A Year of Learning - Graphic Design

For August I've decided to have a go at teaching myself Graphic Design. I'd like to be able to make banners for my blogs. I have had some success in doing this on sites like Canva that are really easy to use but they're also a bit limiting. There are more features but you have to pay to use them.

So I'm going to try get my head around GIMP. It's more complicated but has tons more features, plus its free to use. Below is the GIMP dashboard with a hello message I made. :)

There are a plethora of Youtube tutorials for GIMP so I started off by watching a few guides for beginners. One tutorial showed you how to remove part of an image and put it over a new background. Below is my first try at this!

GIMP works by separating different elements of the image into layers so you can work on each element without affecting the others. It takes a bit of getting used to switching between layers all the time.

Next I decided to go ahead and work on a banner I wanted to make for my food blog. I'm going to be making a food from every American state. I watched a few tutorials on adding text to an image including techniques to make the text stand out more.

For this banner I added a background image. Then added text in two places using text boxes. I made extra layers for each of the text boxes, increased the size of the text on those layers by a few pixels and filled it in white to make it stand out and emphasise the black text. I'm pleased with how it turned out but it was a slow process of trying different things before I finally figured it all out.

I then went on to make a few other banners/images I'd been meaning to get sorted.

It's very satisfying to be able to make a banner and put it up on my blog, I think it improves how my blog posts look.

To try doing something different I decided to try make a book cover. I picked an old mystery book I like, The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne. I thought of some ideas for a cover and then tried to put them into practise.

I had the idea of a house reflected in water because a pond features in the mystery. I used the Path Tool in GIMP to select the reflection (in a similar way to the scissor tool I'd used to cut out JD in the picture above) and then made it a separate layer so I could colour it red without messing up the rest of the image. I think it works quite well. I then gave the image a border by making a background in black a few pixels bigger then the image and added some text in an old fashioned font. I really like how's it turned out. 

Again this kind of practical learning where you just play around to figure things out along with googling tutorials to find what you can't is just what I like to do. I've asked JD for advice here and there too as he's been using GIMP for years and is quite the pro!

I'm pleased with my months work, I've made a lot of banners for my blogs plus got a good start on learning about the different features. There's so much more to learn but as I use GIMP from now on I'll add to my knowledge.

A Year of Learning:

Smartphone Photography

Breadmaking

Arduino Programming

Harmonica

Creative Writing

Meditation

Crochet

Graphic Design

Harrogate Cheap Eats: 53 Bo' Grove

I wrote this review in March 2020 just before everything closed down because of Covid 19. As the rules relaxed we visited again while it was serving takeaway food in June for some sausage sandwiches for Val and Erin. It's open again now (August 2020) with socially distanced tables, hand sanitiser on each table and sterilised wrapped cutlery. The menu may have changed since we first visited but from the menu board as I pass by it looks equally as yum!

A new cafe has opened up quite near our house so we had to go check it out. It's located just to the side of the Grove Road School off Skipton Road. It's quite eclectic in style made up of all different chairs and tables. Makes me feel at home!

We had a look through the menu and it had all the usual suspects of sandwiches, jacket potatoes and soup. There's breakfast items too until 11.30. They had some nice looking healthy options on the menu. JD opted for the Buddha Bowl with sweet potato, avocado, beans and rice. It was presented really well and looked delicious!

I enquired after the soup of the day and decided to order it seeing as it was homemade chicken soup. Yum! It came with seeded bread and butter. It was a broth with shredded chicken chunks in and had seeds scattered on top. Very nice and warming!

We ordered water to drink which came with ice (I love cold water). JD's Buddha Bowl was £8 and my soup was £5 giving us a total of £13 which fits in our £15 budget. I decided to go all out and also had a toasted teacake for £2 which took us up to the max spend. We really enjoyed our lunch, the staff were very friendly and welcoming which is always nice. The whole menu is good value for money with the most expensive item being £9. They also have a good range of hot drinks if that's your thing.

Just next to the cafe there is also an antique shop which was nice to have a look around and a refilling station for dry goods like pasta, rice and more.

It's nice to have lunch just a short walk from home and feel like you're helping a small business. I can see that we'll be back often. If you're in the area, give it a try!

Previously on Harrogate Cheap Eats:

Fodder on the Hoof

Starling Independant Cafe

Burgers & More

Little Breads

Santar Deli

Cafe M

Harrogate Grill & Pizza

Nutrition Joe's

Tak Yan

Drakes Fish & Chips

I Am Doner

Cafe Rita

Palm Court Cafe

App Review - Tasty

As far as I'm concerned Tasty is the ultimate cookbook. My pet peeve with cookbooks is they often don't have enough pictures, sometimes not even a picture of the finished dish. But with tasty you get a whole video as well as an ingredient list and written method. It's pretty great!

