There Goes 2014

Wow, what happened to 2014?  I’ve had a crazy year, I can’t believe it’s almost over.  As you may have guessed, my 365 Days Challenge fell apart again. 😦  I got sick again, and that was that. Once I get behind a week or so, I’m lost.  Oh well, c’est la vie.  I’ve moved on, and tried not to beat myself up too much about it.

SO! This year has been good.  Well, there was some bad stuff, but the good greatly outweighs the bad.  For example, just a couple of days ago, I became an Aunt for the 4th time!  My newest nephew is just adorable, with his chubby little cheeks! hehe

Rob and I also took an amazing vacation!  For our honeymoon we went to London for 2 weeks (and one day in Wales!), and then to Paris for a week.  We saw and did SOOOO much!  We went to the Dr Who Experience in Cardiff, Wales, which was amazing!  I insisted we take a day and drive out to that.  Rob is a big Dr Who fan, he loved it years before I did, but I had to put my foot down and tell him we were going to that (so I guess now I’m the bigger fan ;))  He’s glad we did though, and he even did awesome driving in London, like a BOSS! hehe  We also had the opportunity to meet the New Doctor, Peter Capaldi, and his companion, Jena Louise Coleman.  Check it out:

AND, the day before that happened, we also randomly stumbled on the World premier of Expendables 3, so we saw Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, Wesley Snipes, and JASON STATHAM in person, live on the red carpet.  So freakin’ amazing!!

I was also so happy to see so many paintings that I had always wanted to see, my favourite of which would be Bal du moulin de la Galette by Renoir at Musee D’Orsay in Paris.  Hands down oen of my favorite paintings, and it was a cooler experience for me than seeing even the Mona Lisa (which we saw as well at the Louvre).

The whole trip was just amazing.  A once in a lifetime trip for sure.  While I liked London, of course I LOVED Paris.  The food alone was enough to make me want to live there.  We went out to a fancy restaurant one night, and I had the best meal I have ever had in my life.  Again and again, almost everywhere we went, the food was amazing.  Rob loves Croque Madame, and had it a few times in Paris, so I’ve found a good recipe to make it at home for him.  Only once in awhile though, as it’s SO very rich.

We rented apartments for our stay ( I HIGHLY recommend Airbnb, their customer service was amazing, just outstanding).  Our flat in London was in the City of London, right on the Thames River, with a great view of South Bank (so pretty at night).  But, the real gem was our apartment in Paris.  Check out this view:

Yeah, needless to say, I loved doing dishes (normally I hate dishes). The bathroom was on the same wall, and the window was in the shower, so I showered with the window open every morning so I could see the Eiffel Tower while I showered.  Anyone on the top of the tower using binoculars, looking in just the right direction at that moment got an eyeful! hehe

I was able to cross a bunch of things off my bucket list on this vacation too!!! Visit London, visit Paris, go to the Dr Who Experience, have afternoon tea in London, buy a red Chanel lipstick in Paris *squeee!*, see the Eiffel Tower, visit a castle, and have champagne at the top of the Eiffel Tower.  Those are a lot of things to cross off the list at once.  Did I mention the food in Paris?  The coffee, cheese, wine, creme brulee, steak, macarons, pain au chocolate, EVERYTHING was SO delicious.

*whew*  Oh, besides the celebrity schmoozing in London, I got to go to a rug hooking seminar with one of my favourite designers, and a real insperation to me, Kaffe Fassett this summer in Nova Scotia.  It was great, and I learned a lot.

We also recently got to meet Mark Sheppard at a con, and he is so nice, and funny, and just fantastic.  If you’re not sure who he is, he’s had bit parts in every. scifi. show. ever, from Xfiles on.  More recently though, he’s become a regular on Supernatural (season 5 on), so he doesn’t have time for bit parts on other shows any more, which is sad, but at the same time I totally love his character on Supernatural, so it’s good.  For someone who plays the king of hell, he’s awafully snuggly. hehe

Sorry I haven’t posted any creative things lately.  Life has been SO busy!  I “quit my day job”, and am a self-employed artist now.  I have been doing creative things for years, but I finally took the plunge, which I never would have done without the support and encouragement from my wonderful husband Rob, and so far, it’s been more successful than I could have imagined. My main focus is sewing; I design and manufacture custom paintball gear (as Paintball Tailor), but I love to keep things interesting by doing lots of other things (it can get a bit boring working in nothing but black and olive drab fabric).  Check out my facebook artist page, and remember I’m for hire for everything from face painting to wedding decor to interior decor to sewing (and everything in between).  I do, indeed, do it all!  If you have a creative project you want done, I’m your girl!

