I changed a bit my banner..

Last night, after so many days of cake (3 birthdays in a row!) I was in a sugar rush I guess, so I decided to work on my banner. I have been using the little face as a logo for years, but I wanted her smiling. Of course I don't have the larger original, after so many computer crashes *sight* But I had some in a workable size and now it is backed up.
Don't forget to back up your images people! I personally do not like the" cloud", but many do, either disc, online or any other way, remember to back up.
I cannot even tell you the amount of stuff I have lost due to a virus or a computer digital tantrum, so annoying!

Anyway, now I have a smiling banner.

And I made a comic. Hate Mondays lol

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Never give your microphone to the troll

I rarely make cartoons, but made this one today because it is the best way to say it:

Click to see larger image.

♥ To see more details about this awesome 2019 one-full-year lessons visit this link: https://bit.ly/2SSXxrS
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Weekend animal cuteness

I have been writing, drawing, taping but not blogging. This is a page of the Traveling Art Journal in Sandra in AU's book:

And since I am in the mood for cute adorable animals I am posting pet cuteness just for fun, enjoy!

News and Looong funny rant

My giveaway for the Soul Food Class was won by Gina Morley! She won 39 fun art lessons, yaayy!!

And I was also lucky: We went to my husband's office Christmas party. They always have a raffle. I won a plasma TV. (✿◠‿◠)
Well, that's where the story begins!

I placed it on top of the TV cabinet, kind of eclectic look being that I had my old TV right under. After we connected it, we noticed the sound was kind of yucky and the image quality was not so great, so I decided to take it back to the store, get a store credit and pay the difference for another one. After a couple of hours of shopping, waiting in the return line, blah blah, they didn't have the same size so we had to get a bigger one. LED.

At that point we had gotten rid of the poor old TV, (I say poor because unsuspectingly it got kicked out of its house, left alone in the donations place) it was the kind of huge bulky square -took three of us to move it and I almost threw out my back-- but it was still working fine. We had it mostly to watch old movies, or when the other TV is in use by noisy games and someone wants to come to a more private quiet place (namely, mom's room lol)

We brought the new TV, put it on the top of cabinet but it looked silly since now there was this gaping hole from the other banished one, so we put it in the shelf, connected it, and it had great sound and image quality but now since it is not bulky, it looked tiny in the cabinet's shelf. Readjusting shelves didn't work.
My husband suggested to go get a larger one. I was hesitant because really, that TV doesn't get much use, but well, we went back to return and exchange it. Another 3 hours of a line in the store... ugh  [ಠ_ಠ]

We went out in the near freezing weather, more hours of waiting and lines. They didn't have the next size up but a bigger one. Oops. OK, may as well, we got that one. But not in this store, they only had one in the far away store... So drive far we did, parked far because it was full to the brims, got frozen cold because it was near ice out there, plus the expected long lines...  etc... We  came back home, got it out of the box ready to connect and what do you think...? It didn't fit in the cabinet hahahaha Too big! (-_ლ) No way I'm going back to exchange!

I thought well, I will fill up the shelf with stuff and set the TV on top. Who cares?
Well, no can do; the dang coffered ceiling won't allow it. This TV is now too tall.

I have a hate-hate relationship with that coffered ceiling thing... it is not the typical band around of about 7 or 10 inches thick, it is a whole upside down bench. About 21 inches low! We couldn't get the bed we wanted because of the low profile of the coffering (coffering....is there such a word?) Anyway, let's just say that if it wasn't a huge messy expensive project to knock it down, it wouldn't  be there. I can almost hear it snicker at me some nights :oP

So... Next option: shop for a new cabinet.
We had the old one for 17 years after all. The fact that was pristine didn't matter; it was unfortunately the wrong size for this. Out of the room and shop for a new one.
That brought up another set of problems. I had a bunch of books and magazines in the bottom doors. Oops. Go and arrange that. Down memory lane.... old kids paintings, books and stuff. Discard, organize. Make another trip to donations. Inevitably now I have a pile of junk on the dining table waiting to be redistributed somewhere. But that will have to wait because now I have to go get a new cabinet.

