I’ve developed an addiction to decorating my planner. I currently use a red cloth DayRunner with the monthly insert that came with it, and some printables. Here’s my latest creative bit: a custom laminated “dashboard” for the front page of my planner.

Custom planner dashboard with scrapbook paper background and hand-painted decorations

After cutting the paper to size I glued on the hand-painted items on the front side page. All the items were painted with Twinkling H2O paint which has a metallic sparkle. The geometric shapes were from my pattern design class last summer (the Jewel lesson) and the crown and dress form were ones I’d painted in the past but never found a use for. The flip side is solid orange-red scrapbook paper. I laminated with self-stick laminating sheets and then trimmed and hole punched the dashboard.

I’ve also made myself a laminated time zone chart (which you can see and download here) and am working on a few other pages as well as tabbed dividers for the major sections.

Planners are definitely a lot “prettier” than back when I used one in the 80s and 90s, and I’m enjoying using washi tape and stickers on the calendar pages and to-do/note pages as well.

I started Instagraming when I started the MIID courses talked about in previous posts. I think it combines the best of blogging with the ease of Facebook scrolling through multiple people’s posts. I’ve noticed that if the choice is between grabbing my phone, taking a photo, and uploading it to IG with a couple of hashtags, vs finding the right cord to offload the photo to my computer so I can go through the multiple-step process of logging into my blog and creating a blog post IG wins. Except on sore hand days — then the “ease” of typing on a small phone screen is trumped by my comfy keyboard and the speed at which I can type. I think there’s a place for both blogging and the soundbyte methods (twitter and IG) but worry that blogging will go the way of the blink tag in html.

FYI, here’s my latest IG post (as of this writing): planner charms. Did I mention I’m on a planner kick and have dug all my old daytimer/dayrunner/franklin covey things out of their rubbermaid box? It’s already turned into one of my creative addictions and I’ve only been back in the planner world for a short time. Good clean fun, and useful too.

The third and final brief of the Make It In Design Summer School was centered around Jewels. I immediately began day dreaming about tiaras and other sparkly things and spent hours browsing Pinterest and Google images. But my first sketches went nowhere. As did my second set. And because I was leaving on vacation in just a few days I felt a lot of stress, and didn’t sleep well the night after the assignment was given (Monday). The next day I was groggy enough to sit down for a few minute nap in my favorite chair (a green Lay-Z-Boy with massage and heat, my back loves it). After just 5 minutes I woke up knowing exactly what I was going to do for my pattern — isn’t it funny how the brain works? A few years previously I’d discovered Twinkling H20s, a glittery watercolor paint in a wonderful range of colors — and the set I have is jewel tones. After creating a set of shapes in Adobe Illustrator I printed them out and began to paint.

Painting in the jewel shapes for my pattern

Once the shapes were painted I cut them out and then arranged them into shapes and scanned them.

Individual gem shapes arranged into a flower and then scanned

I also created some strands of “pearls” for the background in AI, and then took both the “pearls” and the gem flowers into Photoshop.

Swirls of pearls for the background on the surface design pattern

Once I had all the elements in Photoshop I arranged them and rearranged them until I created a seamless pattern, which I then submitted to the class gallery.

Flower Gems repeat pattern

Once the pattern was submitted I decided to apply it to my mockup to see how it would look, and was quite pleased with the result.

Flower Gems repeat pattern on product mockup

I’m quite pleased with my design for the third and final brief, and feel the class really improved my skills as well as forced me to learn some pattern-specific aspects of both Photoshop and Illustrator.

The second brief for the Make It In Design summer school program revolved around Tribal patterns. Having never designed anything tribal, I went looking at my childhood in South Dakota and Alaska for inspiration and found lots of beautiful artwork, including some inspiration from things I own.

Native American doll made from Seal Fur, a present from my mom when I was in grade school in Alaska.

As lovely as the memories were, those styles, colors, and patterns didn’t feel like the right direction for this assignment, so I went back to the brief and centered my exploration on the triangles and lines mentioned in the bullet points.

Sketches of various triangles and other shapes

The not-quite-triangles with the squiggles and some wavy lines ended up being the base for my submitted pattern. The colors are both bright and subtle, and the pattern is a seamless repeat (which I have to say is one of the biggest challenges I’ve overcome in Adobe Illustrator).

The submitted pattern

I’m quite happy with the way the pattern turned out and like how elements of it can be used both large and small.

Mockup of “Tribal Notions” pattern on products

I’m one of the many folks obsessing over the Make It In Design summer school program this summer — so much so that I haven’t blogged anything about it yet. It’s a six week course, with a brief delivered to participants every other week and that assignment due the week after, for a total of three assignments. The Facebook group is a very big part of the course, with participants from all three levels (beginner, intermediate, and advanced) posting rough sketches, how-to and style questions, and finished designs.

sketch for Brief #1 of MIID summer school

I’ve never tried my hand at surface pattern design before, so it’s been a huge learning curve. I have really, really enjoyed the challenge, even when I was feeling like banging my head against the nearest wall. I was pleased to finish brief #1 before the deadline and uploaded my pattern to the website gallery.

