ACEO Bounty Challenge Going on Now in Etsy Forums!

One of our ingenious and talented Etsy artists, Bellsakabin, has put her heart and soul into a fabulous promotion for ACEO artists. It's called the ACEO Bounty challenge, and it's going on now! Hop on over to the thread now and read the details. Here's the link:

http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5566696

There are 62 artists participating and one lucky poster is going to score a collection of fabulous ACEOs!

This angel came about as a result of a challenge I accepted to create a traditional angel with a floral halo and rainbow-colored wings.

Pieces of April!

My family refers to April as "The Birthday Month", because we celebrate three birthdays in April! My sister, her son, and my youngest son were all born in April. We never miss an opportunity to party, and the birthday month gives us lots of reasons to get together and celebrate! My youngest will be 20 years old on the 21st, officially ending my teenager-raising career. I have always made a concerted effort to cherish every phase of my children's lives, but I must admit feeling a little sentimental about this milestone.

UFO Challenge! (and another Learning Stretch!)

In this case, UFO doesn't stand for "Unidentified Flying Object"! Instead, this time it means "Unfinished Object". I was a participant in a thread discussion and it seems that all of us had unfinished ACEOs laying around. Some were duds, and some were just those cards that fail to inspire us to completion. Nobody wanted to throw them out, but just didn't know what to do with them. So, we decided to send our UFOs out to each other to see what someone else could come up with! I received some lovely little UFOs from Linda at http://ldphotography.etsy.com
I did not take "before" photos, so I'll just try to explain what I did with each of these.
Linda sent this beautiful blue card with a background of blues, greens, and yellows. She also sent a card with a stamped and embossed image of Glinda the Good Witch of the North from the movie, The Wizard of Oz. I cut Glinda out and affixed her to this card, then embellished her dress with tiny pearlized beads. Her wand and crown are silver bugle beads. I added the Emerald City, the rainbow, and the Yellow Brick Road, all embellished with bugle beads. Down in the left corner, you can see that you just missed Dorothy! All that is visible is her red, ruby slipper. If you are familiar with the musical, "Wicked", you will recognize the quote, "That's right! Just follow that one road the whole time!". The card is framed with colorful fibers.
I've never done anything with mixed media collage before, and had so much fun with all these tiny little pieces.


This next card was already beautiful, so I had a hard time trying to figure out how to do anything to it without messing it up! I have been intrigued for a while with Ultra Thick Embossing Powder (also called UTEE), so I thought I might try to make a resin finish for this card. As I said before, this card was already very nice, so I just added a few items to transform this travel card to a "travel to Paris" card, then sprinkled the card with the UTEE. I tried using a heat gun to melt the embossing powder, but cannot for the life of me figure out how to do this without having powder blowing all over the place!! I ended up sprinkling the powder, then melting it in my oven. This card has 3 coats of UTEE, plus a sprinkling of gold pigment ink for a little bit of glitz. The back is messy (so sorry, Linda!), because the resin ran under the card. But, the front of the finished product is nice and glossy, with a thick layer of resin. This was an interesting project for me, and I'm looking forward to hearing from someone with words of wisdom on how to manage that heating gun more efficiently!
This last card began with an adorable little stamp of an angel with a cherub on her back. When I saw this, I immediately thought this must be the best kind of transportation in heaven! I kept this one a little more simple. The card is a drawing (with permanent markers) of a beautiful day in heaven.

This project was so much fun! Let's do it again!! Linda, I thank you for entrusting your treasures to me! I would be honored to send them back to you if you want them.