Logo Time

I've completed my first project with Inkscape.

This is the actually logo on a tshirt of mine.

This is what I created!

Okay, so I tried.  I'll keep working at it.  Inkscape is really difficult to learn but I do believe it has a lot of potential.  It's just not so user friendly.

Ink-Escape Please

I really want to become a student again.  Yes, because I want to learn more but mostly because of the great discounts you get as a student.  One being the ridiculously overpriced Adobe Creative Suite.  You can buy the student and teacher edition of Suite 5 for $449 as opposed to more than $2,500 for the regular version.  Of course you get more with the full priced version but I only really want Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.  Who knows how to use all those others anyway.

Because I'm not a student...yet....I'm stuck with free versions online which don't even compare.  One in particular that I've been using, Inkscape, is similar to Illustrator.  With my brother's recommendation (computer science genius!), I downloaded it and began my first project: replicating Magnolia's Peach's logo.  I'd like to preserve this logo and not let it get destroyed in a fire or anything.  This proved to be a challenge.  How do you create paths from fonts?  How do you rotate a picture?  How do you use the colors?  These are serious questions.  And the tutorials that are supposed to help you figure that stuff out is very simplistic.  Which isn't a horrible thing, but for such a technical program like this, it blows...

An example of one of the tutorial instructions:

I'm still on the hunt for a better program.  So far others that my brother recommended can only be used on a Linux OS.  I'm pretty basic with computer stuff and use Windows Vista (I know boooo).

I'll post my final version of the Magnolia's Peach logo when I finish it too.

Afternoon Tea

Ever since living in Japan I've developed a liking to tea, especially black tea with cream or milk and a little bit of sugar.

I love walking through the tea aisle at the grocery store and looking at all the different combination of teas available.  I gravitate towards the fruity ones but my smarter side knows that those aren't real teas.  Tea is actually made from one plant, camellia sinensis or the tea plant.  The different types of teas depend on what you do to the leaves.  Green tea is basically the baby leaves plucked early and barely dried, hence the green.  Black tea is dried the most and sometimes even roasted which makes it black.  Most of those fruit teas I gravitate for don't have anything from the actual tea plant except for dried fruit and spices.

I've been experimenting with black tea and different spices.  Recently, I created an orange chai tea.  It has the smell of chai (almost pumpkin like) and sweet oranges.

Orange Chai Tea

equal parts of:

- loose leaf black tea

- anise seed

- cardamom seeds

- cinnamon

- nutmeg

- cloves

- peppercorn

- double the amount of orange peels

Combine all ingredients.  Add boiling water and let steep for 3 minutes.  You can add milk and sugar if you like but I enjoy mine just straight.

My next experiment will be an attempt at earl grey tea.