Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The piece

that almost beat me.....one project at a time I am illustrating and providing text and supplies for each piece in the next book.  The undone pieces all hang on the left bulletin board and the done pieces hang on the right.

I open a new illustrator file...I make all the beads I will use.  I don't start from scratch, I pick a previously used 15, 11, 8, pearl, crystal as the case may be and I color them the appropriate colors.  Then I begin to make an illustration of each step of the process.  When I'm done I take a screen shot of the beads I have used, paste it into a word file and begin the text.  Once the text is written I do the math to determine the quantity of each bead required.  Then I take a photo, print the illustrations, text, supply list and photo, 3 hole punch it and put it in the book.  I move the piece to the right bulletin board. I hope to complete a piece in a day, which is ambitious, but doable.


Sunday afternoon I picked this piece, simple enough really.....but for some crazy reason it was the one that fought me every step of the way.  Wrong beads...no problem I can fix that...forgot two illustrations, had to renumber all the figures...I can fix that....and on and on it went...I alphabetized the beads in the wrong order ...I can fix that, and finally it was done, two days it took, some are just like that.

On I went to the next one...and I messed up and got my filenames mixed up and over wrote them and deleted them and restored them and,  got myself entirely confused and it was gone!  The file I angsted over for two days, gone, poof.  Yes I have a back up, no it didn't help, long story.  Several deep breaths later, and I found the file in the virtual trash can!  Glory be, I'm going to go celebrate now!  The right bulletin board has more projects on it than the left.


5 comments:

Cynthia Newcomer Daniel said...

Whew! I'm so glad you've found it. I've hit "save" when I didn't mean to and wiped out entire illustrations, so glad that is't what happened to you!

Cindy said...

What a relief! The older version of Illustrator on my old computer used to occasionally crash while saving, corrupting the file and all the hard work I put into it! Thank heavens for Time Machine.

Barbara Briggs said...

Yikes...I have enough trouble working on my website with Adobe Contribute. Reading what you are experiencing has led me to the realization that Illustrator would drive me crazy!

Marcia DeCoster said...

not the fault of any software I was using, all self induced...too confusing to relate, but entirely my fault. I need to be more careful and am just thankful I was saved.

Helen said...

What a scary & frustrating experience. So glad it worked out.