party hat!

I had plans to post this yesterday, but then the weather stepped in. It went from 56 degrees to 25 in an hour and the transition was accompanied by rain, lightening, tornadoes, and finally a snow storm. We lost power and heat (because of course the lighter on the gas furnace is electric powered.) The power went off at 7pm and didn't come back on until this morning. And since the temperature dropped down to sub-zero with the wind-chill, we had to abandon the house and stay with my mother to keep warm.
I am happy to be back in my house and have lights and heat and of course, my art room!

I made this as part of my design team work for Retro Cafe Art Gallery, who supplied this charming image of the little girl and cupcake. I used some stamps, paint, beads, and vintage paper.
Here is a big picture of it:



And here is a close-up so you can see the charming little girl:

Wednesday Stamper

The theme for this week's Wednesday Stamper is button fairies. I'd never made one of these before, but now I'm completely hooked! Here is mine:


I used a butterfly stamp by Stampington & Company for the wings. I heated up some fun-foam and then stamped into it. When it was cool, I painted it. The image of the little girl is by Retro-Cafe Art Gallery.

Feng-Shui and other art stuff

I am finally moving into my new studio....after almost 6 months of living in our new house. But, of course, it's a complete mess. I keep trying to rearrange it so that it works better, but mostly I end-up pushing boxes around the floor and dumping piles of supplies out and sorting through them and finding a perfect little something and deciding that I need to start a new project right now! Only to sit down at my table and find myself distracted by the feng-shui of the room--the massive piles of stuff everywhere and so the process starts all over again.
I have 4 unfinished products sitting on my table beckoning to me but all i see when I go in is the stuff...
I did manage to get another page from my journal done, here it is:


I dyed the lace with some coffee to give it the vintage look, and then I melted some crayons with a heat gun for the top and sunk some postage stamps into it while it was wet. It was my first try with crayon wax....I'm not certain I like it, but I suppose that's how it goes when you try something new.

Birds!

We had our monthly meeting of the artistic minds and swap this last Saturday; the theme this month was birds. Here are my cards:



I used alcohol inks for the backgrounds, with playing cards as the base (which is why they're a bit shinny.) The eggs are from old text that I used a bit of distress inks on. The birds are by Retro Cafe Art Gallery--who by the way has a lovely new site up. You should go on over and take a look. If you're feeling really wiley you could click on the design team link and see a fun picture of me when I was a wee-one.

Crying Over Chicken

Crying Over Chicken, originally uploaded by bmandity05.

I have been super busy this week trying to get everything done for the Heirloom Festival that will be in Indianapolis the first weekend in March. I am teaching 2 classes and it's a bit more involved than my normal teaching. I had to design a seating arrangement of all things! But I've got all my samples done, my instructions typed-up, my class descriptions written, and a thousand other little things that had to be done. I'll be posting the link and the descriptions when they go up on the website.

In the meantime, I got this page done. I used paper, alcohol inks (for the eggs) and bubble wrap and acrylic paint for the orange dots.
I am hoping to have some other stuff scanned in for tomorrow--but I guess we'll see how that goes. I'm still trying to go one horrid step at a time!

Metaphorical eyes and stomach

It's finally happened: I've turned into my mother. It was a harrowing revelation to be sure--because no matter how much you love your parents, you don't actually want to BE your parents. It snuck up on me so quietly, I didn't even hear it coming.
You see, my mother is the queen of the big, impossible to get done, to-do list. She is a firm believer that you can get all kinds of things done in a day. When I was in high school she decided to lay new floor in the back entryway and promised me that the whole thing from start to finish should not take more than an hour. (As I recall she had about 8 other projects on her to do list for that day...) well two days and one Spackle tool that was adhered to my butt latter, it was finally done. And she was aggravated because the other stuff on her list wasn't done. Her metaphorical eyes were bigger than her stomach....
And as I sat down at my art table this Friday with a list of art things as long as my arm that I planned on getting done this weekend--only to hit a snag on one of the projects that was only supposed to take "an hour at the most" I realized that my metaphorical art eyes were way bigger than my stomach.
Sigh.
I really need to learn to take my art one project at a time....
Anyway, I did manage to get my over-sized playing card book done. It's for the alcohol inks class I'm going to be teaching. I used pictures from my vegas trip. I'm really happy with the way it turned out. Take a look:



Now I get to move onto the next thing. I'm going to tell myself that I'll get it done when it's done and that's ok.
:)

The last of my mini-book photos

I am finally getting around to posting the last of my min-book photos. This week I've been super busy trying to get the last of my stuff ready for classes the next couple of months. I made another min-book which I'll post tomorrow. It's amazing that during my "down-time" I find myself still playing catch-up. The days need to be longer. That's the only solution I can come up with.


I hope everyone is having a good weekend!

Mini Book Photos

As promised here are four pages from my mini book project. On each of the pages I tried out a different distress technique for the class I'll be teaching later this winter. I think my favorite page is the teal one half-way down. But I'm also in love with these buttons on the first page. I used alcohol inks on plain white buttons to get the vintage effect.


I'll post more of my pages tomorrow.
I hope everyone is having a safe flood-free evening and is staying nice and dry.

Wednesday Stamper

The theme this week over on the Wednesday Stamper is the Gothic arch. As soon as I saw the challenge I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I used the template design provided on the site to make a necklace out of shrink plastic. Here it is all closed up. I used perfect pearls on the front before I heated it to give it that nice sparkle.

Then here is the inside with the doors open. The stamp is by Lost Coast Designs. I colored her in using chalks and perfect pearls and then shrunk. For some reason the scan came out a little blurry, in reality her colors really pop.

And just to give you an idea of scale, here it is in my hand.
Hope everyone had a good Monday. I will be back tomorrow with photos from my mini-book.

3 focused days

The last three days I have been really focused and managed to get an entire mini-book done for a class I'll be teaching in the next couple of months. Here are some photos of the front and the back.


The class is all about distress techniques, which is something I really love, so I'm looking forward to teaching it. Not that I don't enjoy all my classes....but I am really excited about this one! I will post the class description along with the teaching dates when I have them. Hopefully I will be able to put up pictures of all my pages over the next couple of days. In the meantime I am off to try and get a Wednesday Stamper entry done....

The last of Winter

I finished up my last two pages from my set on Winter. I have to say, I really enjoyed having a topic and looking at it for several days in a row. Seeing how my feelings and my art was different from day to day. This first one is unnumbered because I started working on the page while doing the second and couldn't decide if I wanted it to be number three or not...it has a different feel to it, so I just left it un-numbered.
I used vintage papers, crackle paint, acrylic paint, stamps and grunge board on this one. The photo is my favorite part of the page, I took it at night, using the night setting on my camera, which is why the colors are so funky.
This last page I did using fluid acrylics and some scrapbooking paper, along with a stencil and some grunge board. It is truly the most happy looking of all of the set...but I see bits and pieces of the other spreads in it as well.
I hope everyone had a safe and happy New Year! Hopefully I will be back soon with lots more art.