Luna's Baublebilities

On Monday, i was included in a very nice collection of romantic/Victorian era inspired jewelry curated by Vamp.  That collection hit the FP yesterday evening.  It is really hard to get good exposure for jewelry so I'm really grateful that she included my earrings in her collection and thrilled that it hit the front page.  I love ArtFire and the community there!

When I was a kid, this would have been a snow day.   If the school Superintendent didn't make the right call on that, my mom would have kept us home anyway.  She would have made oatmeal for breakfast (with cinnamon and lots of sugar) and would have sent us outside to skate on the thaw pond or slide in the clearing.  She would have made hot cocoa when we came back in.



 Sadly, there's no good place to slide or skate nearby so I sent my kids to school today.  Meemo was much cooler than I am, I'm afraid.

My Grandpa Weston called this kind of snow "sugar snow" because he said that it makes the sap run.  Grandpa was a master syrup maker.  While I've had lots of good maple syrup in the last couple of decades, I've not found any that compares to his.  Maybe someday I'll build myself a sugar house and give it a try.












 I find myself wishing I had a pair of snowshoes and a good outdoor camera today.  It is pretty outside but also very wet and the Konica is the only camera that works.  That's my studio camera and it is such a baby that even the thought of humidity breaks it.  All of these photos are taken from inside the house, porch or woodshed - can't let it get dribbled or snowed on AT ALL.  We're pinching pennies to save for a Cannon Powershot for the family- they are small & portable, supposed to be waterproof, rugged and work in extreme temperatures but they are pricey.  It seems unreasonable to buy one on our current austerity budget until we have a day like this when I would like to go out and get pics of Maxx and Ziggy playing in the snow.


A couple more orders for custom velvet scarves would cover it!   I'll have to put an option for custom velvet luxury scarves in my shops.  They are a bit pricey but they make such wonderful gifts for a significant occasion and I am willing to barter.  The last two that I've made have been happy bartering deals.

Here are the promised pictures of the one I've been working on this week.  A very lucky young lady will be getting this tonight.  I'm loving it.

The purple is highly variegated and really simmers when it moves.  I started the beaded edging in a soft, sliver lined pink but that didn't feel dramatic enough to me.  The young woman this is intended for is classy, extremely talented, well mannered and has a lot of spunk.  She loves lime green.  I felt like the scarf needed a bit more playful drama to suit her personality and then I remembered these lime green window cuts.

I left the pink edging and gradually changed to some very pretty purple silver lined AB beads.  The dangles have the pink seed beads, a 4mm fire polished purple seed bead and a yummy lime green picasso lined window cut.  The fringe is a bit heavier than most of my fringes because the window cuts are quite substantial but the velvet itself is heavy and rich enough to carry it.  The windows also rattle or clatter a bit when the scarf is shaken, which I think is cool.  Interestingly, the combination of purple and lime green makes the pink beads look almost golden.

Yummy!  And the colors are wonderful for a late February birthday - rich and warm with the promise of a greening spring.

















Time to go do that other edge!

. . . . .

What a week! 

Life is more hectic than usual as we adjust to having a busy drama club high schooler in the house.   Maxx is sick with a cold again already, which is about right - it has been 3.5 weeks since his last sick!  But worst of all, Bryan was attacked by a Kamikazee deer Thursday night that may have totaled out lovely little Honda Fit.  Luckily, Bryan is fine.  We're waiting for the insurance company to give us a list of options before we panic about the Fit.  I really don't want to start over with a new vehicle loan at this point.  The plan was to pay the Fit off and enjoy driving a very well cared for car for several years before making another purchase so that the Fit could become Molly's college car.  Let's keep our fingers crossed!

I did manage to make some progress in my shops.

Over at GoblinsMarket - Etsy, I have a number of bead strands on sale.  Remember I mentioned finding a new wholesaler with slightly higher prices but smaller minimums in the last post?  Well, I'm waiting for my first shipment from them and I'm eager to move out some of the extras I had to order from my old wholesaler last summer.  They are beautiful beads but now that I have played with them a bit, I don't see myself designing with them much and my new philosophy on bead inventory is to focus on stocking things that I want to design with.






I have also posted 6 gorgeous Alchemy scarves in my ArtFire shop.   I have such a hard time selling my Alchemy scarves because I end up wanting to keep them all to myself.  They're so sumptuous and colorful.  You can wear them with anything (or with nothing) and they look great.  They're long enough to wrap around in several different ways and they're quite warm and durable in spite of being such a lightweight silk.  I made my first Alchemy scarf over 6 years ago and it is still beautiful and wearable.  They are wonderful for gifts - remember that Valentine's day and Mother's day are coming right up!

