The Start of an Epic Tale

as always for a better look click on the image above or here

It's been a whole since I shared one of the treasury's I've put together on Etsy. This collection was inspired by the City of Stars print by LisaChow. I pulled each item using the ideas behind reaching for that ultimate goal, grabbing for your dreams, jumping out of faith and the idea of rebirth and new beginnings. Please, feel free to click on the image to get a much better view of the collection.

Visual Diary

Every year I start to think about Hallowe'en a little earlier. When making our costumes over buying one off the rack is a priority this is actually key. Now that I have two to dress up it's even more of a time grab hence the hallowe'eny theme this week, click the image for a closer look. Are you planning your costume yet?

Visual Diary

It's my birthday today. To celebrate, here's how I'd spoil myself given unlimited funds and a free hour on Etsy. What I did get was a lemon Meringue pie and a dozen roses from the Husband and a hand drawn card from the Peanut. The Bean let me take her for her 6 month shots. All in all one damn fine birthday, minus (you know) the part where the Bean got stuck with a needle.

A Visual Diary

Since the Peanut's been in a dinosaur mood lately it's leaked into my indulgence in her passion has bled into my list creation




Click for a closer look

A Visual Diary

Ten years ago today I tied the knot

and given the chance I'd run off to Tofino to do it all again just on the beach instead of in a hall. I'm thinking maybe we'll try for the 15 year mark for a little vow renewal.

Click the picture for a better look.

A Visual Diary

There seems to be a running theme in my lists





a certain longing....

Click the image for a better look

A Visual Diary

It's birthday season around here and there's been a whole lot of wishing going on:

A Visual Diary

of what my imagination's been up to

A little visual magic seemed to be called for, but with a dash of edginess for good measure. If you'll notice I ended things on an optimistic note

Click on the image for a better look.

A Visual Diary

of how I've been feeling lately:

I've been building treasuries a lot lately, especially when the Bean takes up a little more time with her teething and solid food eating ways. When I get a few moments here and there but not enough time to really get my make on; I put together a treasury of images that fit my mood as well as my need to make something.

So now I share.
Click on the collection above to get a super view of my curatorial activities

I'm in a Treasury

that made the front page of Etsy today. That's the good news. The bad news is that I missed it; I was out getting my hair cut this morning and wasn't able to get online. Well that and the fact that our ornaments are on the bottom row of the collection and weren't included on the front page. What we got from this is a lot of extra views today from those people who clicked to see the full collection. As you can see from the screen shot above the Treasury itself is simply stunning and full of items that I am currently lusting after. To be included in this grouping is a big stroke to the ego.

We've been included in a number of treasuries over the last few weeks which is exciting all by itself. I always get a little thrill in seeing one of my items included in a collection curated by someone else. What's even better, is that I get to share this thrill with the husband who has as much invested in our ornaments as I do. Really it's equivalent to having a work of art selected by a jury for hanging in a show which is something that the Husband has only witnessed through me when I've had that honour in the past.

Feel free to click on the screen grab above and comment on the treasury and click on the items that grab your attention. You might just find that one of a kind gift for someone on your list and be that much closer to a relaxed December.

PCGS: bloop bloop went the little cement fish

This is my favourite piece on our street and my daughters as well. I like it because it's so unobtrusive and simple. He sits placidly at the entrance of the short driveway and watches the world swim by.

On a walk to the library last week I hit another mother load of PCGS one of my new finds surpasses all those I've seen so far. The statuary in this house is, well if you compared a paint by numbers painting with a van Gogh; that would be an accurate comparison. I'll be photographing the street behind ours once we return from our upcoming road trip vacation.

In the meantime I've been included in a stunning butterfly treasury please go and have a gander, you won't be disappointed.

Speaking of Momentum

A few weeks ago I posted about the challenge of keeping up momentum. I've been actively working towards this, trying to overcome lulls and create momentum for myself as well as grasping opportunity wherever it rears it's elusive head.

