What's in a Bag?

I can tell you that my bag is my most frustrating thing ever. I seem to never have the right size or color, style, type of material or something and I end up going and buying something else that I think I'll like. I don't like heavy bags so that limits what I will carry to small light weight bags and then I can't seem to get all my stuff in them. This is a big worry to my husband as I just either make or buy more bags....I have a limit on shoes but not bags. LOL. I think he is wishing he had put the limit on bags now. Ha ha too bad.

So, back to the reason for my ranting, I purchased a Miche bag several years ago at our local fair. Carried it for 6 months or so and then decided it just didn't work for me, too small, stuff kept falling out, etc. A month ago a friend of mine asks if I would attend a Miche Bag party....who knew they were still around and now gaining popularity, well I told her I would come to hers but I already had a bag and didn't especially like it. "Oh, but now they have two new sizes and they have fixed the problem at the top of the bag and they are just so much better" she said. So, I went to their web site to check out the new styles of covers and sizes. They seem to be better and they do have a bigger bag, kind of like a tote bag. If you have never seen or heard of these bags you can check them out on their web site http://www.michebag.com/. 

Okay, I keep getting side tracked. Last night my friend and her husband came over for dinner and she had one of the new "standard" bags and yes they had fixed the top but just wait, she opens her bag and out pops a liner with all her stuff. What a great idea when you want to change purses. I'm sure you can now guess where this is going, yes, I made myself a liner. It fits inside my Miche bag and several other bags I own so it is very versatile. The Miche folks have one that they sell, smaller but it has more pockets. I used some scrap fabric and pieced these two together. I like the black and white one but I messed up on the pocket, and the tabs were too big so the second one fixed those problems. I'm not crazy about the color but who cares, they go inside a bag and you really don't see that much of them.

Now I will be tempted to buy more covers and possibly that bigger bag tomorrow night at her party....oh, what have I gotten myself into.

If you are looking for the Bead Soup Party blog and my giveaway you can check it out HERE.

I hope everyone had a great weekend.

A Few Wire Wrapped Pendants

Today I dug out my wire wrapping supplies and started wrapping. I haven't wrapped stones in so long I was really disappointed with my first one but the others turned out pretty good if I say so myself. Here they are. This first one is a jasper found on Mount Rainier, the second is boulder opal and the third is Labradorite all wrapped with 14kt gold filled wire.

Don't forget to come back tomorrow for the great reveal of my bead soup and the blog hop. I also will have a giveaway that you won't want to miss.

Still Remodeling

This week has been an up and down week. We are planning our office remodel...what you say do you remodel in an office. Well, this is our only spare bedroom and guess what? No bed. So we are hiring a furniture/cabinet maker to make a Murphy bed with a small wardrobe along with a built in desk and overhead cabinets. To do this we must empty that room, rip up the carpet, take the paneling off the walls, repaint and then refinish the hardwoods. Now we won't be doing all this, we do have a contractor, but we haven't contacted him yet. We will get the room emptied out and rip up the carpet ourselves but we will have the contractors do the rest.

So much to do and then today our new blinds and drapery panels were installed in the living room and dining room. Unfortunately the valance did not come out quite right so they took it back and will be fixing it, but that didn't stop me from taking photos to share with you.

Before - tackie sheers in the living room as we took the heavy drapes off years ago and  nothing in the dining room including privacy.

Now - we got the type of blinds that you can draw from the top or bottom and, as you can see, the reason we did this in the living room on top of the sofa. This is Leo's favorite place to view the world and keep intruders out. I'm not sure where Buddy was when I took this but there was some snow on the ground so he was probably outside,

The color of the drapery panels is actually a tiny stripe with rust, green and gold but you can't tell from a distance.

Just had to throw in a doggie picture. Leo decided to attack Buddy for a some reason. Who knows but that was our day.

One World One Heart Giveaway Winner Announcement

Well I drew the name last night but decided to wait until I was more awake to post the name and blog of the winner. The One World One Heart trip was great and I met some wonderful bloggers on my worldwide travels.

Okay here is the winner. It is Thespoena McLaughlin of Vintiquities Workshop. Check out her blog if you have time. Now you are wondering what she wins, well she wins this box of goodies.

Congrats to Thespoena and all the other lucky winners throughout the world.

Happy Valentine's Day

For Valentine's Day my honey and I bought ourselves a new camera. We do quite a bit of traveling and our little point and shoot is great but hubby wanted to get back into some photography and I really need to learn to take more professional photos of my jewelry, so here we are. New camera and I'm thanking that it has an Auto mode so that I can learn the manual mode at a slow and easy pace. Lighting and focus is one of my biggest obstacles. We do have a couple of light boxes but most of the time I just try to find the best light in the house and photograph the pieces right there on the table top.

I have several jewelry pieces on my table I had set aside to photograph and put out on ArtFire for sale, so here is a collage of some of those items which are my first photos shot with this new camera. There was no sunlight and I was just using an Ottlight on my craft table.

They aren't too bad. I think the crystals turned out the best and I usually have a lot of trouble taking good photos of clear or crystal pieces. The other two on the bottom need to be redone. You can't see the play of color on the boulder opal and you don't see the beautiful blue color on the peruvian opal piece.

I guess you could say I'm in testing phase and hopefully one day I will get to the point where I can take the camera off of auto and still take good photos.

Don't be surprised if you hear of my ups and downs of learning how to use this camera. Oh, the camera is a Nikon D5000 if you want to check it out.

Is it Sunday Already?

