Dis and Dat

Well it's getting closer to the time for my bottle spirit class to start on classheaven.com I am waiting eagerly. All that is left is to take pictures and fine tune my tutorial and it will be ready. I am also planning on other classes I may do on that site. Even though the fairy house I did was my first one I really enjoyed making it. Even the 6 hours it took placing pebbles on there one by one so there weren't any gaps lol. I'm now thinking of more houses and have bought several wood pieces at Michael's to use for them. I think I will have each one a different theme. The next one may be a Fairy Beach House theme with a two story house. I have shells and beads and even some beach glass I can use. I may take pictures as I go along on this one and if it comes out well maybe do it for a class also. But I will iron out all the ""wrinkles"" so that every thing will be easy to read and follow.

I also have plans for a possible wrap doll class and an altered stuffed animal or doll class. I would like to be able to show people what they can make from things they have around the house and how different just a little bit of work can make them look.

I will also be doing an altered bottle class that will be be more advanced than the original bottle spirit class. More techniques such as simple beading and using more materials.

Down the line I may do beading classes but I'm not sure on that one. I used to do beading classes on one of the MSN groups and it was not easy. It is hard to tell people what they are doing wrong when you don't have pics. But we shall see.

Well that's it for now. Stay tuned for late breaking news as you never know what I will come up with next.

Updates

My husband went to Michael's last night to get me a few more bird houses to play with. I was expecting the small ones, but he brought home two two story houses and said he almost got me a castle.

I'm thinking of doing a Fairy apartment house or Beach house. Will need a bigger base for it since the house is significantly bigger.

Also hoping to play with utee today in preparation for the class I will be doing in February on bottle spirits. I think I will also think seriously on a fairy house class as a mixed media class.

On my yahoo group we are starting a Wicked challenge. Everyone is to make something in mixed media with a Wicked/Oz/Tin Man theme. It should be a lot of fun. I'm bouncing between an Elphaba bottle spirit or a cloth doll. We shall see.

Now that Christmas is finally over and the tree is down I can move all my supply boxes back into the living room where I can get to them easily and start seeing what I have and what I may need for the forseeable future. Need to look for an appropriate bug stuffed animal for a challenge that the web site The Beadin Path is sponsoring. Each person does a beaded bug then sends it in. The pieces are then put on display in the store in Maine for one month. That piece is due in July so plenty of time to do it.

Other than that same old same old, different day different ideas brewing and I'm still insane.

Sanity is way overrated.

Fairie House

I am in several different yahoo groups. On one of the doll groups I'm on ther was a challenge/contest to turn a small bird house into a fairy house. I finished the house the day before yesterday and posted pics yesterday. The house came out very nice and I just may have to do another one soon. I used pot pourri and gemstone beads for the leafy roof, twigs on the side of the house along with cinammon sticks. I got some small gravel type rocks and created a walkway and rock garden. This proved to be the biggest challenge. I quickly found out that in order to have the walkway and garden look right I had to place each stone one by one. Very time consuming but at times beneficial when I had a migraine as concentrating only on the rocks helped to reduce the migraine. I used three large pine cones at the back of the house and small pine cones at the front for trees. Added some small dried flowers and larger rocks and a beaded tiger eye pendant for the window and it was done.

I think it came out very well and so far everyone seems to love it. I do think there will be more of these in the future.

A Tip to the Wise

Had to share this funny. I recently became interested in the art of Steampunk. It looked like a great way to advance my jewelry and maybe start a new line of products. Well, I went on ETSY looking for the little gears and cogs to use. One person had little canisters of gears for 3.99 each. I looked at the pictures and said great these are exactly what I want. I then ordered three canisters. I love to make people say OMG so it was a big surprise when I got the canisters and was saying OMG myself lol. The canisters are a little bigger in diameter than a dime. And each one packed with teeney tiny gadgets. And when I say teeney tiney I mean I could fit three of the gears on my big toenail. My first thought was what in the heck am I going to do with these. But my own gears are working and I will be coming up with Steampunk items and jewelry soon with these gears in them. No matter what the size they were still well worth what I paid and the person was super to work with. She has good prices on her items and if you want to take a look here is her addy http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=36140. The name of the etsy shop is cOveTableCuriOsitIEs.
Stay tuned for my own Steampunk Revolution

Looking to the New Year

The year is almost over and a new one starting. New stuff here and everywhere. Starting in February I will be teaching a Bottle Spirit Class on the Class Heaven website. If the classes go well and do well I will most likely be doing more classes. I already have lots of ideas. I also plan to work on doing beading contests that I have wanted to do and didnt have the time for. Im planning some Steampunk pieces and some more art dolls both beaded and wrapped. And more bottle spirits and sculpts done with UTEE.

I will also be working on creating cloth dolls and trying to get comfortable with sculpting clay. Hoping to create some new things to put up on website for sale as well as some of the old stuff that I still like.

For those that dont know what a Bottle spirit is here is a picture. And check out http://www.classheaven.com/ Lisa has classes and some supplies also. Heck sign up for my class if you feel froggy lol.

