Ghost In The Machine

I usually skip right over Halloween but when I saw these graphics, I had to make them. They are so darn cute without being too cartoonish. 

I discovered this artist while perusing through Etsy looking for Christmas miniatures. They are from Susan Hoerth of Hoerth Studio in McAllen, Texas with raidersofthelostart as her Etsy screen name. She's terrific. Go look at her stuff and you'll see what I mean. I've made my share of decorative books and journals so I wanted to make some of these. I love paper crafts.

I haven't used my glitter glue in a while but I really wanted a slick black glitter to accent these pieces with and to get that I first used glitter glue and went over it when dry with Glossy Accents or put down Glossy Accents first and then sprinkled glitter over it while it was still wet. It just depends on how shiny you want it to be.

It gave me exactly what I was wanting. I could complain about all the little pieces I had to cut out but I found I could take a 6 x 9 .png (transparent background) of the pieces I want to use and import the sheet into my Cricut and use the 'print then cut' feature and let the machine do all that work for me. 

I don't know how everyone else uses their Cricut but I use mine most of the time to print and cut graphics for my projects after working with them in PhotoShop or Gimp. I love that feature of Cricut. 

So I wound up doing three little folding book projects with these graphics while dealing with a loudly rattling computer off and on for two days. My computer is about six years old and I've already replaced a fan and two memory modules recently. I decided to upgrade my hard drive with a solid state disk drive since the old one was rattling. It sounded like grinding gears... and got on my last nerve. I was trying to hurry up and finish my project and get everything printed off before it crashed. 

I'm a little bit of a geek so I decided to get in there and find out what was going on and just fix it if I could. I though it was a bearing on a fan since I have three of them on board but when I popped the cover, the noise was coming from my hard drive... YIKES! That meant I had to hurry if I wanted to clone it to another drive. Cloning it means I don't have to reinstall Windows and all my programs. This is the easiest and quickest way really. As long as you have a working hard drive, you can clone it. It's too late after it fails. If it's already grinding, you are on borrowed time and you better get busy fast.

So I researched through the screeching noise and found this resource on YouTube to help me fix it.

Explaining Computers

Yes, I had to open the machine again. It's amazing how much dust it can collect in just a few months. Another cleaning. I cloned the hard drive from a writable disk to SSD and I decided to go from 1 terabyte to down to 500 gigs. That seems like a downgrade but it's not since I only used about 127 gigs in the last six years. I don't need all that extra room. I have a gaming computer but I'm not a gamer. It's got a kick arse graphics card though. I store my graphics library on a backup external drive and pull off collections onto DVD for a backup of my backups. Never store anything important on your computer's hard drive because hardware failure is imminent, not "if" but "when". 

So I got rid of the loud screeching and clattering noises, upgraded my hard drive to solid state which makes it noticeably quicker and the ghost in the machine is happy once again. True story.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN !!!