, this tutorial is for how I created my cards.  Take away what you want from it. :-)

Step 8:

• Divide the duct tape into half, on the roll with a craft knife.  (I purchased silver duct tape (silver, not the usual gray) from Michael's with a 40% off coupon and it was about $2.75 for the roll with the discount.)

• Below, the arrow points to the cut where I divided the roll with the knife.  I measured half-width with a ruler all the way around the roll, marked it with a Sharpie marker, and then carefully sliced it all the way around.  A good slice will cut the roll pretty far down.

• Tip: ALWAYS use a nice, sharp blade in your craft knife.

Step 9:

• Put tape on a low portion of the business card using one side of the tape.  To minimize wasted tape, I did not cut the length before putting it on the card.  I put the tape on the card while the piece was attached to the roll, saw where it hit the end of the card, then cut. 

• Tip: I found it was easier to cut the length with the craft blade instead of a scissor.

• Fold the excess tape onto the back of the card.

 Step 10:

• Cut the duct tape to round the bottom corners....again.  So why did I round the bottom corners in the first place if I was going to tape over them?  Simple: the craft punch will not be able to punch through the duct tape.  By rounding the edges first I can see the lines when I put the tape on the bottom of the card and it's then easier to see where I need to cut the tape off of instead of simply guessing.  The arrow on the photo below points out what I am describing.

Step 11:

• Cut off the tape!  I simply did this with any old pair of good scissors.

Step 12:

• SEW!!  I chose to sew a black zig-zag line on my card.  I just ran it through my sewing machine.  Works like a charm.  You may want to clean your needle after this because it will inevitably be a bit sticky after sewing on 160 or so cards with duct tape!

Step 13:

• Repeat steps 7-12 until the cards are complete.  You'll find that once you've done one card it's easier to develop a sort of assembly line to get a huge batch of them finished.

And once more, the final product!

Thanks for your interest!  Be sure to post any question/comments if you need clarification on what I did to create my cards.

Posting photos of my new business cards in a few minutes...

I love how this first one simply focuses on their faces.  I think eyes speak in photos like this and emotions just flow between the people in the photo and the viewer.  Aren't photos wonderful?  I also love that you can see that the shapes of their faces is very similar - something a mother and daughter can treasure.

I am in love with this photo of Jennifer!  I did some initial editing and then applied TRA's Milk Cookies to the image, Antique tone at 5% for a teeny tiny warm color addition and WOW.  STUNNING.  I love how making it black and white made it POP and really highlighted Jennifer's blond hair, youthful skin and milky skin tone, and gave it a feeling of innonence.  And I just love her slight smile here and her pose!

Thank you so much for the opportunity to photograph you both and capture these moments in time.

Steps to make this happen:

1. Start a website specifically for my photography (Domain name?  Check!  Host?  Check!)
2. GET BUSINESS CARDS!!  
3. Advertise
4. Photograph more people for my portfolio

Have you seen some of the amazing business cards out there?  I never thought coming up with the right card idea would so difficult!  Check out this site (this one too!) for some really cool ideas.

I plan to start my site by next month and hopefully have it up and running by mid-February!

Here's the preview of the freebie:

And my Facebook fan page which is where the link to download it is located.

Be sure to become a fan for updates on freebies, coupons, tutorials, inspiration and more.

CRATE PAPER - SWOON!!!   I just adore their Brook line their debuting in a couple weeks.  Must get my hands on that very soon:

 There's more to the line but I'll just add those for now.  Be sure to check out their site here for other amazing lines!

And Maya Road (always a favorite) has ADORABLE new stuff.  I didn't expect anything less!

I LOVE this new Strawberry Coaster album:

And this elephant one:

 And these chipboard butterflies!

And of course the mini-chipboard sewing set for my sister, the fashion designer:

Can't wait to see them in person! 

The weather is FINALLY warming up in sunny Florida.  I actually dressed too warm today! 

Also, I still have my coupon code for 30% off my Digichick store up on my Facebook fan page!  Don't miss out - available for use until Friday!

Have a happy Wednesday!