I just love etching...

I love etching.. and on copper I am in heaven.  I have been looking through my stash of rubber stamps and decided to play and see what kind of etchings some of them would make..

As with all experiments some work and others not so much. I liked this one so much that I put it together as a gift for my mom. Hopefully by this posting it has arrived to her in Florida.

Mojo's getting there

I committed to this project in hopes to regain some of my Mojo. I'm feeling creative again. The project is a 2 for 2 swap through Retro Cafe. I love their mini houses.

I spent a day papering and painting the houses and then just couldn't figure out where to go from there. So I put them up for a few days. I decided to start with creating in my box. Here is my blinking king cake baby playing in the pumpkin patch.

I have these vintage pipe cleaner snowman heads and bottle brush trees. With a little bit of mica flake glitter and diamonds dust a nice winter scene appeared.

This one is a little more out of my box. I'm really not into birds but as I was looking  through my stash I realized I have several different owls. His nest is made from these copper flat wire strands and some faux moss with a few feathers tucked in for some nest fluff. Adding the stick to the frame just pulled it all together.

This one is a little more out of my box.. little cutsie for what I usually do. I have this stash of worry dolls and thought they would be fun to use. With a blue dew drop roof inked with black stazon and then covered with some vintaj antique cooper patina. I hand stamped a no worries banner and the little brass legs made it all fall together.. I am excited at how these turned out. Even had a quick second where I thought about keeping them.. but ahhh thats part of the challenge. I'm sure they will find good homes and be enjoyed as much as I did creating them.

Long time no see.. Sorry, I have been off the grid so long. In late January I took a few steps back with my shoulder surgery. I had been doing so good and then developed a bad case of bursitis. Which laid me up for 7 weeks, serious bummer. I also lost my creative mojo and its taken me a bit to get it back. I seriously haven't even looked at my blog for 4 months. Soo bad of me. I had a posting that should have happened on Jan. 31st.. I prescheduled it and as I see it didn't happen. I will figure out what is up with that and play catch me up.. Enough of that.  Time to move forward. Here's what I have been up too.

This last weekend I had the privilege to take some workshops with Jen Crossley of A Mark In Time over at SmittenDust Studio in Diamondale, Michigan.

The first being this bird house pendant. My main focus of this workshop was soldering. For some reason I have not been comfortable soldering... so says the girl that torch fires like a mad woman. I don't know what was up with that. I learned so much and this class was so much fun. We had a great group that day.

I had another one that night and I still have to tweek it a bit so will be sharing that in the near future. I took saturday off and spent the morning and early afternoon off with my husband doing some estate sale and flea market shopping... so glad he enjoys this.

Yesterday we created these wonderful little bag pendants. "I CAN"T BELIEVE THAT WE MADE THESE LITTLE CLUTCHES!!!!!!" Jen walked us through the construction of our little bag. We tackled some wire wrapping skills and patina rusting. In our creative supplies were some fabulous tin type photos, vintage brass bobbles and beads. On mine I used a little vintage brass stencil I had. I am saving my tin type for the future. I used the stencil in place only because my other creation (too be shared at a later date) has a portrait tin type.

Happy creating everyone.. more to come.

It has been forever since I made a post. Lots have been going on. Lots that I thought I was going to share and now have to put in the hold file.. hehe.. But all is good. I don't get too personally sentimental here on my blog. But with the New Year knocking on our door, thought I would share. My dads side of the family is a interesting mix for me. For the most part they are the village that made me the person I am today. This last year I lost one of my favorite Aunts. She encouraged me to think out of the box. The major part of this learning spirit happened the summer of 1974 (age 15) when I went to spend a few weeks with them to help out with my little cousins as my aunt had just had a new baby. As they lived in northern Michigan in the middle of no where, my aunt had signed me up for ceramics class as time away from my babysitting duties. I remember butting heads with the ceramics instructor.. I had picked out this chicken cookie jar to make.. I wanted to color it with chalks. The instructor was set on that was not how you should do it. I went home voicing to my aunt that I didn't want to paint it like the everyone else did. I had a different look for my jar.. I'm sure it was a phone call or a stop by the shop before the next week when I went back I was allowed to do what I wanted to do without any negative instruction. To this day that silly chicken is one of my favorite pieces I have made. I wouldn't change a thing I did.