Three days later with my eyes spinning between the prices, sizes and styles we still couldn't decide.  We saw tall, short, modern, antique... I figured since it would not match our furniture, might as well be so clashy that it would look eclectic on purpose, right?  Did you know there are TV cabinets with fake electric fireplaces? Wow.
I was very close to buying an antique black one full of curves, kind of bombe, but it didn't fit the player. Not to mention the price was a bit too much for such an unplanned purchase.

After looking high and low, my husband decided to forget the furniture, just mount it on the wall. There are 2 options: it can be installed on the wall and have all the cables and wires in a neat cover that can be painted the color of the wall, easy. Or it can be installed after punching holes in the wall to have the cables and wires hidden inside the wall. I opted for the easy neat cover. My husband wanted to have them hidden. Difficulty level: 1000.
Now I have 2 holes in the wall. One of them quite uneven. ( ¬_¬) Yes, you can laugh.

I will skip the part where we were missing tools and cables were cut too short, someone stepped on the outlet cover and broke it, and the fact that I had no electricity till 10 pm, just go directly to the part where, after cutting the holes in the wall, we discovered that there was an unexpected wood bar in the way so getting the cables from point A to point B took a whole day more than planned, and unfortunately the 2nd hole ended up larger that expected so a re-patch and re-paint is part of the list too. Hopefully soon he will finish the project.

On the way to get patching paint and a gift for a co worker, I discovered a cute adorable dainty cabinet to be placed in front of the hopefully-soon-hanging-TV just as decor and kind of fence to deter fast walking-wall-bumpers from the electronics. Great price, nice size, no storage unfortunately but seems perfect for the spot. It just needed different knobs to look more unique. I bought it. Then we went to get knobs at the market shop with imports. We got 3 awesome ceramic knobs. 1 for the drawer, 2 for the little doors. It was hard to remove them because of the finishing so my son was very careful to score the paint around with a blade, then unscrew them, to add the new ones.
Well, whaddayaknow? After all his work, the door knobs were too wide and fit tight together so the dang dainty doors won't close! Agh! ლ(ಠ_ಠლ)  He reinstalled the old ones, we just left the one in the drawer. Still unique looking.

It is a little over a week of the infamous lucky winning, and now I have holes in the wall, wires hanging out, plaster debris on the carpet, a new TV back in the box, an old cabinet in the entry way, a pile of junk in the dining room... a new dainty cabinet in the hall (with only one shiny new knob). And a vacuum cleaner ready to go.  Agh!

 

 All of this after a winning price... My husband said he is not going to let me get another raffle ticket next time ( •‿- )

And that is why, ladies and gentlemen, you are not to see the gift horse in the mouth!

Oh! Congrats to Gina!

Nothing much

So.... we made it. I knew it before hand because my buddies in Australia and New Zealand told me so lol

Anyway, I am happy that the last 2 nights we had frost, which is necessary to get rid of all the unwanted bugs, that brings a cold but crisp day afterwards. Which is unusual this time of year where we usually have gray fog. It helps with my holiday issues.
Do you have the winter blues? (no, not you guys in the South Hemisphere!)

I get the ups and downs... too many sad things going on, but I am blessed with my family so I can't complain...:oP

In case you have not noticed, there's not much art going on at my table lately, but I managed to make the text-image posted here with one of my cool fonts :o)

Are you ready for Christmas???

Maker Faire

This past weekend we went to the Maker Faire in Northern California. It was huge, with tons of things to see and do... and lots of walking. At the end of the day I was collapsing, but it was a riot. Same on Sunday, where we had the chance to see Adam Savage who is not only funny, but very inspiring. I felt moved. Really.  I was way over in a corner but got a little video of the end of his show, and he shared the books that inspired him, and some quotes that made him go in the direction he is now: "Follow your passion". At the end he went into the Tesla coils, in the Arc Attack thing, it was so funny!


