mom's birthday

today is my mom's birthday. yup. she's a new year's eve baby.  i wanted to make her a special birthday card this year and was inspired by my friend, kelly.  she was kind enough to send me 2 holiday starbucks coffee cups after i saw a card she made on her blog.  (thanks again kelly!)  i also bought the large hero arts owl stamp that she always uses too. i just fell in love with it when i saw it on her blog.  so this is my mom's birthday card. i hope she likes it. 

playing dress up

my art friend, jennifer, is hosting a dress swap.  i'm not really a girly girl by any stretch of the imagination but after seeing some of the little dresses she made i was intrigued. i decided to sign up and i found i was actually really chomping at the bit to make one.  here is the first one i've managed to make for her swap.

alpha stamps give away

check out the alpha stamps give away that starts on december 27th and ends january 4th.  go to the alpha stamps blog: http://www.alphastamps.com/blog/ and enter to win by leaving a comment and your email address. 

sunday postcard art

i decided to do postcards this year for my christmas cards so i am entering it in the sunday postcard art "christmas theme" this week.

Guest Designer for InStyle Stamps

I was chosen to be a Guest Designer for InStyle Stamps for a week in December and also a week next year.  I was given two current stamp designs to use in samples for their website.  The stamps are currently available for purchase and sell for $6.95.  Please check out their blog at http://www.instylestamps.com/blog and their website at http://www.instylestamps.com to see what stamps you can't live without.

zetti inchies

i am in a zetti inchies swap and these are a few of the ones i've made so far.
i've been doing larger sized art for quite awhile now so whenever i go to
make inchies i forget how hard it is to make art that small.

making a skinny

i had some time to do some art today. i thought i'd make a large christmas tag but as usual i shouldn't necessarily have plans because it turned out that i made a skinny instead. so maybe tonight after supper i'll work on a christmas tag or two.

sunday challenge

it's been quite awhile since i've made a postcard for the sunday postcard art challenge. it felt good to have some time to do it as everyone knows i love making postcards. this week's theme was fairies. the collage image is from alpha stamps. if you haven't visited their site please check out them out. there just might be something there you have to have.

christmas tag

i made this christmas tag for a challenge. it was pretty fun to do and i thought i'd make a couple more. i hope to have time this weekend to get around to doing that. of course i still don't have my christmas shopping done but i'd rather make art then fight the crowds.

making an art doll

as i'm organizing my art room i came across this art doll i made as an alpha stamps project.
it took me a long time to sew all the little beads around the wings. it was one of the projects that you just keep adding to it? i finally had to tell myself "enough".

it's beginning to look alot like christmas

uh oh. it's that time of year again. now how did it get to be december already? a few more weeks til christmas and only one gift has been purchased so far. that is not good. so while i haven't made time for shopping i did make time for art. are my priorities straight?

thankful for art time

today was thanksgiving. as always we went to my mom and dad's house. lots of people were sick with a bug today, but thankfully not me. i sure did enjoy my turkey and trimmings. when we came home i worked on a postcard. it was the first thing i made in awhile.

something new

i just recently started a swap for making business cards. i thought it might be fun to make an artsy type of business card. how fun would that be to hand them out to make an impression if someone is interested in contacting you at a later date for your art? since i'm so use to working on a larger scale with those silly old postcards going small was a bit of challenge. this is my very first one...and it was a little bit of a learning curve. i'm learning what works and what doesn't. all my pertinent information is on the back.

a challenge

one of my good art friends, cathy, made a collage sheet to share. she asked us to make something using a few of the images that she provided. we could make anything we wanted. of course i wanted to make a postcard, that certainly comes as no surprise. so here is what i came up with.

making time for art

my life has been so busy lately that i've had little time to sit down and really create something.
i don't like when that happens. art is like therapy for me. it calms me, helps me to be an altered time zone and lets me be free of any responsibilities. that is good for my soul. today i had a small amount time that i made a postcard. it didn't take too long..but the colors made me happy.

grotesque gyrations

i was working on a gothic arch today. i received a new collage sheet from alpha stamps. this new circus collage sheet is pretty funny. grotesque gyrations just makes me giggle. if you are in
need of any collage sheets check out alpha stamps at www.alphastamps.com. they just might have something you can't live without.

crow journal pages

i have completed all the art work on my crow journal pages for a swap i'm hosting at mail art world. i have to add some embellishments yet. i guess you can tell on some of them i must of been having a "fat day". i wonder if that's when i was wearing my blue jeans? thank goodness for elasticized waistbands!!! so here is a small sampling of some of the pages i did.

