A Post With No Name

This week is my midterm exam week in every subject except for German... I'm taking a break from blogging, crafting, and drawing to focus on school.

And every moment that I'm not studying I'm going to be working on Ink and Fairydust.

I hope you'll forgive my absence from the blogging world this week! I do have some pretty cool art projects that I'm partially through, and I can't wait to finish them and share them with you!

Before I leave you to go drown in textbooks I just wanted to share this picture from my bedroom. Because everyone has a book clock, porquipine quills, green wrought iron, and a cloche hat sitting ontop of their dresser. At least this is better than a post with no picture!

Ad Space

(if you are getting to this page from my sidebar button, I plan on writing up a new ad space page soon, as some of this info is outdated. -Shaylynn 01/02/13)

I am pleased to start offering affordable advertising space here on the Faerie Blog!

I love to help support small businesses, artists, crafters, bloggers, etc. :)

 The first few advertisers can get a special price of $5 for two months. The ads should be 125X125 pixels. Just email me at shealynnsfaerieshoppe@gmail.com! My preferred payment method is paypal but I'll give you more details via email.

 Each month I will do a post featuring the sponsors.

I mostly blog about art, crafts, fantasy, tutorials, geekiness, jewelry, and whatever else strikes my fancy. (Mostly art and crafts, though.)

Please note that not all products or services are applicable or appropriate for the my blog and I reserve the right to decline anyone this service.

I've been pondering this decision for a while. Some of you may have noticed the ads that ran on my sidebar for the last month. Those were the sponsors from my big giveaway extravaganza. You can see them all at the bottom of this post.

The truth is, I spend a couple hours (several hours... too many hours) each week working on new craft projects, taking photos, editing photos, writing, networking, and more for this blog. I've made a bit of income with my Shoppe, but honestly I keep things at such decent prices there that I've never been able to "pay for" any of the time that I spend doing all this stuff. :) 

Additionally, and most importantly, I just discovered that I've used up almost all my free image hosting space. This means that I'm going to have to start paying out of pocket to bring you all the tutorials, crafts, artwork, etc, that I regularly blog about. I'm a teenager who doesn't have a job (yet) and simply can't justify spending my money on that. And so...

Since my blog has gotten quite big (by my standards at least!) over the past few months, I feel that I am finally in a position to offer advertising space!

I've been looking around at other bloggers, and many who have much smaller bases than mine are charging much more for advertising. I'm going to be upping the price to a more common $5/month or maybe $10/month soon, so the special price I mentioned above is a special price.

And now for some stats:

Last month I had just shy of 21,000 pageviews.

Currently I have 279 Blogger followers.

302 people who follow via Feedburner.

334 Facebook followers.

I'm also willing to host giveaways if anyone is interested. I'm going to keep it at a maximum of 2 giveaways a month, though.

And since I seem to always be pressed for time, I'd love it if anyone wants to do a guest post. :) I've had a few guest bloggers in the past, check them out here. (You don't have to have a blog of your own to guest blog). Just shoot me an email with your idea to shealynnsfaerieshoppe {at} gmail.com. I don't bite and will probably say yes.

If you would like to do an advertisement exchange, I'd be open to that... if your blog is about the same size as mine it would be beneficial to both of us.

DIY Paintbrush Case

I like to have a sturdy case for toting paintbrushes around, and the pencil bag that bent the bristles just wasn't cutting it. However, we had a few of these very boring school watercolor sets hanging around. The paints were horribly mixed up thanks to my four year old brother who likes to paint "dragons and knights" that look like (very messy) splotches of brown.

I decided to recycle them into something cute and useful! I made a tutorial for you!

YOU WILL NEED

-an old plastic watercolor box

-scrapbook paper

-stickers or other decorations

-mod podge or other decopauge/waterproof glue

Start by tracing the shape of the raised parts of the plastic box. The top oval shape is raised, so I placed the scrapbook paper ontop of it and pressed down with a knitting needle to get the shape. Then I cut it out.

The bottom of the box is easier, just set the paper ontop of it and rub your finger along the raised lines to trace your shape.

Modpodge the paper onto the box! Use a medium layer of glue and let it dry. While it's drying, attach any stickers or other decoration to the paper. If you use too much glue, bubbles will form under the paper.

Once the inital layer is dry, paint over the paper with a new layer of glue. Make sure that it is thin enough that it doesn't bubble. Wait 10 minutes and apply another coat. If you plan on having your paintbrushes around water (and who doesn't?) you want the paper to be waterproofed.

I made the first box months ago, and you can see that it has served as an emergency mixing palatte a few times. :)

The boxes hold all my paintbrushes except for the three big thick ones.

Here's a sneak peek at my painting tools. The left box has my old brushes that I got when I was 10-14 or so. I've worn them to death and most of them are pretty much useless. But good paintbrushes are so expensive that I keep using them anyway. :P The right box has my new fancy brushes. They're gifts from my parents and art teacher and they are my go-to for nice paintings.

If you use this tutorial to make your own paintbrush case, please leave a comment! I'd love to see it. :)

Ink and Fairydust Website

Please go visit the new and improved Ink and Fairydust website! I completely redid the design from scratch! It's far from perfect and will be seeing many more changes in the near future, but don't you think it's an improvement?

There were a couple of points where I felt like chucking things at the computer and giving up entirely... *grumbles about how unintuitive HTML and CSS are*  I talk to inanimate objects when they are being rude and objectional and uncooperative, and I'd imagine that anyone walking into the computer room would think I'd gone crazy.

www.inkandfairydust.com

Many thanks to Veraprise Inc/Chesterton Press for hosting our website, and to Mr. Andrew for helping me through a caching problem!