Hairyetta Pippsiwiggle

Hairyetta is now finished. My daughter made her face and I did the body. She was stubborn and required decapitation in order to perform neck stabilization surgery. But she made it through with flying colors.

Now that christmas presents are mostly done I get me time once again. Reading, learning new techniques, and polishing old ones. Have projects planned to stay busy, and things to learn and master.

I want to do some more mixed media and also do some Steampunk but in my own style. There will be steampunk jewelry and steampunk dolls so far and who knows what else.

Also want to work on chainmaille jewelry and soft doll making along with teddy bear making.

So Onwards and Upwards we travel along.

Well Harryetta only needs a face now she is painted, fiber wrapped, beaded, and flowered. She will be out in the mail to her new home soon.

I am finishing up the beading on a stick horse that will also be a Christmas present. Once those two are done I can finally do some me time in works.

After the Christmas Rush I plan to try and hunker down and write up some mixed media classes which I have wanted to do for a while. I have started reading again thanks to my wonderful friend Heather and am on the third book of Wicked series called A Lion Among Men. I have to say I'm not sure if I like this one as well as I did the first two. It's not as meaty as the other two and a tad hard to get into.

I also have a couple of projects that have been on hold for a while. One is an altered beaded elephant beanie named Hortense. I will be finished the beading on her and then hopefully by then her Prozac will be working well enough for her to tell me what kind of wings she wants. Yes wings. Hortense has been a testy project with a will of her own at times but will be a great accomplishment for me.

The second project will be a mixed media Winter Tree Spirit I have started named Elora MoonFrost. I found a vase at a thrift store that looked like a tree trunk all white so I painted it a pearl white added some beads so far and thats it. I will be adding beaded leaves and a beaded cabochon face and more goodies to her soon.

The last immediate project is a fairy house made from a small bird house. This is a contest on a a yahoo doll group called Making Dolls. Wonderful and talented bunch of ladies on there. The group has done a lot to spark my imagination and keep me going at times.

Many more projects are planned but still in the planning stages such as more bottle spirits, mixed media projects, maybe some cloth dolls, and some Steampunk done my way.

Until then I bid you adieu and hope everyone has very Happy Holidays.

The Christmas graphic was made by me using Paint Shop Pro. The elf , text, and holly pics are the original creations of Outlawbydesigns. More of her elements can be seen at http://www.freepsptubes.com/ and http://www.outlawbydesigns.com/ . She has some free tubes for download for those of you that work with graphics programs and also has cd's of her work for sale as well as subscription service to her members site to get all of the things she makes for up to a year. All are reasonably priced and beautifully done.

Monkey King

Been busy getting Christmas presents done. This is for a friend of mines 12 year old. It won first place in a beading contest also. Friend was trying to get me to do art dolls and I was hesitant. Then remembered all the beanie babies my daughter had so I confiscated them and this was the first one I did. His name is Monkey King Tiki. The wings are hand beaded and are almost 8 inches long. Was gonna change out the wings yesterday but he threw a fit so he kept his beaded wings. I think they really suit him.

new workings on the horizon

It's been a little bit since the last posting. I have been trying to get health problems under control and working on getting projects done that need to be done by Christmas.
I am trying to finish Hairyetta the wrap doll. Get a stick dragon done for a little boy in Arizona and possibly make my daughter some jewelry for Christmas.

I am also doing some research into Steampunk art. I plan to do some projects in this new media soon. Of course I will put my own spin on it so mine will be called Funky punk or Punky Funk.

So stay tuned for new projects to be posted and after the Christmas Holidays I may be offering classes in some of the things that I do. We shall see

and the list goes on

These dragon eggs were inspired from an online tutorial I found. The tutorial used hot glue and paint. I went my own direction and used UTEE and microbeads.

Went looking for other things I have done and found my altered monkey. . The altered monkey was from a altered mardi gras teddy swap on the Making Dolls yahoo group. Of course I had to be different and do a monkey instead. I just told people I altered the poor teddy so much he turned into a monkey as a self defense mechanism. I think he came out adorable.

This necklace was made using delicas for a spiral stitch strap and then sections of lampwork and czech beads.

It is now part of a private collection.

More creations

The fairy eggs were well accepted from the people I sent pictures to. So I thought I would post some pictures of other things I have made. Sooner or later I will try putting a slideshow on here.

This is a wrap doll that Im making as a Christmas present. So far I have painted a Bendi doll, then wrapped it with ribbon and specialty yarn. Next I have to bead the body, then make a face and hair for it and she will be headed to Arizona for Christmas.

Her name is Hairyetta Monetta Pippsiwiggle

New Creation

Well I'm gonna try and make a go of this blogging thing. So let's start this off with a new creation I just finished. It's a fairy egg. I used pink and blue Granitex clay over a wooden robin's egg. Added some 2mm glass bubbles and some microbeads and we had an egg. I may do larger ones and different themes for them also.

I think I may even try making pendants out of the smaller ones and see how they fly.