Art & Soul Trades, Part Two

These heart pins were what I started out to blog about before Blogger became such a pig. It's bad enough that they've changed the way photos work so that you can't even move them around anymore. Now if you backspace in the wrong place, you can lose all of your photos which means you may as well start over or JUST NOT BLOG AT ALL! At a time when Facebook is just taking over people's lives, you'd think they would make it easier to blog!

BASTARDS!

The heart pins are for the girls from my Yahoo art group, TreasureArtTrends, named after the shop owned by two of the gals who are coming to Art & Soul, Keri and Cathy. Gina and Kathy are coming too and it is just TOO exciting!

Here are close-ups of the two bottle cap charms I made. I have about a dozen of the Dia de los Muertos caps and around twenty of the Las Vegas sign caps.

I'd made these in the past and just had the idea of touching up the Glossy Accents then adding the microbeads. They seemed to need something, you know? Like the Las Vegas sign ones just needed that tiny dot of sparkle at the top of the Las Vegas sign that the icicle colored Stickles provided. I love Stickles more even than the other Tim Holtz products and I pretty much love them all. OK, his masks are too large scale for my projects. They'd work better on tote bags and shirts but I never seem to have enough space on my work table cleared off to do those!By the way, I got a great hole punch at the bead store that works fabulously well for punching holes in bottle caps so you can add the jump ring. I wish I had time to sit and solder all of the jump rings closed. Ha! I wish I had the soldering skills to do that neatly!

Making Trades for Art & Soul!

I made these a couple of weeks ago. Well, I started them. I just 'finished' them the other day while I was caught up in the fever of making trades for Art & Soul in Las Vegas.The Nest and bird stamps are from Red Lead Paperworks' domino stamps. Lately, I am just addicted to their stamps and email newsletters! I did these as a break from making these bottle cap charms. Flattening the caps wasn't as painful as I'd feared. I've got a couple of repetitive stress injuries from my addiction to FarmVille and Mafia Wars on Facebook, so I thought it would hurt. It took four whacks of a regular-sized builder's hammer on a piece of wood that I put over the cap that had the edges down on a steel bench block a friend made for me. The scary part was trying not to mash my fingers that were holding the piece of wood! Be sure the edges are against the steel if you try this. If they're against the wood, you'll have a blank bottle cap embedded in the wood!

I'd already 'customized' the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign for my page in the Fatbook, so making the centers was just a matter of making them smaller. I can't believe I didn't have a 1" circle punch. I had about 3 when I checked but none that were a 1" diameter. So that meant a trip to Michael's. I can never go to that store, get what I want and leave. No. It took two hours. Five minutes there, five minutes back, and close to two hours in the store! When I got home, I was too tuckered out to work on a project!

I HATE Blogger. It's acting up horribly and I think it just deleted two of my photos. :(