Some new work!

Yep, still here, working away.  Time for those Christmas Craft sales.  Two this weekend.. just little ones.  Not looking so much for making money as for networking with other crafters.  Hey, it's all good.  I don't have as much new stuff as I wanted to, but here's yet another dragon!  My, but they are popular.  This one is Dagwood, and he just loves toasted marshmallows!  :)

And some new holiday cards and tags of course, with some fave designs!

                                                                                                                      

As well as some attempts at new designs!  :)

A New Guitar

This is my latest guitar.  I chose aqua pearlized quilling strips for it, using black strips and silver paper for the finishing touches, then black, red and aqua paper for the added musical notes.   I'm always reluctant to just let my pictures end so abruptly at the frame, so once again I used craft quality spray paint to add a little colour there too... blue on black.

Lately?

So, what have I been doing lately?  Someone

mentioned that a dragonfly would be nice, so I did one.  I used glistening paper, all different colours for the wings.  I wish I could find some deeper shadowbox frames though... I could do more with something like this if I had more room.  I may have to start making my own frames. ;p

I just love this little froggy poem... I've made one before with a different frog pattern that I devised myself.  This time I tried the 3D, curly limbed pattern out of a quilling art book.  It's interesting anyway!

Another vendor at the market I'm doing this year asked me if I could make an owl.  "Sure," I said.  She really liked it. :)  And of course, I've kept the cards comin', recently figuring out how to create a likeness of an echinacea flower.  I really like to combine photos with quilling art on my cards, and it seems as if other people like it too.  :)  Most of my cards are blank, all purpose, but the card on the right is a wedding card.  So, busy, busy!  :)

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Pheasant Under Grass

Hehe... sorry... couldn't resist.

This is the first of what I envision as a series of birds in the wild. This piece is a mixed media effort. I used milk weed seeds for the bird's tummy, added actual pheasant feathers to the wings and to make the tail, and used wood chips, birch bark, twigs, and real dried grasses in the piece, to supplement the quilling paper.

I like it, and I'm looking forward to doing more. First though, I think I'll dabble in a little cave art. :)

DON'T LOOK if you're afraid of spiders!

I've always been fascinated with the legends of ancient cultures. They are colourful, often beautiful, and expressive of where we've been... and probably also where we're going.

I've also always been fascinated by spiders. Yes, the humble arachnid, the elegant 8-legged creature that has many people screaming in terror at the very sight of it. I can remember sitting under the picnic table when we went camping, watching the daddy-long-legs whilst the parental types set up camp. Not that long ago I had a five-legged spider crawl across my computer screen. I couldn't help wondering what its story was. Probably one of epic struggle and survival. I didn't give it further grief.

Particularly interesting are the legends of the aborginal peoples of Turtle Island..aka North America. The Grandmother Spider figured in the very creation of world.. she brought fire to the people, she created the stars in the sky from the dew on her web, and more. One popular legend is that of the dreamcatcher. It is a web that allows the good dreams in, and keeps the bad ones out. I thought of this when trying to come up with a way to make the spider's web. In this web I made red beads of quilling paper. In the one below, I remembered some antique mother of pearl buttons... these are made of sea shell of course. I thought them appropriately glittery.

I created the backgrounds with acrylic paint on paper I thought suitable. The spiders are quilling paper of course, to create a couple of mixed media pieces that are the same, and yet not, and that I really like.

And so, "She took a web she had spun, laced it with dew, threw it into the sky and the dew became the stars."