Emily's Day Out - SOLD!

Yay, i added my first item to my website today!

Meet Emily -

At one time, Emily was a lonely little doll, found abandoned in a thrift store. After rescuing her, Emily was brought home and given a makeover. Her new look consists of new hair, new makeup and beautiful new skirt made of vintage lace and an antique button. Her torso was beaded with lovely teal colored amazonite rondelle beads. From clasp to the bottom of Emily's faux torquoise dangle bead, she measures 14". Her chain consists of various deconstructed sterling chain, vintage pearl links and one handmade cacoon bead, layered with vintage ribbon, blue tone seed beads and wrapped in sterling silver wire. Emily is a one of a kind necklace. She has been signed and dated on the back. Emily will be carefully wrapped and shipped first class in a padded envelope. check her out at http://www.lemoncholys.com/

Emily is SOLD!

Marie Antoinette doll

i created this Marie Antoinette doll using techniques i learned from Joanna of Moss Hill Studio's online art doll class.

she is for sale, so if interested, you can email me at keeshagirl4@aol.com. i accept paypal, MC and visa.

update: she is SOLD.

altars and Memory Mondays

i was blog hopping the other day and ended up reading around Cathleen's blog, Urban Rosary and her topic was about altars. she showed some great pictures of altars belonging to her Aunt Vicky and another family friend. So as i was looking at, i realized, that i had an altar of my own of religious statues, but really hadn't realize i was building an altar. I was not raised Catholic and do not know alot about these statues, and like Cathleen, i find them mysterious, interesting and beautiful all at the same time, so i started collecting them as i came across them at flea markets. my interest in them isn't necessarily religious, but more spiritual in nature.

in an way though, even if you aren't using these type of religious statues, i think also, the little "vinettes" that we create are types of altars. Altars of comfort i'd like to think. they are usually pretty little things that bring us joy. we like to photograph them and share them on our blogs. so what kind of altars have you created?

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Well it's about time! i'm finally getting back to Memory Monday's - boy that was a long hiatus, wasn't it? i 'm not sure if we will be doing it every Monday, but more likely one random Monday every month (so i don't run out of topics!). feel free to add this little widget to your blog if you'd like to particpate in Memory Monday's. what it was - was i would post a topic and TRY to find a picture to relate to it (not required though, as some of you don't have access to your old pictures, scanners, or whatever!) then i would share my memory and so would you! all you need to do after reading my memory is to leave a comment so that anyone participating can go read your memory. some of my friends without blogs were leaving their memories in the comment section and that is fine too! i hope you'll play along - winter is dull, boring and blah and this would be a fun way to connect as we hibernate! it is also really fun reading the different stories about our childhood memories. so look for a post tomorrow on the topic of "a childhood memory related to snow"

recycling Christmas and greeting cards

i wanted to mention a place in Nevada, called St. Jude's ranch for Children . St. Jude's Ranch for Children has a 40 year history of healing and caring for abused, abandoned and neglected children. what they do is take used Christmas and greeting cards and turn them into new cards.

Currently they are accepting used, all-occasion greeting cards from November 15, 2008 thru February 28, 2009. You can mail your donations to:

St. Jude's Ranch for Children
Card Recycling Program
100 St. Jude's Street
Boulder City, NV 89005

take a look at their website to learn more about how the program works.

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a few of my new years goals have been to get new stuff added into my etsy shoppe ( i have so much stuff to add) - but i just hate the process of doing this on etsy (have i brought this up before?) it is so time consuming and takes a ridiculous amount of steps. (yes, i have definitely mentioned this before....) my other goal is to finish the tutorials and get my website going so that i no longer have to load all this stuff into etsy. with that said, i'm adding a few things in there tonight, such as this box: ( notice the tiny little shells that are sewed into the tulle.)

my friend, Z, got her Christmas present today. I was going to make her put it under the tree, but she sounded so excited that i told her to go ahead and open it. this is what i made for her. i think she was quite happy!

blog giveaway

well, i 've been quiet for a few days and that usually means that either i'm not feeling well or Tucker isn't feeling well. well, Tucker, it turned out, has bronchitis. wednesday night he was up til 5am coughing, coughing and coughing. i stayed up with him, suctioning, singing to him, talking to him, keep him company, etc. and then i spent the next few days trying to recover! we took him to the doctor on friday and she started him on an antibotic. i swear a few hours after the first dose, he was already sounding better. Friday i ended up sleeping in until 11:00am, something that rarely ever happens. i'm just not one to sleep in. i have some many things i want to get done on a daily basis and usually sleeping isn't one of them! but i was exhausted, had a horrible headache and needed to rest. so rest i did. i'm still a bit tired, but getting there!

