Dogs & Art Space

These are our dogs. The top one, with the crinkly ears, is Kizze. We found her in the paper under "free puppies" nearly 10 years ago. She is supposed to be part Boxer (dad) and part Weimaraner (mom), and she is my DH's dog (because that's who she chose). The bottom dog is mine! His name is Linus and I rescued him from prison. Literally! He was part of an inmate dog training program, and when the program was over I adopted him. He's 18 mos. old and is nearly 90 lbs of love and energy. **EDITED TO ADD: YAY! I think I know where Linus got his name. Hubby and I spent Christmas Day watching Ocean's 11, Ocean's 12 and Ocean's 13. There is a character in the movie, played by Matt Damon, named "Linus"! So I believe that Linus was named after Matt Damon!! :)

The 2nd photo is of my art space. About a year and a half ago I started out on a small table, in the corner of the dining room, and have been taking over space in the house ever since. Our 3rd bedroom has now been converted into art space and computer space. The space is never clean. Next week I'm going to paint the walls. The brown was fine when we had our bedroom in here, but I'd like to make it beachy and happy. I'm just dreading the priming of the walls. :)

More Soldering Adventures...

I worked on a few more soldered microscope slides. The top 3 are my favorites. Images are from various sources.

Adventures in Soldering (Ornaments)

I worked on making some microscope slide ornaments today. From l to r are the order I soldered them. As you can see, by #3 I've sort of cracked the code on soldering...at least the soldering is smoother and more even. The 1st one is for my son's teacher and the quote continues on the back. The 2nd is for ..... (nevermind). The 3rd is for my son's other teacher. I will probably put some beads or something on the bottom of the paperclip point. The images for the first two are from a collage sheet from Lisa at CollageStuff.Com. The 3rd is an image from a collage sheet from DigitalCollageSheets.

Kathy's Journal

These are the two pages I arted for Kathy's altered journal on Altered_Pages (Yahoo). I chose not to do a 2 page spread, and opted to do two totally different single-page layouts. The top page uses an image that I got from Suzi Blu's blog and her journaling "muse" prompt. The images on the bottom page are from magazines.

Dream Big

This is an arch that I created as part of a swap I'm doing on the Altered_stART Yahoo group. I started with a piece of scrapbook paper and added dress pattern tissue paper and stamped the curly-q's. "Dream" is a rub-on and I stamped the word "big". The image is from Digital Collage Sheets. The edges of the arch are inked with a silver leafing pen.

Fruit Crate Label Collaged Backsplash

Suzi was talking about DIY projects on her blog. I did this project several years ago. I have always loved fruit crate labels. I bought a book from Dover Publishing and had color copies made. Each one was cut out and I taped them in place on the wall. My goal was not to have them overlapping, but I wanted to piece them together so that they would look cohesive. Once I had them placed, I removed each label and placed the entire layout on a blank wall in my dining room and then individually modge-podged them back onto the backsplash! It still looks great. I used non-yellowing shellac over the finished project. I guess I should be glad that I like it so much, because it would be nearly impossible to remove! :) We didn't have the money to do any tiling, and I don't like wallpaper much, so this was my frugal answer to a boring painted wallboard backsplash.