My MADE Header

If you found me through the design-my-header contest on MADE, thanks for visiting! For those of you interested, I started with this photo from Dana's Summer Vacation Dress & Shortie Pattern (a pattern that I own and still haven't made! Maybe this will finally get me to work. Love the shortie variation).

I've read Dana's blog for a while, and I know she loves bold colors, so this photo stood out, especially with her cute daughter looking so celebratory—celebrating is a lot of what MADE is about.

To make the photo work with my vision, I used Photoshop (the clone stamp and a little patch tool) to extend the red background to the left to give me room to fit "made" there.

I used Dana's traditional font, Century Gothic. I actually let out the tracking a little bit because I generally prefer more space between letters. Then she posted her Word tutorial and I realized that she usually puts the letters closer together in the word "made." Oops.

To finish the design and make a small allusion to sewing, since that is the core of MADE, I added a dashed line with the pencil tool in Illustrator. I cropped the photo to highlight the angle of Lucy's arms and rounded the corners of the banner since most of Dana's headers are that shape.

There were many excellent entries, which are all in the flickr group here. Dana is rounding up her own favorites, but a few of the ones I liked are...

This one, which is sort of like the Owen version of mine :), by Mandy:

And this one, by Kelly (Although I think I would have cropped the top a little bit to make it a little more horizontal given the usual dimensions of Dana's headers):

And this one, by Delia, which would look very sleek at the top of Dana's blog:

This sashiko one by Ellen is also very, very cool, although I've not seen much quilting work on dana-made-it:

It was a fun contest to enter and I am excited that she chose mine as one of her favorites! What a honor. Thanks again, Dana, for your continuing inspiration in both sewing and design!