On to New Things

I've had to put the tutorial for Mirror Mirror on hold. Either the design will need to be simplified, or my illustrating skills will have to improve before I can finish it.

It's time to start Christmas ornaments. Those of you who know me know I make beaded ornaments for the younger ones of the three generations that come after me.  This year there are a total of 17.  I'll try to get the five youngest ones a brick stitch "toy" made, the next age group will get a beaded star I think and the oldest five will get my new Holly Wreath.

This is a 3-D design, quite sturdy and very "blingy".  After struggling with my last design for a whole frustrating month, I was delighted with the ease with which this one came together. Only took me a week and a half, most of which was spent on the tutorial.

The pattern has been uploaded to all three of my pattern shops. 

BeadPatternsBoutique

The Bead Coop

Craftsy

Lebre Office

YaHOO!  I'm excited! This morning I was looking for a user forum for Open Office.  I wanted to be able to change the default line color. In the latest update of Open Office the default line color had been changed from black to gray. It got really tedious having to change the line color of each little line I drew as a thread path.  It HAD to be changed. I couldn't see it and thought if I couldn't see it my customers couldn't either. And of course, I couldn't be sure it went where I wanted it to.

Right under the search results for Open Office official site was an article on why you should ditch Open Office for Libre Office. I thought I could always delete it if it wasn't any better than Open Office, so I downloaded it.

YAY! Default line color is black, it has the ability to rotate an object to any orientation I want without having to guess at the angle degree, AND it will open all my Open Office files!!

So far I'm one happy illustrator. It'll only help with the line color in the tutorial I'm working on right now, but this is going to be much less frustrating!