Felt Ornaments

I've been making these little felt ornaments for a little over a year. Saturday, I finally put them up for sale at Spring City Vintage in Colfax. Admittedly, I priced them a little high, but I kind of hate to part with ANY of them, so if they come back to me, then I guess I'll have to keep them!  I shared a few on my Halloween Party post last year, but here are some more:

Pumpkins

Button-Eyed Owls

Sleepy Owls

Sugar Skulls

Voodoo Dolls

Snowflake Ornaments

Tree Ornaments



Gingerbread Man & Christmas Tree

Stars



Hearts

Penguin

Birds

Fish

Some of my ideas came from my head, and some came from Pinterest.  I drew all my own patterns and just freehanded some and then used the first cutout for the pattern for the others of similar design.  Everything is sewn by hand because the sewing machine and I don't play well together.

30 "Blows"

Happy 30th Birthday Gift

My office pal, Annie, turned 30 last week, so I made her a little birthday surprise. As a twist on my "30 sucks" sucker bouquet (a link to that post is HERE), I created a "30 Blows" gift with 30 pieces of bubblegum. Here's how it turned out:

I did all the writing freehand, which was really pretty sloppy before I embellished/doodled over it. I kept with the colors in the gum wrappers: blue, red, & white, except for the lid of the ball jar, which I covered in bubblegum pink.

 

The top sign is just affixed with a handmade easel:

 

A handmade tag, some leftover ribbon, and done!

 



Social Crafting

Painting with Friends:

 

Having never tried one of those "wine and canvas" group painting classes before, I was super excited to do it. Paint is really not my preferred medium, especially with a brush. I enjoyed it soooo much, I've been telling all my friends we need to go do it.

 

We went to Social Crafting in my hometown of Monroe. It was super reasonably priced.  If you live in central Iowa, give them a look. Paula, one of the co-owners, said they'll take their show on the road to the Des Moines area too for a nominal fee.  Here's the website: http://www.social-crafting.com/ or find them up on Facebook on the Social Crafting page.  Here's a shot of our group hard at work on Wednesday night. 

  

 

And one of Jess deep in thought about her painting:

 

Here's our group with all our "masterpieces."

 

 

And my finished piece.

 

Creative Minds Are Rarely Tidy canvas

 

Creative Minds Are Rarely Tidy  (truth.)

 



I finished up this canvas today.  The background is a Dyan Reavely-inspired background, using her new Dylusions paints from Ranger.  I stamped "Creative Minds Are Rarely Tidy" using the CTMH "Cocktail" alphabet and added some dots and white-pen embellishment.  The flowers are misc. ones from my stash, and the centers and black flourishes are all CTMH. The lighting was too bright in the bottom right-hand corner when I took the photo.  The black letters are actually all as dark as the upper left. 

H2H "Poppy Color Challenge"

I haven't participated in an online challenge for awhile, so I decided today's the day.  This challenge is from the Heart 2 Heart challenge page.  Here was the inspiration photo:

 

And here's what I made:

 

Obviously, I added a lot of black accents to the suggested colors.  I started with black cs for the card base, then added a CTMH Lagoon cs base mat, then a white cs mat, then a CTMH Sunset cs mat. I ran the final and top piece of white cs through my Cuttlebug for the embossed dots. I added white doodled dots around the black border to make the card more whimsical.  The poppies and sentiments are from CTMH's stamp set "Wavy Blooms." I colored the poppies with Copic markers (YR04, YR68, & R05). The flower centers are CTMH large black sparkles.

The Sunset cs, bottom left poppy, and "happy" are all attached with dimensional adhesives.

I have a friend who loves orange who has a birthday coming up, and this just might be her card!

New Mantra?

I think this might be my new mantra:

"Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

Art Journaling AFTER Dyan Reavely's class

I've been mostly absent from my studio this summer, but I did have a chance lately to work on some art journal pages after being inspired by the classes I took from Dyan Reavely in July. Here are my results:

My first efforts at collage.

Left: "Life is hard. Art Shouldn't be."

Right: "I Wish I Had More Vacation Days."

 

The pictures above & below are from my small art journal. I used Dyan Reavely's paints, stencils, masks, and stamps.  I'll probably add some kind of journaling to the pages below, but I like the top one the way it is.

 

Wastin' Away Again!

My gang at our annual trek to Alpine Valley, Wisconsin, to see Jimmy Buffett (and tailgate from noon to 7 p.m.).  We had a great time, as always. Next stop for this group of friends: Halloween in New Orleans.

Tom & I posing for a photo.

These "big girl panties" are always good for a laugh.

Our setup this year.

Complete with Tiki Bar!

Enjoying some oar shots.

I got this idea from Pinterest, and I'm going to post it there again. Everyone (well, the women anyway) who walked by our tailgate setup was in love with this.  We use a shoe organizer to keep lots of our smaller tailgating supplies.  For us that means shot glasses, cups, weird sun glasses, napkins, straws, swizzle sticks, inflatables, clothes pins and clips, sharpie markers, tape, scissors, wet wipes, beads, leis, etc. We hang it right up from the tent, and it keeps everything in order and off our food & booze tables.  When we're cleaning up, we just roll it up and store it away until next year.

Dyan Reavely Class!!!

In July my friend Robin and I took two days of classes by Dyan Reavely from Ranger Inks at Memory Bound in Ankeny.  It was SO MUCH FUN.  Dyan's personality is a hoot, and she's a great teacher. I learned so much about art journaling. We worked with paints, sprays, stencils, stamps, collage, etc. And her accent--I could listen to her talk all day! (which I guess I did).  We were so lucky to have her here in Iowa.  She's lives in England, but designs for Ranger, so she's in the United States a ridiculous amount of time,  There were people in the class from as far as ten hours away. 

 

Here's a pic of Dyan doing a demonstration:

 

I am hard at work.  

My hand were sooo messy!

 

Me with Dyan:

 

After the classes, Dyan was always willing to visit, take pictures, and sign her book, etc.  Here she's signing one of my completed pages:

 

Here's the page she signed and my small art journal.  I asked her to write something snarky on my page as if she were grading it, and then she put "gold star"--sweet.

 

We decorated the outside of our small journals. Here's my "after" and what it looked like "before."

 

Here is one of the small journal backgrounds we did in class. She encouraged us to use colors we normally wouldn't:

 

And some of the large journal pages we worked on, both with inks and paint and some stamping:

 

It was a great weekend! If you have the chance to take Dyan's classes, DO IT! I was definitely out of my comfort zone, but it was so fun to learn her techniques and meet her. The two days flew by.