My video was not as good, so I'm linking to this one.
I collected a bunch of websites to check out later on, visited great booths and did a little shopping. They had a whole area for the Steam Punk stuff and my daughter didn't want to move from there LoL.
It was a blast, but I'm glad it's only once a year, because it took me a while to recup ;o)

It's Friday...Friday... gotta get down on Friday

Gotta get down on Friday...

Here is the silliest video I have seen in a long time:

I finished the crow mask doll, but I have not taken the pictures yet, but I have a little picture of the new clay baby I'm making, hope you like it!

Have a wonderful weekend! Don't forget to give your mom a hug, even if only in your heart :o)

it's Friday!

I hope you won't get fool too many times. Here, by the time it was 7 am we got 4 pranks! Gosh... (And 3 of them was just me!) LoL
For friends in other countries, this is similar to All Saints day in December, where they play jokes of all kinds to a poor innocent soul. :oP
Have an awesome day!

How not to take pictures

I am delighted to announce the birth of  Timmy. He is a tiny 5 inch polymer baby, and he will go places playing the touring baby blog with a mouse, a piggy, a frog, and another baby.
This is a WIP picture before curing the clay:

Taking pictures of your dolls is a whole different art. It requires creativity, and some camera knowledge. I don't  claim to be an expert at all, but I know what not to do ;o)
As I was taking pictures of this polymer baby, I came across all the problems in the book: bad  lighting, shadows, bad angles, weird background... and also an unwanted visitor (aka Panzón) and decided after several "photo bombs" that I needed to post them in the blog. Here you go:

Baby looking in the wrong direction.

Weird lighting and shadows. Needs cropping.

Light is too sharp . Goofy cat in background.

Total fiasco. Bad shadows, blurry. Photo bomb cat.

I cropped the best picture of the session, and this is the result:

I'll go pack him to go to his 5 States tour. Ta ta for now!

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Most of the time, anyway!

Don't you feel you should have more control over things sometimes?
The weekend came and left so fast, I'm still spinning.
I didn't do as many things as I wanted, but managed to organize some of my mess, and the house regular mess. Summer is around the corner, well, the summer weather is here anyway, we reached the 90s today!
We have 3 more weeks of school then everything will flip backwards in our schedule. Some will be happier about the change, some will not LoL
And there's nothing we can do about it ;o)
Thinking of that, I made a little Queen collage some weeks back, but just now scanned it (in my "organize or toss away" rule) and here is the result:
A picture of me as a queen (fake short hair, mind you)
Will this give me more control over things? No. Did it make me feel better? Yes.
I am still giggling. My favorite part is the cookie :oD


I am queen of my desk. Most of the time, anyway!

Snail on the run

Having a kid that loves animals has taken me back to my own childhood, when I myself loved ALL animals. The only difference is that we didn't have a carpeted house (where animals indiscretions can and will leave an undetected mess for days) And the fact that my dad had a magic trick, where all my collected animals would randomly disappear eventually. All except my adored chihuahua, that lived with us for 18 years.
We have rescued, fixed, helped, fed a bunch of animals which usually we manage to find a new good home for them.... As you might remember our latest experience with Scrofie's 5 boys. :o) (I'll get updates on them soon!)


So, while working in the yard few days ago we found a HUGE snail, and of course we had to place him in a little new house, right? Well, after making a snail house out of a plastic bottle with a net secured with a rubber band on top for ventilation, and a jungle of leaves for food and habitat, he settled in the kitchen by a shady wall. They wanted to name him "Keeper". I wanted to name him "Goner". We settled for "Cooper"
Yesterday I found the bottle horizontal, opened ....and snailess! agh! The only thing left was his poo :oP
Where is Cooper??


