Let’s face it, thousands upon thousands of crafters, myself included, use the same mass-produced decorative elements in their projects. However, there is another option. If you don’t want your art to feature the same materials hordes of other artists are using, you can easily create your own elements. 
After two and a half loooooong months away due to an unplanned medical snafu, I am gratefully alive and finally venturing back into crafting.
Unlike the arrogant little tot featured in my project, I was much less confident about getting back to crafting. I decided to make the transition a little easier by using some of my favorite things for my first project: Gypsy Soul Lasercut’s Mini House Shadowbox, Paper Calliope’s Snarky Ancestors, 7gypsies paper and Seth Apter’s embossing powders.
Let’s face it, doing the laundry would be so much more fun with a retro pink washer and dryer. Read the rest of this entry
What is this packing light you speak of?
I just don’t “get” people who manage to pack light. Even when I travel to the family lakeside cottage less than two hours from home, I manage to fill an entire minivan with vital stuff I simply cannot live without.
This particular postcard, which I made as part of the “Postcards from the Road” set I created for the Gypsy Soul Laser Cuts/Canvas Corp Match Up, drives home this point. Read the rest of this entry
I was thinking about the AALL Challenge #1 Europe one day and inspiration came to me throughout the day. First, while visiting my elderly mother, I spied the family Bible–a massive tome in Swedish that no one in our family can read. Later, while preparing photos for digitizing, I came across both a stoic picture of my Swedish ancestors and a colorful picture of my own multicultural children with impish looks upon their faces. The day concluded with racist hate spewing across the news channels. Read the rest of this entry
The lifelike qualities of the Architextures mixed media embellishments almost demand a new kind of altered art tag.
You can see my unique answer to that call on the 7gypsies blog.
Look who is pretty in pink. More importantly, look who is strong in pink. Canvas Corp is featuring my Girl Power tag and tutorial on their blog today.
I recently published the tutorial for this Miniature Inspiration Cabinet on the Canvas Corp Brands Blog. In it I offered this Free PDF of Inspirational Sayings that you can print onto the 8 x 8 Ordre du Jour notebook page.
Use a light-adhesive masking tape to adhere two sheets of the Ordre du Jour notebook-looking paper to the top right corner of a blank 8.5 x 11 inkjet paper so that you can run the paper through your inkjet printer. I created a free pdf of inspirational sayings that you can use to print onto the Ordre du Jour sheets. Please make sure you run a test page on your own printer for alignment before using one of your Ordre du Jour sheets.
Combining altered books and Halloween–does life get any better?
It does when your altered art album gets featured on the Canvas Corp blog!
Please stop over and check out my tutorial (and my first-ever video explaining how I used magnets in the book).
Canvas Corp will soon be publishing a plethora of 4 x 4 canvases, uniquely created by each of their design team members. Since the canvases are supposed to reflect the designers in some way, I decided to create a vintage circus meets industrial canvas.
