Bluebird Blues

It's been a while since I've written a blog post...I guess sometimes life gets in the way. Regardless. I've had a busy year making things. It's been my goal to make hand made gifts this year... And needless to say, I'm behind on my gift giving. But of the gifts I've completed. I'm super pleased with all of them! Hopefully the recipients feel the same way!

The first of my endeavors was based off of some earrings that I picked up from the Alzheimer's Association's Memories in the Making show in 2014. The bird nests were paintings that were in the show... And I loved them and knew that they would be the perfect present.

Then... As luck would have it I found this beautiful broach... And then a concept came together (because that's how I operate!)

So I had my basis and theme and I found fabric to coordinate and used a Collette pattern to come up with the following dress.

Pure Imagination

I have to geek out about this one because I love it so much! It makes me as happy as the song from Willy Wonka about pure imagination. Go ahead... Sing it... Remember how happy that made you! Well this skirt makes me feel the same way. This is another gift for a friend... And I absolutely adore Melody Miller fabrics and I splurged and came up with this lovely little combination!

I based this idea of happy go lucky childhood off of the necklace. The necklace is a copy of a painting that was in the Alzheimer's Association's Memories in the Making at show for 2014... It needed a fun and happy outfit to go along with it!

Flowers in the window

Such a lovely day... This was another project for a friend of mine. She had bought this dress... But it was so incredibly full that it wasn't very flattering. I told her that I could do something with it that she would love. The finished piece looks nothing like the original... In fact I probably have enough fabric left to make another dress like this if I wanted to!

Comic strip

My next project... Okay. By the way background music should be comic strip by the ghost of a saber tooth tiger... Because it's ridiculous and fun and ties in with my next project.

This is my second version of this dress. At my previous job we hosted an annual event called super hero slushie salute. I made it a requirement for staff to come in some sort of super hero attire and I let a friend of mine borrow my dress... And she fell in love. But I made mine quickly without much attention to detail and I wanted to be able to make her a nicer version.  See my version below:

Then this is the version I made for my friend, notice the careful planning to centralize the logo! And I couldn't help myself... I wanted to add the bright accents to make the comic book feel more present in the yoke but subtle.

Mint Card

"The sun is up, I'm so happy I could scream, and there's nowhere else in the world I'd rather be than here with you." I know that The Cure is known for depressing music, but some of my favorite music of theirs is really upbeat and ridiculously happy (this song included). So I honestly can't say that this song inspired my card. In all reality I just like this image from A Day from Daisies, and I really just wanted to color it and make her hair mint green (because I would love to have such fabulously colored hair myself...but I have a respectable job, and will have to wait until I'm much, much older before I will ever be able to pull that off...as I like to say, when I go gray, i will play (and more specifically I will play with hair color like mint green and more!))

So that just about sums up this card, I really wanted the main character to have mint green hair. This card was designed for Dutch Paper Crafts and features an embossing folder by Lifestyle Crafts called Tile. I think this embossing folder is a really nice one, and works well for a basic "wallpaper" background. I used some plaid paper to balance and offset the background (because one color backgrounds are really boring to me, and I need more out of life than just one color). I still thought it needed something and so then I added the silver embellishments, and with that thought the card looked complete.

Thanks for visiting me on my blog, and don't forget to check out Dutch Paper Crafts as they have a variety of items to choose from!

Piggies

Okay...so I am using another song by the Beatles (because frankly they're a good band, and were influential early on in my life). And I LOVE this song, because it's a LOT of fun. "Everywhere there's lots of piggies, living piggy lives. You can see them out for dinner with their piggy wives."

This card was designed for Dutch Paper Crafts, I'm a part of their design team. This group of cards was definitely challenging for me, and this is one of the cards that I contemplated what to do with it for far longer than I should admit to. Featured in this card is the embossing folders from Lifestyle Crafts called 'Tile'.

You can see in the background of the card that I used one of the embossing folders from this package to create this card. To me this embossing folder reminds me of wedding quilts...but it was still a tough concept for me to tie together with a clever theme. So instead i eventually decided to use the cute little female piggy in her cute dress and bloomers, and hoping that it would look okay together. I think it does (let me know if you feel differently!) I felt the embossing folders didn't stand out enough without embellishing them (likely due to the paper I used). Again, you can see that I used the embossing folders to make a concave design as opposed to convex, so to help this pop, I colored in the concave shapes with silver on the pink, and orange on the yellow to make it a bit more noticeable.

The pig is from A Day for Daisies and was colored by copic markers...at this point i think it's pretty clear that I'm a big fan of A Day for Daisies images. I think that they're a lot of fun and since it takes me time to come up with my own drawings I often use her images as they are whimsical and fun!

Mermaid Avenue and Ingrid Bergman

So the blog title probably is confusing...Mermaid Avenue is an album by Billy Bragg and Wilco in which they sang the lyrics of Woody Guthrie's songs that had yet to be published. So Ingrid Bergman is the title of one of those songs (and also an actress). Anyhow, the mermaid in this reminds me of some of the lyrics from the song and the fact that the album is called Mermaid Avenue.

So the concept again is incredibly simple. I like to use my scrap paper, and the swirls were from some letters that I had cut out for a friend (so they were the negative pieces and were left over). I thought the swirls matched well with the embossing folder that I used. This is an embossing folder by Lifestyle Crafts and is in the Lattice Package. As discussed in another blog, these particular embossing folders remind me of vintage swimmers, etc. So it was natural to combine the swirl negative image, the mermaid, and the embossing folder to create this type of design. I wanted the card to have that vintage feel, so I used some silver paper for the embossing folder that has the feel of old glitter that has aged to get to that vintage looking color to it. Then the rest was just combining everything to work out together just right and of course some embellishments were used to simulate silver bubbles from the mermaid swimming.

The embossing folders are from Dutch Paper Crafts, which I am a design team member of. The image was from A Day for Daisies, and was colored with copic markers.