So, I’d better go get some work done of some sort.  Sorry to not post creative things any more, I wish I had time to do so on a regular basis.  if you want to follow my creative happenings, I do suggest following my facebook page, I’m more apt to do a quick photo post from my phone to that page than write a big post here.  🙂

365 Days of Creativity – Days 77 – 83

And more Artist Trading Cards, moo cards, inchies, and twinchies:

 

365 Days of Creativity – Days 49 to 51

Much fabric has been flying in the studio this week.  I’m selling my paint ball wares at a huge game in Ontario in a couple of weeks, so I’m making stock for that like mad, and getting the rest of my custom orders for Rob’s team done so they’ll have their items for that game.  I know I said I’d try to keep the paint ball posts to a minimum, but I’ve got a few neat things, and that’s mostly what I’ve been working on this week, so bear with me for this post.

First I have a few 10-round paint ball tube holders, in Vietman tiger stripe camo.  Team SMERF’s camo of choice, and these are for a member of their team.  Don’t mind the chalk marks, I forgot to wipe them off before taking a pic!

Next up is something another member of SMERF asked me to make.  It’s a wishbone harness, with paracord straps.  You use it to attach your gun to your vest, so you don’t have to hold it when it’s not in use.  I had never worked with braiding paracord before, and while I caught on to the braiding part pretty quickly, it was the finishing the ends to make them super secure that had me stuck.  I tried the usual burning the nylon and smooshing the melted ends into the braid.  That didn’t hold well enough in my opinion.  Then I tried every glue I could think of from glue gun to gorilla glue to epoxy.  Nothing.  I finally found a fantastic tutorial on youtube that gave instructions for weaving the ends back into the braid itself, and it makes it super secure.  I’m so happy with the final result, I’m making one for myself too.  🙂

Since I’m going to that game in a couple of weeks as a vendor, I’m of course bringing my new banner.  I whipped up this cute sleeve for it for safe transport.

My craft studio audience.  They look impressed.  hah

 

365 Days of Creativity – Days 43 & 44

We went to the wedding of a couple of good friends of ours this past weekend in Prince Edward Island.  What a great weekend it was, with friends, good food, and lots of fun.  My crafty things for these 2 days were both wedding related, of course.

First off, I made the cake.  The bride wanted it heart shaped, as the wedding was on Valentines Day.  We went with red velvet with cream cheese icing, topped with strawberries.  The cake turned out as planned, with the exception of the strawberry glaze.  I hold the lady at Sobey’s responsible; I had never used it before, but she assured me it wouldn’t run.  She lied.  *shakes fist*  At least it still tasted good. 🙂  Oh, I made chocolate cuppies also, just in case.

 

I also ended up putting the bouquet together, easy-peasy.  The bride had a dozen red roses, I bunched them , wrapped the stems in the same red ribbon I used for the cake, and added a simple tulle bow at the top.

 

Awww, such a cute photo!!

