Northern Lights Danglies

These are my Winter Danglies for the swap on Art Erratica. I'm very pleased with the results and they look much better in person than in these awful scans. Boy, will I be glad when I get my PhotoShop back!

I bought little flat wooden stars--of course, the store only had 9 large ones, so one of the danglies is a bit smaller, but still nice. I wanted to get that irridescent look--kind of like the Northern Lights in the background, so I used an acrylic ink as a base, then with my fingers I mixed different shades of Pearl Ex powders with Diamond Glaze and covered the whole star. Then I adhered vintage images printed on fabric on the front with Diamond Glaze. I used copper and silver scalloped foil around the edges, hung it with copper and silver wire & either vintage buttons or gemstone beads, and tied bits of irridescent ribbon around the top. The final touch was choosing a word or phrase to go with the pic and stamping that. My favorite is the one with just hands holding a rose and the word, Eternal.

More Art from the Traveling Treasure box

These are three chunky book pages I made last night for Lorna Sommer's Priest River Idaho Animal Shelter Benefit book. I got the images from the traveling treasure box--aren't they adorable? I had lots of fun making these! I hope Lorna makes a ton of money for the shelter--I'll post when it goes up for auction on Ebay.

Traveling Treasure Box Dangly

Belong to a great list of art people on Yahoo called Ephemeral Notions, and yesterday received the Traveling Treasure's box I'd signed up for! It's such a wonderful concept! I gleaned some great stash from the box, and I am to replenish it with treasures from my own stash....and boy, am I having fun finding stuff to put in there! I LOVE giving goodies! It's more fun than getting them, and you know how fun that can be! Anyway, this is a little dangly that I made from a beaded bottle cover I gleaned. Isn't it cute?

I Give Myself A Permission Slip

This is a chunky book page for a book we are doing over on Bad Babies to celebrate 2 years of arting together. It's based on the art style and words of Sark, and my Sark phrase was "Give Yourself a Permission Slip".

Things with my daughter have been stressful lately. I felt, while doing this, that I really was giving myself permission to enjoy my life for a change.....The smaller image is the accompanying tag. The winged man is the front, it folds downt the middle, and the back says "Be Happy".

Wow. Had surgery. Recovered. Created.

Now, aren't you glad I caught you up on everything? :-)

I just finished working on a great little deco made completely out of coffee filters. It was quite original and quite fun to work in. This past weekend, worked on some submissions for a paper craft magazine using Leslie Elledges fabulous images (www.alphastamps.com). She has some of the most unusual and eclectic images around and I love working with her stuff! Here's a sampling of the coffee deco and the submissions. The submissions were all Valentines for next year.....when you work on submissions you're always out of sinc with the season! I will tell you that Leslie has some AMAZING vintage Valentine images on the AlphaStamps site--if you are like me and want to make your own for next year, definitely check her site out--you'll be so glad you did!

Creativity is Key

Art has given me back my life......after devoting so many years to my kids and none to myself, I can finally say I'm coming into my own. Creativity is key in everything I do, and if I'm creative in one part of my life it spills out and over everything else. To quote Van Morrison, one of my favorite artists, I'm headed "into the mystic" and very happy to be clueless as to what is around the bend.......