(NOTE: Click on images to enlarge for better viewing) I bet a lot of you don’t know that I got my start as a professional artist in the medium of Stained Glass. My sister had been in business for a couple of years and taught me the basics. My career took off from there. I did craft shows, custom design work and even helped her in a custom commission for turret windows in the rebuilding of a Victorian Mansion in Ventura County. The mansion had burned to the ground during restoration work. The Historical Society was able to pull together the best crafts people of the modern age and recreate the home, it was amazing to see.
One of the things that convinced me to give up doing stained glass work
was the poisonous nature of the materials involved. Lead and other dangerous compounds were in almost every supply I used on a daily basis. I valued my health too much to compromise my life-expectancy for art.
Fast forward to the CHA show and I discovered some wonderful soldering products that can be used for creating jewelry and are entirely lead free. Simply Swank has a delightful range of products for making very fun and contemporary charms and other jewelry pieces both easily and safely.
In the picture above, There is a delightful contraption that holds your piece so that your hands are free and don’t get near the extremely hot liquid metal. This is quite helpful especially in soldering tiny charms. This item can be used for many other projects than making jewelry. It literally is your “third hand!”
HERE’S THE LINK TO THE SIMPLY SWANK WEBSITE
Think of all the uses that this jewelry craft can make of the digital art you probably already own. Think of the heart-touching jewelry you could make with your treasured family vintage photos. The look can vary from Victorian to contemporary to very feminine! I’m hoping to get my daughter, Jennifer (the jewelry making daughter) started in this so she can make me some fun jewelry pieces.
You can also use copper foil and solder to create magnets, sun-catchers, wind chimes and dozens of other crafts. HERE’S ANOTHER LINK TO SOLDERED ORNAMENTS FOR IDEAS.
Later I’ll share a company that produces a microwave kiln for producing fused glass! Talk about AWESOME, wow that looked like so much fun.
years ago and it still is one of my all-time favorites. It was fun to pull elements out of this painting to create these two kits.
The main two hummingbirds included in this kit are Rufous (the brown with green and red throat) and Ruby-throated. Both of these frequent my feeders so I’ve had a great selection of photos and real life experience to paint from , the green hummingbird is a tropical variety that I’d love to see in the wild one day.
I’m planning on painting quite a few more hummingbirds later this spring. Those of you that have read my blog for a while know that I feed about 100 hummers during the summer and I have a wealth of photos to work from. They are such fascinating subjects that bring back wonderful memories of my childhood. My mother planting hummingbird attracting flowers in every home that we lived in and we would sit for hours watching the winged jewels flit and play in our gardens. 
I have a quick preview to show you today. I hope to have some more images from the kit perhaps tomorrow and I’ll also do a FREE recipe card perhaps next week so stay tuned! 
I get all those wonderful Holiday Gift Catalogs from the awesome Gift basket companies like Harry & David. Their presentations are incredible, but so are their prices!!! So I created this kit so to help you make your own little gift basket for the people on your list that you just don’t quite know what to buy for or for your hairdresser or others for whom a small "Thank You" would be just right.
Using the Holly Berry Christmas 1 & 2 art sets, this is a classic Red, Green and Gold Christmas that is both elegant and fun. It contains a bow top box, a cocoa packet, a tea bag cover, book mark and assorted gift tags. Add your cocoa packets, spiced holiday tea, some peppermint sticks and Christmas Hersey’s Kisses and tuck in some of the free recipe cards that I have available elsewhere on this blog and you have an instant gift! 
think "I’ll get to that later?" If so, I hope I’ll be able to help you out a little this year. I created this album for MYSELF first because I design scrapbook products but all to often don’t follow through and create them for my family (shame on me 
)
This Contemporary Christmas Collection is a perfect mix of elements that will appeal across the generations. My daughters adore it and my 84 year old Mother in Law loved it as well. These instant album are awesome to give as premade Christmas gifts that the recepient can easily customize with the photos they take Christmas day.
created anything on a computer before, but can print a page from a jpeg file, you can make them. The art is laid out on letter-sized paper pages and every open space is filled with goodies for you to cut out and use to decorate the pages.
tting the finishing touches on my mockups and samples, I thought I would give you a preview of some of what the templates you’ll receive for free can make. I used my Gift tag template and "Holly Berry Christmas" and "Gingerbread Christmas Village" along with my AJ’s Copperplate Handwriting font. 
to make these tags. I also used some actions from Atomic Cupcake to produce the sponged/inked edge look on some of the pieces.