Recent Work

Here are some recent canvases that I have done for other people. With all of the house projects we have been cramming in this summer, my poor little studio is getting dusty...Enjoy!

Banned Books

I decided to put this on the keerativity blog because it involved books, (mmm, yeah, I am aware that made absolutly NO sense at all.)
In retropect, looking at this list and all of the ones I have read, I am left with the question, am I a rebel or merly open minded towards literature and very annoyed with small minds that ban books?

Little House on the Praire...REALLY people, get a grip! Do yourself a favor folks, read a banned book today. There are some fabulous ones on this list. At the same time, there are a few on this list that I have read and hated. The point is, that we should decide for ourselves if a book is worth reading. This came from my MIL's blog, who in turn took it from her friend.


Banned Books

My friend Susan K. had this list on her blog. It's a list of the 110 most banned books. Take a look at the list and do this:

Bold the ones you've read. Italicize the ones you've read part of. * the ones you specifically want to read.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Qur'an
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 The Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 1984 by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 The Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 A Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 The Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#71 The Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud #98 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown #100 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Inspired by...

Inspiration is a muse that each of us seek in different ways. For me, I have to be surrounded by bits of life. Each of them can touch me in different ways.

* Maybe it is my soul that is touched by a bit of light and shadow. The way I place my furniture in my creative space is directly related to the way sunlight and shadow play on the wall.

**Maybe my creative juices flow when a bit of texture, color or shape touch my senses.

***It might be an odd little object that was discarded from a previous owner. It sat homeless, until it touched my emotions.

****Sometimes it is an object that touches my sense of humor. It makes me smile for whatever odd reason.

Each of these things are a part of the puzzle that is me. When they are placed together as a whole, they help me to encourage Inspiration to stop flitting around and visit for awhile. Do her job as a muse and together we create, and dream and create some more. Below are some of the things that help inspire me.

Two of my favorite things, Chocolate and vintage signs! Yum for both the tummy and the eyes!

This makes my soul calm. I am reminded that we not only have a Father in Heaven that loves us, He cared enough to make a world that is beautiful as well as functional.

The most tender green you will ever see. This is the color of creativity, rebirth and renewal. The only time this green doesn't work is when you see it in the fridge on food. :-0 Then it is time to get out of your studio and clean out the icebox! Loll

My favorite flower, look at that color saturation! This was taken by jillclearyinc

I remember practising drawing by studying Leonardo's work...yes we are on a first name basis! :-)

I like to burn candles while I work...something about that small steady flame is comforting. No, I am not a fire bug, I leave that to my husband with the BBQ.

These little owls make me smile with their whimsy. I would love to own the fabric they are printed on.

Crafty Chicas!

My friend Les has a wonderful blog called Dragonfly time. It is easy to lose a good chunk of time while you are looking at all of the fun pages and card ideas on there. Her blog has reached 45000 hits (yes you read the number right) and she is doing a fun give away.

http://dragonflytime.typepad.com/dragonfly_time/2009/05/new-ideas-and-some-more-layouts.html

Little Spring Inspiration

Our April stamp group meeting brought a little "spring" into our lives! This was the cute project. I really love those blocks! It inspired me to make my own twist on them that I could display year round. I change a few things, chocolate brown blocks, silver edging, more pearls...The other things I have done were a card for a birthday party, I designed it for a demo I taught a while back, but it has turned out to be one of my favorites that I keep making again and again. Always a little bit different, but using the same elements. The necklace is one that I designed for my baby sister when she was here in March. It is all soft blues, crystal beads, pearly white and silver. I am learning that we can't rely on the weather to let us know winter is gone. We need to create it! ;-) Happy Spring everyone!

Simple Cards

These were some simple cards I put together for a friend. It was fun to take the same pattern and make it look different just by varying the papers and ribbons. The metallics didn't show up nearly as well as I would have hoped. In fact, I am not sure in general what happened with these pictures...sorry for the quality of them. I liked how the get well card had turned out. It is one I did last year for a get well swap. I had forgotten it and just recently found it. You see, I have the sad problem of making cards and giving them away as gifts, but never sending them! ;-)

So very far behind...

