My buddy, Beth (http://bethleintz.typepad.com/gathering_dust/), the Ebay guru, came by today and helped me start listing on Ebay!!! She patiently walked me through each step and gave me advice for a couple of hours. (did I tell you she was a very good friend?) Since I closed my showroom in June, I have been telling people I was going to start selling on Ebay, but just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.  At first, I was "taking the summer off."  Well, honey, summer is long gone and I just might have stretched my vacation to the breaking point.  Time to get back to work!

Here is one of my listings, it is a Fairy Cottage.  I am trying to do a variety of items, jewelry, fairy homes, fairies, artist trading cards. I will have cottage style antiques, garden signs, paintings, and other goodies coming up. Wish me luck!

Beth even showed me how to put a link from this blog to the Ebay sales and visa-versa.  Take a look if you’d like to, by clicking on the link in the top right column of this site.

After we listed things, we sat and played with papers.  She was making tags with cool old dress patterns, I was making artist trading cards with some of the vintage paper items I had added hand painted fairy wings too.  Here is one, titled: Delight of Earth. 

On my junking day last week with friends, I found sepia photos for 50 cents each, so bought a dozen of the cutest for projects.  This little girl was already as cute as she could be, but with that elfish smile, I thought she should be a fairy.  I liked her so much, I painted all of the "new" old photos into fairies. 

How To Hints: I used acrylic craft paint, glitter glue, gold pulver, chalk, and distress ink with artist paint brushes and cosmetic sponges

Ink and chalk are great for tinting in areas where you want to see through to the original picture, such as I did on the hair, stockings, and pants.

Craft paint is opaque, but doesn’t tend to want to stick.  Build up layers slowly on the large painted areas like the wings.  I used a cream color (never pure white, it is too  much of a contrast against the sepia) and painted the wing shapes, then did about 4 coats of the cream letting it dry in between.

Once I had a base ready for the wings, I used pink and yellow to color them in and outlined them in brown/black together with a fine brush. 

The flowered and stripe shirt and antennas were done without having to build up like the wings.  I used acrylics again and just made dots and lines.  No base coats were necessary since it was only simple strokes and was just gone over once. 

Buttons are dots of glitter glue with gold pulver sprinkled on to the wet glue.

More Sugarwings- Little Leandra has such a sweet little fairy face, no wonder I can’t stop making spritely pictures of her.  I am keeping an artist journal/photo album of my fairy grandbaby and today I made these 2 collages of her.

I used a blue paper background with a border of vines cut out of the newspaper this weekend. With colored markers, I tinted the border and then added floral stickers, rhinestones and glitter.

Lee Lee’s cut out photo was tucked into  the edge of the vine border and I added butterfly wings from a vintage booklet that has been a wonderful fairy wing source for me.  The wings got a bit of tinting from the markers I used on the background, then were sparkled up.  I added a few more flowers from a page of vintage die cuts and then drew antennas and added some flower stickers to make a wreath on her head.  Of course, those flowers got a hint of glitter too.

And when is one of anything enough?  A photo of her in a more mellow mood got a pastel rose background, wings cut out of handmade paper and thoroughly glittered.  A store bought sticker border was enhanced with more and more glitter, then a swag of pink netting across the top and a sequin row across the bottom.  Her shining crown is cut out of the sticker paper I used for the border, then treated to gold, glitter, sequins, and rhinestones.  "Sugar Wings" (her nickname) is written in gold paint pen and outlined in black sharpie. 

Both of these pages in my album are a mix of vintage, sparkles, and hobby store bits and pieces.  As nice as it would be to make everything from pure vintage goods, there is so much great stuff out there and available to use, I just have to indulge and fill my cart when Michaels or Hobby Lobby has 1/2 price scrap booking sales!

In a completely different vein, here is what I did yesterday.  My sister-in-law invited me over to her home to play decorator.  She had repainted her living room/dining room and had every knick knack and picture piled up in the middle of the room. Our game for the afternoon was to rearrange them all and come up with fun ideas for display.  Here is one, it is an old, glassless, window frame.  We hung it behind the sofa, tacked up a doily in it,  and hung two prints she had found on clearance for $2 each.