White and Red Bleeding Heart Flowers with Ruby Throated Hummingbird Hand Painted Custom Gift Bag

This is a hand painted gift bag, my personal favorite so far. It is White and Red Bleeding Heart Flowers, with a Ruby Throated Hhummingbird. I have been working on lots of resin pieces too. Yesterday, I tried one of my flower sections in the big heart resin, eh didn't like how it came out. I will share it in another post. So, instead I measured the size of the heart mold, drew on on my painting paper and made a second painting to fit the heart. Now tomorrow I will cut it out and set it in resin. Hopefully it will work and I will have a beautiful Christmas ornament to offer my buyers. I will be working on more of these in the future. It is actually much easier to paint the piece out, even though it is small and not easy, and then insert that into the resin, than to paint on the resin. That was a big fail. This bag is available for purchase in my Etsy store, I am slowly getting all items into my Ecrater store as well. Both of my stores widgets can be found in the side bars of this blog. Stay tuned to see more of my work. Caitlin no longer likes me to clean while she is doing homeschooling, too distracting, so I have to do something more quiet, lol. Bummer, I have to do crafty stuff!

White and Red with Hearts and Pearls Crochet Bag

With the nasty cold weather, I have been hibernating. While I hibernate, I crochet, make new resin pieces and jewelry. This is my first attempt at crocheting hearts. It is not exactly perfect like I want, but it is adorable. This a white bag, with red bottom and handles, crocheted red heart appliques with pearl centers. I actually made this to be a bag to carry my new Bible in, but the Bible is too heavy, lol. So, I will have to go back to the drawing board for that. This is available to purchase in my Etsy store, and will be in my Ecrater store soon.

Hurry Free Shipping Until 1/23 at Midnight

From now until January 23,2014 I am offering free shipping on all items in my Etsy store.  Free shipping does not include frames for paintings.  The paintings will be shipped unframed.  Be sure and read why.  Hurry over to my Etsy shop, and take advantage of free shipping!

We Made Shrinky Dinks!

Caitlin and I decided to try and make our own Shrinky Dinks. Why? Well I want to paint on something that I can insert into resin with ease. So, I was browsing around the Bing search engine and found that you can make Shrinky Dinks using recycled plastic. You can find the full instructions both on Ehow and Instructables. One website said use #5 plastic and one said #6. Well I had no idea what they were talking about, but apparently all plastics have a triangle on them, and in the triangle is a number. I have no idea what a Pepsi bottle is because I could not read the number. We had no #6 at all, we had a lot of ones, a two and a bunch of fives. The #1's definitely seemed too flimsy. The 2 was a bit stiff, but was a nice green color. I was going to try it but I decided to recycle that bottle into a new watering can. So we had a Pepsi bottle with no recognizable number and some 5's. So, we removed the labels, cleaned and dried, and then cut off small oval pieces of plastic. The Pepsi bottle I carved out the whole center, leaving the top and bottom intact, and made it into a new bird feeder for the smaller birds. So, then using glitter, some permanent marker, and acrylic paint we painted on the pieces of plastic. Caitlin painted on the #5 a dog face. I painted on the Pepsi bottle plastic a heart and a bear holding a heart. Caitlin also painted on the Pepsi plastic, but she covered the whole piece of plastic with paint. She made an ocean and a horse on grass. Then we put them on aluminum foil and set them in the 200 degree oven. The Pepsi plastic shrunk immediately and I mean immediately. Caitlin's were towards the back and immediately folded into something unusable. My two were towards the front and I could salvage the bear, the heart I am still not sure if I can use it.  I trimmed up the Teddy Bear, image not shown, and I hope I can use it.   The #5, the one that was recommended did not shrink at all. We even left it in longer and it did absolutely nothing at all. So, if I can find #6 plastic I may try this again. Painting on plastic is smooth and nice, nicer than glass in the texture. But, I will also be trying translucent photo paper to paint on in small pieces. I can paint on my acrylic paper, but it is not translucent and I really want translucent. So, my experiments continue. I do not like painting on the resin itself, at all.