Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Crafts and Lessons





DH is gone to San Francisco for the week, leaving me quite at loose ends, and not sleeping too well because my cat wakes me up every hour to ask where dad is. Grrrr....he better get over that! So when I'm at loose ends I tend to get crafty, and I did. I have wanted new curtain rods in the family room and kitchen ever since we moved in, but because they are very large windows the long rods are either not available (in our little town), they're ugly, or they cost way more than I think curtain rods ought to cost. What is a curtain rod? Well, a long shaft-type affair with some kind of decorative finial at the ends. OK - one 10 foot length of electrical conduit is $1.97 - for the whole thing! At the craft store I bought wooden eggs, wooden candle cups, a piece of dowel and some hammered gold paint.
First, cut the dowel into 6 pieces, about 2 inches each. Screw thru the bottom of the candle cup into the end of a piece of dowel. Glue the egg onto the top rim of the candle cup, and let it all dry. Sand lightly, a couple coats of primer and a couple of paint, and voila!


It's a curtain rod! LOL! (those are not the brackets I'll be using - I have painted new ones to match the new rods)
NOW - I guess I better do something about curtains for the new rods?

LESSONS:
I am so new to html and the intricacies of editing and have made a huge discovery. In trying to learn if I can change the background of my blog, I copied and pasted lots of background jpgs from websites offering those kinds of goodies, but none of them worked. I tried it from various webpages that I visited, with the same no luck. One evening while blog-rolling, I came across one of my favorites, Forest Jane Designs, and she has a beautiful quilty background there. I tried the copy and paste technique and it worked! Changed the background on my blog, and I was so excited it never occurred to me it might be copyrighted. Come to find out it is her own design and is indeed copyrighted. I sent her a note right away, and she was so gracious in accepting my apologies and giving me written permission, along with a very nice suggestion as to how this might be better handled in the future. I am very grateful for that, and embarrassed enough that I can't use the background now even tho she said I may. This lesson has pushed me to figure out what I was doing wrong, and learn how to copy and paste from my own files rather than someone elses' web page. It's probably only news to me, but Forest Jane, you have done a good thing for other page owners and designers, and novices like me. Thank you.

(Now I see that my new background only shows up in the preview on the edit html page, not on the live blog............oh well!)



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9 comments:

Unknown said...

Great curtain rods! So clever. Keep investigating ways to get the background you want. Let me know what you find works!

Mary said...

What a totally creative idea and the rod looks great!

Melzie said...

You can take little snippets from any graphic and save it as a jpg and then upload to a free place such as photobucket.com. Then you can fiddle a bit with the codes they provide and use them for your backgrounds. That said I use to have a gorgeous snowy blog and messed mine up LOL sometimes it helps to make a "test blog" to fiddle with :) xoxo melzie

Pam said...

The curtain rods turned out great - very crafty. I have no idea how to do anything with HTML - it scares me :)) Forrest Jane does wonderful web pages. She has done the web page for her quilt guild and it is a great web page to save and go look at - there is lots of good stuff her guild has on it.

Quilting Kim said...

Your curtain rods turned out great - you are so clever.

Fabricfaire said...

Well, you are a fabulous interior designer and affordable at that!!!

Susan said...

I'm so impressed with your curtain rod skills - and for so little money! Way to go! See the husband goes and all kinds of creativitiy comes out. =) Like the hearts background on your page.

When I wanted to use a graphic on blogspot (I left there to return to my favorite livejournal) I would just upload it to a message that I saved as draft, and use the code it gave me. You can keep them all in one message and it's fine, just don't publish it. =)

Susan said...

BTW, if you do use a graphic or background from a site that allows you to do so free, don't forget to post the link and thanks in your sidebar, or the footer, as I did here:

http://desertskyquilting.blogspot.com/ =)

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