Hi fellow Craftsters, just came back from the coolest supplies store on the island of Bali. It is ridiculously full of beads, sequins, charms, feathers, findings, and every manner of doodad a crafty type person could ask for. Every time i go there, my heart starts to race and i can feel my pupils dilate. I am not a rep for them. I just want other people like me to experience this place. Quite inexpensive, too, unless you are like me and want to buy everything in the building. So, if your travels bring you to Bali, let me know. I will tell you where to go!

cheers

hi craftsters! okay, i am only posting one monster with a monkey on its back right now, but wanted to share this one. my hubby and i have a little restaurant in Bali, and the tropics are tough on walls. they sprout cracks like crazy and it's hard to match the paint, so i just fill the cracks and cover them with creatures. what do you think?

  hi there fellow craftsters, i was wondering if anyone knows a good resource to look at 50's retro motifs that were used on textiles. Think atomic amoebic- i am thinking of sprinkling a long wall with starbursts and boomerangs, but wanted to look at some reference art first.

thanks in advance, la Fuzz

   hi everyone- i am finally doing it. getting all of the art work that i have made over the past eight years, dusting it, touching it up, and getting it framed and ready for an exhibition. i make paper and mixed media collage pieces. they are very detailed and heavily textured and must go under glass to protect them from dust and where i live, lizard poo. so my question is, how best to photograph my work for a portfolio and of course to share it with you guys? how do i deal with glare?
  all suggestions are appreciated. thanks!

   has anyone noticed that you can remove paint, even enamel paint, from your skin with tea tree oil? It works really well. I know it's good for skin, but i have also seen it remove the finish from a car, and it eats rubber. What's that about?

 hi! here are a couple of new pieces. The backgrounds are made of little bits and pieces of scrap paper, all glued together on a sheet of plastic covered plywood, which was peeled away from the plastic when it was dry. Then the resulting sheet of paper was embroidered, beaded, sequinned, ans tricked out with all the little bits of stuff i obsessively collect. What do you think?

  I've been fooling with Photoshop more and more lately, and so i've been using a lot of photos of myself to practice. No sense insulting anyone in the name of art...
  Anyway, now i have all these self portraits.Don't exactly remember how i did it, but i like it. Please post your self portraits too. It's always cool to see who's out there.

 I've been working on the computer a lot lately, fooling with the filters in Photoshop. I've combined a photo of my hand with pictures i got from the net of astronomy pictures, like Hubbell telescope photos, of nebulas, comets, stuff like that. Now that that is underway, I've started printing some of the pics on transparency film and using the bits in real time collage. I feel like I just stepped intoa whole 'nother world  of possibilities! I'll post the collage soon as the glue is dry, but what do you think of this pic?

hey all- here is my daughter's last minute halloween costume, or part of it, anyway. I had paper mached a base for the brain, but the day before the costume was supposed to be ready, i found that the base had been thrown out. AAAAAHHHH! Plan b was an old bike helmet. The brain part was a scrap of pink stretchy velvet wrapped around tissues to give it some squish, then i glue gunned all the velvet to the helmet. I am famous for last minute costumes, but this one was really done on  a serious time budget, probably 5 hours total work time.

 Hi! i just wanted to share another one of my mulberry paper 'paintings'. This piece is about 35 inches by 38 inches, and is made of torn bits of mulberry paper, lacquered down with lots of PVA. Do you think I should seal it with anything else?  Do you like it?