Art & Soul Trades, Part Two

These heart pins were what I started out to blog about before Blogger became such a pig. It's bad enough that they've changed the way photos work so that you can't even move them around anymore. Now if you backspace in the wrong place, you can lose all of your photos which means you may as well start over or JUST NOT BLOG AT ALL! At a time when Facebook is just taking over people's lives, you'd think they would make it easier to blog!

BASTARDS!

The heart pins are for the girls from my Yahoo art group, TreasureArtTrends, named after the shop owned by two of the gals who are coming to Art & Soul, Keri and Cathy. Gina and Kathy are coming too and it is just TOO exciting!

Here are close-ups of the two bottle cap charms I made. I have about a dozen of the Dia de los Muertos caps and around twenty of the Las Vegas sign caps.

I'd made these in the past and just had the idea of touching up the Glossy Accents then adding the microbeads. They seemed to need something, you know? Like the Las Vegas sign ones just needed that tiny dot of sparkle at the top of the Las Vegas sign that the icicle colored Stickles provided. I love Stickles more even than the other Tim Holtz products and I pretty much love them all. OK, his masks are too large scale for my projects. They'd work better on tote bags and shirts but I never seem to have enough space on my work table cleared off to do those!By the way, I got a great hole punch at the bead store that works fabulously well for punching holes in bottle caps so you can add the jump ring. I wish I had time to sit and solder all of the jump rings closed. Ha! I wish I had the soldering skills to do that neatly!

Making Trades for Art & Soul!

I made these a couple of weeks ago. Well, I started them. I just 'finished' them the other day while I was caught up in the fever of making trades for Art & Soul in Las Vegas.The Nest and bird stamps are from Red Lead Paperworks' domino stamps. Lately, I am just addicted to their stamps and email newsletters! I did these as a break from making these bottle cap charms. Flattening the caps wasn't as painful as I'd feared. I've got a couple of repetitive stress injuries from my addiction to FarmVille and Mafia Wars on Facebook, so I thought it would hurt. It took four whacks of a regular-sized builder's hammer on a piece of wood that I put over the cap that had the edges down on a steel bench block a friend made for me. The scary part was trying not to mash my fingers that were holding the piece of wood! Be sure the edges are against the steel if you try this. If they're against the wood, you'll have a blank bottle cap embedded in the wood!

I'd already 'customized' the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign for my page in the Fatbook, so making the centers was just a matter of making them smaller. I can't believe I didn't have a 1" circle punch. I had about 3 when I checked but none that were a 1" diameter. So that meant a trip to Michael's. I can never go to that store, get what I want and leave. No. It took two hours. Five minutes there, five minutes back, and close to two hours in the store! When I got home, I was too tuckered out to work on a project!

I HATE Blogger. It's acting up horribly and I think it just deleted two of my photos. :(

Books!

I'm nuts about books. I love to read books, look at books, shop for books, and to make books. And lately, I've been doing just that, making books. This house book was for a Round Robin and swap on our TreasureArtTrends group, inspired by an entry in a January Interweave Press Embellishments newsletter (the one for Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine) written by Leilani Pierson and taken from her article in the Nov/Dec 2008 CPS.

This is my book for the round robin. The generic binder rings will be changed out for a ribbon when I get it back home and finished. I think it's my favorite book I've ever made, except maybe for my first Laguna Binding book that I used for my very first round robin.

This pink book was done for the swap.

So was this blue and brown book. I just had to try out my new Red Lead stamp. It was hard not to keep this one! The paper under the paint and gesso and ink is taken from an old atlas someone gave me. It's a map of South America, swiped with a light layer of gesso, some light turquoise heavy body acrylic, and then stamped on with my favorite sepia colored Archival Ink pad.

This blue and brown book was made with some paper my friend, Bev, gifted to me when her local paper arts store had a huge sale and closed. These colors and textures together just get me excited!

And finally, here's the first book I made for the exchange. Love Shack by the B-52s is my personal theme song and the ringtone on my cell phone. So I had to keep this one!

Oh My! A Dooney Tale

I hardly know what to say or who to tell.

If you know me, you know that I am a Dooney girl and always have been. When I got my first really good job, I started noticing the handbags that all these corporate women were carrying and how attractive they were. They just looked like fabulous handbags. I had to have one. I'd know that I was successful if I carried a bag like that.

