Tuesday, February 24, 2009

The Curious Case of Jon the Stamper

It began innocently enough. I was, as is often the case, chatting with my older sister. "Any idea what this film is?" she asked, sending me to a stamping blog she frequents called Cinema Saturday. I was intrigued. I'd tried to play along before, but this time they claimed to be doing something special. I got sucked in.

The next morning, when the movie was revealed, one of the women who runs the site posted, "Jon and Libby - i love that you have made this a family affair - now Jon, we are expecting you to play along - can't wait to see your card!!!" I have no desire to work with scissors and ink, but, after some consideration, I got an idea. I could use the challenge to play with some CSS and Javascript tricks.

The result is here, with a small version to the right. Over at the site, you can click to hide/reveal each individual element of the card, to see how it's put together.

The pieces are:
  • A gear cut out from this clock at The Clockworks Unlimited. Cutting out the gear was more tedious than I hoped, so I just cut out the top-left corner of the gear and the center, then duplicated the spokes to build a gear (you can tell if you note the repeating white spots). All three gears are the same image file, resized on the fly as necessary.
  • Brown paper from an Australian stamping store.
  • A vintage calendar that was way too hard to find, and then I closed the tab that had it, and now I can't find it again!
  • A clock from the awesome Clipart, Etc project at the University of South Florida. If you are or know a student working on a school project, that site is great. I wish that had existed when I was in school.
  • A plain HTML/CSS block for the text, using the Papyrus font if you have it, but defaulting to other fonts if you don't.
Please click through to see how it's all put together. I'm really happy with how it all came out.

6 comments:

Laura E. said...

You rock! Well done playing along. You are such a geek. Did you post a link on the site?

Jon Harmon said...

Yup, although I don't think it should be eligible. It's a card challenge, not a CSS challenge!

Libby Hickson said...

I know a lot of time went into your "card" - more than will go into mine if I'm able to make one. Ugh now I *really* need to make one this week!! :-)

Brooke S said...

You totally Rock! We love that you totally play along and guessed the movie with us! The card is totally awesome... Wish I had more time to play around on the computer and learn all the cool tricks..
Please join us when were you want we are thrilled to have you..

Brooke

Sankari W. said...

Jon - THIS is Awesome!!! We are totally thrilled that you joined us! LOVE how you created this creation and so glad that we sucked you in!!! Can't wait to see you for Friday's guessing game :0

Thanks for playing along!!!!!
Best wishes and smiles!!
Sankari :0

Sam said...

Groovy creation Jon. You could start your own digi-scrapbooking line!

:-)
Sam.