A happy customer :)

My lovely niece recently place a large order from my Etsy shop for some early Christmas shopping. I was quite grateful for the business, of course, and envious that she was getting started Christmas shopping so early. I'm sure I'll be running around in December, as usual. [sigh]

One of the items she purchased was for herself, however, and she sent me a very nice picture of her wearing her new Frida Kahlo pendent.

She paired it with the perfect black cord, I think!

Thanks for sharing, Jackie! I don't usually get to see my creations out in the big wide world when they find new homes, so this is a nice treat for me.

Domino Pendents with Dangling Bits

Over the weekend I completed some more domino pendents. I has rediscovered an old floral art calendar that I just couldn't bear to throw away when the year was over. Some of those calendars have very high quality reproductions so I alway keep them. Same for those little postcard books too. I also thought that I would add some more embellishments in the form of some extra dangling beads. Here are a some of my favorites.

This time I used Diamond Glaze on top of the adhered image and I think I like that product just a little bit better than the dimensional Mod Podge that I used in the last go round. It seemed to dry clearer and more glass-like.

I will be moving this coming weekend and the next so I'll be taking a break from crafting. :(
But after that I'll be in my grand new place and happy to get going on several planned projects. :)

Pendents and cabinets

I'v been a busy little bee in all sorts of arenas lately so here are some more finished projects! I'm always so happy when I can talk about finished pieces because I have so many (ahem) unfinished ones floating around. I have to work very hard at not feeling guilty about that (a wasted stupid emotion) and instead let each piece progress and grow at its own pace. Or something. I just wish some pieces (and you know who you are!) wouldn't take years to incubate. [see how I did that? its not my fault I have a bejillion projects underway]

Here's the latest in my cigar box cabinets. Note the beautiful woods used on the boxes. Gosh, they sure are pretty. No cigar box labels for these lovelies! The logos are simply burned or imprinted into the wood and stained. Notice the dove tailing on the edges? So nice.

This time I used very small and demure knobs to help me grasp each box and pull it out from its shelf. You hardly even notice them, huh?


And here's a picture of all of the cabinets I've made so far nestled all up together all snug and friendly in my studio. They look happy I think.

Should I make some more? I do have a few more boxes. Well, we'll see.











But as I mentioned in the last post, this past week has been all about domino pendents. Yesterday I finished 8 more. Fiona, my daughter, ran off with one of them, so here are the remaining 7.

This batch turned out better than the first two as far as the surface sealer was concerned. I don't know what I did differently but the sealer dried crystal clear and was perfect. I used a mixture of different images: another Frida Kahlo portrait, 3 Tarot cards from the Major Arcana, 2 screen shots from Pocket Frogs (my current fav iPhone game) and even a close up from one of my quilts.

And now I truly do have the whole process ironed out and the whole thing is a breeze to complete.

Domino Pendents

Currently, I've been enjoying making some more jewelry from recycled materials. I had pinned several tutorials for pendents using a base of Scrabble tiles on my Pinterest boards but they all struck me as being rather smallish. So when I saw the same technique depicted with a domino tile instead I was much more interested. And it just so happens that we had a vintage set of 'em laying around the house that no-one much bothered with. So with a little shopping for the sealer and the hardware, I was in business. Here are my first two efforts made from materials that I mostly already had.

 A book of stickers of Frida Kahlo's artwork supplied the image for the first piece and it was easy to choose an appropriately sized sticker for the domino. The second one features a word trimmed from one of those vintage cigar box labels I found on Ebay a month ago.

Ebay came to the rescue again for the findings: the small silver tone screw eye and the Bali style bail. Seriously, I think you can find just about anything on Ebay.

Of course, almost every new project type necessitates  at least one trip to Home Depot and this was no exception: the insanely small screw eyes that hold the bail (loopy thing) were not large or strong enough to just screw into the wood (which is, of course, ebony) so I needed to drill a hole. A tiny, tiny hole. So a new universal chuck and a mini drill bit set for the dremel tool we already owned was in order. Sigh. So much for a cheap project.

That's OK. I'm all set now and have another 8 in the works! So stay tuned, I'll post them soon.