RATTAN BAND
RATTAN BAND
The bracelet that I blogged about HERE yesterday was particularly challenging to get the bead colors to look correct. I thought you might be interested in seeing how a photo looks when it comes out of my camera vs how it looks after I do the color correction and other editing. When you see how bad the "before" photo looks below, bear in mind that it was the best of the six shots that I took of that pose. I generally take four to six shots of each of the poses and have to choose the ones that I think look the best.
Below is the original photo as it looked straight from my camera. Note that I already cropped and resized the photo.
RATTAN BAND
In my previous post, I mentioned that I am unable to get EasyBeadPatterns to run on my new Windows 10 computer. I also mentioned that I found an online bead pattern making tool called Beadographer HERE. They also have a lot of video tutorials HERE on their YouTube channel.
Yesterday I spent some time trying it out by copying one of my existing "Russian Leaf Earrings" designs. Beadographer is very nice to use and the patterns come out about the same size as I had been making my color charts. I also like that I can create custom colors as well as choose from a list of Delica bead colors. They even seem to have the latest Delica colors. EasyBeadPatterns is limited to an outdated set of Delica colors.
One thing that I do miss about Beadographer is the black outline around each bead which makes the individual beads stand out nicely. Beadographer does offer a choice of three background colors and below you can see how the same color chart looks on each of them.
For comparison, here is the original earring chart that I made with EasyBeadPatterns:
I have been a bit scarce for a while and I apologize for that. This is partly due to lack of motivation during the pandemic but also because my 14 year old Windows XP computer suddenly died a couple weeks ago on August 26. I thought I had better post an update on my situation so that nobody would worry that I had caught Covid-19 or something. My husband and I are both well. We are staying safe and taking every precaution to avoid the virus. He had a liver transplant in 2010 and he is on immunosuppressants. He has had three shots of the Pfizer vaccine but there is no telling how well he is protected so we are being extra careful. While I was shopping for a new Windows 10 computer, I was able to use my husband's computer for email but not much else.
As you can imagine, it was pretty traumatic for me to lose my computer after so many years. I knew for a long time that the day would come when I would have to get a new computer but I was dreading it. You see, I've been using some very old software programs to edit my photos and artwork and also to create my beading patterns. I was worried that those programs would be much too old to run on Windows 10 and I can't afford to buy new software. I don't even know of replacements for some of them.
My old computer had three hard drives in it and two of them died. The ones that died were the primary drive and the secondary drive which stored most of my data. Thankfully the hard drive that did survive was my backups drive so I really didn't end up losing much. I have been religious about backing up my data weekly and even daily and now I am so glad that I did that. Having said that, when I did the most recent full backup of my files in August, I somehow forgot to backup the folder for my beading blog. Luckily, I still had a previous backup of it and I was able to copy the missing blog posts from the internet and they are now restored to that folder. Whew!
I got my brand new Windows 10 computer on September 3. The good news is that I was able to install most of my old programs! Some of them work just as they should and some have minor glitches but are still mostly usable. These are the relevant programs that I can still use on Windows 10:
Microsoft Publisher 97
Microsoft Publisher 2000
Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 (2003)
Publisher is what I use to create my beading pattern files and my options for doing so would be very limited if I had to make them in WordPad going forward. I also use Publisher 97 to create the blank menu calendars that I post on my website. Unfortunately, the calendar creating feature doesn't work on Windows 10. Thankfully I can still use that feature in Publisher 2000 but it does work differently and not quite as easily.
Paint Shop Pro is my main graphics and photo editor. I do have several newer versions of PSP but version 8 is my favorite and I'm very happy that I can still use that version.
The bad news is that I can't install EasyBeadPatterns on my new computer. Unless I can find a free replacement for EasyBeadPatterns, I will no longer be able to create color charts for my peyote and brick stitch earring designs. I'm really bummed out about that. Hopefully they will post an updated version that will run on Windows 10. Windows 7 was the last supported version.
Having said that, while searching online for a similar bead pattern app, I came across THIS article about an online bead pattern app called Beadographer. I have only had time to take a quick look at it but it looks like I might be able to make it work for making my color charts. Click HERE to take a look at the app. I haven't yet determined which features are available in the free version and which ones aren't.
UPDATE: Someone posted in the comments that they are able to run EasyBeadPatterns on their Windows 10 computer. I have tried everything that I can think of to make it work but I just get these error messages. If you know how to fix this, please let me know. The program actually installs and shows up in the programs list but I get some of these errors during installation and some when I try to run the program. I have uninstalled and re-installed it several times with the same results.
I was starting to wonder what was up when I realized that I had gotten virtually no donations since the beginning of July. I thought I'd better check to see if there was a problem with PayPal. It turns out that PayPal updated the donation page in July and it has some issues. First of all, I am no longer able to access the donations page at all from my ancient Windows XP computer. Thankfully, I have an Android tablet where I was able to open that page to see what was going on there. I don't have any Mac devices but I assume that the new donation page works pretty much the same on them.
Besides the access issue on Windows XP, I found another issue which I think is the main reason for the lack of donations in the past month and a half. It appears that there is no way to enter a dollar amount and at first glance I thought that the page was broken. If you try to highlight and delete the zeros that are there by default, nothing happens. After trying a few things to try and get it work, I stumbled upon the secret. You should see a flashing cursor bar to the far right of the $0.00 (see the screenshot below). If you are on a computer, simply start typing a dollar amount and it will replace the zeros. If you are using a phone or tablet, click on the $0.00 to bring up the keyboard and begin typing the amount that you want to donate.