Having said that, I'm once more heading into a situation where the temptation to drop the ball is going to be high. We're going on Vacation next week and I'm a little worried about whether I'll be able to keep up with the Blog, Tweeting and TMCPhoto and PeanutButterPie.

With the worrying has also come the drive to keep things going. I'll be posting while we're gone (thank all Gods for Laptops) and I may even add a new photograph or two onto TMCPhoto while we're there. We'll be at my Mom's, the location of my Borealis Photo-shoot as well as the Electric Series. I'm hoping that I'll have the opportunity to take some new and fresh shots while I'm there. Since I'll have the laptop with me I'll also have access to my Creative Suite programs.

It's been over two years since I've been back to Alberta and I'm pretty excited about seeing my family. With the exception of my older sister and my two nephews who came in March for a Hockey Tournament; I haven't seen any family except on Facebook in all that time. I'll either be so homesick to stay at the end of the trip or ready to get out of Dodge and not want to come back until a suitable time period has passed. I suppose any posts I do while there will give clues as to how I'm feeling.

Speaking of momentum and grabbing on to opportunities; I was lucky enough to get in on the recent Etsy Treasury window. In honour of our upcoming road trip I've put together a selection of items that are just making me yearn to get on the road.

A card a week for a year: Week 1

Before we begin a little housekeeping:

My Borealis Set Of 4 has been included in a Treasury on Etsy. It's a beautiful one and I'm so pleased to be a part of it. Go and check it out and make sure to click on any of the items that really catch your eye. there are some really striking images included there.

PeanutButterPie now has two new cards with more to come over the next few weeks Go check them out.

Now for what you came for:

One card a week for 52 weeks. Each card depicting a single word or phrase to be used in an affirmation deck at the end of the year.

This is the first posting in this series. I'll be posting the cards here each week with a list of the materials and the process I have used for each one and a short statement about the card. Please feel free to offer word and phrase suggestions if you have any. I'm a little worried that my well might run dry...

Here's the process:

Materials:

• ATC card (in this case Strathmore Acrylic)
• Nicholson's Peerless Transparent Watercolour
• Watercolour Tubes
• Pearl Ex interference pigment
• Brush pens
• Paint Brushes



The Process:
The process was a simple one, a wash of light green Peerless watercolour with further layers of Daniel Smith Under Sea Green and M Graham & Co. Quinacridone Rust with a tiny hit of pearlescent Pearl Ex pigment. Once the base was finished I went in with a Staedtler Mars Graphic 3000 duo marker and sketched in the tree and limbs, using a darker accent colour to add detail and texture.

An atmospheric landscape was brushed in, with the more distant hills painted in fainter than the foreground.

Finally, using the brush pens I added the word Ground.

I chose Ground as my first card to remind me that creativity has a firm foundation in nature. Becoming grounded allows me to refresh my mind in order to approach creative problems and refill my creative energy. Walking in the woods or along the beach is a good way to do this. Gardening is also a good exercise in grounding. Being in contact with nature is a grounding experience.

Grounding is also a technique that is used for ritual ceremonies to draw strength and support before a spiritual working. Often the image of a tree is used to reach this state, with your spiritual roots spreading out and down into the "earth" and trunk and branches growing tall and strong up into the sky.

When I am firmly grounded I feel more confident and creative. Hence the earthy tones and the growing tree.

so much to do

I've been working on some custom orders of greeting cards for some friends and family this past little while and feel as though I'm neglecting my Photography and PeanutButterPie shops. I've been busy creating up a storm though. My goal this week has been to work on two cards a night and so far so good.

I was included in a wonderful treasury which was put together by Artmind last week; and I didn't have a chance to mention it here, although I did plaster the news all over my Facebook account and fan page as well as one or two tweets on twitter to get people to look at all the beautiful images I'd been surrounded by. It really was a fantastic mix of black, white and sepia toned photographs and it made my day brighter to have been included.