I've made quite a lot of foods from Tasty over the last couple of years. It's great for fun recipes the kids will like as well as some delicious dessert ideas.

Here are some of the recipes we've enjoyed:

Pretzel Dogs

Hot dogs wrapped in pizza dough makes for a quick, fun meal. It's basically a glorified hot dog. We enjoyed them anyway!

Chocolate Peanut Butter Balls

These were delicious, moreish but a little bit too sweet. You can only eat a couple at once. It was tough but we managed to eat them all.

Pizza Bombs

I've cross posted these on my Pizza post but they're worth mentioning again!

A really nice way to get your pizza fix. Pizza dough filled with pepperoni, sauce and mozzarella. Delicious!


Mini Peanut Butter Cheesecakes

These little cuties are fantastic. So easy to make but really delicious. The cheesecake base is made with ritz crackers giving a little salty taste to them. We all really enjoyed them.

Nutella Cream Cheese Turnovers

If a recipe has Nutella in it, you know it's going to be a winner. These turnovers are so easy to make with bought puff pastry in a roll and go great with a bit of whipped cream.

I've used the Tasty App a lot and the majority of recipes work out really well. I like how watching the videos gives you a clear idea of how much effort a recipe is. I can't count how many times I haven't read through a recipe properly beforehand and got stuck halfway through. With a video to watch you know everything that is involved. It's a great way to add variety to your meals as the recipes seem endless with dishes from all over the world included.

And it's all free! A very thrifty way to try some new foods out on your family!

Burger It 38: Ramly Burger

Ramly are a Malaysian fast food company and their signature burger is wrapped in an egg omelet. They started off selling the burgers from street food stalls but have grown in popularity so much that they span Malaysia. Sounds like a burger I'd like to try!

If you want to make one follow this recipe with good instructions --> Link to recipe!

I was slightly nervous about the egg aspect of this recipe because our non-stick frying pan is losing it's non-stickness a bit so it's hit and miss if egg sticks to it or not.

Luckily for me it worked perfectly this time!

Beat an egg (or two if like me the egg seems a bit small) and tip the pan so it spreads out. It cooks quickly only a minute or two.

Add your cooked burger to the centre of the egg. Fold the egg around the burger like you're wrapping a burger parcel to send to a friend. I don't know about you but I do that about twice a week on average!

Pop your burger parcel in a bread bun and add any other toppings you like such as tomato, onion, etc

I liked the Ramly burger, the egg wrap gave the whole burger a nice texture and added some moistness. I wish I'd thought to add cheese to the egg when I cooked it, that would've been even better in my opinion. Next time. Overall though we were impressed with how easy it was to make and it looks great.

Ratings: JD - 3, Emma - 3

A Year of Learning - Crochet

I've always been a fan of knitting and I've knitted on and off for years making quite short projects because I like to get things done. But despite buying a crochet hook years ago I've never got round to learning how to crochet.

July is the time to learn! Erin decided  to join in with me and I bought her a hook too and stocked up on wool.

We started off by watching a tutorial on Youtube. It was for beginners but the girl crocheting was going too fast for us and every time we looked down to check we were doing it right she'd done something else before we could see what was happening. We had quite the hilarious time and laughed so hard that my sides hurt.

We both managed to do a slipknot okay and found chaining very simple but after that it all went downhill.

We were struggling. It's really fiddly and we weren't totally sure what we were doing. We both started again after our crochet started to look uneven and changed to a video that said it went 'super slow'. Maybe this would be more our speed.

It wasn't. So I decided to blame the wool. It was made up of three threads which made it very easy to muddle up the threads when we were trying to yarn over and go in between Vs. (Crochet lingo :D). We decided to start AGAIN with wider wool that I was currently knitting with to make a scarf. We got quite far this time but something was going wrong. I was trying to crochet a simple square and this happened.

Haha! You might notice that it's more triangular. Argh! At this point we're both wanting to give up and do something more fun. Something less fiddly. But we persevered.

We carried on crocheting just a bit every day. After another week of this I decided crochet wasn't for me. I didn't enjoy it and had to force myself to do it each day. I could've carried on for the purposes of this blog post but I didn't. Crochet was something I always wanted to learn and now I have. I've learned I don't like it.

Erin on the other hand, loves it! She's kept going and crocheted with all different thicknesses of wool to experiment. Which is really pleasing for me because I encouraged her to join me in learning and now she's found a new hobby. It also lets me off the (crochet) hook because now I have pictures of Erin's crocheting to share. 

She even made me a crocheted pan rest for my casserole dish. Thanks Erin! :D

Next month: Graphic Design

Previously in A Year of Learning:

Smartphone Photography

Breadmaking

Arduino Programming

Harmonica

Creative Writing

Meditation