Ko-Fi?

 One of my good friends, artist John Sumrow, fantasy illustrator extrordinaire and all around brilliant self-promoter without being creepy about it, just pointed out a nifty new site today, called ko-fi.

I'm more of a tea kind of gal, but I'm not going to argue if someone wants to buy me a cuppa. It's a site I wasn't familiar with, but, much like a blog, it's a platform ya'll can follow along on, and like Patreon, it gives followers a chance to toss a coin to their creators. Unlike most sites, apparently they don't take a cut from every donation, so that's nice. Instead, they make their money off of offering a paid level creator account that allows a more patreon-like experience. So, I decided to give it a go.

If you want to check out my ko-fi page, follow the moth. 

I think it's set that a cuppa jo is three shiny dollars in my paypal account. I know, right? Schmancy. 

For the rest of you creators out there, you might wanna give the site a gander and see if it suits your needs. As my friend John pointed out earlier, he mostly just signed up to secure his name on the platform. Well, check and mark. 

Have a great day, everybody. 

I made a thing.

 Not too many sleeps ago, Shutterfly was looking at me with seductive come hither eyes, and when it closed them, I saw that it had busted out the waterproof eyeliner and written 50% off on it's eyelids. I mean, how can a woman resist that? Well, the answer is, by having the checkout feature on the cart break down and try kill the mood. But, that eyeliner was on point, and once I'm seduced, I don't easily seducen't. So yeah, I contacted the powers that be, they contacted the engineers, and helped me and that sale find ourselves someplace a little more private. 

I ordered some notecards for writing to my grandmother, who recently went into a new assisted living arrangement, and I'm told some women there compare the cards they receive like Yu-gi-oh cards. Mongoosine and I were joking, "I put a card from my niece in defense position," says Muriel, leaning on the table. "Well," sneers Betty, "I have a three-page letter from my grandson, and I'm putting it in attack position!"

Now, you might have noticed that two of these cards seem to have been printed upside down. It didn't escape my notice, and I'm a bit perplexed. Nonetheless, I'm pretty happy with them. I'm going to send her one of each of the cover designs I created for the books I have out, so bottom 1, 3, and 4. The second one on the bottom is a design that is still in progress. That way I can show her what I'm working on without her having to read the horror/romance peculiar whatnot that might be too scandalous. I can just imagine the horrified look during that one naughty cryptid bit. It's not a great look. So I will keep to summaries and artwork.

It's one thing tell her"it's a story about a girl who moves to an island far from home and gets tangled up in the plans of eldritch monster while falling in love with someone she meets there, even though he's definitely hiding something from her," and another thing to have her read the parts with  cryptid couplings, the pickled eyes, and the ever climbing body count alongside the degradation of moral true north. 

So yeah, say goodbye to Exodia, Grandma's gonna be playing book cover cards in attack position.

Folding 5 yards of bias tape, in 10 minutes.

Try It Tuesday

So you've taken the fabric you picked to make your own homemade bias tape and turned it into a parallelogram of doom. You've marked it, folded and pinned it so that the first marked strip pins to the second and so on. You've pinned it, lost hope and stitched it anyway, all the while grateful you decided to try it with a fat quarter instead of larger yardage. You took your twisty wonky mess to your sewing machine, stitched skeptically, then used your good shears to cut out one bit continuous string of fabric, on bias.
That's a triumphant place to be, but also a daunting one. If you're like me and cut those strips at 2", suddenly you have just over 5 yards of bias tape, and therefore a LOT of edges to turn under and press.
Yeah, major time suck.
Well, I don't believe in time suck, so here's what you do to quickly turn that strip of bias tape into something functional.
Get TWO long needles and a ruler. Decide just how wide you want your bias tape to be when both edges are turned. I went with an inch.
Take your pins and put them, about 2" apart so they go through your ironong board cover and back up, then through and up again, so that the space created in the middle of each needle, over the ironing board, is your desired distance, in this case, 1". do it with both needles, 2" apart. It sounds complicated, but it really isn't.
Now hand turn the edges at one end of your bias strip and feed it through the needles. Pull it out about six inches, slowly, and press this section. It's "the hard part."
Now, your can take the ironed end of your folded bias tape and just pull the rest through, under your iron.

