Hi. My name is Katy. I started Shoestring Decorator as a way to collect creative ideas and put them in a safe place. But there are so many other benefits that I've already discovered from running this site!

First, it forces me to sit down and think out all sorts of ideas. I work them out on paper, I document them as I'm working, and I finish a much higher percentage of my projects than ever before.

Secondy, I'm finding that as I write down one idea, five or six more rush into my head. I'll wake up in the middle of the night with a vision of a new way to do whatever article I've been writing. Or I come up with three new alternate ways to decorate something. Writing an idea down gets the thought out of my head so that there is room for others to flood into its place. I find it kind of thrilling!

But mostly, I get a kick out of seeing the body of ideas I'm collecting. I feel this way about my regular blog as well, but with this one the satisfaction is even greater. There are so many articles, and I love every one of them! I am amazed that I've done this much. I am motivated to do even more. The ball is rolling and I like the path its taken so far.

Posted by katybeck at 01:03 AM | Comments (0)

One of my current ongoing projects involves a tabletop fountain. I got the inspiration after visiting the Gaylord Texan Hotel & Resort a few months ago with my family. Its basically this huge, octagonal building with a large, eight-story open space in the middle covered by a glass conservatory ceiling. So the inside has all the light of an outdoor space, but is temperature controlled. Which, in Texas, is a very good idea.

Anyways, inside this huge atrium is a huge indoor garden, complete with and fountains and waterfalls. It also had had scaled replicas of some of Texas' most famous landmarks, including the River Walk in San Antonio.

The River Walk part of the gardens were filled with lovely tile and mosaic work, which is what inspired me to build my own little fountain. But I wanted the details of the fountain to be to scale, which meant tiny bricks, and tiny plants.

So I've been working for the last month or so, casting hundreds of little bricks out of plaster using a special resin mold. When I was finished casting, I stained everything using acrylic washes, and then sealed it all with polyurethane varnish.

Now I am in the process of gluing all the little bricks into the various pools that will spill into each other. The fountain also has a small square planter in the center where I plan to put a dwarf mondo grass (or maybe a miniature conifer) to fit in with the scale of the bricks.

Posted by katybeck at 01:10 AM | Comments (0)

Another project on my table currently is a moving announcement card for me and my boyfriend. Between the two of us we have a lot of people to notify, so I embarked on a project to make the announcements by hand.

The project was inspired by the one over at Paper Source. Except the envelopes are a little more like these, with an antique map liner. I only recently discovered the Paper Source store/site/weblogs, and they have been very inspiring for me. Its stirred up all my old loves of paper and bookbinding!

For the inside card I whipped up a little announcement in Illustrator and printed it on kraft cardstock on my office's color laser printer. It turned out great! Laser ink typically sits right on the surface of paper and looks glassy, but on kraft paper the ink was absorbed a little more and took on a satiny matte finish that almost looked like it rolled off an offset press. Plus the kraft color added some nice depth and dimension to the typically "bright" laser ink.

For the envelope itself, I laid out several envelope templates in Illustrator and printed them out to see what shapes appealed to me. Plus I wanted something large enough to be mailed, but with a template that fit on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper. Not an easy task, I discovered! I made one like Paper Source's Petal, and then I started playing around with a combination of rounded and straight edges. Ultimately straight edges won out because I didn't want to go crazy cutting zillions of rounded edges by hand.

Then I turned to the Google image search to find me some antique map images. I ended up with a cool hand-lettered map of Staffordshire in the UK, which I picked because I could crop it to make it look like it was a map of just Shire (My first date with Adam was to see Lord of the Rings, so I have a special affinity for it). Its amazing how many high resolution images you can find with the google image search! I tossed the map into Illustrator and created a clipping mask from the envelope template so I would have cutting guides when I printed it out.

Posted by katybeck at 09:48 AM