My own little nightmare…

Guess what! This is post three in the “coolest thing I ever made” series.

You’re wondering why I am compelled to torment you with preludes, am I right?

Did you end up making a Crystal Beach toile? Just get to the meat!!!!

That would be irresponsible.

Really.

You know what wasn’t cool about the coolest thing I ever made. A hare-brained scheme that gave me actual sleepless nights because I did it “bass ackwards.”

The title of this post should be:

“A Nightmare of my Own Design: How I did everything all wrong, but it turned out all right in the end because of the kindness of strangers.” (Wow, just gave away the whole plot, there.)

Not sure that title meets suggested SEO guidelines.

Not sure it meets “Where Bloggers Live” guidelines for this month, either. This month’s topic is supposed to be “Sleep Routine.”

You know what cost me a lot of sleep? This project!

Let’s review:

• Recreational obsession with a place I loved that no longer exists. ✅

• Desire to redecorate my powder room using a Toile print. ✅

• The idea to make my own toile print featuring images of the place I loved that no longer exists. ✅

• Complete lack of skillset to accomplish the mission. ✅

• No original photographs of my own with which to work. ✅

And it was that last one that did, indeed, keep me up at night (not exaggerating here…at ALL!). That was almost the undoing of this project.

This is why I am absolutely thankful for, entirely dependent upon, and incredibly grateful for the generosity and the kindness of strangers.

As noted in the last post, my family has 0 photos of Crystal Beach, and while I can draw a little, I don’t think I could recreate an entire park from memory. So, my only source of images would be the internet.

Let me just say, that source is plen-ti-ful. HOWEVER…each of those images–pasted in a multitude of places on line, usually without any or proper attribution–has an original owner.

The Pollyanna approach is that there’s a shelf-life to Crystal Beach memories. The park closed in 1989, so you have to be of a particular vintage to even HAVE a Crystal Beach memory. And memories are for sharing.

Plus, have we met? I am the procrastination queen… I have dozens of similarly hare-brained schemes that never see the light of day. I mean, some days I need a motivational speech just to unload the dishwasher.

If the chances are near zero that your hare-brained scheme might actually work, should you track down permissions from the source of each image if you were likely to never use them?

In retrospect, the answer is definitively “YES.” Getting permission was always part of my plan, just as a basic human courtesy. HOWEVER….Even though there was a slim chance this project would ever happen, asking in advance was the RIGHT thing to do and also would have saved me from a lot of stress and worry.

Instead, taking the bass ackwards route, I began by selecting the images I most wanted to use. The one photo that gave me the most inspiration, actually, was this one:

You know that phrase “even a blind squirrel…”? That’s the short explanation for how I used a variety of methods to make my toile designs. Here’s a longer one:

Enhancing resolutions, removing backgrounds, erasing distractions, adventures in vectoring and rasterizing, hand sketching things I couldn’t find or recreating incomplete images, and then trying to make the images look more like related sketches than a collection of napkin illustrations and photographs… It was QUITE a process.

I spent lots of time poking around Photoshop and Illustrator, but when I wasn’t getting the results I hoped for, I also turned to editing progams with which I was more comfortable and experienced. I purchased and have used Lemke Software’s Graphic Converter for as long as I’ve been blogging and it was a very useful tool; and the most helpful editing site for transforming images into “drawings” was BeFunky.com.

Adobe Illustrator was most helpful was when it came time to turn my collection of individual images into a repeatable pattern…I turned to YouTube for step-by-step help with that. The most helpful tutorials included:

• 383 Design Studio’s How to Create a Half Drop Repeat Using the Pattern Tool in Illustrator
• Helen Bradley’s series, particularly Illustrator CC Seamless Repeat Patterns – Illustrator Basics 101
• Spoonflower’s guidance tutorials, like How to Create a Seamless Repeat in Illustrator | Surface Design Symposium

Little by little, I figured it out enough to make a usable pattern… Each of the heavily edited images took a lot of memory individually, let alone when I tried to put them all in the same file. I knew I had started to push my laptop to the limit when every small change would take tense minutes for my computer to complete. Then, each time I closed in on the finish line, my computer would completely rebel and freeze up again and again (x20 …I’m slow to take a hint).

While I would have preferred perfection, I reluctantly realized I had already carried this project further than I would’ve dreamed, and it was time to cut my losses.

Was it time to get permissions yet? YES! But even though I made my full pattern and fillers, would the images even line up properly on printed wallpaper? So, I continued with bass ackwards and had sample rolls of paper printed, while simultaneously beginning to go back to try to find the original image sources.

That was NOT as easy as I’d hoped…and though I kept searching, I also kept moving forward…There was still a solid possibility this wouldn’t even work out.

I have to say, not obtaining permissions first really gnawed at me. A lot.

WHY? You’re not going to sell this. WHY would you worry about something that will only exist in your home. Who would even care?

I would. Even with this little blog, I absolutely know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of this kind of thing. I’ve discovered instances where people have taken my entire post content INCLUDING photographs, and reposted it with five small word changes… “According to Em of DustandDoghair.com….”

Hey, thanks. Took me three weeks to put that post together and you couldn’t even ask before you scraped it.

I felt like I was doing the same thing.

Even worse, since last spring, I had invested a lot of time tracking sources and permissions and thought I had all I needed…but there were several stragglers that I thought were likely “fair use.”

Okay, so fast forward: the room is all done, and you STILL kept looking (!!!) only to finally find a couple more sources that you missed. What were you going to do–after the fact–if they said “NO”?

Honestly? I’d take it down. Cry for about a week. Delete all related posts. Write a post to tell you what happened…

Then I’d put up the Bigfoot alien abduction paper, consider it a very valuable lesson and move on.

(Remember when I said that sometimes the D in DIY stands for “Debacle”?)

In the end, I couldn’t take any joy from the project if I felt like I had no right to do it.

Yeah, I’m weird that way.

But guess what. I didn’t have to take it down. SO…that is why I would like to offer VERY sincere thanks to Kim Carney, Rick Doan, Ken Jones, Jr., Ken Jones, Sr., Dale Roddick, and Thomas Martin Smith, for all their very gracious help with my project. (IF I have somehow still missed someone…please let me know and I will do my best to make it right.)

And… if these gracious folks ever want to collaborate in the future to recreate this idea (or others I have, haha) the RIGHT way…and perhaps to benefit the Alzheimer’s Association or a children’s charity…count me in!

WHO’S ready for the big reveal (finally)!?

ME TOO! (I’m also ready for a nap.)

But first, please check in with my blogging buds this fine November day to see if/how anything separates them from their ZZZs. Kindly visit:

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks
Leslie at Once Upon a Time & Happily Ever After
Sally at Within a World of My Own  
Iris at Iris’ Original Ramblings
Bettye at Fashion Schlub
Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style 

Welcome to “Where Bloggers Live.” It’s kind of like HGTV’s “Celebrities at Home,” but…Bloggers! 
Who doesn’t like to peek behind the scenes and see inside people’s homes? 
The second Friday of each month is when this group of seven bloggers link up to share their workspaces, 
homes, towns… or whatever our fearless leader, the fabulous Bettye, proposes.
Make sure you visit everyone to see where the magic happens!