You'll want to move your iron around a little so you don't scorch your ironing board.
If the bias tape starts feeding unevenly, just stand up your iron, manually readjust the fold a few inches away from the needles, and start up again. I find I have to readjust about ever 2 or three feet, but it's not a big deal, and still so much faster than painstakingly folding down one edge, and vastly superior to spending money on one of those "bias tape maker" contraptions. It's a free modifiable bias tape maker that you didn't even know you already owned. Pretty cool, huh?

Let Them Play Dolls

In the spirit of the Halloween season, I spent the evening in the Sewing Cellar working on a Marie Antoinette Zombie doll.

They cut off her head, but now she's back, and she isn't looking for cake.

I'm pretty pleased with how she turned out. This was my first attempt at a cut & sew fabric design from both perspectives. I'd never designed one, and I'd never tried to sew one before either. She came together almost exactly the way I had envisioned, and all in less than the time it took my daughter to watch the latest in awful vampire dramas on television. :-)  The hardest part was turning the sewn doll body. I always struggle with turning, and this was no exception.

Now that my ghoulish gal turned out so well, I may be on to making more cut and sew dolls. It was a lot less labor intensive than my usual process, and since I had the design printed on Kona Cotton, she's just as durable as my typical Raggedy Rebels.

Now that I spent this evening playing, tomorrow it's back to the serious work of sewing on Halloween and Teslacon costumes.

What are you working on these days? 

Color Me Flustered

So, I designed a TARDISy fabric on Spoonflower because I am a big fan of all things TARDIS for my home. Doctor Who, and the lovable TARDIS are probably some of the best things ever developed by the BBC (which owns all of the concepts, I'm just a fan artist who loves creating things that make people's lives a little geekier).

But, here's the problem, I have this The Doctor's Ditsy fabric which I love. It's dark and full of stars, and looks cute as just about everything. My friend over at Brooke Van Gory Designs, who makes super spiffy custom bags, clutches, diaper bags, wet bags, and sundries,  even turned it into a clutch for a really happy owner, but that's when it was brought to my attention that for some prints, Spoonflower's  Old Color Profile and the New Color Profile DO NOT TRANSFER WELL.

I never dreamed that such a simple design with so few colors would have been drastically affected in this manner, but nonetheless, check it out.

The OLD COLOR PROFILE

THE NEW COLOR PROFILE

See the difference? Yep, the background. The one printed in the OLD COLOR PROFILE is a nice strong dark blue, the one printed in the NEW COLOR PROFILE printed up a funky dusty purple color.

So, long story short, I'm working with Spoonflower to find the best replacement colors, and until that date, always pick the OLD COLOR PROFILE until it's all straightened out. 

My Favorite Fiction, on Fabric!

TARDIS Paisley

A while ago I got to give away fabric from a site that allows you to design your own fabric, but I'd been pretty lazy and hadn't bothered to create my own.  However, I've had too much Doctor Who on the brain lately, and have been doodling things like TARDIS and Dalek paisleys.  So of course, this led me to photographing them and photoediting them into a fabric design.  Isn't it nifty?
I've been having a lot of fun with it. Sure, it's a bit pricey, but I think that I'm going to save up and get myself some for Christmas. Even if it's just enough to make a pillow case for the JabberWalky or Mongoosine's bedroom.

I even made one just with Daleks.  

Dalek Paisley

Maybe this one for Mongoosine and the TARDIS one for JabberWalky?

The paisley designs themselves were actually done in sharpie on shrink plastic, and will soon get holes punched in them and be shrunk down into necklaces.  I make a lot of necklaces based on my favorite fandoms.

Nifty Eye of Jupiter Mandala shrink plastic necklace inspired by Battlestar Galactica. 

Yes, I'm a Science Ficton kind of girl.  

How does your favorite fiction influence your craftier side? I'd love to know.

Spoonflower Giveaway

Once in a while, an opportunity arises to give your readers something fantastic. This is one of those.

While I've been sew busy around here lately, I've also spent a ridiculous amount of time looking at all the beautiful fabric designs on Spoonflower. And by beautiful, I mean geeky, and by designs, I mean TARDISes.  Because that's how I roll.  

In case you aren't familiar just yet, Spoonflower is an on demand fabric printing company that lets you design, buy, and sell fabric designs that perfectly fit what you want, opening up the artisan's world of fabric possibilities immeasurably.

Spoonflower has a plethora of different fabrics on which they can print.

(T.a.r.d.i.s. design by Unicornandthewasp)

You can pick sizes from a 5x5" test swatch, fat quarters, yards, and many many yards.

You can read about their design guidelines here.  

