Two Tutorials For The Price of One

I was planning to do a quick photo how-to for the felt flowers in my October Counterfeit Kit and then got several comments and one request about how I'd made the blinking images of this month's kit-to-copy stop blinking!  Happy to oblige - just scroll down past the flowers!

Felt Flowers

The cutting mat has 1cm squares to give you an idea of scale

These are really quick and simple to make - simply cut 5 (or 6  or more if you prefer) squares from felt. Trim these squares to circles (or leaves or other fancy shapes) and cut a notch out of one end.  Take a shape and pinch the two sides of the notch together and sew through them; repeat with the next shapes and form a circle of petals; tie off your thread.  Insert a brad through the centre of the flower and arrange petals evenly.
My Tim Holtz scissors were brilliant for this as they allowed me to cut through 5 layers of felt in one go.

De-animating blinking images

First off - when you see a blinking image on a web page you seem to be able to stop the animation by pressing the ESC key (this works in Firefox and Explorer - not sure about other browsers).  There are browser settings to permanently disable animations but I'll leave you to Google that yourself.
Here's the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog blinking blinkie ... try pressing ESC and see what happens!  If you want to restart the blinking (glutton for punishment eh!), just refresh the screen.  Timing of the ESC key allows you to freeze the animation at any point in the sequence.

If you want to save a copy of just the first image (actually called a frame) of the animation - simply save the blinkie to your computer (it will have a name ending in .gif), open it with some sort of photo editing program (e.g. MS Picture Manager) then save it as a jpg file (e.g. via Export in MS Picture Manager). Simples!

The problem comes if you want to extract one of the later frames from the animation ... then you need to involve a gif editing program!   This is a bit beyond me ... but I did find an on-line gif-splitter which will separate the frames of an uploaded animated gif file.  You can then save an individual frame back to your computer or download a zipped file containing all the individual images. (Quite) simples!!