You may Bee right.

I may Bee crazy, but I'm finally following through on a desire I've had for several years to keep bees.

Far be it from me to do anything in the standard way. Rather than building or buying a traditional hive box, I recently acquired a sturdy but somewhat beaten-up highboy dresser to convert into a hive.

With its all-solid-wood construction, a thorough coat of exterior house paint, and some ingenuity, I expect it to hold up for quite some time.

I've started the new paint job. It may not look like much of a change from the old colors yet, and in fact the old colors influenced the new ones. But it will be a distinctive design, with varying shades of dusty lavender and pollen yellow set off by crisp white.

The drawers will be stocked with top bars, allowing the bees build the comb down from the top, more or less as they please. My plan is to make the second drawer from the bottom the main hive, or "nuc" in the parlance of beekeeping. This is where the queen

will lay eggs, and the workers will raise brood and store pollen and honey to feed the hive.

Each hive drawer will have two or three entrance holes drilled through the front. Unused drawers will have corks in the entrances to keep them from being colonized all willy-nilly, but once the nuc drawer is pretty well established I'll connect it to the drawer above by means of a length of tubing run between a hole on the nuc and a hole on the new drawer. This will give the bees access to more space without allowing them to build in the body of the dresser. If they need still more room before I start collecting honey comb for my own use, I'll add a tube from that drawer to the next one up, and so on, as high as the second drawer from the top.

The bottom drawer will be storage. The top drawer will be altered to provide access to the top of the drawer below it for maintenance and feeding, if necessary, while keeping that drawer closed.

You may have noticed the dresser is missing a couple of knobs. I've moved the odd yellow knob down to keep the odd grey knob company. They will soon both be lavender.

In their place on the second drawer down will be cast metal bee knobs, already looking aged and worn to perfection.

The finishing touch will be art work, like the bees at the top of this post, courtesy of Karen at The Graphics Fairy. She combs estate sales and antique stores to source print art that has fallen into the public domain. Many of these pieces she shares as free printables on her blog, along with instructions for beautiful crafts you can make with them. She also gathers images into theme packages you can access via a monthly subscription. If you just think you might want some piece of vintage art for a project, you must visit The Graphics Fairy!

Time for a cup of tea. Where did that jar of honey get to?

This One's Letterfu is Strong.

You're at your computer printing out thirty party invitations when you discover you only have 3 envelopes. What to do?

Run those invites through the printer again and print a design from Letterfu on the back. Five folds and a tuck turns the invitation into its own envelope, sealed with the postage stamp. There are 4 designs available on the Letterfu website, links to several other folks' designs, and all the tools you'll need to create your own vector designs.

So, when's the party?

Color Me Happy

Every crafter is a visual artist, and, as such, works with color. You probably learned in grade school that red, blue, and yellow are the primary colors (of pigment, not light, but that's not the issue here), and that combinations of any two of those make the secondary colors, orange, green, and purple. You might have learned about complementary colors, colors opposite each other on the color wheel. And of course you know that black and white go with everything.

But what do you do when you're tired of primaries and secondaries, monochrome and two-tone, black and white? Unless you followed an art track in college, you probably don't know much more about color theory. What happens when you open your bead box, your yarn stash, your fabric closet, and don't know where to start?

Color Scheme Designer to the rescue! Created by Petr Stanicek as an aid to web site designers, CSD is an elegant, easy to use guide to color.

Above the color wheel on the left, there are buttons for selecting for six different color arrangements (monomchrome, complementary, triad, etc.). Once you've chosen that, you can pull the dots on the wheel around to select your main color, and the colors that fall within the range of your chosen arrangement. On the left are four blocks in a row that show the main colors of your selection, above a larger block showing some different shades of your palette. Below the wheel are tabs that allow you to play with brightness, saturation, and contrast. If you do happen to be designing for a website, or need a color for your digital art, you can get a list of the colors with their hexadecimal codes. There are even controls for viewing the colors as people with different kinds of color blindness see them. I could write a how-to guide for this application, but really, the best thing is just to go play with it. Try everything on the page, just to see what it does.

If Color Scheme Designer can't break you out of your color block blues, I don't know what can!

P.S. Idle fun for sports fans: set the color wheel to "complement," then pull the dots around and see how many team colors you can find. ;)