Hidden

New little piece in my Etsy shop called "Hidden" . I love making forest critters and have had this piece in mind for a couple of weeks. Thankfully I was very busy with custom orders this past week and just got around to making this one.
I hope you love it as much as I do. We have had quite a few little fawns come through the side yard lately. And of course the grown up deer have had a hay day with our garden which did not do as well as expected. The trees in our yard have are just too big and our garden does not get enough sun. In the fall Scott is going to trim back some limbs and hope that helps a little for our fall garden, but I think that we may be moving the main garden to a different location (which is going to be a pain in the tushie) next spring.

Custom pieces for my Artgaragesale shop :) and speaking of AGS...I am the featured seller again :) Yay!!!

"Chica Power" - custom fabric on wood original
This piece about good friends, enjoying red wine and a beautiful evening outside.

"Forever my Friend" - custom fabric on wood original
This piece is super sweet and is meant to show a lifetime of friendship between to friends. If you look close enough the girls in the water are supposed to be around 10 yrs old, but then their reflection in the water is of them as grown ladies. :)

We just had a nice little afternoon shower here and it is still cloudy. The humidity is thick and hot here lately. Little London has broken out in a mild case of heat rash so we are trying to play outside first thing in the morning or go to the pool right when they open at 11am. So hot out. I want to start taking walks in the neighborhood with London without his stroller, which he is pretty much done with lately. The only thing holding us back is the super hotness. I know that before I know it Summer will be gone and it will be wonderful Fall and we will all be longing for the next season. ha Although, I am super excited about spiced, cinnamoned, hot soups, crunchy leaves on the ground and pumpkins of course. Actually, what I look forward to the most is the breeze. :)

Giveaway, and some other fun stuff!

I was asked by Grace of the sandier pastures blog to do a giveaway and of course I jumped at the chance! She has such a wonderful blog with many many giveaways and just very interesting information about her life in Dubai. Since she found me I have gotten sucked into her blog which is not hard to do. If you have not checked her out you should! Also if you want a chance to win your choice of any 8.5" x 11" archival print of mine then hop on over to her blog and see how you can enter to win...super easy! Good luck :) The winner will be chosen at random on July 31st so you have plenty of time and you can enter more then once! YAY

Now to share again with all of you one of my favorite Etsians who lives in Turkey and has become a good Etsy friend. I hope someday I get to meet her in person but she is really far away. Below is a little sampler package of her work she sent me. It truly was like
Christmas day when I opened up the neatly packaged box she sent me just because she is the sweetest lady out there. You can find Fusun's amazing work in her Etsy shop Zeustones!

So my pictures of her work are terrible b/c I took them inside with bad lighting but here they are anyway. This stone necklace is so perfect and meticulous I can not believe she does this by hand (well I do but it amazes me)!

So also in the package she sent me was a magnet, an ornament and 2 stones. She is so generous and talented my jaw was on the floor and when my husband came home he could not believe it either. So I just knew I had to do something just for her (but of course I do not know if it could ever compare to what she has made for me).

So here is the piece I have made for Fusun. I am waiting to send it to her b/c she had been traveling but I am hoping she enjoys it even just a fraction of how much I have enjoyed her work!!!

Commssioned piece for ArtGarageSale.com

This piece is still in progress and there may need to be some changes made (still waiting to hear from my client) but I thought I would share what I have so far. I have never made a fountain before and had a lot of fun trying to make a broken tiled looking fountian.

It has been a busy week for commissioned work but I feel so lucky and blest to be asked by super cool, art appreciating people to make things for them! Yay for art!!!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Sunset Brightness

This week I have had the pleasure of working with a fabulous client on 2 custom pieces. Above you can see the first piece I did for her. It is a take on the below piece (which is called "A Thousand Kisses") but with a sunset sky and a little bit of blue. She is giving this piece as a wedding gift and I so hope they love it.

Also, in case anyone was wondering, when working on custom pieces I try to get the piece as close to what the customer envisions, which is sometimes different then what I see...and that's ok. Below is the original fabrics I used. The rolling green hills and the green and white fabric were traded out for blue ones and I think it was a great choice. PS- I still love the green and white fabric...so bright. :)

Sunset River Trip - original fabric on wood art
This is the second piece she commissioned. It is a take on the original river trip which I explain below that I only have in print now. The sunset goes from warm yellow and orange to a red then purple. I think the sunset makes it a whole lot of fun and I hope this makes her smile (because this one is for her self) :)

Here is the original River Trip - which can be found only in 8.5 x 11 archival prints or postcards in my shop. The original was bought as a gift to Ben from Humbleglory who I never see around etsy anymore but he was a super nice guy.

That is all for now...I must go entertain my toddler who refused to nap today. It's either NO nap or a 4 hour nap but no inbetween. Ha

weeeeekend!

So finally the weekend is upon us and I am going to the mountains and my wonderful in-laws are keeping London for us! We get to go tubing down the Green river and not worry about baby-gating the steps or trying to get him to sleep when he wants to stay up way past bedtime. We are really lucky that he loves going to stay with them and they give him undivided attention...yup...super lucky and blessed!

So here is a new piece I finished last weekend. "Skinny Dip" is the name and it is fabric on wood. I have been itching to get in there and do a little more patchwork like backgrounds. Hopefully I will do a few more...next week.

