Lately, I've been doing some "Fall" cleaning and I haven't really been interested in doing anything crafty. I guess after seeing all the UFO's I have and the stuff I've bought to do something with and then never did anything with them, must have had an influence on that. I do have a couple of new interests, though.
One is flower ink pens. That's ink pens that have a pretty silk flower on top. I just started seeing these in the last couple of months at different stores and workshops that I've been to. It's a small thing, but it makes me happy to work my crossword puzzles, write in my journal, and do the writing I do at work with a pretty ink pen. It's a good way to dress up those boring old black pens that you have at work and at home. A new Joann's opened up last week near where I live, and when I went for the first time they had a table set up for customers to sign up for prizes. They were using these cute pens and I asked one of the sales associates about them. She said they made them using silk flowers and floral tape. What you do is you go and buy some ink pens that have the removable top (not the kind that click), buy some inexpensive silk flowers, and some tape to attach the flower to the pen. I will say that I tried the floral tape and I didn't like it. It was too sticky and didn't seem like it would hold very well. I guess floral tape was suggested because it was green and would look like a flower stem. I had seen some made here at work using just black electrical tape and it looks fine. It does a much better job and it accomplished what I wanted so I decided to use that. I also read that some folks used colored duct tape. That would work too, I guess, if you can find colored duct tape. I try to find supplies that are easy to find. I hate having to order supplies online and pay shipping. I want something that easy to find in the stores. I made several of these pens for work and home. If you decide to do this, I'll warn you, they don't take many supplies, they are a snap to make and are
very addicting.
You need some silk flowers (Walmart or Dollar Store), floral tape or electrical tape (also Walmart) and some ink pens with the removable top (Walmart).
Here are the ones I made. They look really pretty in a coffee cup when you are not using them.
The other thing that has recently rekindled my interest is art that depicts women. When I was a little girl, my dad taught me how to draw a woman's body and head, etc. Now that I'm an adult, I've used that to draw a few women in various dresses, gowns, etc. I recently found an Etsy store that has some beautiful paintings of women on pillows, eyeglass cases, tote bags, and more. I am so inspired by this artist. The Etsy store is
here. There is also another Etsy store that my good friend, Linda has where she has her Girlfriend Art for sale. I am very inspired by this artist as well. Her Etsy store is
here. I want to take some ideas from both of these artists, plus my own experience and see if I can create some art featuring women.
My photography class ended a couple of weeks ago. I'm glad I took it, but I was a little disappointed. It was a condensed version of the class. In other words, we combined a whole semester into about 4 weeks. I was hoping that we would do more projects with maybe field trips and stuff like that, but all we did was bring in photos that we had made and looked at them and critiqued each other's work. The class didn't really tell me how to use my camera to make better pictures. I guess I was just hoping for more. The good news is that my new Canon DSLR camera is working now and I love it. You can see some of the photos I've taken with it if you go to my Photography blog
here. I am very inexperienced at this, but I have really enjoyed taking photos and plan on taking some more soon. I hope to get some photos of the leaves turning in our area soon.