After school, I showed the kids the empty "snail house" and asked them if they knew why it was opened and if they have seen the snail.
Imagine my delight when I heard my daughter say "oh, maybe they went for a stroll together"
They?
"...I brought another snail to keep him company" she said.
I'm speechless for a minute. agh!

At least it wasn't as bad as when I was her age, and brought a bag full of snails to my grandma's house, and forgot it in her bathroom. I was so proud of myself, I had collected like 30 in my little paper bag.
They were still finding snails in strange places a month later. XoP

As it turns out, Cooper was art inclined. I found him by my paint's box, tucked in behind the corner. He is residing outside again as you can see in the picture, but he didn't want to smile for the camera. The other one, I guess will be in a French l'escargot dish when I find him, sneaky thing.... XoD

Cinco de Mayo

Here is a "Cinco de Mayo" Frida. She will go to my Etsy soon, but I wanted to share this funny picture, kind of a creepy angle if you ask me:

I was taking the dolls photographs and I had an audience.
Well some people hire models, I have Panzón on the roof ha! I wanted to take a picture of him with a bandanna but he would have none of it. Dratted cat >^.^< hehehehe

So instead, I made a new avatar:

Old banana ACEOs

I was re-organizing some files in the computer (since I burned the heck out of my skin, in our little outing over the weekend, I really don't want to go run errands till I am not purple anymore.... but that's another story!)
So anyway, I was going through a bunch of files and I found some old ACEO images I wanted to share here.
Some are from before I even started this blog, when the ACEO group was just barely over 100 people and we had one thread in the ebay group that was hilarious, and for one reason or another we started to discuss bananas.
My buddy Deb Company was there, and if I'm not mistaken, BlueEyeDuck as well. Gosh girls! Can you believe we have known each other for so long? I wish I remembered all the people at that moment! All I know is that I laughed till it hurt...
Based on that topic, we all went to make banana ACEOS, ...not food, mind you, but art cards inspired by bananas! :oP
Here's some of what I made then:





The ironic part is that this last ACEO about the last banana... didn't sell! I still have it! How is that for irony?? :oP
I might list it, it looks crisp and pristine like if I made it yesterday, which tells me that using good materials makes your work last for a long time.

I also found one Alice in Wonderland I painted/sold in 2005. Wow... and right now it is still the rage!

Earth day

OK I am posting late, but I hope everyone had a nice Earth day. I am not a tree hugger, but I love Nature. I can say more stuff about it but I want to keep my blog Artsy Craftsy oriented so, in our precious planet's name, I made a little organic sculpture:



I have been working on it for a few days and you will see him and his friends on Etsy soon. He is a real walnut and I think I'm falling in love with his crabby face :oP
What do you think?

Four little piggies went to market...

And one little piggy stayed home....



Actually, it was not piggies but doggies, and they didn't go to the market, but to a new home. :oP
This past few days have been crazy. We said good bye to Wickham first, then Bingley .... couple of days later Darcy left, then Bennet. Tomorrow a nice teacher will come and fall in love with Collins, who is very funny and full of energy.
Now they have different names (Champ, Sugar, Bolt, Doug) and soon, they won't remember me, which is a bit sad. But I won't have the marathon feedings and cleaning at 6 AM after five doggies and I am sure that by itself will make me miss them a bit less :oP

Can't ride 2 horses at the same time

[Skip this post unless you really have nothing else to do!]
Yup, Can't ride two horses at the same time. I see the logic in that. I have heard also the same saying but with camels, which has to be even harder I think lol
But of course me being me... try 5 horses... 5 camels... 5 different projects at the same time, why not? The Result? Ha! A huge amount of unfinished projects! My rapid response to a crisis? Climb up fast on yet another horse! LOL
Oh my gosh...
Well, I'm blabbering all this because I came to the computer days ago to post a tip, well, originally I came to the computer room looking for my cup of coffee, but that's beside the point.
Then I thought, "better post a tip and a tut in the same posting" as I had mentioned something but I'll make a post dedicated to that later, as that would be getting into another subject here, and I know me, I get easily distracted by familiar noises and shiny objects...