So when I got my first performance bonus, I went straight to Parisian and bought a Dooney & Bourke Medium Essex bag (above). It weighs 17 pounds empty because it is really thick All-Weather Leather. It's waterproof. These purses can hold water inside, though you'd never want to. The drop on the strap is realllly long, so it is hard to keep on your shoulder when you go shopping. I wanted a smaller bag just for shopping and going to conventions and conferences. A bag that would hold the essentials but not be in my way. I wanted a red Kilty bag but when I went to purchase one, they didn't have red. I ended up with another bag entirely, the Duck bag in Fir green AWL.

This bag became my everyday companion. I carried it while the Essex bag sat in my closet. Weighing something down, no doubt. For years, I was happy with just this bag. I went on to be more successful and to make a lot more money, but I never felt the need to replace this bag.

Until I inherited some money. I bought a Coach bag. I hated it. In fact, I still hate it. I switched to a purple D&B wristlet I'd bought. For a long time, I carried a purse that was smaller than many people's wallets. Then I found a cute little pink patent leather Guess bag in a shop in Paris in Las Vegas. I loved it and carried it for about a year.

On my next trip to Las Vegas, I found the Dooney store in the Canal Shoppes at the Venetian. Oh bliss! So every time we went to Las Vegas from then on, I HAD to go to the Dooney store. The best bag I ever bought there was the day after I'd won $375 in half an hour playing blackjack. I went in and bought three bags for just under $1000. My mother was horrified. (Handbags that cost more than $10 just seem too expensive to her.) She doesn't get it. So I took one back! What was left was the Crimson Croco Medium Hobo bag. I still love this bag. I bought the matching zip-around to go with it and to use when we go gambling in Las Vegas. It's still my gambling purse since it's so easy to hook onto my belt loop or to loop over my wrist. It doesn't really fit into the Medium Hobo though, so I don't use it as a wallet. I have a small croco change purse they gave me when I made the big purchase and I use it all the time for actually holding change when I have some. But the Crimson Hobo is my very favorite handbag. The leather smells divine!

For the spring, I bought a pink and white cloth bag. Love the bag but I just cannot keep it clean. I cleaned it per their instructions, then didn't even take it outside and it still got dirty! I'm more careful with my D&B Giant Anniversary Sac. It goes out a lot and is often used as a briefcase or luggage, but being black and white, it doesn't collect the dirt that the pink bag does.

On the next visit, I bought a French leather collection bag in dark green to go with the MINI Cooper S Sidewalk cabrio I intended to buy. I was saving the bag to use when I actually had the car. Life sort of intervened, so I still have not used it!

On another visit, I bought the pink medium Luna bag and a matching wristlet. I needed a larger bag because I needed to carry more stuff around once my mom came to live with us. I hate this bag. Right away, some of the stitching started to come out. It smells like the tire department at Walmart (read: the worst possible smell you can put up with every day, really not pleasing to the senses). It did when I bought it though among all the leather bags, I couldn't smell it. Once I started to use it, I noticed it. Dooney's response was to send it back and if they couldn't fix it, they'd give me a new bag for half price. This WAS a new bag! Morons.

I'm still using it. Oh sure, I have plenty of others included the beloved and rare Crimson Croco Medium Hobo bag, a navy Calvary bag I bought on Ebay, a pink bucket bag also from Ebay, and even the green French Leather bag that has never been used while it waits for the matching British Racing Green Sidewalk to appear. But I'm stuck in a rut with that pink Luna bag.

Or I was.

Today, I got an email from D&B announcing a new sale. Since I've been so ticked off about the pink Luna, I've not even been reading or even opening their emails. If my old friend, D&B, could treat me that way, why should I even give them an opening? I don't even know why I opened it.

The little black Scotties on a red background were on sale. OK, I'll look. I looked at a few and decided to look at all of the handbags. Commemorative All-Weather Leather Collection?

Suddenly, I felt a renewal of my spirit. Maybe I CAN still be a Dooney girl! There in all it's wondrous glory is that icon of Dooneyness, the Duck Bag in Fir Green!

Be still my heart! Life will go on! I'm off to put everything back in my Duck bag and get back to the real me!