So I've been diving deep into the networking pool and driving traffic to my shops and raising the views and hearts on my photographs and cards. In the midst of all this I've been wrestling with the idea of venturing outside of Etsy with my stuff and onto other sites that sell. My one reservation is that I don't want to spread myself too thin and burn out. I'm stretched a bit thin as it is. Once the new year rolls around I'm going to revisit the idea again.

I know I said in the past that I'm not getting down about my lack of sales. I know they'll come. I really do and I'm being as patient as I can, but. But there's always a but and the but usually follows some sort of self doubt. Am I pricing too high? Are my shipping prices all wrong? Is my stuff sell-able? I'll blame it on the down in the dumpses I had last week, and try, try, try to focus on each view or heart as a step towards that first sale. I'm looking at the whole thing like climbing a ladder; a very, very tall kind of ladder that could, at any moment shrink down to a height that would allow me to see the top. Right now the top is shrouded in a thick bank of fluffy clouds. Above those clouds is a clear blue sky and the sun and the moon are sharing the sky.

it was so obvious now that I think about it.

I don't know if it has been apparent in my last few months worth of posts or not, but I've been experiencing a little bout of the blues. I did write about my relationship with depression in October and unfortunately the fug has managed to stick around a little longer than I would have liked.

Normally I'm pretty aware of why I'm feeling any given feeling at any given time. I'm an internalizer who reads a lot and I often find therapy sessions (when I have them) to be troublesome because of this.

This time around I haven't been so aware of where my sadness is coming from. I thought it might have been sleep related, or possibly that it was my way of mourning for the lost time devoted to my art because of being a mother, or because I haven't seen a single member of my family since last January. I mean any one of those things and a hundred others would cause a bit of the Down In the Dumpses but really they were just extensions of the real cause.

So here's my moment of clarification, and it came to me as I was catching up on a few Blogs yesterday. I was reading about a the latest in a series of emotional sculptures by ArtMind (see photo to the left) and then I went on to read a very sad post from another one of my favourite Etsy artists The Dreamy Giraffe, she was writing a tribute to her recently lost pet Buddy and it occurred to me, that while this past Wednesday is the anniversary of the day we found out I was pregnant, it also happens to be the anniversary of the day my Dad passed away. This year is a little different for me because I am now the same age he was when he reached the end of his life. It's a bit of a bummer (Understatements are my speciality).

One of my Aunts once told me a story about a dream my Dad had. It affected his whole life and was eerily prophetic. In his dream, a tear-away calender began to flip through the days in a month. As it got closer to 30 and 31 it flipped faster and kept going until it reached 36, where it stopped.

For almost all of his life he lied about his age, even convincing my grandma at one point that he was in fact the youngest child in the family and his little sister (my youngest aunt, who is about ten years older than I am) was older than he was. He made it to his 36th birthday and then died in his sleep about a month later, while he was away working on an oil rig in Northern Alberta.

Now that I'm looking back at the last few months I should have known what the problem was and I'm feeling a little relieved that it's a naturally occurring sadness and not a chemical imbalance. So I've been missing my Dad and a have been a little freaked out over passing this age milestone myself.

How to shop handmade this holiday season

OK, I know I've mentioned it and then mentioned it again, but I think it bears repeating. I'm buying all my holiday gifts from artists and artisans this year. that means I'll be trolling the talent on Etsy for everything from stocking stuffers to that major, blow them away with my thoughtfulness, gift.

In anticipation for this, I've started my shopping way earlier than previous years. Mainly because I find shopping this way to involve a lot more forethought. You aren't just browsing in the mall for something that catches your eye in order to get the best gift, you have to know a little about the person you're buying for. In fact the more you know the better your gift choices.

Here are some items that I'm eyeing up so far in my online shopping travels. Take a look at what's here and if you see something you like why not buy it out from under me? I promise, no hard feelings.