Here is the original sketch I drew a few years ago. Keeping sketchbooks is so important to me b/c it is great to rediscover an image your brain had way back when. Had I made that piece when I originally drew it, it would have been totally different I can guarantee. Many of the fabrics I buy now are so different from the ones I used when I first started with my fabric on wood process. Also, they retire fabrics so unfortunately some of my old favorites I can not get anymore...unless I am lucky enough to find them on someone else's forgotten stash. ha

"Green Patch IV" - fabric on wood
I know a 4th in this series and actually it is the 5th if you count "Green Patch - Night" But what can I say I love these little 5" x 5"ers :)
And I suppose others like them too b/c the first 3 Green Patch originals sold and are now only available in 5" x 7" prints!

Here is a little summery piece called "Grass between my Toes" - I so wish we had a nice patch of grass in the yard. Hopefully someday.

Alright, I am off to finish packing, go outside and play with London, then come in and give him a bath , eat lunch, put him down in his crib long enough to pack the car, gather the dogs and head out. whew. No complaints here!

100th post...lots of new work

Scott and London and Sugar bunny and Douglas all chillin - they are the best!

Yes, I finally made it to my 100th post, slowly but surely. I thought for this post I would put up a few new pieces I have completed. I have always seemed to work in spurts and the past few days have been very productive (...now if some of it would just sell- LOL). I have as of right now 372 items in my shop. Now many of those are prints of sold originals or favorite images. Acutally, probably a little more then half of the items in my shop are prints of my originals...but still...super full shop!

I just finished this one above and named it "A Thousand Kisses" it is fabric on wood and really is so vibrant in person. I must admit, I think it is a new favorite. I have really had the best time building up my stash of green fabrics. It gives me great pleasure to pair up various greens and somehow having them work well together. I will never stop making these fabric pieces and that makes me Happy!

Below is a little piece called "Tall Grass" and it is fabric on wood. We have been living in our house here in Lancaster for 3 years now and have yet to have more then a few small strips of grass. We have so many trees that they have created quite the natural space and with Scott always working and me always running around with London it just seems to stay more natural then anything. Someday we will get our grassy yard back but it could be some time and I just will continue to make grass pieces until then. My dream grass is the kind that is soft and you can roll around in it. In the winter it turns brown but always comes back green in the spring. Not sure what it is called.

More Kitchen pieces! I seem to sell my breakfast pieces pretty well and had sold out of almost all the originals so I decided to stock the shelves again.
Here is another "Kiss my Grits-Blue" I added the blue twist and rearranged things a bit from the first 2 grits pieces I made.

"Tea" original fabric on wood

"Waffles" (with blueberries) - finally I got around to making some waffles, thought it was only fitting since I have made a few pancakes already.

Finally sometimes I just want to draw on the wood. This particular piece had such nice wood grains coming through I just could not cover them up with fabric.
"The Mountains were Calling" colored pencil on wood

Hope everyone's summer is going well. I will be headed to the mountains in a few weekends and can't wait to get a little bit of that cool, crisp air!

Portrait Sketching

Did a quick little sketch of London the other day. I seriously sat down for about 7 minutes and sketched quickly but some of the detail was lost when scanned in b/c I used light pencil. I used to take a sketch book with me everywhere and draw strangers, friends or honestly anyone who would sit still long enough. Thinking I need to get that skill back as it has been a while and I miss it. Sometime it is like switching gears to go from fabric on wood to painting to portrait drawing to digitally coloring thing (which I am not very good at).
This is the first of many..I hope. :)

And about my poor digital coloring skills and lack of photoshop knowledge...anyone have any Wacom Tablet suggestions. I have been eying them on ebay lately and really think I just want to get a small one to begin (unless I can get a good deal on a medium one). The mouse just isn't cutting it. I have so many drawing that I want to turn digital but with my sketchy style of drawing there always seem to be white spots where there are not suppose to be. I am open to any suggestions and hope I can get one soon so I can begin playing around. Also, I want to start creating patterns and things so that I can have some fabrics made on www.spoonflower.com
If you have not checked out spoonflower yet...it is the coolest little place and I can not wait to order some fabrics. I do not think that I will sell any...just use them in my own fabric on wood work - al least that is the plan for now.

I have a new friend...featuring Zeustones

How sweet and detailed and incredible are all these? I have made a new etsy friend who lives far far away in what sounds like an enchanting, magical place just north of the Aegean Sea.
Her name is Fusun and she is so talented and lovely that I wanted to bring her work to anyone who has not had the pleasure of seeing it yet. Her shop name is Zeustones on etsy.

Here is how she makes her work....

"I use more than one type of paint in almost all of them ; acrylic, sketch marker, porcelaine paint, archival ink, crayon, permanent marker, x-ray marker, coffee, berry juices etc. I seal them with the appropriate warnish or system. They will stay as they are for many years without fading as I use the best quality of materails. But they may not be suitable to leave under sun or washed with strong detergants, as natural materials tend to fade."

WOW!

Hopefully someday I will commission her to make a set of knobs for me. I can imagine them on a dresser or my kitchen cabinets.

If you want to be swept away stop by Fusun's brilliant shop. You can find this little stone HERE and peek around to find the others..each one is a treasury for sure.