The photo for what was supposed to be my last post for this group of days seems to have disappeared off of my ipad.  It was an origami heart out of paper currency that I made for the Mr & Mrs, an idea I got from my sister, and it was so cute.  Booo. 😦

 

365 Days of Creativity – Day 42

Continuing with my Photoshop kick this week (my graphic design diploma is something that I rarely put to use), I made some labels for my husband Rob’s beef jerky, Durdle Jerky.  He currently makes 3 flavors, mild, regular (or, medium), and hot.  We worked together to come up with some design ideas, I did some rough sketching, and then scanned the sketches into Photoshop and went from there.  What do you think?  😀  I love that Rob let me put little kawaii faces on the thermometers! *giggle*  I’ve also got a label done for his ghost pepper jerky, which he has yet to make, but I’ll share the pic anyways.  🙂

 

See the little ghosts that are supposed to represent smoke, but are also ghosts because it’s ghost peppers?  Oh snap, I laughed at that idea for a while, I was pretty tickled with it. hehehehe  Rob had the fantastic idea to have the top of the thermometer looking like a burned match.  Brilliant.  We work so well together, especially when it comes to thinking up creative things. 🙂

365 Days of Creativity – Day 41

I am very excited about today’s post!!  The UPS guy woke us up this morning banging on the door, and I was happy about being woken up, amazingly.  Last week I designed my business cards and banner for the Paintball branch of my craft business, and got them ordered.  They’re nothing elaborate, just text on a camo background, but I think they look awesome, if I do say so myself.  I ordered from Vistaprint; I’ve been using them for many years, and still can’t say enough good things about them.  The quality is great, they cards are cheap (even with me uploading my own design), and shipping is super fast.  *the background of the cards looks grainy/pixelated, but they’re not; my camera was being weird).

365 Days of Creativity – Days 38 to 40

First up we have a project that is a redo for me.  I had done this on a big canvas a few years ago, but ended up eventually needing the canvas for something else, so peeled the letters off.  This is on a wee canvas, painted black.  I think it’s pretty adorable, if I do say so myself. 🙂

My next crafty thing was born out of necessity.  I seem to be coming up with a few of those projects!  I have a neat metal planter that I keep my markers in.  I have a few (well, I couldn’t find the 3rd, so I only did it for 2) mini Sharpies, that just get lost in the bottom of the container under all the regular sized markers.  So, I gathered up a few random beads, and some wire.

I then just strung the caps and the beads on the wire, then curled it all around the handle of the planter.  This way it keeps the Sharpie minis on the side.  Their caps have a little part on top that pops off, so I can easily get them off of the container to use them.

My entry for day 40 is my week 4 Journal 52 entry.  The journal prompt was “building character”, and you were supposed to create a self portrait.  I have to say, I’m not overly happy with my self portrait.  I tried something different, and it came out kind of meh.  I do like the other elements though.

365 Days of Creativity – Day 36

I’m not going to lie; I giggled all the while I was making this.  Toilet paper origami is a bit silly, but kind of cute too.  I was a chamber maid many years ago, but then the only toilet paper origami I knew about was the classic triangle.  This just tickled me so. I kind of didn’t want to go to the bathroom for the rest of the day, so I wouldn’t destroy all my hard work!  I got the instructions here.

365 Days of Creativity – Days 25, 26, & 27

Threads have been flying in the studio this week.  I’ve been doing a lot of sewing, getting caught up on my paintball orders, before the season starts.  I’ve also squeezed in a couple of art journal pages too.  Here’s what I’ve done:

These are paintball gauntlets.  You store 10-round tubes in them, as well as a couple of C02 canisters. (Well, except for the bottom one; that customer didn’t want the C02 storage).  These were all for customer orders.

Also a custom order, two hats.  They are padded, to lighten the blow of getting shot in the head. I’ve been shot in the head (by my darling husband actually). It hurts. Bad.

A Peek Inside My Studio

I’ve been working hard to get my studio cleaned and ready for the new year.  I had packed up a bunch of stuff because I was going to paint the walls in there, but decided against it.  All the stuff was in storage , so I had to unpack everything.  This created a huge mess, of course.  Plus, I wanted to move some things out of the studio to the garage, to store, and so I’ve been going through and inventorying everything digitally so when I need something out there I can find it easily.

Anyways, on to the important stuff!  Here are a couple of before pics.  It was pretty well impossible to work in there, as I’m sure you can imagine.  Stuff was just piled everywhere, and, much to hubby’s dismay, it had spilled out into the living room.  Not good!

So, I worked hard the past few weeks, and I have it almost done.  There’s still a few things out of place, but it still looks 100 times better in there.  Behold!