Burlap Polar Bear ATC

Texture! Polar Bear ATC made with watercolor paper, ink, burlap, thread and 2 seed beads.... Now I sleep. Good evening!

Great day for features!

Hey everybody! Good news! Some of my projects have been featured!

First, a couple of my yeti crafts are featured today on http://ilovetheyeti.blogspot.com (thanks Alexz for submitting them!)

and my old LolCats shrinky charms are featured today on http://geekcrafts.com

Check 'em out :D

Important Owl ATC

Made some pretty neat background textures fooling around with inks and paints and whatnot today! The background to this was made with canned air, acrylic inks and bubble wrap. The owl was drawn seperately then cut out and pasted on. Happy Tuesday, friends!

EDIT: I just realized this is my 300th blogpost! Go me! *dance party!*

Sea Monster Embroidery

Here's that sea monster I mentioned yesterday! Not as many colors to it as I usually like, though ;) I think I'm going to save up my embroiderings and then use them as blocks in a quilt eventually. Very eventually. I can't imagine making an actual real-sized quilt any time soon!

Bubblies.

Did some more french knots, and I do say, I think I've got the hang of them! I colored in the monster with colored pencil, but next time I'll color in BEFORE I do the knots. Coloring around them is no good.

More Bright Postcards!

Ack! Sorry I haven't posted in a couple of days. Been busy and a little under the weather still, but I think (fingers crossed) that I'm close to recovery from this blasted cold. I've been working on another piece of embroidery (a sea monster!) but it's not done yet. Anyways, here are a couple more postcards I've yet to share. This one went to my dear good pal Audio and she liked it!

And another. Attached the different solid-color paper scraps to a cereal box base, then cut & paste the kid from a book, then used white acrylic paint and ink for the bubbles. I'm going to go work on that embroidery. Hopefully I'll be able to post it tomorrow! Happy Sunday!

Old Family Photos featured at MafiosaGrrl!

Hey everybody! My talented and crafty blogger pal, MafiosaGrrl, has a very excellent blog with a weekly feature that I just adore called "Snapshot Friday." Every week she shares some fun and interesting vintage photographs she's collected from here and there. This week, she was so kind as to feature some of my old family photographs, so head over to http://mafiosagrrl.blogspot.com and check it out :)

Cat feelin' cruddy.

How rude. One day I think I'm feeling much better, next day it's back to Illville. Coughing up stuff so vile I almost called the Ghostbusters. I woke up at 8:30 to hack up a lung then shortly thereafter accidentally fell asleep until 1:15 PM! Still tired and achey. I'm mad at my immune system right now.

Seizure-Inducing Peacock Embroidery

I sincerely hope this doesn't actually induce any seizures out there!!! It's just a lot of different colors.... and that was what I was going for with this rainbow peacock embroidery.

I'm no pro at embroidery (and I'm sure the pro's out there can tell), but I want to get better, so I stitched this up today.

I did some little french knots! Truth be told, I don't really actually know what they're supposed to look like because when they tell you how to do it on youtube, all you see in the finished result is a speck. But this looked fine to me, so I went with it.

The obligatory back-side photo. It looks crazy! Thanks to Artymess for inspiring me to do a little stitchin' with her radical and awesome embroideried ATCs and postcards (specifically these) :D

Resin Scrabble Doodle Pendants

Finally got those scrabble tile pendants all cured and put together! They're mostly birds with a few cats and sea creatures thrown in here and there.

I only mixed up about 2 tablespoons of resin, but ended up with some extra, so I had to quickly make some rinchies for three bottlecap pendants. So for future reference, 1 tbsp resin base, 1 tbsp resin hardener (2 tbsp total resin) makes about 36 scrabble tiles plus 3 maybe 4 bottlecaps.

Some of them (not pictured!) will be heading out in the mail to some friends this week! And if I don't feel lazy, the rest of these will likely end up in my Etsy shop! At any rate, happy Tuesday.

PS. I bought a tomato plant today :D

Happy Rat Saddles Dejected Cat

Woo hoo! Feeling much better today. I've still got a cough and some nose stuff going on, but I'm in higher spirits, so I present to you a rat riding an annoyed cat, saddle and all. Watercolor and ink. I'm trying to work through my new "How to Draw Animals" book to improve my drawing skills. I drew the cat first, but a plain cat seemed incredibly boring , so I added the angry expression, the saddle and the rat. Happy Monday!

