Princess Shrine made using a Happy Meal Barbie figurine distressed with bronze metallic paint and blue patina. The box is a simple wooden craft box painted with Lumiere acrylics on the exterior and lined with hand made paper and Mardi Gras beads.

Catching up on some artful blogging here with a set of polymer clay cameos I made for a swap.

I'm kicking off (I hope) a full week of making art every day. This piece does double duty, inspired as it was by the theme of "maps" from Mixed Media Monday and "where you live" from Go Make Something.

Remember cootie catchers?

I made this one for a swap on swap-bot.com.

The background design is a fabulous medallion stamp from Holly Berry House stamped in bleach on black paper. Then I took color into the design using a variety of pigment stamps, blending as I went. Finally, I stenciled the numerals lightly using Golden Titan Buff liquid acrylic paint.


I used the same technique with this fabulous little winged heart stamp for the flaps on the interior. Under each flap, I wrote two "fortunes" that are really words of encouragement like "Follow your bliss" or "Trust your instincts."

I hope my swap partner likes it. I had a lot of fun making it and may make a few more now that I remember how.

IMT: (not very far) Beyond my comfort zone
I've wanted to machine sew on paper for quite some time, but something has always stopped me. It seemed like an awful lot of trouble to change needles in my sewing machine. I felt certain I would manage to screw up the tension or break my machine in some way by sewing on paper. But I had the machine on my studio work table, already warmed up from doing some very creative patching of my sweetie's favorite jeans, and I had this tag book project just languishing in my "get to it" pile. I also had the wonderful image from a Seattle Art Museum exhibit program, a few small loteria cards, a snip of text from a truly awful novel, and a scrap of handmade paper infused with roses. All it took was one brave moment to pop out the needle I'd been using to sew the fabric, pop in a new needle to sew the paper, and I was doing it.
Yeah! Go me!
Okay, so it's not a very big leap out of my comfort zone, but it was a step. I'm glad I took it. I hope to spend some time over this weekend finishing up the tag book project and sewing up some paper quilts on my machine.

IMT: Comfort Zone

I created this accordion book for my Spirit Houses swap on swap-bot.com. Everything about it -- the deep, rich green of the background, the collage elements, the house shape and the fact that it's a book -- goes right to the heart of my comfort zone.