New items in the shop

Spring MUST be in the air again (she sighs with relief) ..

Mother of pearl round pot - small

Light green vessel - mosaic

Mixed blues mosaic pot - small

Patchwork mosaic bowl

By special request i've made this bowl for someone ... the colors used are blues, reds, lime green and brown/earthy tones. I'm very pleased with the result!

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.

The Poppies handmade housewares event awards

I'm rather excited to have been nominated as an entrant in one of The Poppies handmade event award categories! I've been nominated in the Favourite Housewares section which you can access here

I would love for you to vote for me ... please!!

Thank you :D

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!

Super Happy sunday 12th July - meeting Nanouke!

This past sunday (12th July) I had the enormous pleasure of meeting up with fellow Etsyian, Ana a.k.a Nanouke .. for those of you that have 'met' her virtually she is exactly as how she appears on Etsy, fun, lovely, caring, gorgeous and so terribly funny!

I left home around 10am (meant to be away earlier but overslept) and headed off in the direction of Lisbon .. 2 hours later I arrived in Ana's home town of Torres de Vedras and oops, accidently took the north exit instead of the south exit but never mind .. she came to my rescue!

We headed off to a café to sit and have a little chat. Mitsy a.k.a ArtMind had posted to me a little pressie to give Ana (I so keep wanting to call her Nanouke .. and the poor darling did get me calling her that throughout our day together). Here is Ana opening her surprise from Mitsy at the café where we sat and chatted for a while:

We got into Ana's car and headed off to the beach area of Santa Cruz .. to have a beautiful wander around this gorgeous seaside village (which by the way is one of Ana's favourite beaches)

It was an absolutely pleasantly warm to hot day .. enough to be hot but there were little cooler breezes around to cool you down a little.

We decided to walk down to this rock shown here in the water (it has a giant hole in it)

Here's Ana showing us her beautiful brooch from Mitsy and also you can see the hole in the rock behind her .. and the just beautiful beach area of Santa Cruz.

Ah huh .. we managed to ask this dear older woman to take our photo together .. after 4 or 5 attempts she managed to take this photo of us without chopping our heads off :)

The hole in the rock, rock. You see, i was thoroughly fortunate to be with Ana on this day as she was able to give me a geology lesson and tell me about how these rock formations (and hills to the side) are around 40 million years old and instead of being slanted as they are now they used to lie flat ... she's really brainy about all this!!!

This is a delightful little church that we saw in our wandering through the village of Santa Cruz.

We spent around 7.5 hours together .. chatting, chatting, laughing and chatting and laughing some more. I had the BEST day with Ana .. it was so wonderful to have this opportunity to meet her.

Ana knitted me the most beautiful bracelet .. I haven't taken the photo's of it yet (shame on me) but when I do I shall be sharing this with you as well .. it's extremely elegant and beautiful! Thank you so much Ana.

Towards the end of the day we sat up on a little hill overlooking the sea and watched the beginnings of the sun set ... we talked about so many wonderful things .. ha ha especially etsy (which is most likely no great surprise to you all) .. but not just that, about our lives, our families, our friends .. all of it perfectly natural and special. In so many ways it was like meeting up with an old friend even though this was our first meeting.

A big and enormous hug Ana, thanks so much for making my sunday one of the highlights of my 7 years here in Portugal .. I hope that we'll do this again before too long.

Just one more thing to add. The portuguese people are a truly lovely and caring 'race' of people, Ana is no exception to this but she has that something extra, extra warmth and zest.

Hugs and beijinhos, Kerrin xox

Signified

YAY .. I finally did it!! I got my 2nd shop opened on Etsy. For a while I have been wanting to do this as I just didn't enjoy seeing my mosaics and magnets mixed up together in one shop. I love to make my magnets and I am so happy that I have finally got Signified up and running.

I must thank two very special friends for helping me out.

Renate from Kreativlink who gave me the right 'push' into getting off my behind to make this happen and also for helping me with the new shop name .. thanks so much .. you ARE a genius!

Frances from enchantedpond who created the banner for Signified and also a new banner for my Sigmosaics shop on etsy .. thank you so much as I am thrilled with them both!

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

TO DO LIST ....

I'm one of those people that writes lists, oh how I love a good list .. I gain a certain amount of satisfaction from crossing things off my list.

Over past months i've been building up a good supply of items to mosaic .. I stopped writing a list about what I needed to mosaic .. it's gotten a little big ....

This is a small 'preview' of some of the types of creations that you will be seeing sometime (i hope soon) in my shop.