Still ill, no crafts to share :(

To my dismay, I'm sicker still than yesterday. It's that kind of bug that not only leaves you feeling cruddy, but also uninspired and lazy. So I've got nothing crafty for you today. Instead an old photograph of my dad's cousin most likely taken in the 1950's. I want that outfit.

Bright Collage Postcard

This guy's one of a set of three postcards I made a week or two ago... The colorful squares/rectangles in the background are some of the little scraps of bright colored paper I had stashed up. The boy is cut from an old kid's encyclopedia book, then I painted on the bubbles with white acrylic paint.

In other news, holy crap am I sick. From what I hear from various friends around America, people are pretty much getting colds and junk all over the place. Not fun. So chances are that some of you reading are sick, and my sympathies defiinitely go out to you. Get well soon, and if you're lucky to be healthy now, stay away from us ill folks. You don't want it.

Have a good weekend!

Scrabble tile WIPs

Noooooo! I can't be getting sick! NOOOOOO!!!

*Ahem* Okay, where were we? Oh yes, scrabble tile pendants. These babies are still works in progress, as I've yet to apply resin or bails and whatnot. Once I have a good big batch of teeny scrabble tile-sized artwork, I'll do the resin. I hate to mix up smallish batches of resin because it's so dang smelly and a lot of it sticks to the inside of the containers I mix it in. Seems like a waste.

Anyways, I'm going to go eat some oranges now and try to sleep off what may or MAY NOT be a cold coming on.

Instant Scrapbook: The Pages...

Each page holds an ATC-sized photo which will slide nicely into the frames :) There are various phrases on each of the pages like "Families are Forever" and "Love at Home." So now whomever(?!) wins this tonight at the auction will have a nice little handmade scrapbook without all the effort. Woot!

An Instant Scrapbook or ATC Album

I've been working on this book since yesterday afternoon for the Relief Society B-day Party/Service & Talent auction at church tomorrow night! Women from church will be bringing stuff they made or coupons for services like a night of babysitting or a carwash or other services like that, then we all get fake money to bid on stuff for fun! Since I'm pretty useless for physical labor things, of course I decided to make something. I made an "instant scrapbook" with ten pages where whoever wins it can just slide their own pictures in.

Here's the back one of the slide in picture frames. For the sliding mechanism, if you can call it that, I just glued on strips of cereal box so there would be a little track the picture could slide right into. It works like a magical charm! And even though this won't be used as an ATC album, the frames are ATC-sized. I just know I'm going to make another one of these for ATCs, guaranteed.

Sliding out action shot! It's pretty dang sweet, if I do say so myself. While I was working on it, I thought I had better keep it several times.... But I dont' really have time to make something else, sooooooo I guess I have to give it up :) The whole book is 5x6'' with 5 front and back pages. You all just have to wait until tomorrow to see the other pages because I'm just suspenseful like that. Happy Monday!

Inchie Bases & Bookmark

Made a bunch of inchie bases for the alphabet inchies swap on Craftster tonight! I finished a lot of them, but won't be posting them until they're sent out!

And here's a little collage bookmark from scraps and stuff. The white bubbles are acrylic paint and sharpie.... Goodnight everyone! I hope your weekend is going well!

Collage Postcards

Isn't that tattooed man the BOSS?! I decided that I need to start doing a little bit more collage because I have tons of pages out of books, ephemera, scraps, etc. that I need to start using up so I can justify keeping the other awesome pages, ephemera, scraps, etc. that I come across :) So I'm turning back and restarting my efforts to use up things by making postcards.

This one is a little more random. Kitties and Coke.

Teeny weeny inchies artbook

Audio talked me into joining the Alphabet Inchies swap on Craftster and I'm getting excited to start making some sweet inchies for it! I'll be getting a set of 26 inchies from various crafters and I'm pretty sure I want to make them into a tiny artbook like this one! But I had to make a trial run and here it is.

I glued the inchies back to back, then used my 1/8" punch in 2 corners. I bound them together with some jump rings and VOILA!

This ocean doodle set of inchies is pretty basic, and I think I want to make another little inchies book and spend a little more time on the individual inchies for a book with more variety.

It's my goal to have a nice collection of mini-artbooks by next Christmas for my tree!