A blast from the past!

This is a paper mache lion I made for a long long ago NYE party in Milwaukee.  I liked him enough to drag him through several apartments and all the way to this current house of mine... sadly, he'd become mouse-eaten and tattered enough that I had to say goodbye to him earlier this summer.  BUT, not before I took some pictures!

Partial Quilt

Before assembling the four panels:

After assembling the four panels, but before attaching a border:

I'm waiting for this to come back from a lady who is machine quilting it for me. It's really hard not to send the lady weekly inquiries about the progress on this thing :) I'm super excited to get it back, even though it means I will have some 40+ feet of binding to make and sew on...... remind me again why I didn't just have someone else do that for me, too?

VFW Craft Fair

Last weekend I was in a spur-of-the moment (like they called around 7pm the night before) craft fair. I met some nice people, didn't sell much, and am super grateful to those friends who stopped by to hang out :)

2012 Dziesmu Svetki Milvokos

I guess I made enough stuff to fill a table :) I almost even look a little professional, if I do say so myself.

I was at Milwaukee's Latvian Song & Dance Festival from July 4 - 8. This year I was selling sandblasted glassware, jewelry, decorative switchplates, and lino printed cards. My mom had the table next to me, which was fun :) Now slowly moving onto (what feels like a monumental task) photographing jewelry and other items to post up for sale on Etsy.

The other sock monster!

Here's the other animal/monster for the baby mobile we made in March :)

Glass Fish

This year, for the first time ever, I participated in a glass magless exchange (technically "magnets" but since everyone would have had to pay extra shipping costs if everyone glued magnets on to the back of their work, we all skipped the "glue magnet on" step and hence then name "magless").

I made fish.

One heckuva LOT of fish:

Rainbow snake!

In March, I made two stuffed animals for a dear friend's baby mobile..... these are the only pictures I took, though, so you folks might not get to see the green bat/owl/monster that also went to her house.

Bench in progress.....

Someone mentioned that they're tired of looking at that picture from November AND ps, it's been nearly five months since I've updated this blog. So. Here goes an attempt to get back in the swing of sharing things that I'm working on.... Because there's been a lot of new stuff going on :)

Day 7 --- playing with a laminator

Tuesday I finally made those plant tags I was talking about to attach to some contested plants in my backyard. These are now attached to the plants in question:



After finishing those I decided to play with some collage and laminate it.... unfortunately, I learned the hard way that two layers of cardboard going through my laminator = pain, sadness, broken things, and much much much pulling to get things unstuck. Here's all that's left:



(Luckily, I had some awesome help to get this unstuck from the machine. I do believe that the machine works again, too.)

October = felt?

This month I prepared my very first fascinator for use at a fancy tea party:



Turns out that they are really fun to make AND I now see fascinator possibilities everywhere I look! Which means I'll be hosting my own tea party in January or February just to have a reason to create (and wear!) another one (^_^) And since I made too many green felt "flowers", I then experimented with barrette possibilities:



I'm surprised at how much I actually liked how those barrettes turned out!

Sock monsters

I found an amusing book and decided to make sock monsters an activity for an art night. Here are the ones I made:



now what do I do with them?
I don't even really like stuffed animals...
Hmmmmmmm.

The Inspector

This is what I see every time I get in to my car and it makes me smile! I've had my car for just over 2 years and it's never had a name, but suddenly I'm inclined to call it "The Inspector".....

A cement mushroom in progress...

Played with cement just a little bit before it got cold outside.... and now I have a 70% finished mushroom hanging out in my kitchen....

First, create a plain (if lop-sided) mushroom from a lightweight cement recipe that you just happen to have the ingredients lying around:



Begin attaching "reject" glass pieces around the edge with mortar:



Fill in the rest with pieces of broken and leftover kitchen tiles (these were really fun to smash in to smaller pieces with a hammer ---- though next time I think I need to break them in to even smaller pieces):



NEXT UP: grout the cracks & seal the mushroom...... someday when I get tired of having a half-finished mushroom in the corner of my kitchen :)

Latvian Bazaar in Newtown Square PA

My dad and I went on a road trip to Pennsylvania this weekend. Here's a picture of what our booth at the Latvian bazaar in Newtown Square looked like:

Framing happy thoughts

I finally finally finally framed the two sheets of good wishes that people had written for two of my friends upon their wedding ---- originally the stick figures were supposed to be replaced with actual pictures of the bride & groom, but we decided that the stick figures were kind of cute. So we left those in and put the actual pictures all around the edges.

Bird book!

I practiced coptic bookbinding a couple of times before making that book for the friend's wedding..... (sadly, I still didn't get part of her book as tightly bound as I'd liked to have --- her covers still shift left/right more than I think they should).... here's the only one that I remembered to photograph before giving it away:

Instant gratification

Cutting up small watercolor remnants to make cards:



(Note to self - pick a better background for photographing this stuff next time)

Coptic Bookbinding

For my friend's wedding:

Latvian Easter Eggs

Here's the only picture I have to prove that I colored some easter eggs this year. This was done entirely naturally using onion skins, rice, barley, pasta, and plant material (like grass and bush clippings).

December 2008 - miniature flower arrangements!

Invited to "A Giants Christmas Party" where everything is small (because let's face it, we don't have good giant outlets here in the US) . . . . with the help of my mom, we came up with the idea of miniature flower arrangements for the party . . . . and with the help of S, we made the actual arrangements just minutes before heading out for the event:



Flowers include: baby's breath, fern, two types of stattice, and goldenrod.
Vases are various candle holders.

(Click on the image to see individual arrangement close-ups.)