Playing with birds and a stinky dog

Good Sunday! First of all thank you for 20'000 page views!! I feel so flattered! :)

This morning Abby came back inside all stinky. She perfumed herself with fox dung and felt oh so good. Yuck! Hello spring... :)

I still can't do much today but in a pain-free minute I managed it to take some pictures of the tags I did last week. They are very easy to make.
Look for pictures ( you can find royalty free pictures on The Graphics Fairy's blog) but make sure they are royalty free in your country too especially if you'd like to sell the tags.
Arrange them as you wish, print, cut, pierce and use hemp or burlap twine or a ribbon that matches the colors of the graphic. Done.
I keep using mat photo paper or marbled paper, mostly in brown. If you wish you can add age with a wet teabag or coffee ground. Just press it onto the paper and add stains. It's a lot of fun to play with it.
Tags are great to decorate all kind of things, not only gifts.

Have a great rest of the weekend!
Much love, Dina

Display Box and Sledges

Ooooh I was at "Mösi's flea and antique market" again and guess what? I came home with a lot of treasures again.
Not only because the owner René and Yvonne are such nice and sweet people but also because they've got A WHOLE HOUSE STUFFED WITH TREASURES! :)

My heart was dancing when I spotted an old metal sledge and an old puppet sledge with a weed basket in it and I also found an original baroque chest! These great pieces I will work on pretty soon to get them done for the christmas market.
Yes you heard it right! I'm already working on my christmas market products and I even was missing the snow on saturday while working on graphics for christmas cards and tags. Plan is to attend three christmas markets. One with my mom, one with my mother in law and one probably on my own. So I will have to keep it up to be able to sell on all three of them.
But I got back to summer by now and of course there will be many pieces and products for summer before.


First I would like to show you what I did out of this old garland showcase I've found the last time I was at Mösi's.
On this one I was working for quite a while because I had to paint it in a lot of steps but I think that it was worth time and effort!

Actually I wanted to do a 3D collage to it but when I saw the case shining in white I changed my mind. I thought it looked just beautiful as it was and I did not want to add much more to it.

This is how it was looking before. Fir wood, painted in a dark brown.

I did major cleaning on it, ripped the inside (paper with glued on fabric) out, grinded it and painted two layers of matt white paint.

The edges got distressed, the wood got waxed.

For the inside bottom I sewed four squares of two different (beautiful in my opinion!!) fabrics together and did a little "upholstery".

Then I glued on an old christmas tree candle holder (on which I ripped off the candle holder) and posted two cute vintage pictures of birds, which I found on Karen's blog (The Graphics Fairy) to the "ex"-candle holder and voilà.

My husband asked me: "Do you really want to sell it? I think you should use it to present your necklaces at the store."

Huh? This seems like a great idea to me! I decided to use it as a showcase for my jewelry but still, it is for sale because there are many purposes that this case could be used for. :)

Next to it I did two more of the "summer" tags. These are also made with images off of Karen's blog (The Graphics Fairy).

These tags go wonderful with the showcase because I used the same fabric on them.

Ok. For today I will enjoy summer and let winter be winter because the weather is just splendid!! Unfortunately I've got much work to do and will miss paragliding school once more. Have a wonderful day!

Love, Dina

Tags go multifunctional

What a week! But I finally found some time to relax this past weekend. Of course I could not sit still for longer than an hour or two.

I was working on some cool vintage tags using two beautiful images I found on Karen's blog , The Graphics Fairy.

I ripped the paper around the images and distressed the tags and the images with distressing ink and glued the images onto the tags.

Then I ripped some stripes off of fabric, scrunched them and bound them erratic (is that an english word??) onto the tags. On some I also used lace trim.

I used little metal keys, hearts and knickknacks to decorate.

Those tags also look great on a bottle or for decoration of anything. Even on or in books they look awesome.

I thought I would leave them blank (without any inscription on them) because they look very "summer-like" but I will also do some more with inscription.

And here there are some of them.

They are for sale on my shop too ;)