Just felt like painting some cherry blossoms this weekend so did so while watching anime with a fellow Etsian!
I like the blue sky effect but should have put dots or shadow leaves in the linen (brown) section. I probably should also have had less offshoot branches, but it was a larger canvas than the first Spring Cherry Blossoms so I wanted to give it more negative space.
Well, I actually did this a week ago, but I now have new product in my shop. Lately I’ve become obsessed with pillows. It started with needing to replace two of my own decorator pillows. Looking at what I wanted to do to replace those, I decided to go with a japanese motif. Then I thought about embroidering sakura (cherry blossoms) onto the fabric but knew it’d take me a long time to get the embroidery pattern completed so I decided to finally try fabric painting. The pillows turned out so well that I decided to make more!
From there, I thought of more designs, both painted and pieced, that I wanted to try, so played with different designs and fabrics before coming up with these:
These are brocade, satin and white velveteen and are very nice. I have more that I will be listing soon with other colors and designs. I’m really enjoying it. Who knew pillows could be so much fun! 
So I decided to try something different for me and following the suggestion from a friend on Facebook, I tried fabric painting. I think I’ve fallen in love with it! For my first project, I decided to paint my trademark cherry blossoms onto a couple of pillows. Pretty straightforward. But then I decided to make them patchwork, just like my paintings. I’m very happy with the results. The first pillow I made I put a gold and red braided trim on. It looks nice, but was a Pain to do.
The second pillow, I left the trim off and went for a plain knife-edged pillow. I like both of these pillows, but think I prefer the crisp, clean look of the knife-edged pillow. Next I’m going to work on making some pillows that don’t have the patchwork background!
A new, fun direction has been opened for me! Yay! Let me know which type of pillow you prefer: trimmed or not!
Today we’re going to look at the evolution of an idea as it proceeds from being a vaguely abstract thought to being a painting hanging on a wall. While the idea didn’t end up being completed quite as I originally envisioned it, I think seeing how it progressed may give some ideas on painting workflow to others.
It all started off with an idea I had while driving home from a doctor’s appointment last week. I was thinking about my usual painting subjects (landscapes and flowers) and was wondering which I wanted to do next. My cherry blossom paintings are my most popular, but after doing a few more during the week, I was tired of the home decor style painting and wanted to do something different. Unfortunately, I also knew that my skills had not progressed yet to be able to do a more realistic painting of them. Regardless, I knew I wanted to do something that evoked the light, gentle feeling of cherry blossoms. I also had this random thought of a young girl sitting on a swing, looking a little sad as the cherry blossoms danced around her, carried on the wind. The result was the sketch above. Read More
Another in-depth review for you today, or is it? Truth be told, the shop I’m reviewing today needs to do very little to improve, in my humble opinion. That shop, is Waterrose.
Right off the mark, I fell in love with the Waterrose banner. Very nice, appealing and shows the range of products without looking like an Etsy Mini. The shop announcement is short but inviting and the policies are in place on the profile page, which also adds warmth in it’s initial description of where the name of the shop comes from.
The item photography is nice and bright and shows off the cute little items very well. The colors are vivid, the backgrounds nice and basic so as not to clash with the items themselves, the descriptions are strong, and the shipping costs are reasonable. Truthfully, it’s hard to do an in-depth review/critique of this shop as I can’t find anything to really suggest for improvement! The ONLY suggestions I can come up with, and that’s after taking a break last night and looking at the shop again this morning, are firstly that the shop accepts money orders and checks so may want to add something into their policies to protect themselves regarding time for the payments to clear before shipping. Secondly, that the shop needs to fill those empty sections or remove them for now.
Truly, this is a very well-done shop and I enjoyed looking at it. Let’s see if anyone else can come up with some constructive commentary that i might have missed!
My rating: 5 out of 5 cherry blossoms!
At some point, I suspect everyone has heard the familiar idiom: ‘practice makes perfect.’ It’s a mantra thrown about frequently for anyone attempting to learn a new skill. Frankly, I think it’s a crock, and I’ll tell you why: if you ever think your work is perfect, then give up and go home as you’ll stop growing as an artisan or worse yet, become complacent and your quality will suffer while the world passes you by. Thus, I prefer the simple statement that practice brings improvement.
When I set about to begin painting again after not having touched them in twenty years, I knew my meager skills from high school had completely fallen aside and that I would have work to do to get even those back. When I left high school, my most accomplished piece of art was painting one of those little bears with hats that used to be in the art school ads in the TV Guide so I knew I had a lot of room to grow! Thus it was with a bit of hesitation that I invested the dollars needed to purchase my first supplies. Even harder was getting over the fear of how badly it might turn out and touching brush to canvas.
Choosing this week’s subject of review turned out to be more difficult than I had expected. Both shops have lots of appeal to me and I see areas for improvement in both. In the end, I decided to review Sweet Tea Company, but will also be reviewing Waterrose later this week! Having said that, let’s just jump in, shall we?
The first thing I noticed about Sweet Tea Company is the vibrancy of the shop. The banner is bright and engaging and the design elements are very pleasing and suit the shop theme. The slogan, ‘refreshing designs for cool people’ is catchy and memorable. So memorable that I could have sworn I had heard it before but some intense Googling didn’t turn anything up so it’s just THAT memorable!
Completed this morning and now listed in my fine art shop are these two 5″ x 7″ gallery-wrapped original canvas paintings of cherry blossoms. They are listed at $20 USD each, including free shipping to the U.S. and Canada as I received a very good deal on a number of these canvases so want to pass along the savings. It shouldn’t only be the wealthy who can afford nice decorative art for their homes and I think these will find very nice homes in someone’s kitchen, breakfast nook or even bathroom!
Looking at all of the wonderful sellers on Etsy, I often remember fondly some of the other crafts I’ve worked on in the past. While I’m not about to bore everyone by discussing them all here, one in particular stands out to me, simply because it shows how long I’ve been obsessed with cherry blossoms!
Keith’s Craftworks Products Circa 2006
As you can see, I used to be in the soap and lotion business under my second shop name, Keith’s Craftworks (Mindless Pursuits was just a personal blog back then). I was obsessed with differing scents and loved making everything from lotions to shampoos to body washes. Experimenting with scents was a lot of fun, but what I enjoyed most was playing around with packaging design. Considering I have a background in graphic design/publishing and am an artist, this should be of no surprise to anyone!
My favorite scent, however as well as my favorite package, was the ‘Cherry Blossom Festival’ line.It smelled wonderful and I loved the stock photography that I found to use as the background. I still use that background on my PC today as an occasional wallpaper! I’m currently working on making a cherry blossom logo to be my brand, but we’ll talk about that in a future post. For now, I just thought some might find a quick glimpse of my crafting past to be of interest!
Have you ever been looking at craft sites and come across a shop that was just filled with such potentially cute stuff but in the end you just couldn’t bring yourself to make a purchase? Sadly, there are a lot of sites out there that could do so much better in sales if only they took the same time that they use to make their creations so well and put it into their shops. I suffer from this as well and so in looking to write this review, a lot of what I am going to discuss applies to my shops as well. So let’s move on to the subject of today’s review: Bugs in Rugs on Etsy.com.