They even have a color chart so you can design in colors that print best with their printing process.

I love this site and spend too much time drooling over the possibilities.  You can check out their flickr pool to see what people have done with their fabric. 

Would you like to try out some of that creative fabricy goodness?  Well, if you would, you'll be happy to know that Spoonflower has deigned to give one lucky Paisley & Pretties reader a $50 gift certificate to use on their site!

How to enter-

Mandatory Entry-

Sign up for a Spoonflower account and comment below with your Spoonflower username.  

Extra Entry options-

Leave a comment with a link to your favorite fabric design.

Upload your own design and comment with the link.

Make a purchase from Spoonflower of any amount during the contest. Leave a comment letting us know what you ordered. (If you win, you need to show proof of the transaction of some sort, email, screenshot, something.)

Enter the weekly fabric competition.

Contest will run through Midnight on July 30th 2011.  Winner will be selected via Random.org. Winner will be contacted via email and have 48 hours to respond.  If winner does not respond, a second winner will be chosen via some bizarre method that amuses me.

Why are you still reading this, shouldn't you be signing up for a Spoonflower account?

Disclaimer- I am not being compensated in any manner for this post.  I have not received any product or other compensatory item.  Have a nice day.

Gettin' down the with artists

I'm the artsy craftsy type, and although I hear that Etsy and Artfire have message boardy networky functions, I haven't checked them out yet, and I'm kind of glad, because that gave me a chance to see the awesome going on over at Attack of the Craft.  Better still? One of the very first items I ever fell in love with on Etsy was by the artist who runs the Clay Pony shop.  But then, at some point, though she continues to stock her shop with awesome jewelry, the specific pieces I love the most were gone.  I know that around the time they disappeared Etsy was cracking down on fan art pretty hard, and since they were Whovian pieces of goodness and wonderment, I was sad that I'd never have a chance to buy them without contacting the artist and being all "please please pretty please can you make me one of those things you used to list?" and that comes off as a little stalkerly to me.
Fast forward to ...

She's selling there now!!!!!

Go look at the magical TARDISy goodness the Clay Pony makes.

Did you go? Did you look?  Do you see why I'm excited to have found this new crafty forum?
It's wonderful.
So go check it out, because it's radness is unparalelled.

Pink Saturday: Color Me Pretty

I love sugar skulls. I love the life in death in life and art mimicking death and life imitating art aspects of them.  As a result, I follow some exceedingly talented artists online who specialize in this sort of art.
One of them, Wenchkin, recently hosted a coloring competition.  Since I'm a five year old at heart, I happily busted out my favorite photoediting program and entered with giddy glee.
This is the picture we had to color:

Cool, isn't it?

This is what I did with it.

I decided to go spacey with it, because that's how I roll. If you haven't noticed, I geek harder than I rock.

Well, the model picked my picture as the winner, and so I got my own picture sugar-skull-ified by the very talented Wenchkin.  

I sent her this photo as a reference:

Ooh, pretty.

And this is what she came up with:

Absolutely amazing, isn't it?

And since I'm essentially still a five year old, I decided I needed to color it in too, with the same photo editing program, and this is what I came up with.

That was a lot of fun.

In any case, when the tween sees this, she's going to be very jealous, and I'm very pleased with the way it turned out.

If you want to see more of Wenchkin's art, check out her Facebook page.

For more Pink Saturday, check out How Sweet the Sound.

Madd Make up

Yesterday I happened to be sitting at the computer at the right time to notice that Madd Style Cosmetics was having a giveaway (a super complicated giveaway) for a full set of pigments. Um, hello? Yes, please!
Did I mention the super complicated part?
Ah, well, here's that bit.
Super complicated means that you had to opt in, tag someone, be tagged, and then get assigned by the party who tagged you/assign the party you tagged three to six colors and a theme for a sugar skull inspired look for them to create on no more than half the face, but at least one eye.
I was assigned white, pink, yellow, and blue in something super girly with hearts and flowers.


This is what I came up with.  

Noting the exclusion of black or green, I did hot pink (Young Blood with some Ben Nye bright blushy goodness) flower of traditional sugar skull styling, layered over a multi-yellow (Ben Nye creamy yellow and some scary unlabeled yellows I borrowed from the tween) sunflower with pink hilights, a couple hearts and polka dots in light pink. Eye done in Disco Biscuit, one of my favorite blues and Gothcupcake's Zombify- Police Box (also sold as TARDIS), which was also used for the lines. The white is Ben Nye creamy foundation.
I decided to go with the "phantom mask" or quarter face approach because it's girly, as commanded by Megan, in the mommy can kiss the toddler still kind of girly way, and because I think it rocks old school.

