New Hounds on the block

All New Hawkes Hounds 

Finally, my latest designs are finished, and I am very pleased with them.  

For those of you offended by craft  completed in a non pet-free environment, look away please... 

The chap on the left is finished in soft chenile and the other in boiled wool and tweed, and they are so snuggly that while my back was turned Maggie snuck up and nestled in amongst them. You can see where I get the inspiration from these days. 

I had great fun making these chaps, the ears and the eyes are the most fun part and I am glad that I switched to hand making the felt eyes, they are more expressive. By mixing different materials you can get all kinds of effects for the ears, and then they can be bent as you wish. No names for these guys yet, but I have a waiting list for them already. Thanks Mr C for the super cool photos. 

New Hawkes Hounds tags and doing battle with the Cameo Silhouette and winning...

To go with the new designs I have worked on new label tags and packaging this week. Learning new skills is time consuming and I often resent the time spent, but yes I do know it is good to persevere. 

This week I was especially bold and decided to take on Photoshop and the cameo silhouette cutting programme to produce more professional tags. 

I started with this image from you guessed it - the graphic fairy: 

    

They kindly remove any text so that you can do your own thing with it. Opening it in photoshop always make a duplicate background layer by clicking on layers and then follow these instructions  You play around with the size of font and font until you have something you like. I ended up with something like this... 

 I saved it as a jpeg and then took it into the Cameo Silhouette programme. I should say that I have a love hate relationship with this programme. It reminds me of early PC days, when you spend ages looking at the screen while the cursor decides what to do before a message pops up to say "programme not responding - shut down PC" . I have learnt my lesson and save the file after every click. 

Strong coffee in hand, and after watching too many you tube tutorials  I finally managed to trace and mark the image for cutting, and after a mini break down when the printer chose to rescale the image and so the cutter cut a perfect shape about 2cm away from the printed one. Pause for a day for recovery, more reading and a supportive chat with Jo at Briar Patch Designs who is a whizz with the cameo and success! So now I just have to do a back to compliment the front, and I will be done.