During this Remixed waiting period, while all 8 patterns are out but the rest of the ebook is still in the works, I thought it would be fun to talk about the music part of the project!  As you’ve seen, I’ve made album cover artwork pieces for each pattern, of the album for which the pattern was named:

You can click on these mosaics to see my drawings next to each actual album cover:

So, want to see how I made each piece?  They are hand-drawn with pen, but I traced the actual pictures, using my awesome light table (from Ikea’s kid section many years ago, one of my best Ikea finds)…

I started out by putting together a messy collage in photoshop – the original album art with my Remixed knit piece pasted in.  These were just meant to be printed and traced, not to stand alone, so they aren’t great quality, but I like how they look so I’ll show you my favorites:

I took a few process photos during the creation of the Rumours art, so here’s the collaged cover for printing (the levels are lightened to save ink and show more detail in the dark areas for tracing):

Ready for tracing:

And here is my drawing, which was scanned…

…and the final step was filling in parts with black in photoshop.  Done!

My pdf cover designs are meant to kind of mimic the front and back of a record, with the pattern bullet-points acting as a track list… vaguely…

So that’s the music element of Remixed.  Since all the patterns are named after albums that I like, it was obvious that a Remixed mix was in order!  So I had lots of fun making one, and gave away copies for my latest Remixers giveaway:

The winners got the physical disc, artwork and all, but I want to digitally give away the mix for your listening pleasure!  (You have to have Spotify, but a basic membership is free.)  That link should take you to the whole playlist (I hope it works and plays all tracks… still don’t completely understand how Spotify works with sharing playlists).

Update: So, turns out the entire mix isn’t public on Spotify, but most of it is now.  I put the playlist into Spotify by dragging it from iTunes, and I assumed it would automatically link up to Spotify tracks, or however that works, since it told me the playlist was public.  But then when I posted it in my Tumblr, it showed as “playlist is empty”… So, I googled and read faq’s and forums for an hour, tried going through every individual track and telling it to update through Gracenote, which totally should have worked I thought but it didn’t, still empty.  I finally went through every single track and searched for it and dragged it into the playlist and deleted the old one, except that 5 tracks don’t exist on Spotify.  So you can now click and listen to the mix minus the Zappa, Metric, Mates of State, and Blondie remix… I’m kind of hating Spotify right now.  Grr.  (So, does all this mean that all my other “public” mix playlists on Spotify are empty as well?  I sure wish Spotify would tell me things like this instead of letting me go on believing that I’m sharing my mixes.)

Here’s the track list artwork:

I made the track list the same way I made the cover art pieces – created the text box in photoshop, then traced the entire thing by hand (ohgod my hand hurt by the end!!), moving it at an angle a few times, then scanned it and added the title in my Remixed font.  Then I embellished the hand-drawn piece with colored pencils, and scanned it again for the back artwork.

The mix will again be a prize for the Remixed knit-a-long giveaway happening at the end of May!  Details are in the leethal ravelry group – all you have to do is knit a Remixed pattern and post it in your rav projects!  Happy knitting!