Easter voter on etsy

Oh holy cow, here I go again making another post canvassing for votes ... when i should be making a post on everything else that i should be posting about! But hey, i'm a tad excited as i've never been in an etsy voter before and well, what can a girl do? Yay!!! .. my wee mosaic eggs made it into the voting round for easter and i'm really very happy. So if you feel like casting your vote you can do so here, or here, or even here ... your choice :D There's a ton of talent there and naturally i'd love you to vote for me .. pretty please with lots of sweet smiles on top, i'll even love you forever and if you don't want that then i'll just be eternally grateful! Thank you!

Happy easter everyone!!!

... and a very special thank you to Huismus for nominating me .. she's an amazing woman who lives in Holland and i'm certainly glad I had the honor to meet her and spend the day at the Rotterdam zoo with her last year. You can find her stunning shop here.

Woohooo for Secret Santa!!!

The European Street Team had a secret santa game which was organised by the brilliantly creative ArtMind. The gist of the game is that we are all matched with another european seller and have to make something for that person based on the information from their questionnaire that they completed. This year my secret santa came all the way from Barcelona in Spain ...

Fantastically she was able to send the package to me in our new home right here in Christchurch, New Zealand ... THANK YOU so much PALEOLOCHIC!!!!

The delightfully creative Moira a.k.a PALEOLOCHIC made me a superbly stylish set of Lavendar hangings and also sent me a seriously beautiful magnet for my fridge! Thank you so much :D I've hung the lavendar sachets throughout the house .. wonderfully fragrant!

It's been such an honor to have been part of this majestically warm and wonderful team. I miss 'the girls' and I certainly miss europe.

A special thanks to you Mitsy, everyone appreciates all of your hard work in putting the Secret santa together .. you are one in a million girl :D

Just a day at the beach

It's certainly hard for me to believe that we moved to NZ 3 months ago ... in the coming days i'll be blogging like never before (no giggles please Mitsy if you read this) ... there's so much I have yet to share with you, our summer road trip through Europe, secret presents from my gorgeous EST pals, secret santa, meet ups with wonderful europe etsy sellers ... and no doubt more! But today, well, today I want to share with you a couple of pic's from our beach trip yesterday. I took the kids to Okains Bay outside of Christchurch (the city we live in).

We frolicked around in the breaker waves .. the kids absolutely loved it!

Pricing holders

For the past few weeks and certainly like super crazy this weekend (I have afterall been child free these past few days) i've been gearing up like crazy for the Maastricht craft fair in Holland. The fair isn't until the 16th August but the kids and I are packing up the car next weekend (9th to be precise) and heading off on our little road trip (well, ok it's not so small it's a 2100km trip) .. My dear friend Mitsy a.k.a Artmind recently posted a tutorial on her blog (she's a tutorial MASTER) that was all about making memo clip holders and kind of orientated towards 'price tags' .. now, this was something I really wanted to try as I hadn't yet organised a thing for my pricing options for the fair.

I did end up modifying it a little bit based on the materials that I already had here at home. Instead of using the loo rolls I decided to make use of some colorful silicone cupcakes I had had sitting around (I can bake a cake and biscuits but i'm seriously crap at baking cupcakes) .. matching paint, some meat skewers and some mini clips .. and here is my effort:

I HIGHLY recommend that if you don't already follow Artmind's blog .. you should be .. it's always updated with super interesting posts, tutorials and amazing things.

http://artmind-etcetera.blogspot.com/

Thanks Mitsy .. you are the BEST girl!

Pawprints and new work

Once again i've let time pass without posting .. so, i'd LOVE to share with you a few special things!

A few weeks back I had a request through a potential customer to see if I could custom make something 'dog related' on bowls. Pawprints seemed to be a good direction to head in. I had a discussion with my friend Mitsy and look what she came up with:

Mitsy (a.k.a Artmind) was extremely helpful and made these amazing pawprint tiles for me to use in my mosaic works for this customer (as yet I haven't made a bowl but you can see a little bit further down for what I have made). I'm really excited by these pawprints, they are completely perfect and so terribly cute!

While I was awaiting the tiles to arrive I tinkered around with my own ceramic tiles and handcut paw prints for a small bowl. I think it came out pretty well actually .. (there are 3 of these placed evenly around the bowl). The customer really loves this and has also seen the pictures of Mitsy's tiles so she's VERY excited about all of this!

Having the kids away for the weekend has been absolute bliss .. as much as I miss them it's been great just having time for me and time for making some new mosaics .. here is a sample of some of my new work in my etsy shop

Perfectly purple dish

Little lemon eggcup