Next Series of ACEO's

We're getting ready for our trip south to Arizona for the winter and most of my winter shows are behind me now. I'm taking time to play in the studio as my inventory in the bead department is adequate for now. I'll be starting up again with production when we get down to my Bisbee studio.

I'm not sure if some of these  ACEO's are complete but I'm building them up in layers and assessing them to see if they have a finished feeling to me. 

I have been holding on to a wonderful old Japanese knitting machine book for perhaps the early 80's that show sample swatches of finished patterns. They're bold and bright and made for a good background. It's fun grabbing snippets of random text from old books and out of context they become more enigmatic paired with the images.

Some of the images magically pair themselves up on my table like the giraffe and hip socket much to my own delight.  The 1912 book of cattle diseases becomes an inspiration.

This is my second series of ACEO's fresh off the press this week.

Fun with Vintage Ephemera

I'm starting fresh with a new blog since my old one is sadly neglected  and I've been doing some new things. Since my retirement and moving to Arizona half the year I have been collecting vintage books and ephemera ostensibly to sell on Etsy. Now it seems that I'm inspired to keep this stash for myself mostly and make my own artist trading cards (ATC's) or ACEO's Art Cards, Editions & Originals.

The art cards are required to be 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches and can be in any medium as long as they lay fairly flat and not so embellished that they are too thick to fit in a collector's album. 

They are fairly addicting to create I'm finding and I've done my first two batches in the last few weeks.

My main craft however is lampwork bead making which I have been doing for over ten years now. You can find my beads for sale on Etsy and can see an extensive gallery of my finished and mostly sold work in my online gallery on my website.

I also have been posting on my fan page on Facebook. If you care to become a fan you can get more day to day small updates regarding my business.

Here is my first batch ever of ACEO's that were made with vintage cabinet photos collected in antique shops on my last trip to Maine. I use vellum, mica and text from vintage books. a few of the images I got from a site online that  provides free vintage images for your crafting.