Just before washing it all off, after dinner (yes, I sat down to dinner this way, because it made me giggle) I decided to rough in a full half face, for giggles. I would have finished it, but without my glasses, I really can't see at all, and my glasses slide around so much I didn't want them smearing things.  But this is what it looked like roughed in.

This is with the glasses, since I wanted to see it before it had been washed off.
Of course, they ended up smearing the heck out of the details they're covering.

In any case, I had a lot of fun working on this, and the toddler thought it was funny and enjoyed sticking his little fingers in it.

He likes makeup.

Beading Party

I love a good jewelry party, but I don't really love all the Made-in-China and possibly lead tainted, hopefully not slave labor, and cost more than I should be spending parts of it.
Fortunately, I have a brilliant mother who came up with an idea. A Beading Party.

What you need-
a group of friends
all your and their broken beaded necklaces
some cord/wire/whatever you want to string something new on
new clasps
wire cutters
jewelery or needle nose pliers
creativity
snacks
bowls
baggies

It'd be nice if you had
ear ring hooks
a couple of those special beading trays that let you lay out your beads in order first
everyone bring a package of new beads to play with
background music
a big long table

Once you have your guest list together, it's pretty simple.  Invite your friends, make sure they know what to bring, and when everyone gets there have fun making new jewelry out of your broken old jewelry.  At the end of the day, everyone has their own new creations instead of a hostess gift, and all the left over beads can go in little baggies and go home with whomever brought them.

It's easy, and your friends will probably be relieved to be able to create something new for free or maybe four  dollars in new beads rather than getting the high pressure sales pitch to buy something they really don't feel they can afford.

So go, plan a beading party, have fun, and save some broken but loved pieces of jewelry from sitting there waiting for you to get around to fixing them, or worse, from winding up in the garbage.  You'll have a great time, and in the end you'll be able to be proud of what you've created.

Wordless Wednesday: Queen Me

Queen Me

4 watercolor & acrylic ATCs

Slee Fenton, 2006

WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

My ATC beg.

Obsession & Birthday Cake

9 Mandala ATCs, colored pencil on card stock, Slee Fenton, 2006

I'm one of those people who gets interested in something and gets kinda myopic about it.

At the moment, other than Sock Monkeys!!!! I'm kinda obsessed with Artist Trading Cards.

I know. Nutty.

But I'm NOT THE ONLY ONE.

My daughter is obsessed with them too.

So here's my super secret plan that makes me hope she's not secretly following my blog:

I'm doing a ATC drive for her birthday.

What does this mean? It means I'm trying to help her grow her collection for her birthday, by asking people to make and send her an Artist Trading Card.

Woah, what's an Artist Trading Card?

They measure 2.5" x 3.5" (the size of a playing card or trading card) and are no more than 1/4" in depth. They are original artwork or prints in an edition. They can be fiber art, they can be paintings, they can be clay, or a collage, photographic, digital art, or some awesome multi media piece. I've even collected ones made of glass.

So why am I telling you?

Simple, I'm trying to get more people involved. :-)

So if you'd be interested in creating and sending Mongoosine an Artist Trading Card for her birthday, email me or leave a comment with your email addy so I can email you the details.

Think this is something you or your kids might enjoy? There's a GREAT group on yahoo for trading ATCs.

Ornamental

Recently, the fabulous Jessie over at Moma Lovebug, maker of Heart Felt Food, and twitter goddess extraordinaire had a brilliant idea. She thought, why don't we have a bloggy/twitter ornament exchange to breathe some new life into our holiday decorations?

Well, so of course, being the artsy craftsy type, I was all on board with it.

Sadly, the ornament is gone now, so I only can share the pictures I took with my phone, but I thought I'd share with you guys so you too can feel the love.

This ornament measures 1"x 3" and is made of two layers of glass with different pieces of paper cut, stamped, and otherwise embellished sandwiched in the middle. On the back there was rice paper, an elephant, some nifty woven mesh, and the word "Joy," but I prefer the side with the breastfeeding mother, and have therefore chosen to share that with you.

I genuinely enjoyed making this ornament, though in retrospect, I wish the old art text which I cut apart for the image had contained more than the one breastfeeding mother painting!