While GoblinsMarket-Etsy is fully functional right now, I still haven't re-opened my LunasBaublebilities shop. I  am concentrating on uploading scarves and jewelry designs to my ArtFire shop right now.  There are a lot of reasons for this shift in focus but the main one is that I hope that my work will be found faster on ArtFire.  I'm waiting to see if Etsy fixes their PayPal link and how many of Rob Kalin's new bright ideas actually get implemented over at Etsy before I decide whether or not to re-open LunasBaublebilities over there.  For the past year, I've felt like almost every minute dedicated to that shop was time wasted because of low visibility for jewelry and accessory sellers on Etsy.  I'll be doing some advertising experiments for both my ArtFire shop and my Etsy shop(s?) in the next few months that I will let you know more about as results start to come in. 

Onward!  Saturday is almost over and there is much left to do before we  have friends over for games tonight.








. . . . .

When I was a little girl, I had a puzzle that I absolutely loved.  It was made of little cubes with illustrations for 6 different fairy tales.  It was actually pretty easy to "solve" and once you had one picture put together, you just had to know how to flip the blocks just right to get the other pictures to line up correctly.  I think that playing with it was really good for my ability to understand spatial relationships.




















Sadly, that toy went the way of most toys long ago and is gone.  I haven't been able to find another one since.  But recently, I ordered some tiny hardwod cubes from DickBlick and downloaded some of my favorite illustrations from SurLaLune and printed them out on pieces of Strathmore Satinboard.  I thought of buying some digital sticker paper, but decided that might be too messy and complicated to cut up and apply neatly.  I figured the satinboard would take a nice, smooth image, modge podge onto the blocks pretty well and hold up to use for a while.  I also would have liked slightly larger blocks - maybe 1" square instead of 3/4" but this is O.K.  Maxx has pretty good fine motor comtrol and can benefit from practice.

(This image is from Edmund Dulac's illustrations for The Little Mermaid.  I know she's kinda sexy.  Don't you know that's what Fairy Tales are all about?)

I cropped my illustrations square (which sadly eliminated some of my absolute favorites) did some basic math and printed them out so that they would fit on a six block square.  For the first illustration, I used my slidey paper cutter to do the cutting,  very precisely, and glued the little pieces on with Sobo glue.  (I love Sobo glue.  It works for anything, dries clear and cleans up well as long as you get to it before it dries.)

Now - before you stat thinking that I do this sort of thing all the time, you need to know that this is a much fussier project than those I usually undertake.  Gluing tiny squares onto tiny cubes is not my idea of fun.  I encountered some trouble with the prints themselves after my fingers got sticky with glue.  The picture actually pulls off the paper if it gets stuck to something tacky.  This is frustrating.

I coated the first illustration with liquitex gloss gel medium to protect it from further image loss as I apply the rest of the illustrations because I know that finger stickiness will be involved.   I am experimenting with applying the gloss medium to the illustrations before cutting and gluing to see if that has a better result.

I'm not really happy with the streaks in the gloss medium but that is what I have at home and I do not want to use any of those spray glosses.  Our family has enough respritory issues going on right now and its too darn cold and wet to do that sort of thing outside.  If I had been working on this in the summer - I'd probably have coated each illustration with spray on diamond glaze or something before gluing.

I will also make a little book with the illustrations in it so that Maxx will be able to see what each picture should look like finished.  The booklet and finished puzzle will fit quite nicely in this old Harry & David box I've been saving for a couple of years.  I knew it would come in handy!

He is quite interested in puzzles right now and is getting very good at them.  He is also finally getting interested in faiy tales and stories I can tell him without a book.   We had a lot of fun retelling Little Red Riding Hood the other day.  Somehow, the wolf grew a few extra heads and arms and ate Gramma, Grampa and Little Red before the Woodsman finally showed up with his axe.  Too many Greek myths, maybe?

The illustrations I chose to use are all quite old - Rackham, Dulac, Parish, Billibin, Folkard - all well within public domain at this point so I am comfortable using them for a family project.   This would also be a nice project using family photos or your own illustrations.  Whenever you use someone else's art for a project, whether you intend to sell the project or not, you should check to make sure that it is not under copyright.  Be careful and be respectful!  If the illustrator is still alive, he or she probably holds a copyright and it is illegal to copy that work, even if you intend the copy for personal use only.  There are fair use exceptions for research and reporting purposes but even then, it is nice to ask.