Chinese Takeout

So I finally caved in and bought Twilight by Stephanie Meyer at Walmart today. The movie preview looks interesting, and I love to read the book before the movie (and if you haven't seen Memoirs of a Geisha - read the book first, they leave out so many things in the movie, it's annoying). Usually I wait forever to buy popular books as I don't like all the hype, but it looks good.

My newest obsession as you may have noticed is ATC swaps over at Swap-bot. I just love them. So I have several swaps in the works. I forgot to take pictures before I mailed out some bookmarks I made for a swap where you send a list of 10 favorite books some bookmarks, but I did remember to take a picture of this one.

This swap is for ATCs made out of only a Chinese restaurant menu and a fortune. My favorite chinese buffet had this beautiful design with dragons and goldfish on the front. You couldn't use anything else on your ATC, which was hard, I'm an embellisher by nature so I had to really hold myself back. One is called Lucky Goldfish and the other is called Go For It.

Now I'm off to make paper dresses for another swap.

The Butterfly Fairy

So this is the second ATC in my Fairy ATC swap. I call it Butterfly Fairy. I'm thinking it needs something in the upper right corner, but I'm not sure what. It still looks kinda naked to me, lol. I think my swapper person will like it because her username has butterfly in it....hopefully she will. This vintage picture is from a collection I bought of magician vintage posters from Lunagirl. She has all kinds of collage pictures, and great quality stuff. I get the ones that are digital downloads so they show up instantly to print, as I have no patience to wait on a CD in the mail.

I'm so excited about my jewelry class this weekend with my mom, she's so much fun to go to stuff like this with, and I never get to do it. I

Ok, gotta get back to work, today is the last day of pay period. I'll post pics of my cool new jewelry makings from my class this weekend.

Fairy ATCs

So I've been swapping over on Swap-Bot and I joined my first ATC swap. If you don't know what an ATC is, it stands for Artist Trading Card. It is basically a little piece of art you create the size of a baseball trading card, and people trade and collect them. There are even yahoo groups dedicated to collecting and trading. Just do a search on google to find all kinds of sites on how to make them. When you da a swap for one, there is usually a theme, and the theme for this swap of ATCs was fairies.

I had never made one before. I have admired many, but just never tried it. Well this weekend, we went over to my mom's house and I made one. I need to make a second one for my swap since we are to send 2 before I send it, but just wanted to go ahead and post this one because I really like how it came out. My flash kinda washed out the bottom of the card, but it still looks pretty good. I'll post my second one, when I finish it later this week. I'm still deciding on what kind of fairy to use.

For this one, I used embossing powder and then stamped over it, and the part you can't see is that I sprinkled a tiny bit of embossing powder, like a dusting across the entire card, to give it a sparkly feel, and then used the heat gun to set it - that part came out just perfect, so when you tilt the card just slightly it sparkles.



And the person sending to me already sent my fairy ATCs, and they are hand drawn fairies! They are really beautiful. I really like the one up on her tiptoe, doing an arabesque, reminds me of my own ballerina.