More of What I've Been Up To

A few weeks ago I found out that I had been accepted into an upcoming local juried craft fair, known as the Bloomington Handmade Market. I was happy to get the news since I was turned down when I first applied to be in their winter show last December. This will be my second experience of being a vendor at a craft fair. I was in a small local show shortly before Christmas, but this one is going to be much bigger. It's held in our town's convention center and it will have a lot more vendors and will be better publicized. Since I've been working hard for the last few weeks to get ready for it, I'm hoping I do well.

The multi-flower punch

One of the areas I decided to concentrate on for this show would be handmade cards and other paper goods (prints of my illustrations, bookmarks, etc.). Since the fair takes place three weeks before Easter, I decided I would make some Easter cards. These have been a lot of fun to make. I've been using a combination of paper punches and rubber stamps. One of the punches that I recently purchased is one that makes different sized flower pieces. One squeeze of the punch cuts out six different shapes that can be used either as is or stacked in combinations to make different looking flowers. When you use an assortment of paper colors, the combinations are endless.

Some of the card stock I used for the flowers

After punching out dozens of various colored flowers, I sat around for awhile and glued pieces together in combinations that I liked. After making several dozen flowers, I began thinking of card designs.

I'm not only creating Easter cards, but also cards for birthdays and other occasions. If you scroll to the bottom of this post you can see some pictures of a birthday card I designed as well as a 'thinking of you,' card.

So far I've spent more time creating the punched and stamped components than I have actually assembling the cards. So over the next two weeks, I have a lot of card assembly I need to get cracking on.

An array of paper flowers

Close up of some of the color combinations

Work in progress

A few of the card designs I came up with

Some of the squares and shields I'll use for backgrounds

using some paper punched designs as stencils

I tried my hand at doing some embossing

elements for an Easter card

hand-colored and cut-out rubber stamp image

finished birthday card with a western theme

finished thinking of you card

My First Etsy Treasury

Etsy has a feature that allows people to gather together their favorite items from different Etsy vendor shops into what is called a treasury. You can choose sixteen items to feature in your treasury. Most people, when they create a treasury, design it around a theme. Sometimes the theme is a particular color scheme, sometimes it's a holiday theme, sometimes its centered around a particular animal or type of object.  The theme can be anything. I've been on Etsy for over a year now and until this week had yet to try creating a treasury of my own. A few days ago I took the plunge. I love rabbits and with Easter just around the corner I decided that my first treasury would be centered around various rabbit items that I have marked as favorites. I called my treasury Bunny Love.  Check it out if you get a chance. Thanks!

Illustration Friday - Swarm

I've been busy this week getting ready for another craft fair so I didn't have time to create a new illustration for this week's 'Illustration Friday' challenge but, in going through my old files, I did find an illustration from two years ago that I feel fits the word, which this week is "swarm."  Though I completed this illustration in January of 2009, its history actually goes back quite a bit further.  This image of a funny looking creature on an alien planet who is caught stealing nectar from an insect's private stash, started off as a pencil sketch in a sketchbook from twenty years ago. I came across it one day and decided it might be fun to do something with it, so I created this illustration.  You can see that in the final illustration I added a whole swarm of angry insects who are poised to chase off the nectar poacher.  I created a special insect nozzle for the image hose to paint in the swarm of bugs.

Below are some images depicting the various stages of the image's creation.