Pattern as submitted to MIID Summer School

I felt I’d met the requirements, but wasn’t actually satisfied with what I’d designed. For one thing, it wasn’t a repeat pattern. For another, the colors were bright and tropical, but I could see the weren’t the type of colors that someone would buy in the form of a pillow or a kitchen towel (typical media for patterns).

I decided to leave the pattern as uploaded and be ready to move on to the next class…and then I ended up taking a class from Creative Live on Surface Pattern Design during the week between when I turned my pattern in and when the next assignment was given, and my mind got blown. (Well, further blown, actually, since it was already pretty close to explosion levels thanks to the amazing patterns I was seeing in the MIID Facebook group.) That class taught me how to make a repeat pattern, and how to apply it as an Adobe Illustrator pattern to a vector mockup of a product. So much for doing things like house cleaning or paying bills…I felt that I needed to take my sunny tropical idea of a pattern from true beginner to something a little more sophisticated. So I did.

My tropical pattern from Brief #1 turned into a softer repeat pattern.

I’m very happy with how my revised tropical pattern turned out, and really excited about everything I managed to learn in a two-week period. Making repeat patterns is quite addictive, and I’m sure that I’ll continue to make patterns long after the MIID Summer School 2014 has ended.

People throw around phrases and words like “spiritual meaning” when talking about what they do for a living, but there’s a hard cold truth about work that most folks hate to admit: for most of the folks talking about their “higher purpose” it’s really hot air and a way of rationalizing the long hours and time away from family and friends. Seriously, sitting on a mountain top meditating has spiritual meaning, selling knick knacks or services only has the meaning that you pretend it has.

Pretend is not a bad thing — pretending we all get along and agree is how nations are run. It’s what keeps corporations from imploding when there’s a change of management. And it’s how most marriages survive past the first couple of years. It’s a good thing both for stability and mental health. But believing (i.e. pretending) that your life’s bliss comes from having a deep spiritual bond with your clients and that your only real goal is to enhance the universe has two huge problems when it comes to business:

• A business needs to make money, and that type of airy-fairy attitude not only doesn’t encourage people to spend money with you, it often keeps you from asking or demanding money and respect.  

• It can keep someone who is making a decision based on rational thought from respecting your pricing because in the back of their mind they’ll assume your prices are based on emotion rather than hard cold numbers, and if the prices are based on emotions they can use emotion to get you to change your prices.

How many forum posts and private emails go around every time a small business owner has a client who doesn’t respect him or her and who treats them badly? Lots. It happens daily in some industries, with the same people posting/emailing the same complaints over and over.

And how often do you think that attitude in the client has been accidentally nurtured by the business owner being all “spiritual meaning” about their work and leading the client to believe that the business owner will do ANYTHING to keep from having their spiritual meaning tarnished? Seriously, you just gave a pushy client a giant advantage, because if this is more than just how you pay your mortgage they know that you’ll honestly do anything to keep them happy.

But in addition to giving the client power, by making your work all about some kind of “higher purpose” you’ve given yourself an “out” to not do certain things well. Bookkeeping for example — you can justify ignoring the numbers by telling yourself you’re following your bliss. You can focus on the things that are your “passion” and happily ignore those things that actually make a business successful, which usually means numbers and processes and nitty-gritty late nights doing non-creative things while your family and friends are out having fun.

Sadly, 99% of running a business (any business) is sweat and paperwork and customer service rather than the bliss that modern “isn’t my office beautiful” magazines would have you believe. There’s not a lot of spiritual bliss in realizing you need to scrub the office toilet before the client comes in, especially not when you know that specific client doesn’t respect you and will demand extra services and more attention and not want to pay you for those things.

Once upon a time I used to get newsletters that were full of information. Both online and in print, they had info and tips up the wazoo. Some I paid for, some were free.

I now get at least 10 times as many “newsletters” and every single small tidbit in them is a hint, not an actual tip — you can only get the real info (the “news” part of the word newsletter) by going to a website and reading (or watching) boatloads of over the top selling pitches for their membership-based forum, their online training, their Skype training, or their in-person conferences. And what are those tidbits when you finally get to them? Regurgitated Zig Ziglar pep talks with examples from “Tom T.” and “Sarah H.” talking about how much they learned from the next pricier item up.

I’m really wondering “where’s the beef?” these days — actual tips and info seem to be missing from most of the tips and info out there. And seriously, if I wanted more Zig in my life I’d go to the source (which I can get for free at the LIBRARY) rather than crawling through waves of “funnel pages” and ending up paying more than a new car for your regurgitated version of him.

Poor Maggie Mae. For a while her intestinal tumor was shrinking, and the vet was very hopeful. But in the last week she’s been fading a bit. She’s lost more weight, isn’t eating as much, and is barfing more. We’re tracking how she acts and reacts, very aware of our responsibility as fur-parents to not let her suffer. It’s not quite time but we can feel it inching closer.

She has times when she purrs a lot and hangs out in the sunshine the same as the other cats, and times where she wants only to be alone in the back room. Watching a cat battle cancer — something they can’t claw at, can’t hiss at, and just suffer through — is an education in true illness. There is nothing worse for human or animal than to feel your body betraying you. She’s never been the best digestion-wise, but this is beyond her.

The best we can hope for is to fill the time she has left with tasty food and warm laps since those two things were always what made her happy.