How Charming!

One of my favorite artforms is art charms. I love to alter little tiny things, and charms... by necessity, are tiny.

However, because of my crazy schedule this year, I've hardly had much time to create any art at all... the move took a lot of my time, and now since everything is *still* packed in the garage (although, it's slowly... slowly... ever so slowly taking shape), it makes it difficult to get to anything to work on anything.

Anyway... I joined a couple of charm swaps recently as a member of Amber Dawn's charm group. The first one was an Alice in Wonderland themed swap.

Each of the 10 charms I made for this swap have a different image, but, the basic idea behind each was the same. Each charm is on a scrabble tile, with a tiny, pale blue Swarovski crystal bead on top, and the bottom is adorned with a heart shaped bead and a little blue bead. (These details are a bit difficult to make out because the scan is a bit blurry -- hey, it's a very teensy, tiny bit of art!)

My original plan was to have a rose bead on the bottom (painting the roses red!) but, unfortunately, the red rose beads that I had ordered for these charms never arrived. So, instead, I made a mad dash to the bead store and found these little heart shaped beads, thinking that the queen of hearts would approve.

I made this bit of digital art to serve as the tag attachment for the charm...

I also made another set of charms, and I'll post tomorrow about those!

~Anne

Inchie Quilts...

Hello Everyone...

Inchie Quilts... well, that's what I'm calling them, anyways... A while ago, one of the members of my yahoo group suggested that the group host a paper quilt swap. I was very intrigued, because, well, I love paper, and I loved the various eye candy samples she sent my way. Not long after that, another member suggested that the group host an inchies swap. That got me thinking (this can be dangerous sometimes) and I thought about combining the two -- paper quilts and inchies.
You may remember my previous inchies post, these are the inchies that I submitted, along with 16 1 inch squares of patterned paper, for this swap. After I got my package of swapped out inchies and squares of paper, I started working on my quilts...

I made two 4x4 quilts... here's the first...

and the second...

these were incredibly fun to make... and has definitely piqued my interest in creating more inchies... and more quilts!

~Anne

True Colors Journal

Hey Everyone:

Last year, I purchased the book "True Colors" by Kathryn Bold. I purchased this book primarily because I was involved in a swap that was inspired by the book, and since I hadn't heard of it before this, I wanted to know what I was supposed to do for this swap. Well, I so enjoyed the swap, and the artwork I created during that time, as well as the artwork I got back from the swap, that I decided that I would host a similar round robin.

My colors for this swap are chocolate brown, lime green, and teal/peacock blue. I found this really gorgeous paisley paper, so I decided to keep my cover very simple and allow the paper be the primary focus of it...

The first journal I've received in this round robin belonged to Liisa... and she chose light, icy tones of blue with one feature color (of my choosing) for her color palette. Her journal is quite large, 10x10, and since my scanner bed is only about 8 1/2 x 11, I wasn't able to capture the entire page... so you only get a glimpse of what I've created for her... this is a portion of the left side of the spread...

And here is a portion of the right side of the spread...

When I first received her journal, I wasn't sure which feature color I was going to select... but, when I went shopping, I found these amazing papers with the icy blue, and brown featured prominently, so I decided to go with that. Strangely enough, and as I reported in the journal entry... brown has been a very popular color with me lately... it seems that I'm always choosing it! I'm not sure why. It's not even a favorite color of mine, and a few years ago, I would have told you that I didn't really care for it much... but in the past year or so, I've noticed that I've really grown a fondness for it.

I'm really happy with my spread, I hope that Liisa is too... the brown presence in her book is a bit more than a splash, I hope that's ok...

~Anne