in stitches

i've been busy
doing quite a bit
of art for swaps and haven't had much time to work on postcards lately. yesterday my luck changed and i managed to get two done. i used my sewing machine on these. i wish i had more time to sew on my art because i love the texture it adds to the pieces.

something new

my friend, cathy, challenged a few people to make a hanging chunky page to trade. i've made lots of chunky pages, but never have i made one to hang anywhere, so this was a first for me. i've had a few first lately in the art world; moo cards, altered cds and now hanging chunkies. i wonder what will be next?

making art from music

recently a challenge was posted to alter an old cd. i have lots of them laying around that skip music or stick and for some reason didn't ever throw them out. so i decided to give a try at making some art with one. here is my first try at altered cd making. i kind of like it and think i just may try it again.

christmas art

is it too early to think about christmas? oh, it probably is, especially since halloween hasn't even passed but i have to start planning a little early because i always make my christmas cards. this year i decided i'm going to send christmas postcards, so i started working on some tonight. i have a few ideas for various ones but i just love this little bird ornament stamp i bought and i just had to use him first!

postcard penauche

i had this packaging tape transfer that i did for "bless its little pointed head" for many many months and it just laid on my art desk. i never seemed to find just the right thing to use it on. i was making this postcard yesterday and thought i'd marry the two. it makes me chuckle.

say cheese

most of the time this blog serves to post pictures of my artwork, however, i'm throwing you all a curve ball today. here is a picture i took at my youngest son's birthday party on october 15th. can you believe my baby turned 23. wow. where does the time go? my oldest son, josh, will be 25 in december.
so left to right we have todd (my hub), stacey (josh's girlfriend), josh, my dad, my mom and mike.

keep 'em coming

yup. more journal pages. i was on quite a roll yesterday, managing to get 4 journal pages done.
here are two more. the one about the taxi cab cracks me up.

more crow journal pages

i got to work on some more crow journal pages today. i kind of really felt
drawn to the caged bird page for some reason. without getting all
philosophical i do wonder why people do the things they do sometimes.
life sure is a mystery.

journal pages

i'm hosting a zetti crow journal swap on mail art world. here are a couple of pages i've completed so far.

cupcake chunkies

some of you may have seen a couple of chunky cupcake pages i put on my blog a little while ago. yesterday i spent a large part of the day working on a few more. i now have all the fronts done but they still need tags, ribbons, etc plus i have all the backs to do. i'm still a long way off from completing them but i did put a considerable dent in them yesterday. here are a couple more from yesterday's work which are 1/2 finished.

many thanks

i have an awesome art friend, mar, who made my new banner for me. yes, she took pity on my pathetic computer skills and offered to help me. didn't she do a fantastic job? i love it!

wow

it's been a few days since i've been able to complete any art, but tonight i managed to get three postcards done. i think i will keep two of them initially so i can make copies. i am trying to get a few postcards together that i think will be good to make copies to sell. here are the three postcards i did tonight.

creating cards

the past couple of days i've been working on a few things. i dug out my wax and flat iron and made some paper to cut up. you can see it on the "don't look back" postcard. i thought i might
use that postcard for a halloween contest on the mail art world site but when it was finished it just didn't look halloween enough to me. i'll have to try again i think, altho, making halloween things isn't quite what i like to do. i'm not too fond of the whole halloween thing, well, the candy part is ok!

sunday postcard challenge

this week at the sunday postcard challenge i was asked to host the theme and provide a sample for their website to use. i picked a "zetti" theme for them. i can't wait to see what every one does for the entry.

chunky cupcakes

i'm hosting a chunky cupcake swap on the mail art world site. some of the people who signed up for the swap are making cupcakes like crazy and i hadn't even really gotten started. i felt a little motivated to make a few in an effort to catch up to them. i still have to put cupcake recipes on the back but at least the fronts are done.

the looking glass

on the online class i class i took with wilna she had a project where she used mirror tiles on a mirror album by heidi swapp. i couldn't find a mirror album around these parts so i used chipboard instead and covered the whole front in the broken tiles. what i liked about this idea was that you just use regular old glue that dries clear as the grout so when it dries you see the background paper through the cracks. i used an alpha stamps collage sheet image and saying to make the front. i'm thinking i'm still going to add some ribbons, charms, tags to the bottom...but i just haven't figured it out as of yet.

here's another

this morning i found myself totally unproductive and just fooling around with this and that and not accomplishing much of anything. did you ever have one of those mornings? so i decided to just go make some art. i'm thinking i might make some copies of a few of these postcards to either give as gifts or to sell. here's one that might go well as a package with the one i did last night.