Scranton Reads is an annual event organized by the City of Scranton and the Albright Memorial Library that encourages citizens of Scranton to read one book during the month of October. I have been lucky enough to work with the committee the past two years in the creation of promotional materials. This year I redesigned the logo which we have used on all promotional materials and advertisements.

This year’s selection is the works of Mark Twain. Be sure to come attend one of the many events where you can pick up free copies of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I’ll be working the booth at Pages and Places on Saturday, October 2nd. Stop by and say hi!

Many, many months have past since I first began this Ripple Baby Blanket and it is finally complete! This classic ripple pattern in charcoal, lime and seaspray will go with my friend’s little boy from childhood to adolescence due to it’s neutral style. As I stated before I really love this ripple pattern and I have ideas of other projects to use it in. If only I could find the time to start them!

This weekend I attended the Endless Mountain Fiber Festival where I was completely overwhelmed by all the beautiful hand dyed, hand spun yarns and fibers. I was like a kid in a candy shop. I discovered a lot of new vendors that also have Etsy shops, but I restrained myself and bought a single 4oz skein of  mohair yarn dyed in a beautiful shades of blues, greens and purples. I plan to finally make myself something using it, I just don’t know what!

Almost a year ago I made a six layer rainbow cake. It was a hit, but also very time consuming and incredibly rich. I decided to take the same concept and apply it to everyone’s favorite baked good, the cupcake.

The process is simple: mix up your favorite white cake recipe (a boxed cake works just fine), divide the batter into six disposable containers, add an excessive amount of food coloring to each container to obtain highly saturated colors, put a dollop of each color in foil cupcake liners and bake according to your recipe’s instructions. The most important step to this process is the foil cupcake liners. Using foil instead of the normal paper liners protects the cupcake from browning on the sides, allowing it to maintain the saturated colors. Once cooled I used a vanilla buttercream frosting topped off with a healthy amount of rainbow sprinkles. The best part about these cupcakes is the reveal, from the outside they look like a normal cupcake but once the foil wrapper is removed the bright colors are exposed. I’ve made them for numerous parties and just for fun and they’re always a hit!

If rainbow cupcakes weren’t exciting enough, I recently purchased a new digital camera. After four years of art school concentrating on design and photography I’ve finally purchased my first DSLR. I’m excited to finally take some pictures of my crafting, baking and design and to (hopefully) blog more frequently.

Until then, taste the rainbow!

Yet another baby blanket! That seems to be all I crochet anymore, but as I always say something handmade is the greatest gift you can give. Surprisingly enough, this is my first ripple project and I now understand why this pattern is so popular. It works up quick and is easily altered. This specific pattern was altered from Lion Brand’s Child’s Chevron Throw (the pattern is free, just register on the website). I am using Lion Brand Cotton-Ease in Charcoal, Lime and Seaspray. I really like using non-traditional yarn and colors for baby blankets to make them feel modern. The colors in life are much closer to the images below, although the Charcoal appears closer to a Navy than Charcoal. I keep telling myself the next crochet project I do will be an afghan for myself, I think once I get around to it I will use a ripple pattern.

These were by far the easiest scratch-baked cupcakes that I’ve ever made. With minimal ingredients and simple preparation it took minutes to mix up a batch. The hardest part was finding the dried lavender buds called for in the recipe. All of my local chain grocery stores did not carry this ingredient, but a local natural food store carried it in bulk and also gave some very good tips on the using lavender buds. The recipe calls for 1 and a half teaspoons of dried lavender buds, but according to my friendly natural food store clerk that amount would just about overpower any other flavor in the cupcake. I used a healthy pinch for an entire batch plus a few buds on top of each cupcake for garnish. There was just enough of the lavender flavor in each cupcake without the flavor completely overpowering the fresh lemon taste. And most importantly, the cupcakes were a hit with the birthday girl!

The recipe can be found here at Shape.com.

I attended a Home Showcase expo with my sister this weekend to get ideas for her new house. While the show was a bit of a wash for home ideas, the best item I found was this very creative business card for a local builder. It’s the standard size of a business card, 3.5″ x 2″, but it’s 1/8″ thick. It’s made of a very lightweight wood, making it nearly the same weight as a traditional business card printed on heavy stock. The information is done in, what I can assume, a wood burning engraving technique and it’s just as legible as type on paper.

Not only is this a very creative business card, it’s also highly appropriate for the business. There were also traditional, paper business cards available from the same business but the wooden ones were the definite attention getter.

I began the process by designing a logo, as the company is in the beginning stages of defining it’s identity. The logo went through approximately four different phases before the below logo was approved and finalized. The final logo is a good blend of what the client requested and what I was hoping to achieve.

Once the logo was defined I began researching other floral companies to see what the trends in web design are in that market. I had a pretty solid idea of a layout mapped out in my mind prior to researching, but looking at other floral design and wedding design websites helped me to get a handle on what sort of information I needed to request from the client in order to create this product. I requested the information I needed and learned that what makes Four Leaf Clover Designs unique is that they don’t do the standard ‘package deals’ that I came across at most other floral design and wedding companies. They tailor everything to the client’s needs. This unique and intimate quality needed to be well defined in the website. There would be none of the standard corporate business website design used here.

The design of the website went through two revisions before the above, final, version was approved. Originally I had a more playful color scheme that used pinks, oranges and greens to balance out the orange and green of the logo. The client requested a simpler scheme of just orange and green. The major challenge, for me, was integrating a WordPress photo gallery that could be easily updated and maintained by the business owner.

I talked in my previous post about how I haven’t worked with WordPress in a long time. I knew what I wanted to do would be simple and I gave creating a customized template a try. I used WPDesigner.com’s tutorial So you want to create WordPress themes huh? to create the custom template used on the gallery page. It was very easy. My knowledge of HTML was big in aiding me create the template. I also learned a lot about PHP and I hope to integrate more of it in my future web projects. I used the NextGEN Gallery plugin to organize and maintain the actual images within the gallery. It’s a simple plugin that gives a professional look to image galleries. There are a few kinks to work out, such as tagging photos and making them completely searchable, but with the amount of images in each gallery right now that isn’t posing a problem.

Overall I am very pleased with the outcome of this project. I believe it is a good representation of the clean, simple, user-friendly design that I love creating. To visit the website and to get more information about Four Leaf Clover Designs visit FourLeafCloverDesigns.com.

When I enrolled in college my focus changed to print design and the front-end of web design. In the four to five years that I wasn’t developing websites on a regular basis I missed a lot. Most of the standard HTML practices I used were now simplified by CSS, but that wasn’t the difficult part. WordPress, the publishing platform I used most often, had completely evolved. It went from being simple HTML tags you could integrate into templates to coding languages that are foreign to me.

I began refreshing my knowledge by learning new CSS techniques and now I’m moving on and tackling WordPress. The first step was setting up this blog using a pre-designed template and learning to use the dashboard. Now I am ready to move on to the next step, developing my own theme. I started by installing MAMP on my Mac to allow a local install of WordPress. Now I’m following WPDesigner.com’s tutorial So you want to create WordPress themes huh? The theme I’m hoping to develop is rather simple and I’m hoping the process will be the same. Only time will tell.