Painting Small Cuties

Just signed up for this workshop with Suzi Blu and I am sooooooo excited!!!! What fun!!  Stay tuned for Angelo and Dana paintings!! :)

Oh, and in other news, I am now over 5,000 page views on this blog!! Yes, really!! How exciting!!  Do you think it's time for a give-away to celebrate?  If you do, comment below and tell me if it should be a belly dance DVD or a set of collaged cards.

Have a great day!! :)

Art Selling Experience

Not a suburb picture, but I wanted to share my table with you from the Spirit Fair at Sterling Yoga.  Lots of thinking and planning went into this little table.  A couple of Angels even came by the night before and helped me finish up the trimming, tagging, sleeving and set up run-through.  Really, if my new friends (I'll explain in a minute) Michael and *Michaela had not come to my rescue, I would have been selling my art for the first time on only a few hours of sleep... and me on a few hours of sleep can mean seriously bad things.

A friend of ours came to visit on Saturday- Bill. Bill has many friends and went to see some at an SCA event on Saturday.  Michael and Michaela, who are book binders, joined us back at the house.  Yes, that's right; two people who had never been to our house, one of whom I'd never met, and who know paper and truly understand the artistic process (including selling said art), paid a visit the night I was working every possible minute to get my wares ready for my first art vending experience.  They generously helped me finish so I could go to bed hours earlier than I would have been able to doing it all by myself.  Plus, we got to talk about art!! I have to give a big THANK YOU to the Universe for that!!

BTW, I just love what *Michaela does with her photography- specializing in celebrating and honoring the beauty in all people, regardless of whether they fit the "standard" model of beauty. 

My collage sheets are re-listed in my Etsy shop. Once I get the rest of the cards, journals and jewelry scanned/photoed, they will be up there too. There are some fairies (both elegant and adorable), beautiful mermaids and inspiring Deities just waiting for you.  Only a few of our belly dance instructional DVD's are left, but several of the performance DVD's are still in stock.  Does anyone know if I would be allowed to list those on Etsy since I did all the pre-production work, some of the filming and assisted in editing?  My husband did the rest of the technical work and he's not listed on my store... not sure if I can add him now.  My sister is also featured in two videos and my students in the other.

Also, you may have noticed that the blog has a new name: Vinegar and Glitter!!  I'm super excited about the personalization, and have a new website, which is far from finished, that will help people find me on my major websites.

Happy Monday!

Holiday Art

This first piece of art was a last minute Halloween crown. I just felt I needed one. Angelo is modeling it here since it's adjustable and he is such a cute model. :) I made more Halloween art, but will post it later, maybe.

This piece, I made a long time ago when the free to print company www.ilovetoinspire.com asked me to do some collages using their materials. I used a quote and background from their site and cut it out in the shape of a house. The quote says "In our daily lives, we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy." It surfaced a few days before Thanksgiving and I thought it was pretty appropriate to have it out to go with the theme of the day, especially with the house image.

The set of Christmas houses was for a blog challenge over at Art Chix Studios. I used their mini wooden houses, vintage letters background, Christmas fun images and Christmas post image. The challenge was to use their baroque trim in a holiday art project and the stars and medieval borders worked out nicely for this project. If you like it, pop on over to the Art Chix fan page and comment. It is a contest and I could win a $20 gift certificate for more Art Chix art supplies! Please, feed my addiction! :)

Feeling Wonderful :)

Yesterday, I got lots of art time. More than I normally get at one time. I even started with a trip to the book store and Michael's just to get out of the house. I spent all this art time on one project. One glorious project that I'm so excited about I want to dance. (and I did this morning, but more on that in a minute.) I haven't taken pictures of it because I'm going to be _wearing_ it this weekend at the WVU Spring Hafla. We are celebrating Earth Day by wearing costume pieces made from recycled or re-used materials. I've already deconstructed a skirt I wore in High School and made it into a panel skirt and this mystery project that I made yesterday includes a hand-rolled string/tie from a choli, which used to be a sari. :) I also used some fabric from this choli in a fabric collage last week. It's better that way and I don't have to worry about what to do with it. Beautiful fabric, just not on me. So, this mystery project is a mixed media piece. If you'd like to see it in person, come to the WVU Hafla on Saturday! Show starts at 7:30pm and you get to see bellydancing!!

I also scanned and submitted my Halloween projects to Cloth Paper Scissors last night- ok, technically very early this morning. I'm feeling brave and will be thrilled if they publish my pieces (and mildly crushed if they don't, but let's not focus on that). If Somerset Studio will accept my digital submission of a piece, I think I'll try to get something together to meet their April 15th deadline. Just saw that this morning. :( But, they are calling for something "timeless and elegant" in the vintage Halloween genre. That sounds like less time adding creepy layers to me. Maybe something small like a card...

Then, this morning, I had such a great practice with my little one running around! I didn't pressure myself to have the world's most efficient warm up and then Angelo was excited and dancing with me rather than wanting me to hold him while I danced. I think it's a great sign that he enjoyed the songs so much! :) Hope you can make it to enjoy them with me this weekend at the WVU Hafla! (I'm also teaching a props workshop during the day- veil, cane and basket. So fun!! I've extended the early discount pricing for a couple days, so you can get to the pay pal button here.

Hope you are feeling wonderful too! :)