French Vinaigrette Bottle Cap Design

Occasionally, I'll make myself some vinaigrette dressing for my salads or as gifts to others. I'll make them in bulk, at least 1L (~34oz) each time. Because they're handmade, I usually try to finish them within a week. 1L is actually quite a lot for a week's supply of salad dressing, and it does make sense to gift them away. That's exactly what I did on many occasions. Sometimes, I'll make it as one of the potluck dishes for gatherings.

I created this dressing label, printed them according to size, and pasted them over several caps of those jars, which are recycled from jams and sauces. Of course, they needed to be cleaned thoroughly before I filled them with the dressing. To give a feel of an old granny recipe, I covered the lids' edges with jute strings.

I packed them in brown packaging recycled from various packages from my shopping orders, paper, which I  and they're ready to be gifted. 

My own homemade dressing on my salad.

This is one of the ways I recycled some items at home and try to make it giftable. You are free to download and use the label of your own personal usage for your own French Vinaigrette dressing. However, I'd be very appreciative if these are not modified further for resale and distribution.

Let Us Eat Tarts To-Gather

Designing digitally is not really my kind of work and I very much prefer to create stuffs physically by hand. However, occasionally I do create stuffs digitally and my taste buds often gear towards Victorian and Regal style. I wonder why, perhaps I'm someone who love to tell a story behind everything I do, I just love vintage and old stuffs; the older the better, best with some history or stories behind.

Just very recently, I've done up an in-house poster for my congregation for an upcoming Ladies Fellowship event. Though I was asked to do up a simple one, I simply couldn't do up one that look simple enough as what they defined as "simple". At the end of the day even perhaps a simple R.S.V.P. attendance sheet has become something like this:

As we were going to make some pineapple tarts and an afternoon tea after that on that day, the quote "Let them eat Cake" (which is widely attributed to Marie Antoinette) came to my mind. While the story behind this phrase is widely controversial and denotes insensitivity and incomprehension towards the realities of the unfortunate and poor, the truth is this quote didn't come directly from Marie Antoinette herself. History aside, despite the original ill intention of such a quote that's widely linked to Marie Antoinette (granted it's insensitivity thought behind), I rephrased it to "Let us eat Tarts" to re-frame it's intention to "through thick and thick, we will gather and eat together no matter what" (Hebrew 13:1, Galatians 6:2). I replaced "cake" with "tarts" just 'cos we will be having pineapple tarts during tea. Hence, "Let us eat Tarts To-Gather" emerged as a new conceptual phrase in this setting. 

Because it's a ladies only event, I decided to use an image that will relate closely to Marie Antoinette's period of time. I found this French lady that came from 1870s costume book at Graphic Fairy, a website that's filled with tons of vintage clip arts and photos. Simple love this site! Of course, we do have several other fellowships as well, just that sometimes we'd want to have some "ladies only" events simply 'cos it's always better to keep men out of the picture for such events . 

I've digitally created the attendance sheet using several graphics from Graphic Fairy and other public domain websites such as Pixabay. However, though most of these images are freely available for personal use (some even commercially), it's always rightful to check the various copyrights and licensing terms before saving them into your computer. Though these are quite common for images and graphics, there's one aspect that I'd think a lot of us might miss out - fonts licensing. The fonts you use for your artwork especially for commercial usage is very much  neglected and often taken for granted. It didn't occur to me that fonts need licensing even I've downloaded several free fonts online during the past years. It's only recently when I was about to blog about this project then I start to take notice that I might have used a font that could be in conflict with the terms set by the author despite this is a non-profit project. As I've already transmitted it freely to publicize the event within the church, it caught onto me and I was thinking about this last night. To make sure I'm not in any conflict with the terms, I decided to write to the author, explaining my intention of this project and in hope permission could be granted. I was all mentally prepared that the author would say a "No" and I'll have to take down everything and further extend my apologies to my church. Thankfully, the author replied with much appreciation for my email and is more than happy to help me with this project. Thanks Maelle!

The thumb of rule, in general is to attribute to the original creator when using their creations within your artwork. I believe the creative community is quite generous to begin with and there're actually tons of graphics and fonts freely available for us to use for our personal projects and education. I think that's only legitimate to give them the credit as this respects their creation(s) for the time and effort they've put into. So below here are the list of digital graphics and fonts I've used for this project:

• French lady in 1870s costume
• Baroque printer ornaments
• Vintage fancy cake
• Silhouette frames and doodads
• Fonts used (Eternal Call, Felix Titling, Garamond, Nymphette)
• Vintage background from Pixabay

Disclaimer: Though these graphics are derived from the public domain and are consider royalty free in a sense, I cannot be 100% sure it's entirely free from copyright. This includes the fonts as well. Some of them I used are already pre-installed in my editing software (i.e. Photoshop) so the links I've linked to might not be entirely free. However, they're generally freely available for personal use, not commercially and you will need a license for that. Some has some angel policies behind. Nonetheless, do check and get yourself informed. Write to the author to clarify if in doubt. I might have miss something out and I can't be sure as well, so if there's any conflict I'd very much appreciated to be made known so that we can all learn together.

P.S. I didn't include the main poster for this entry due to privacy issues as it contains some personal information that out of due respect it's best not to disclose to the public in this kind of setting. 

Every Occasion Cookie/Candy Gift Box

Though the festive season is over, everyone seems to be busy shopping trying to grab great deals. It seems to me everyone is still in a very much holiday mood. For this very reason, for I'm a poor girl, so there's not much shopping for me to do. But I do have lots of junk and definitely Graphic 45 goodies. Nothing beats handmade and I can assure you the personal touch is something no amount of money can be bought. Here I'm showing a dainty gift box for everyday occasion which can be done with 2 large ivory tag, a few sheets of pattern papers and some ribbons. Click HERE to view the full tutorial.

I hope this tutorial can be useful for your everyday, any other day occasion or last minute gift packaging. To further expand my sweet treat labels, I've created more sweeter treats which can be purchased at my Etsy store HERE.