Tuesday Teaching {Wordle}

Word clouds by Wordle.

My curriculum for my technology classes always includes a graphic design unit. The students always get a kick out of finding their inner designer, and they love using Wordle! I'd even go so far as to say the students prefer spending their time on the internet on this site over an educational game website. Believe it! :)

I love this. I love this for games, for summaries, for brainstorming, for design - in science, technology, reading, English, a little girl's bedroom. I love this for everything!

The first word cloud comes from a 'Copy & Paste' transcript of one of my earlier Teaching posts. Hm... Displacement, water, boat, tinfoil.... Can you guess which post it is?

Click here!

Wouldn't Wordle come in handy when in a Reading class setting? Or even with your kids at home. After the child reads a story, they can type in the main points they remember and see their word cloud come to form. Or you could make the word clouds and have the child guess which story the word cloud represents. 

Sound familiar?

I also think this is a very creative and cute way to incorporate a personal touch in a framed print in a child's room.

Taken right from her Wikipedia page. Did I pick a famous enough woman? :) 

To use Wordle,
1. go to http://www.wordle.net/create
2. type in your set of words. Click go!
3. change settings in the upper left hand corner of your image (font, color, direction of words, etc.)
4. if there are words you do not want to have in your graphic, simply right click on the word and click 'Remove _______'

I can't wait to see what you come up with! Comment with a link to show off your designs!

Anything Else Fridays {Spice Container Labels}

Our Friday this week falls on Wednesday. Or atleast, a boating adventure tomorrow gets me feeling like it's the weekend already! This week, I wanted to spice up our .. spice rack. Zing!

We've been in the market for a spice rack since we moved into our everything-is-bigger-except-the-kitchen apartment to free up some much needed cupboard space. A nice wood one was our first choice, and we scored one off Craigslist for $10!

Included were the dull generic bottles, identical, making it ridiculously hard to tell the 32 spices apart and adding 10 minutes to dinner prep time.

 

I shopped around for some new spice container labels and only found blank labels that you write on yourself. AH. Not going to ruin my new beautiful spice rack with my squigglies! I decided to make them myself. Another excuse to break out the tiny graphic designer in me. 

I like to do test prints on lined paper so I know exactly where on the paper the graphics will print. Put it in the correct way a normal lined paper would lay and see which side/corner your design comes out on. It's foolproof!

The initial plan was to use Avery labels with their printing template. Sounds easy, right? Should've been. But, the Martha Stewart version I got sadly printed out really runny - not even a step up above my squigglies. So, for the (hopefully) temporary time, I've just cut these out from printer paper and glued them on the blank labels.

Not ideal, but I invite you to imagine what they look like from really far away :) Even with that hiccup though, I feel like they add lots more personality to the kitchen. I love them! 

Let me know in the comments if you'd like the sheets I designed and in what format (Photoshop/Word/PDF). I'm going to try these with the normal, non-Martha Stewart Avery 1.5" labels soon to see if they work. Enjoy!

Anything Else Fridays {Finishing up}

I'm real excited (and relieved) to report the Projects Completed this week!

Other side of Pillow cover for baby girl's room. Design by cluckclucksew

Still no curtain rod, but I'd say this baby girl's room is done! Finished the race, but hasn't gotten the medal yet kind of done :)

Flip side of the pillow

This gallery wall was tricky! I had a few different arrangements that I really loved and so I put the different sizes of paper on the wall only to discover that the spotlight above gave really weird shadows! So I decided nothing could go underneath the middle one, which is going to house a cute typography of our family mission statement. So I had to go out horizontally. In the end, I made a single breakage line on both sides of the middle frame and matched up the little ones to keep the breakage line obvious through the whole thing. Yes, I made up the term breakage line. It's the new planking.