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Month: April 2012

April 30, 2012
Kathy
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Etsy Wedding Registry

Posted in Art Work, and Reviews

Brand new to Etsy is a wedding registry. Very cool idea.  If you've poked around on Etsy, you know you can find wedding rings, custom wedding dresses, purses for the bridal party, invitations, hand decorated shoes for the bride and her bridesmads,  and much, much more.  You can also find just about anything you could imagine for the wedding, the reception and for  the home,
 Here's the link for the registry. 

I had a chance to paint for a wedding from an Etsy customer and it was great fun!  A bride contacted me for a series of miniature paintings as gifts for  each member of her wedding party.   She and I worked out what she wanted and I got to work. What a creative and personal idea she had and I loved being a part of it!

For lots of information and ideas, here's the wedding page at Etsy.   And if you are on twitter, I see lots of excitement at #etsyweddings

And lastly, there are lots of real life Etsy weddings to read about here

 

April 27, 2012
Kathy
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Monarch Butterfly Wall Hanging

Posted in Art Work, and Sewing: Finished Bags & Pouches

Sometime ago, I found the most beautiful Monarch butterfly wing fabric. It was a little remnant that I fell in love with. Unfortunately, that was all there was left …..just that little remnant. Just enough to make a border for a small quilt or wall hanging. I've had an image in my mind and finally got to work on making that image a reality.  Below is the butterfly painted on lavender cotton.

  Monarch painting on fabric

I used a heat sensitive pen to sketch out the butterfly, then painted it with Jaquard acrylic fabric paints.  You can see the butterfly wing fabric on the lower right.  Below the border is sewn on, it's sandwiched with batting and a backing, pinned, and ready for quilting.

Monarch butterfly painted and ready to quilt sibstudio blog

I used free motion stitching and mimicked the fanciful flitting that butterflies do as they move from flower to flower.  The border is quilted to loosely look like a the monarch wing.  Here is the finished wall hanging:

Monarch butterfly wall hanging by kathy sibley

That is all there is left  of the butterfly wing fabric. It turned out exactly as I had pictured.  : )  You can find this at my SibStudio Sewing  shop.

April 23, 2012
Kathy
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Second Shop: SibStudio Sewing

Posted in Sewing: Finished Bags & Pouches

I'm back!  I've been working on getting a second shop up and running on Etsy. I forgot how long it takes to set up a new shop – banners, writing policies and welcome messages, writing out the description of new items…..  And now my second shop is open and I am working on loading items into it. 

What's in my new shop about you ask?  I've been sewing most of my life and started playing with  painting and fabrics together a years ago. I had a few painted purses in my Etsy shop and I wanted to expand on that idea.  The results ?  SibStudio Sewing is now a new shop on Etsy.   I have a number of new items that  need photographing and descriptions written. Over the next week or so I will be adding new inventory to the shop and will adding more weekly.

I will continue to paint canvases, wine glasses, etc for my SibStudio shop and locally.  I have new artwork to load on SibStudio shortly as well.  I'll be blogging about both here. The thought of trying to write for two blogs and two twitter accounts is overwhelming and, really, do people manage to do that?  I know how that will work out for me……. disaster!  That was part of the reason I named the new shop with the SibStudio branding, to make it easy. One blog and one twitter account to handle both  SibStudio shops. 
Do any of you have more than one shop of selling venue ? Any tips on handling multiple online shops?

April 11, 2012
Kathy
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Keep Calm Signs for the Studio

Posted in Other Artist Work

I saw this sign today  on Pinterest – of course. It's much easier to be creative if your mind is calm. Perfect for the studio.

 

I headed over to Etsy to see what other Keep Calm signs for the art world were available

KeepCalmShop at Etsy

This one is cute from the KeepCalmShop . The wonderful one below is from Sherriferry shop.

http://www.etsy.com/shop/sherrifairy?ref=seller_info

My all time favorite is what not to do when you have a custom order that a customer is waiting on….

ThoughtsToPrint shop at Etsy

You can find this sign and more at Thoughts to Print at Etsy.

April 4, 2012
Kathy
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Looking at Forsythia

Posted in Peeking Behind the Easel, and Reference Photos

I think it is so interesting that many of the first spring flowers are pink or yellow.  I have daffodils planted near forsythia in the yard. It was not done intentionally, but I love that they both bloom roughly the same time. The big burst of yellow shouts out Spring! like nothing else. Here's burst of yellow from the Forsythia:

Forsnthia in bloom

You can see each flower is held onto the branch by a little bit of green stem and four petals.

Yellow Forsythia in bloom

Inside each flower, there is also a touch of green near the upper base of the stamen.  Each flower has 4 petals with a faint raised line down the center of the petal. 

I like painting then with  any shade of blue background  – my preference is a grey-blue or a cerulean blue, depending on what mood Iam aiming for.  A  painting with single branch loaded with flowers makes a statement. But I also like painting them as a peek into the entire bush ,like the left side of photo above, where the flowers seem to go on and on.  No matter what the composition, they are just fun to paint for the sheer joy of burst of yellow color and the sign that spring is on it's way.