Burnt

I'd intended to spend yesterday doing sketchbook-y stuff for my homework, following the mini tutorials set by Gina  but ended up spending the whole day buggering about covering a 'good wishes' book for a guy who is retiring this week - I'm off into town for our team 'lunch' and drinks later. I wouldn't do it for just anybody, but I've worked with him for over ten years, and as he's off with his lovely family to live in Brighton, I thought it would be nice to make something a bit special, instead of the usual 'Farewell' card, hence I found myself volunteering to do something with the album everyone had signed.  

I worked until the early hours of the morning on Tuesday, (in between watching 'Meet Joe Black' - one of my favourite films) making mock up photos (he likes to dress up in women's clothes, but assures us that it's only at  fancy dress parties).  On the pretext of showing a colleague how impressive the zoom is on my new camera, I'd managed to take a couple of pictures of him in the office on Tuesday, so using those and a couple of downloaded pics, including  'Dorothy' from the Wizard of Oz, I cobbled them together.  It's probably simple if you are an expert at Photoshop, but I'm not, so it involved a lot of printing and reprinting to get the images the right size, then a bit of Blue Peter cutting and sticking, and then more scanning and reprinting until they looked half reasonable.

Then yesterday morning I started on the cover.  Now to look at it, you wouldn't think it was a whole days work, but to start with I messed about with a photo in PSP to make it kind of Andy Warhol-ish, which I was going to put onto fabric.  First of all, the cheap transfer paper I'd bought from a large supermarket didn't work, (that Asda go back!) so there were 3 abortive attempts before I found some better stuff and succeeded in printing it out.  I ironed it onto some cotton, but then it wouldn't stitch onto that fake leather fabric without puckering, so I tried bondaweb, but the iron was too hot and damaged the surface of the leather stuff.  

Feeling slightly harrassed by now, I cut the whole thing out again, reprinted onto the decent transfer paper, transferred it onto heavier weight fabric and stitched it down successfully.  I then stitched it into the cover based on the measurements I'd got.  

Fortunately, I got someone to drop the book off yesterday evening, just to make sure everything was tickety boo, and it was a good job I did because it didn't fit, so I carefully unpicked it,  and stitched it back together again. And now, it fits, the picture is more of less central, I've printed and stuck in a front page, and put the mock up photos into the book.

So all's well that ends well.  Even the burn where my inner forearm met the hot iron has stopped stinging.

I wouldn't mind, but he'll probably get pi***d and leave it on the train anyway.

Burnt - The Futureheads