my project for the last few days was working on a wreath. i decided i wanted to make a wreath using vintage ornaments. i've been collecting these for awhile, so i had plenty on hand. i started it last night and got about 1/2 done before i ran out of glue stix. stopped at Michale's this morning to restock my stix and back to work (why is that they only had 1 cashier on a saturday morning, a few days before Christmas and with a line 12 people deep? ugh!)

i made my first wreath when i was in college and had gone home for Christmas break (that was also the time i made all these adorable "gingerbread people" ornaments out of felt. ) my mom was making them and she showed me how. we would go deep into their property (she was living in Greensboro, NC at the time) and we would look for grapevine. then we would wrap it in a circle and begin the decorating. we used a glue gun and whatever supplies she had on hand (i really don't remember what it looked like!) i just fondly remember the time. so now that my wreath is completed, i thought it'd be fun to guess how many ornaments it took to fill in this wreath? whoever comes comes the closest will win a prize (a prize i am still determining)

i'm bummed

Well i got the phone call today from the data recovery service. I had sent them my external hard drive that houses all my pictures as it wasn't working ever since i accidently dropped it on the ground. he told me that my photos were not recoverable as some thingy-ma-gig suffered a traumatic blow when it fell. BUMMER! so here's some advice to you - make sure you back up your photos! i have many photos stored on flickr and there are many pics on my blog, but still there are so many that are just gone. so that' s my news.

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also, here's a holiday tip i thought i'd share with you. a few years ago, i started saving some of the tags that my mom uses when she wraps my holiday gifts. she usually has them all done up in lots of ribbon that she has curled. i save them and hang them on the tree. i wanted to do this because as my parents get older, i realize how fast time is going by and i like the thought of her writing out that tag for me as she wrapped my gift and i know she put a lot of love into it. i like seeing her handwriting as it is such a reflection of her. my dad doesn't wrap gifts, but i've been saving his letters and cards for the same reason, to have his handwriting and pieces of him.

i had several requests (thank you for the interest!) to see my resin pendants individually to get a better idea of what they look like, so here they are. i've been adding them into my shoppe today (still have a few more to go, but working on it).

this pendant, featuring "the girl with the pearl earring" says on the left side "after much thought, i've decided not to do the laundry today" - SOLD!

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this one is SOLD, but i will be making more featuring her, as she is very popular.

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still available

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still available

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still available

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SOLD!

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still available

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vinette by the front door

here's a little vinette i created and it is really easy to do, so if you feel inspired to create your own, it took me about 15 minutes. of course, i have the resources in my own backyard to go cut holly, berries, pinecones and evergreens. we took the dogs and made a little trip to the back field and snip these items, collected pine cones, yelled at Gracie for running off, oh and looked for birds nests. we found one which jeff wrangled out of some sticker burrs and then i took all the findings and starting laying them out around this old farm table (bought for $5 years ago!). the wreath you see in the back of the picture, we got at the flea market this morning and the same with the rusty old truck (which had been in a fire). i fell i love with the truck the second i saw it. it reminded me of jeff telling me how when he was little, he use to bury his toys in his backyard. so i told him, we are going to tell people that you buried this truck when you were little and we recently dug it up! in the first picture, you can see the darling little bird nest in the cab of the truck. in the second picture, i decided to add some vintage ornaments also purchased at the flea market this morning.

don't have these kind of items? well, let's get creative and see what else you have to substitute!

here's a picture of sweet Kirby on our walk today. she was very helpful.

My friend, Abbie, created my new avatar, featuring one of my icons. isn't it great? i just love having a handy computer friends!

my baby loves her jewelry

new spoon jewelry (and a fork too!) to be added into my etsy shoppe within the next few days.

1000markets.com

Have you heard of 1000markets yet? it is the same concept as etsy; but i have to tell it is so much user friendly than etsy.it also allows you to have a blog and is a social network at the same time (meaning my friends can leave me comments on my home page and communicate with me from inside the network. here is my banner for my new 1000markets shoppe which can be found at http://www.lemoncholys.1000markets.com/. keep in mind they are brand new, but i found the whole presentation more upscale and less busy than etsy. take a peek when you have a minute. Also, i'm in the process of working on a website, which is a bit daunting, but exciting at the same time. there isn't anything in it yet, but you can go see it at http://www.lemoncholys.com/