Finished ACEO & We Have a Winner

The collaborative ACEO is done! I personally love the way that it turned out and I really love that we created it together. Thanks so much to everyone that participated! I had a lot of fun and I am sure I would not have created this exact piece without your input. Well, enough with the pleasantries, I'm sure you all are waiting for the winner! I did the old folded pieces of paper random drawing and the winner is:

















In case you can't read my handwriting, Aurora won the finished ACEO! Thanks again to everyone that participated. If you also created something that was inspired by this project, please don't forget to contact me and I will post it here along with a description and links to your blog or shop! We'll have to do this again soon, so make sure to check back!

Quick Sneak Peak ACEO Collaboration

Here's a little sneak peek to hold you over until the finished piece is unveiled and the winner is announced. It's cooking away as I type. If you haven't already done so, leave a comment to be entered to win the finished original ACEO. If you haven't been following along, read this post to get the background of this project.

Inspired by Love and a PCAGOE Challenge

It's PCAGOE challenge time again and in honor of this month's theme was "Love". There are a lot of places I could have taken this challenge. These are a few of the words that floated around in my head while I was brainstorming; love lost, true love, unloved, passion, motherly love, kissing, elation, forever, commitment.... I have been planning to do some wall pieces for a while and decided that this challenge would give me the motivation I needed to get it done. I had a tree in mind (Yes, I do have a tree fetish) for my first piece and already had it sketched out in one of my sketchbooks. I then was inspired by my new XOXO design and decided to make the tree's "foliage" a bunch of hugs and kisses. For some reason I have been inspired to use mostly black white and red with my XOXO design, so I decided to stay with that color scheme. I plan to make the circles painted on the canvas a common thread throughout my canvas series, but for this piece they symbolize the cycle of giving and receiving love. The story behind the tree is that it has a lot of love to give (represented by the hugs & kisses) and is just waiting for someone to share it's love. I think most everyone has felt this way at one time in their life. Just bursting with love and wanting someone to give it to. I added the "Love Me" circle to emphasize that it wants and needs love in return!


We had 43 entries into the challenge this month, and seeing all the different interpretations of love was really inspiring. There was puppy love, the feeling of bubbles in your stomach when you are in love, mothers love, romance, passion, hearts, heat, summer love and even love potion. Make sure you get over to PCAGOE.com to check them all out and of course vote for your favorite to be entered to win a fun polymer clay prize pack! Here's a sneak peak of this month's entries. You can see each one of them up close here.






















Take a little time this week to create something inspired by love or make something for someone that you love. Use some of the words and themes used by the PCAGOE entries as a jumping off point and don't forget to vote!!

A Charmed Life

Have you ever wondered about the lives of trees? Well I have. If you have ever looked at my Etsy shop, you would see I have a bit of a tree fixation. Think about it. As a seed you get to fly through the air, once you find the perfect piece of real estate (no closing costs) you set down your roots and start your upward climb. You get to sleep through the winter and wake to spring where you can show off your new spring colors. Your friends are birds, squirrels, butterflies and bees. A charmed life indeed.

Well I decided to create a little wall art homage to the charmed life of a tree. The PCAGOE (Polymer Clay Artists Guild of Etsy) has a monthly challenge and this month was a mixed media challenge, so it was the perfect time to bring my little tree to life. I have had the idea of this tree in my head for a while. I love to recycle boxes into shadow boxes (great for the trees), so that's where I started. I thought using the recycled boxes was also a little statement about recycling and saving trees which only added to the theme. I wanted the tree to be coming out of the box portion of the shadow box with it's roots and branches reaching out. The tree ended up a bit bigger than I planned with only it's trunk sitting in the box, but I still like how it turned out. I added the charms to represent the creatures that live in the trees as well as the leaves and blossoms. The charms are twofold in that they are in fact charms which is clever with the title of the piece, but also that each one represents something special to the tree. I used the vintage sheet music as a background to represent the sweet music of the birds that the trees wake to each morning and since the tree lives a charmed life, the sky is blue and the grass is forever green.

A second meaning to this piece is about gratitude. As with most people, I tend to forget all the blessings that I have in life and only focus on the things that go wrong. A tree doesn't do this. It keeps reaching toward the sky no matter what happens to it. Have you ever seen trees who are curled or bent because of a strangling vine or another obstruction? They persevere despite the set backs and obstacles. So the tree is a reminder that no matter what our struggles, we too live a charmed life.

I love the way the piece turned out and I won't be adding it my Etsy shop. It will have a home in my kitchen where I can see it everyday and be reminded that I too live a charmed life.