So, in order to post the tutorial (on making a light box) I had to dig for hours into my files, and finally I found the pictures so I decided to stick them together into one document (insert familiar noise here: "Mooooom I need heeeeeelp!") so, after running to help, stopping fights, gluing, clipping, spell checking homework (Why do I have to do that if my first language is Spanish???).... finally it was time to fix the tut!!!.... right after cooking diner.
Next thing I know? I forgot that horse Because I had to help my son to do a video for the English class (Now you tell me, why on Earth do they want a book report video? Is this the Spielberg High or something? What happened to pen-and-paper book reports?) :oP
So in order to make the team-work video (which the team wanted a clay animation HA!) we had to argue fuss and fight about the impossibility of finishing on the due date, something that takes Pixar 2 years. Gosh, try to convince a 14 year old of that! LOL
My natural reaction? By now you know: toss everything else up(tut, blog, finish the mohair wig), and climb another horse. I think we are talking about horse number 14 in the same week. There are weeks like that.
Good thing? I'm not having any real-world work to do for now. Bad thing? No one owes me money :oP
After some days of previous deliberation, and not a single sign of life from the team mates, it was decided that instead of clay, it was going to be sock-puppets.

Now, I have nothing against sock puppets, but I am not going to buy good healthy decent socks to trash them on a whim for a video. -That in itself was another big fuss- I thought of something simple, fun and cheap to do which is paper bag puppets.
We were in a hurry because by then we had lost like 10 days of work (Still the team has not shown traces of life) but we hired little sister and my goodness we've been having a blast!
The goofy things look like funky zombies and I'll post the video when I finish editing.
[Definitely Skip this paragraph if you don't want to get tangled into my brain web]
I actually came to the computer to edit, but for some mysterious reason decided to blog first... You see, I moved the paper bags to the counter (where I had my polymer doll parts still waiting to be assembled) to go get the camera and take some quick pictures, so I thought, "I still need to pick the fabric I'm going to use for those dolls...." and took off walking to select fabrics. Completely forgot about the camera! Couldn't decide what color to use, but saw the list of errands I needed to do yesterday So I took off running to the car. My tummy grumbling because I didn't even had my cup of coffee yet.
And did I mention the kitty got fixed? Poor thing, but he's feeling fine except for the cone head (and his empty purse) LOL
[End of skiping part]

Now that I blogged, I'll go edit the video.
And you know where my cup of coffee was? Right by the mohair that I was going to use for my bald doll. ;o)

Personalized Adaptable Global Good Wishes

Since we live now in a globally-connected world, and we have so many ways to wish others happiness family closeness and religious observation, I thought appropriate to cluster all the joyous thoughts:

Have a Holly... Jolly... Politically Correct...
Rama-Hana-Kuan-Xmas!

Felíz Navidad!! Bonne Fête!! Merry Christmas!! Fröhliche Weihnachten!! Buon Natale!! Joyeux Noël!! (If anyone wants to add another language, please do so!)
At the end, we all want the same thing: Peace, love, health, friends (and some cake).


A big kiss and a hug to all my creative friends out there!

This is why the printer doesn't work...

You know the reason why stuff disappears, get broken or moves out of place...? Sometimes it's the fairies, but sometimes is something else:



I hope every one had a good week! I'll post some pictures of my "fairy wood seats" soon, they are turning out nicely!

For all the cat lovers out there...

If you don't laugh hard at this one, you are probably sleepy.
Even if you are not a cat person! :oD

I must add, my family is trying to convince me to adopt another feline.
They are sending me kitty videos, pictures... my daughter is making cat-art...
Will I surrender? ;o)

Christmas tree and general sillyness

Here's a picture of our Christmas tree.


And here's how it looks like if you wiggle the camera and play with the lights:

And here is a FUN link of how to decorate your tree if you are still not done with it.

Click HERE and enjoy.