I have been behind in posting new items. Here are some pages that I have been working on for a friend. They were fun ones to do, from the M&M factory in Vegas. There were some techniques on them that I thought I might "lift" for future cards too. The yellow is backed with chocolate (what else?) paper. All of the scalloping was done with my awesome Stampin' Up punch. I love that thing! It made it really quick and easy. The letters were cut with a Cricut Keystone cartridge and all of the "M&M's" bordering the page are actually metal snaps that I set with my Cropidile. I don't usually tend to be a tool junkie, but they really made this page come together very quickly. I'm going through my books and projects photographing pages, cards and items, so soon we'll be able to get this blog hopping. :-)

Stacking box

I need to take the photos off of my camera so that I can blog more often! I was looking through some pictures that were on my computer though and came across this cute box. I learned how to make these from my friend Sheryl. It is amazing what a few scraps of chipboard and some paper can turn into. I made this one to hold a thank you gift for my friend PD. It is great, first you build the outer box and line it. Then you fold and place the stacking drawers inside. Fill the drawers with treats, put the lid in place (which of course you have made!) and it all fits neatly together and closes up tight. I have made a lot of them to give as gifts, depending on what paper and embellishments you pick, they can look so very different. These really are easy, as long as you follow directions, a couple of years ago Shon even had me teach his young men's group at church (14-16 year old boys) how to make them for their moms for Mother's Day. If anyone would like to know how to make them, let me know.

What's all the Hoop-la about?

Several years ago, I was garage sale-ing with my mother in law Joan and found a big bag of wooden embroidery hoops for $1. That's right, 20+ hoops ranging in size from 3 to 40 inches. Whoo hoo! Did I know what I wanted to do with them? No. Does that ever stop a crafter? If it does, than you lose the right to call yourself that. So much of art is instinct, and something about these simple wooden hoops called me. I instantly used the biggest one to make a canopy over my daughter's bed. The rest, hibernated on one of my craft shelves until the need for some cheap wall art for Lissie's room arose. Take the above hoops, some craft paint, scrapbook paper and vinyl skulls...(drum roll please) and presto! Cheap wall art for my pirate crazy princess! The best part is that when she is tired of pirates (according to her that will be never) I can change it out.I used a great embossing powder called ultra-thick pewter on the chipboard scrolls and flowers so that it looked old and pitted. Stamped a little flourish on the skull. The paper is a rich chocolate brown flock. Drop a little diamond in the center of the flower and you're done.

This great paper needed nothing more than a frame. There is a little bit of glitter on the butterflies. I added the littlest skull to some black paper filled with pirate sayings and drawings. On the butterfly paper I traced in some of the silver and free handed the other. I added glitter to the butterflies in black, chocolate and pink.
Just in case we forget who Lissie is. :-) I combined two great papers and then added the banner. I threw on some flowers with rhinestone brads and added pearls down the side.
This one was easy, I punched circles from various scraps from the other hoops and then added the word pirate over top of it.

This one is my favorite. :-) When Lissie is tired of it, this one will go in my scrapbook room. The crown is done with the ultra thick embossing powder again, with pearls added. The wings are a material called grungeboard. It had a great texture already and I just rubbed ink over top to bring out the pattern.

Here they are hanging on her wall. Pretty fun art for a $1's worth of embroidery hoops and supplies I had in my stash.

Fleeting...

How quickly time passes! I found these pages I did a couple of years ago of Joey. He was only seven. I think I am biased, but man, is he a cute little boy! :-)

A little birdie told me...

I found this picture of Toby when he was two and had to throw together a quick layout to show it. It is pretty simple, just some doodling and that cutest boy. Can you believe he is turning nine?

I am starting to photograph more layouts, so we'll see some more on the site. With spring in the air, there have been all kinds of projects flying around! I have been appliqueing some owl pillows, making wall art and of course, scrap booking. Watch for some updates!

Shiny things are good...

Somehow the text for this blog was posted all the way under the pictures, probably because I started it forever ago. Whoops, sorry, you'll have to scroll down. :-)

The top bead on this one is hematite, it catches the light nicely. I like the simple shape of the bird and the little unexpected pop of turning the tear drop bead upside down.

I wear black almost all of the time. It is my favorite color and makes it fun to wear funky jewelery because it sets it off. I made this chunky turquoise and silver necklace to wear one Sunday.

This is one I made for my friend Sherry. It is made out of raw silk ribbon, leather, glass, copper and a hand stamped clay pendant that her friend had made. I love how all of the organic elements came together.