A Very Wordy Heart

Happy Valentine's day, dear blog readers!

(A day late because I was hard at work on school and non-computer, non-crafty things yesterday. And having a lovely talk with a friend in which we discussed accents and other brilliantly absurd things.)

I'm so grateful to you for reading my blog. I do a lot of rambling here on my blog, and it's nice to know that other people are crazy and awesome and artsy, too!

Thank you so much for all the encouraging comments you leave and for being so wonderful!

And this is my attempt at making a little Valentine for you..

DIY Book Page Bow { Tutorial }

 I did not come up with this idea. I'd like to thank How About Orange, for sharing the tutorial for making a bow out of an old magazine. All I did was apply this concept to the whole I-love-cutting-up-old-unloved-books thing that I'm obsessed with. :)

You Will Need

an old destroyable book

scissors

tape

staples or glue dots

Use glue dots or staples.

A beautiful, DIY book page paper bow! It is a lot of work, and it's not the best idea for quickly decorating the whole batch of presents under the Christmas tree, but this would be the perfect, unique touch on a special gift for a friend.

This was my first bow; it's not perfect. But it's cute. I made this back in December but the photos got buried and I forgot to post it.

You can see this DIY gift bow on the bookish Christmas tree that I made into a "Christmas card" for my blog:

The Birth of the Phoenix

A few weeks ago, I decided to participate in a homeschool art show. I was just going to enter some of my graphite drawings, but then (me being me, which means I have no idea why I was this insane) I decided to do a new peice to enter. Something a little different. Something outside of my comfort zone.

I decided to do it a week before the deadline. (I did mention my insanity, right?)

Some of you may remember my little drawing of a phoenix. This post has pictures and an explanation of my fascination with this legendary creature. I decided to base my project off of that paint-sketch, except I would make the phoenix a baby one since it doesn't make sense for a grown-up phoenix to be rising from its ashes.

The first two days were spent planning (and researching! I wanted to base the drawing off of illuminated manuscripts-- think the Book of Kells-- but I wound up making the drawing in a wildly different style.) Then the sketching and inking.

I always like looking at "behind the scenes" shots of other artist's work to get a feel for the way they go about their techniques. So I took pictures of mine. Not that anyone can learn much from them; I seriously just winged the whole drawing, and the watercolors in particular. I've been working with watercolors sporodically for less than a year.

I'm honestly quite proud of the little knotted phoniexes in the corners. This is a place where I put my research to good use! This is a "zoomorphic" knot, based on the animal-like interlacing done by the Vikings and by the early monks in the British Isles. I found a couple pictures of zoomorphic peacocks from the 9th century that I studied to see what was characteristic of this kind of design. There is a surprising dearth of images from manuscripts on Google...

I spent every ounce of my freetime that week working on this picture. And some. I stayed up past my bedtime and was cranky in the morning (nobody likes being around an obsessed artist...).

Inking a drawing using calligraphy pens and an inkwell is surprisingly calming.

Working with watercolors is also calming! (This comes as a surprise to me, after months of rebel watercolors dancing around in my palette and screaming, "We hate you! We won't do what you want! We won't cooperate! We're eeeeeevil!").

Well, I'll retract my statement. The watercolors got really opaque and covered up my pen lines, so I had to trace over the entire finished picture with more ink. Also, my Bristol board buckled really badly. Thankfully I was able to save the paper by dampening the back and putting it under 50 million textbooks (rinse and repeat. It took me three nights to mostly-flatten the paper).

I can truthfully say that this is the most detailed drawing that I have done in a long time (possibly ever!). It is certainly the most wildly-colored ever, unless you count my grade school notebooks full of rainbows.

I'm fond of taking little abstract looking photos of detailing.

Anyways, that's what I've been working on lately! I wound up finishing the project in time and got a pretty red ribbon! The first place winner's piece was an astounding graphite drawing. Now I'm going to be obsessed with graphite... I want to learn to be that good.

Remember

Remember how I said that I might just make some red and pink and heart jewelry in time for Valentine's day?

I actually did!

And I discovered some new wirewrapping techniques, too. The first three pages of the Shoppe are all new items. I'm sorry for two "hey, look at all my jewelry!" posts in one week, but I'm fairly proud of some of these new designs!

I'm also offering free shipping until Feb. 14th. Order today to get guarenteed arrival before or on Valentine's day! (After today the only way you can be sure that it will arrive in time is to pay extra for Priority mail-- the free shipping applies to USPS first class only.) Use the code  HAPPYSTVALENTINESDAY22012 at checkout.

P.S. I'm disabling Anonymous comments. I've been getting a ton of spammy comments and it's just too much headache to delete them.

OK, so I am majorly proud of this one. It's definately the hardest wirewrapping I've done yet-- and believe it or not, attaching the freshwater pearls was even harder than connecting all the copper components. It's just that there are so many beads in such a small place that my plier's didn't want to squeeze in there.

Ah, so you noticed that this one isn't Valentine's themed? *grumbles* Why did you have to notice?

This is another wirerwrapped pendant... and I am, again, SO EXCITED THAT IT WORKED AND NOW I KNOW HOW TO DO THIS FANCY SINUSOIDAL/ELVEN/ART-NOUVEAU WIREWRAPPING TECHNIQUE! *bounces off walls*

I'm calling this one Imladris after the Sindarian name for Rivendell. (Sindarian in the colloquial Elven language. And if you have to ask what I am talking about... you shouldn't be reading this blog. You should be grabbing a copy of the Lord of the Rings and reading it voraciously).

Anyways, I am typing this up in my few moments before the school day, so I don't have time to write fun little stories about each of these peices. Enjoy, and click the photos to see more pictures of each piece.