Danita Art

One of my goals this year is to support women artists when I'm shopping and one of those artists I am thrilled to now own a piece from is Danita of Danita Art.

Here's what I bought:

These woodblock ACEOs are art prints the size of playing cards that are printed at a very high resolution and then adhered to a block for display or hanging. 

I was a little worried that they would be too small to make an impact but the thickness of the block and the vivid nature of the colors really makes them eye catching and powerful.

Love them!

Right now Danita is having a jewelry sale where you can get 25% off all jewelry using the coupon code JEWELRY25 on your Etsy Checkout screen.

I really want to buy this:

Cool eh?

Or maybe this, it would look COOL on my purple cardigan:

Or this Blooming Frida - Encaustic Beeswax Artist's Journal - crazy cool! ... *sigh* so much pretty stuff.

Yeah... she totally rocks.

And just in case you were wondering, she doesn't know me or know I'm posting this. I'm just sharing stuff I like that you might enjoy too :-)

You can see more of Danita's art at her Etsy Shop.

Her Blog: Danita Art

Danita's Flickr

Wrapped In Blue

Here's a few more gifts I wrapped with my blue Brown Paper Packages Kit from Bonita Rose.

It is such a time saver for me to have a nice selection of packaging supplies and vintage touches to add to them. On this one, I loved the piece of a reclaimed sheet.

For the rosette, I cut a circle out of cardboard and hot glued lace around and around until it was full. Then I folded down some of the top edges to add dimension and interest.

You can get yours as a one-time purchase or via subscription HERE.

Family Traditions: Art Journal Page

Family Traditions:

Next time I art journal I'll fill in the right side; those hot air balloons should be fun to work with.

Favorite Days: Art Journal Pages

Favorite Days of the Year:

Cookie Day: Chris and I celebrate the anniversary of 

meeting more then we celebrate our wedding anniversary. 

We call that day, ‘Cookie Day’

Easter: I think it’s the most important religious holiday 

and I love making resurrection buns with the kids and 

reading the Easter story.

Pancake Day/- Shrove Tuesday: We always have pancakes with 

bacon or sausage and tell stories about pancake dinners at 

my church when I was a kid and how my Grandpa would offer to 

do all the dishes so, “the women can put their feet up and 

gossip a bit.”

Any day that it snows.

Happy St. Patrick's Day: Irish Cream Bundt Cake Revisited

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone!

May I direct you to one of my very favorite 52 Cakes Posts:

Irish Cream Bundt Cake

Overheard: Art Journal Page with Stampotique

This is the background I started with. 

The hearts really didn't suit the topic so I altered it a bit with Inktense blocks and some Balzer Design stencils by Crafter's Workshop.

Then I decided I didn't like the green so I painted over the background with white.

And added back less muddy green and blue.

And here are the finished pages, gessoed again, of course :-)

Love my Stampotique Stamps. They've been so much fun to add to my art journal.

10 Years Ago and Super Powers

I'm trying to catch up on my 30 Lists so I did two more art journal pages last night.

The first topic was, '10 Years Ago..." This was really heading into sad territory so I focused on the facts - like that my boys were 3, 4 and 5 and we had amazing friends, I was researching homeschooling. 

I started out with this:

And made this:

She is a favorite Stampotique stamp of mine called Glimmering Hope

On the other side I used the prompt, 'My Superpowers' and I didn't worry about the two sides matching. I decided that it's all me so some sort of continuity should present itself.

The heart was some leftover Ouchless Cardboard from Gauche Alchemy that I used the area around it in this Love Birds AJ page:

See:

And I used a mix of stickers, rub-ons and words from magazine pages for the text.

The wings on the heart are Bombshell Stamps from the Sacred Heart set. It was one of my first sets and I still reach for it often. Gotta love that kind of staying power. After cutting the wings out, I Mod Podged them to the heart and background and then, once dry, colored them with Sakura gel pens.

Here are the pages side by side. click to see them full-sized.

And I wanted to thank my friend Eileen for the Versatile Blogger Award, so sweet of you.

Toys and Tools to Try: 30 Lists

I'm four lists behind right now. *sigh* As soon as I grasped that I was going to be missing eleven lists due to our vacation I sort of lost my mojo. Which is completely silly because the lists will be here when I get home.

But mojo is a fickle thing and it rarely responds to logic. So today I decided to get back at it and enjoy making all these luscious pages while I can and do the rest when I get back.

This was a fun topic as I adore tools. Not die cutting machine type of tools - blow torch types of things. It's fun to hammer, burn, pound, wreck and restructure raw materials until they're new and visually exciting. One of my favorite smells is grease - the kind that coats wire, not what you fry fish in - yeah, I'm weird like that.

The opposite page was one I made last August. I thought about going back into it and messing about. Adding some layers, making it integrate better. But that is where I was at and it's important to honor that too.

Koi Card

This week the Card Positioning Systems challenge is being sponsored by Bombshell Stamps. I couldn't let my girls down so I decided to play along. In doing so, I made my first card of 2012... which is weird, but I really haven't been feeling the whole card making thing lately.

Here's the sketch:

I used Koi Tattoo, isn't it cool!

And here's the whole she-bang:

I tried to use manufactured paper - I really did - but it looked so... bought... so I added a little gesso, some stenciling, Inktense blocks, gold paint! (for Julie Balzer's 2nd Floor Challenge), messy stitching.... ahh! Much better.

This is also my entry for the "Anything Goes" challenge at Simon Says Stamp and Show.

Painted Heart Whole-Cloth Quilt

When I was working on my Dress Quilt I was really worried that the assignment was going to be WAY too hard for me to tackle so I made this heart quilt as a back-up project. My thought being if the dress is impossible I could at least work out the stitching. 

This was a nice, simple, mildly reminiscent of Van Halen sort of design that really popped once I added the stitching.

And more importantly, it gave me the confidence to make the dress project.

Remember, you can always take an run at a new technique in an easier way then it is presented. For example, try new paint or paper craft techniques on a tag, halve a recipe, make a pot holder instead of a quilt... gain a little confidence first, then you can bring your A-Game to your project.

P.S. Who thinks I'm going to be going back into this simple heart quilt and adding all sorts of messy fun stuff to it? Yeah... me too.