In my adult life I did not see her as much as I should have... more like the usual gatherings.. weddings, funerals and a baby shower here and there.. But it was always a joy to see her and catch up. My Aunt Ruthie loved antiques.. the more unusual the better. It was always exciting to hear what new item she had acquired. And loved to see the expression of one of my cousins faces as they would roll their eyes in that what you going to do with that look. This fall was her estate sale. I took this opportunity to make the 2 and half hour drive north to wander around the property and reminisce. I didn't go up with any intention of really purchasing anything. But to my surprise the above cabinet was in the sale. It was one of her favorite pieces, the other being this awesome buffet with marble top. It needs a little bit of work.. With the help of my husband we will fix it without changing any of the outside look. The paint patina is just awesome. I am pretty sure my aunt hadn't done anything with it since she purchased it. I acquired the dust bunnies and spider goobers, probably a good thing I hadn't looked inside the drawers before I loaded it up to bring it home... lol.

Most of the drawer bottoms are made from what appears to be a stock market recording chalkboard. I love the reuse of items. Make it or fix it with materials on hand. The drawers are broken up into little compartments, with a couple full drawers. At some point in time someone decided the drawers needed to be numbered.. Adds so much character to the piece. In one of the drawers I found a baggie of linograph press letters. Could that been the use for this.. held letters in a print shop?? Wish I could get a picture of them.. but they are so small I couldn't get anything that you could see what they were. Its fun to just imagine what it might have been used for. With the little cubbies it must have had a definite purpose. The color is closer to the picture below.. much more green tone than whitish.

This piece has quickly become one of my cherished pieces. For now it will be in my living room while we do some work to sturdy it up. I think at some point it will end up in my studio. It has to be a useful piece for me.. if I can't use it to store items.. it's not much use. My aunt encouraged self expression. As long as it did not hurt others and was respectful. This lesson I have tried to follow in my life. Happy New Year everyone.

Wrapping things up

I've completed another fun swap over at ArtCharms yahoo group. This time we are doing wired wrapped. This has been a fun but challenging swap. The one rule we had other than the basic charm making rules. If you choose to use another element, it can not out shine your wire wrapping. Boy.. When I signed up for this I knew exactly what I wanted to do and also a bead I wanted to use.

Since I love copper, my metal of choice. Awhile back I found these small faceted beads that are a light purple in tone with a iridescent copper shadowing part of the bead. When I saw them I knew they would look great with some copper wire wrap.

These will be making there way to our hostess.

Vintiquities Workshop Halloween Charm Swap Linky Party

Awhile back I told you about a charm swap that was happening over at Vintiquities Workshop hosted by none other than Thespoena McMcLaughlin. Our charms started arriving a few days ago. What a awesome package. The goal was to create 15 charms, you could either make 3 sets of 5 or 15 different charms. Today we are having a linky hop to share what each of us created.

Here is a closer view. I made a double wrap bracelet out of a strip of halloween fabric and attached the charms.

Just as exciting as the charms was seeing the packaging they came in. Everyone created a fun little display for their charm. Here are my contributions to the swap. I chose to make 3 sets of etched copper discs.

Here is the set fresh off my work bench.

To see what the other participants created go here to find the link hop list.

Apothecary Challenge

When Laura Carson of Artfully Musing and team designer for Alphastamps posted her Apothecary Challenge I thought why not. Boy what a challenge it was. It just kept growing and growing. Here is what I started with, a grape crate.

And this what I ended up with. My darling husband got right into the challenge also. He added shelves and this trim I found laying around. He figured out how to add some doors. I just had to have doors. I covered the inside of the crate with some flocked scrapbook paper.

Here it is with the doors shut.

I'm going to start out with this is a long post with many photos. There was just no way I could share and not really share... so here it is. I would love to hear what you think.. please leave me a comment when your through. There are two separate challenges. Both using items made from images Laura designed for Alphastamps. The first challenge was to create at least 3 potion bottle from her images. The other a much grander challenge was a apothecary cabinet. I started right in creating my potions bottles. It took awhile longer to come up with a cabinet. In her video Laura uses paper mache boxes. This was not the direction I wanted plus I wanted something compact and that I could close up when done and store.

This is where I will make this a little like Where's Waldo and let you search for potion bottles. My apothecary bottles from Laura's apothecary sheet are, Frog Slime, Sleeping Death Powder, Bottled Ghost, Rotten Pumpkin and Poison. In there I also have some glow in the dark dragon eyeballs, zombie fingers, werewolf fur, bottle blondes and much, much more.

I do like the creep factor.. so along with your search you will find cockroaches, spiders and webbing, a rat or two and a plate of brain.

Here are a few up close and personal pics of bottles.

And some more.

More.

And one last one.. Here it is with the lights on. I can't finish this posting without stating after many failed attempts at photographing. I ended up taking most of these in night mode.

Please let me know what you think.