Friday, December 27, 2013

Coupons.

You know those cliche coupon books that you make for your hunny for their birthday or valentine's day?

No? Just Google Image search "Coupon Book" and you'll see a plethora of them. Most are pretty cute, some are professional, some people have templates so you can make your own.

For me, I didn't like anything I saw. I had an idea in my head of how I wanted it to look, and I couldn't find anything similar online except something along these lines:




Of course! Vintage. Although I love modern and contemporary, I think vintage and antique are more of what I'm drawn to.

Now, again, there are people who have graciously given us freeloaders templates so we can make our own coupons in a time efficient and quite cute manner. However, even though I love free, I also love to create and do things myself. Naturally, therefore, I made my own:






And of course, I added a message at the end:


The book was adhered together with two heavy-duty staples that I stole from work. I wanted to have it look fairly authentic, so I wanted the back of each coupon to not be colored white. I simply printed the background image on the back of the paper before I printed the front.


The company name of "Whyte" and Sanchez" are just random names I came up with. I was trying to be funny. Adam didn't get it.

The background I found from Far Far Hill. This chica is crazy, I tell you. Nearly everything she makes is free and she posts new freebies daily. DAILY. FREE. Not even lying.

Here are screenshots:



Contact me if you're interested in something like this!
(see the widget on the right hand side)

I learned so much in the process, and pretty much taught myself everything by trial and error.  I taught myself how to make the "Whyte & Sanchez Co." sign, which I actually ended up doing in Microsoft Publisher using the "WordArt" tool, how to cut the edges off of the corners of the coupons, and I learned from just a quick search how to take a .jpg (an image with a white background) and to use Photoshop to edit it appropriately with the magic wand tool to make it transparent, then obviously to save it as a .png to keep the transparency. With that done, I was able to use the precious (free) vintage women on the cover!

Side tracking for just a minute:

Adam learned in college that there's a "right way" to do everything in programming, even if another way may produce the same results. The "right way" is the easiest, simplest and most direct way to accomplish what you are trying to achieve. This concept was hard for him to understand, because if you produce the same results, what's wrong with your method?

Answer? I don't know, or at least I don't remember what my husband told me, but that's just the way it is.

The way I did this whole project was definitely not the "right way". I know that if it were, everything would have been done in Photoshop or a like program.  Obviously it was not.

I am shamefully able to admit that I used Silhouette Studio to perform my magic. Other than the tidbits I told you about above, with the help of Publisher and Photoshop for two elements, everything was done in Silhouette. But the good news is that I was able to cut everything out in two seconds! lol...

In the end, I had a ton of fun, even though it ended up taking me days upon days to tweak everything "just" right. Adam thought it was one of my coolest crafty projects ever, and still has not torn a single coupon out. He says he doesn't want to because it looks so cool!

1 comment:

  1. I was wondering about this, I thought there must be someone out there who has done a classy version of coupon book, but then I got distracted & never ending up 'googling' it. Your take on it is stunning! (Pinning this for valentine's day for the Hubby. Thank you so much!)

    ReplyDelete

Thanks, mango! You're a fabulous person and there needs to be more people like you that comment on awesome posts.