Where does the weekend go? I just seem to squander it away and then before you know it Monday is here. Yesterday I worked on my Bead Soup....oh what fun and I made several pieces. Sorry I can't show them to you yet but I will soon. Let's just say they aren't my usual style, although I'm really not sure what my style is anymore. I'll have to think about that a bit more as my tastes in jewelry change.

Today we are going to visit a friend in Seattle and then to take the kids out for dinner. Grandson is having a b-day tomorrow and it's best to do the celebrating on the weekend.

I will share my Art Charms for the Celtic swap and Steampunk/Found object swap that I'll be mailing out tomorrow. Once I had the ideas for them, they worked up pretty fast. The Celtic ones are shamrocks with either a copper flower charm, green crystal or pearl dangle. Then I made a pocket to hold the charm out of fabric and vintage images of Irish music or postcards. Lots of fun.

I signed up for the Steampunk charms thinking this is going to be fun and then the swap details indicated we needed to use a found object in the charm...ugg, I really don't like abiding by rules but I did it. Most of my found objects came from my hubby's tool chest in the garage (don't tell him). Then I made a new little Steampunk card to attach to the charms with a cute little gal on it. I think when we just do the Steampunk theme I'll have more freedom to explore this theme a little bit more since I couldn't use the jewelry findings I had specifically for this.

The next charm swap I signed up for is Adopt-A-Ancestor. It is a B&W color theme in which you have to use a vintage image or photo in the charm. I have the images and I think I'm going to do some soldered charms for this one.

Okay, time to fix lunch before we leave. Have a wonderful Sunday.

Fat Book Embellishments

For Art and Soul this year the theme is "In the Garden" and I volunteered to make pages for one of the Fatbooks that will be distributed at Hampton this year. Since this is my first one to participate in, I was feeling a little overwhelmed and wanted to get a head start on my design. I decided on 3 different page layouts (these are only 4x4 pages) and wanted to make most of the embellishments on the pages. The theme is so broad that I didn't have trouble there but did when it came down to actually putting a sample together.

Here is all the stuff, pages cut and front covered, pile of embellishments and the 2 samples I have completed so far.

This pages features one of my wire trees with a couple of purchased felt pieces.

I like this page. It has vintage flower packet images sized down, one of my tissue paper flowers and a couple of felt flowers.

Here is a better look at the trees. Not sure whether I will use the wire flowers....maybe on the third sample.

These are the vintage flower packet images. You can find them HERE if you want to download them yourself.

This are the tissue paper flowers with buttons and either a pearl or crystal center.

I had so much fun I decided to make some real flower packets as I had some flower seeds. These I will  add one to each page on the back as a gift to the receiver. I used the same image and fabric to create a small pocket, left the top open to insert the seeds and then sewed it up.

Now to do a little flower painting on the 3rd sample...maybe I'll use the wire flowers on this one.

I hope everyone is enjoying the One World One Heart blog event and giveaways. If you want to find out more about this great International event see my post from Feb. 1st. Oh, if you are a blogger, be sure to enter your comment on that page to get in on the drawing.

One World One Heart

Winner has been announced....come on over to my post on Feb. 18th to see who it is.

Welcome friends. This year I'm participating in the One World One Heart blog hop. This is an International event and in years past had over 900 participants.....can you say WOW. This is a wonderful way to get to know fellow bloggers. All the bloggers participating will also be giving away a door prize for visiting their blog.

When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I'm a stay-at-home wife, as I really am too young to be retired. I do have a wonderful hubby who is retired and two quite mischievous dogs. We pretty much have the days to ourselves to get into all kinds of trouble. You would think that having all day every day to myself that my house would be clean, there would be no laundry to do and dinner would be cooked every night...well no, it really doesn't work out that way. At least not for us. I have so many interests that more often than not, I get immersed in whatever jewelry, painting, paper art, mixed media, art charms, ATC's, crocheting, sewing, writing my next big book or whatever new thing that comes along that I often forget the time. Such is life and we do enjoy it so much and that is the point isn't it.

We take mini trips in our motor home in the Spring, Summer and Fall (hoping that we will be in Arizona next Winter) and we go on cruises at least once a year. We love wine country (Napa, CA) and visit there annually along with other parts of the area that grows wine such as Eastern Washington and Oregon. So to say we sit home all the time just doing our thing isn't quite right as we do travel quite a bit.

We do have family around, my parents live close by and two of the three kids are close as well as two of the three grand kids. I have several step siblings and when we have a family gathering it can get quite hectic with up to 20 for dinner. I'm so glad my mother still has a large enough house to accommodate all of us.

I really never know what to tell people when I introduce myself so sorry if I have blabbed on and on. Now to the good stuff. I have a ginormous door prize of destash that I will be giving away. Drawing will be on February 17th and I will be mailing those items within 3 days. What do you need to do? Just leave me a comment, that's it. This is open to all International participants and bloggers.  In your comment, be sure that it links back to your blog or an e-mail where I can get a hold of you if you win.

This prize is something I would jump on if it was me and I don't need any of it...humm maybe that's why I'm giving it away. Although it could be that I have just collected too much stuff. I don't know, can you have too much stuff? What you will get is a small flat rate shipping box packed to the brim with items you can use in mixed media, jewelry, charms, scrap booking or whatever you want. What is in it, well you can see quite a bit but there is ribbons, charms, beads, found objects, scrap book paper, ATC size paper, digital images, scrabble tiles, beach glass, buttons, glue, old stamps and other things that you don't see is scrap leather and a wood unfinished bangle just to help fill out the box. So see for yourself.

Just skip on down and leave me a comment....it can be about anything. Oh and make sure you have included your e-mail or that I find your link via Google or Blogger in case you win.