Trying to commit to blogging, again...

So, clearly I didn't manage the two posts a week I talked about in my last post. Oops. That's okay, I'll just try again.

Plan going forward:  a post on Saturday, about crafting stuff. A post on Wednesday-ish about other stuff. 

So, today is a post about crafting stuff. I've made a bunch of paper flowers out of coffee filters dyed with watered down acrylic paint, just because I felt like it, and turned some of them into this colorful garland for my fireplace (I should have spaced those middle two flowers differently):

Bright, colorful coffee filter flowers

These were really simple -- I started out cutting the edges of the coffee filters into scallops to be more petal like, but then did a bunch of them without doing that, and from a distance, it doesn't make a huge difference either way. I do wish I'd darkened the edges with paint or ink for some contrast. I just stapled probably 10 filters together, then bunched up each filter individually into the middle, and then sort of fluffed them out. The garland is made up of pairs of those glued back to back with bakers twine in the middle of them. Super easy.

I carved a new stamp:

Heart border stamp

Carving stamps is something I can do when I need to be at the computer, but am not actually captioning programs -- like in the time when I'm waiting for a show to start. It's easy to just stop when I need to start captioning, I don't feel like I'm losing my place or anything, I can just pick back up the next time I have a break.

And I've been adding things to the Zazzle store I started. Zazzle is a print on demand (POD) site -- there are quite a few out there, Society6 and Cafe Press are two others you may have heard of. I uploaded some art to Zazzle and to Society6 just to see how they work, and I've already sold some things from Zazzle. It's not going to make me rich, but if it brings in a little extra money, that would be nice. It's harder than it used to be for me to get overtime at my real job, so I'd be really happy if I can find some ways to have some extra spending money, especially if I can earn it doing things I like to do and would probably do anyway, and that's basically what this is -- the types of stuff I'm uploading is stuff I would have done anyway, now I just go a bit further with it, scanning it into the computer, cleaning it up in Photoshop some, and then uploading it to Zazzle and putting it on different products. Some of the items available are:

Wrapping paper

Pillows

Bags

And tons of others too -- some of them don't work so well with this kind of art work, but I hope to continue adding more options and more designs over time.