How to create a watermark

This has been on my todo list for a while. I don't feel like a legit blogger since there aren't watermarks slathered all over my pictures on here and on my "business" hobby page on Facebook.

I've decided to take the plunge. I have heard horror stories from fellow bloggers and embroiderers who have had their images stolen and have found them being used improperly.

Let me just say that I am 99.987% sure that other people have probably already blogged about this. But I honestly figured this out on my own. There was one part I was totally stumped on and I'll talk about that a little farther down.

I used the totally free online photo editor picmonkey.com. They know nothing about me so there is no way that I was paid or perked to use them. I use them because I used picnik back in the old days, and needed a similar program when picnik folded. The funny thing? I have photoshop on my computer and have used it VERY minimally (I think photoshop uses a part of my brain that doesn't exist). I'm sure it does the same thing and is better than picmonkey in more ways to count, but to do this quickly I turned to the familiar.

Ok let's back up... wait how can we back up when we haven't started? Sometimes I confuse myself.

Watermarks are SUPER easy to do when you are editing an image. But I wanted to take it a step further and add it to pictures I take with my phone. 40% of what I put on my business page is taken from my phone. I wanted my watermark to be uniform from the computer AND my phone.

I went in to just play around with basic watermarking. So I clicked edit>upload photo>choose photo.

Next I chose the font I wanted. So I click on Tt>didact gothic>typed in create pretty.

I took this extra step because I wanted to get a feel of what the watermark would really look like on a picture. I wanted SIMPLE. Less is more. Especially when I usually add more text to these pictures. I wanted the watermark to blend in as much as possible.

Next I blew up the text. That sounds really great... but it's not very exciting. There it was size 138. I made it size 618. I also changed the color to white and faded it 70%.

I adjusted it diagonally and then added the rest of my text. Simple right? I love how the watermark blends in yet is visible. The "white shirt" writing is actually overlapping the watermark but you can't really tell (or it doesn't jump out like typical overlapping would).

Super easy to do but not practical when you need to add this to ten pictures. Once I decided on a watermark font/fade/color I needed to create an image of that watermark with a TRANSPARENT background. Why?

Two reasons:
1. So I could pull the watermark image up and overlay it over any future photos. That will save me the step of having to create it each time.

2. I needed the transparent background image for an app called Watermark It Pro. To keep this post from becoming a book I'll do a second post about this app and how to use the picmonkey photo there.

This is where I had to consult google. I knew what I needed to do but I wasn't sure how to do it. A quick search landed me in pic monkey's tips no one knows, and I quickly found my answer. There's a lot of snark in these answers so it's kinda fun to read... the mascara comment? Hilarious.

The key is you have to create a COLLAGE. This is the only option from the homepage that will allow you to make the background transparent.

Click on "collage" and open a random picture. It doesn't matter which picture because you'll delete it. You are really creating a fake collage.

Near the first arrow you'll see my "fake" picture that I won't use and the second arrow is pointing to the X in the upper right hand corner of the collages. Delete 2 of the boxes so you are left with a single cell (or ONE white box).

Click on the painter's pallet and the click transparent background. The white of the cell will disappear (where my red dots are).

Save it. Now.
Reopen it in the edit mode. So go back to picmonkey.com>edit>chooseTHATphotoyoujustsaved

When it opens in the edit mode it will look like a gray and white checkerboard. That's good.

Now recreate the watermark. This is exactly what I did in the first few steps of this post. Choose the font, size, color, fade. Don't be so worried about the size because you will be able to adjust the size each time.

You can't really see it, but it's there.

Save that and you have a watermark with a transparent background.

Since you've created the watermark, you now need to upload it onto the picture you are wanting to watermark. Go back to the home screen: click edit>open photo and choose the photo you want to watermark.

Then on the left and side click the butterfly and the overlay section will come up:

Click "your own" under overlays and choose the transparent background image you just saved. Instead of pulling up a gray checkerboard box, it will just pull up the watermark you made.

It will insert the watermark VERY small:

Just drag the corners and adjust how you'd like it to look:

Click save and you're done! It may seem like a lot of work up front but once your watermark is created you can use it over and over without redoing it. I'll share a follow up post with how to add watermarks to iPhone photos. I figured this was enough pictures for one post! 

Psssst... jump over here for the watermark app tutorial. :) 

Sewing: A skirt and a bag

I got the sewing itch a few weeks back so I wanted to share what I made! I really have to be in the mood to sew, and the itch doesn't come around too often. To me sewing takes ALOT of thought. I'm not spacial at all. Geometry was HARD for me. Monogramming and doing appliqués is totally brainless to me. So I do that much more.

Speaking of... my embroidery machine totally died. It desperately needs to go to the shop, but I really didn't feel like forking out $100 for it to be fixed when the sewing machine part works fine (I have a sewing/embroidering combo). So Josh agreed that the $100 should go toward a new machine- the machine I have totally been drooling over. In a month I've put over 200,000 stitches on it. Typical monograms are usually no more than 10,000 stitches and appliques range from 4,000-15,000. So that's alot of work!

I thought I would share my latest sewing  projects with you and give you direct links to the tutorials I used. I have ventured into the world of Etsy patterns, but I haven't finished a project yet, so I'll be back later with how that goes.

All these are free tutorials that use basic measuring and lots of color pictures. My kinda language.

First up is the library bag I made Luke. I've been wanting to get him a library bag to carry his books to and from and I was just going to try to find a cute reusable bag. But my mom found a fat quarter (that's a sewing/quilting term for a few scraps of coordinating fabric) at our local Tuesday Morning and this project instantly came to mind!

I quilted (haha hardly right?!) the scraps together to make larger panels.

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and it's reversible. Think that's hard? Think again!

I found the tutorial here. The possibilities are literally endless. Beach bags. Big tote bags. Little doll bags. On and on. The tutorial was great, except I had a hard time figuring out how to attach the straps. It goes back to that spacial thing. I can't visualize anything. The tutorial was right, there was a little user error and I had assembled it wrong. It was an easy fix.

Next is this adorable skirt.

We had birthday pictures planned for our sweet girl and she needed the perfect party outfit. Her party (which was at the beginning of May) was "You are my sunshine" and this skirt fabric just screamed "sunshine" to me! I appliqued a sun (with various ribbon for the sunbeams) in coordinating fabric on a bib, and then I monogrammed her initials on a shirt. I actually didn't plan to add a contrasting band to the skirt originally, but I thought it would really pop in her pictures and match her shirt. I LOVE how it turned out! Here's a sneak peek at some birthday pictures:

Tutorial can be found here. By the way there are 2 other tutorials there and all are equally amazing! The hardest part was figuring out the measurements. I measured Emberly and then I used a pair of her pants as a guide (since I mainly sew when she's sleeping).

I have a few more skirts and bib projects waiting in the wings. Honestly I've been too wrapped up with my new machine that I haven't touched my sewing machine in weeks. Hoping to get the itch soon (cause I have some stinking cute fabric to bust out!).