RUBBER STAMP BOGO 50% off SALE

Here is just a sampling of some of the Hand Carved Rubber Stamps ON SALE NOW at The Star Box on Etsy. Buy One Get One of equal or lesser value 50% off.  If you love cardmaking,  rubber stamping, collage or making altered art, this sale is a must see! Check it out - and Happy Stamping :)

Snail Mail Stamp

5pc Art Doll Stamp Set

Marie Antoinette Art Doll Accessories Stamp Set

Chandelier Stamp

PostCard Stamp Set

Skeleton Keys Stamp Set

Bashful Handspun Yarn

I am so excited! I just sold my first handspun skein on my new Michigan Spinning Etsy Shoppe! I purchased this Merino Alpaca Fiber from Jehovah Jireh Farm at the recent Fiber and Animals Fest held right here in Marshall on June 12th.

I call it Bashful and it was single spun on my Kromski Minstrel and measures 271 yds at 12wpi and now it's SOLD! YAY!

I am still working on Revamping the Studio. No pics yet, it is still a mess, but there has certainly been some progress. I hope to have it all completed tomorrow night, but we'll see what happens.

Still working on Stamp Orders. Every day brings more orders in and I am very thankful for each and every one and for the Lord's blessing and provision.

Lord willing, I will have some time tomorrow to card some new batts and add some more items to Michigan Spinning on Etsy.

Have a good night :)

Revamping the Studio!

Spontaneous Combustion Batt 5.6 ounces! This is the one batt I didn't sell at the Festival

So I spun it up myself and will share some pics of it in tomorrow's post.

I realize I haven't blogged in a while and I promise to rectify that shortly. When I first started my blog I had envisioned writing daily posts and then it dwindled down to weekly posts, and now sadly I am lucky to post once a month.

Well, I am making a commitment that I will blog everyday from here on out. You are my witnesses, and I expect you to hold me to it and call me out if I fail to follow thru! It is a wonderful thing to be able to share the projects and accomplishments of the day, as well as brainstorming sessions, new projects and patterns, dreams and goals for future endeavors with all of you. Currently I am reorganizing my Studio to fit all of my new Vintage Fabrics and supplies as well as to set up a fiber prep station for carding my batts and storing my raw and dyed fibers. I will share some pics of the new set-up tomorrow.

I am extremely excited to be starting 2 new business ventures this month. My Michigan Spinning store is up and running on Etsy and soon will also be accessible at www.michiganspinning.com and I just opened a vintage inspired shop on Etsy called Sew Simply Vintage where I will be selling handmade aprons, household linens, baby linens and various other vintage and vintage inspired items.

My Star Box Shop is still going strong and will now be devoted to handcarved stamps and paper crafts only. I will be submitting some new stamp designs to The Spotted Box sampler box for July so be sure to check it out!

On the fiber front, I will be a contributor to July's Phat Fiber Sampler box as well. I am ecstatic over that and hope to send in enough samples to get a sampler box of my very own! We'll see if I can manage 50 samples this month. Expect to see samples from Michigan Spinning frequently in the Phat Fiber Sampler Box as I am determined to join in every month.

My first Fiber Festival event was on Saturday June 12th and went over pretty well. My cousin joined me, and I am thankful she did because I was not 100% ready for the event and my booth would have been a pitiful display without her. I did sell what I had, but I wish I was able to accomplish more in time for the show. The small success has encouraged me though, and my next show will be very well stocked. I spun up 4 skeins of yarn from Saturday to Monday and I am currently knitting with one, and the other 3 are going up for sale on the Michigan Spinning Etsy shop, so check them out.

On the home front, the family and I went out to pick strawberries at a local farm yesterday and so now I have 9 quarts of strawberries in my kitchen just waiting to become freezer jam, strawberry syrup, shortcake topping and maybe even a pie! It is way too hot, 90 degrees, to stoke up the stove today, so I am going to process all my strawberries bright and early tomorrow morning! I will definitely share some pics at the end of the day :)

Next post: Strawberries, New Studio Space, Carded Batts, Current Knitting projects, new yarns...............just for starters!

Wonderful Wool! Dyeing to Spin!

MY NEW KROMSKI MINSTREL! YAY!

My very first spinning wheel arrived on Friday afternoon and I gleefully assembled it and started spinning - yarn pics to follow at end of post. I am so excited to finally have a wheel. I am getting ready for my first Fiber Fest in June and so I really needed this wheel to spin up yarns for the show and to sell on My Etsy.

I also purchased my first Fancy Kitty Kitten Carder. This is the fine 90/120 carder, and I also purchased an auxiliary swift in the Medium cloth as well for carding some textured art batts. I am so excited. My auxiliary swift will arrive on Monday and then I will be carding batts like crazy!

This is my first hand dyed, hand pulled roving. I call it RARE EARTH, because when I saw the colors the first words out of my mouth were "Wow, it so earthy!" I also washed and prepped this fiber from the raw state. It is from a 80/20 Corriedale/Sussex mix breed whole fleece purchased from a local farm.
This is the very first yarn I have spun on my new wheel. It was made using the RARE EARTH hand dyed roving. I also added in some ribbon shreds and some ribbon roses. I just love it. I know I am just going to get hooked on spinning art yarns!

Here's a close-up!

And this is the roving I used. I had 2 batches of this dyed up for a total of 4.2 ounces. The final skein is 4.4 oz and 124 grams.

Here is the very first Batt I carded on my friend's Fancy Kitty before I purchased my own. I used the same Corriedale Sussex fiber, only this was the leftover bits from flick carding locks, and from pulling the rovings. I spun it up on my drop spindle and have not taken pics of the finished yarn yet.

This is the fiber I used to make the Batt above.

This is a pic of all the fiber I dyed that day. I dyed all this in about 30 minutes in between morning and evening service last Sunday.

Well, that's all I have time for right now, I can't wait to share some more Fiber Fun with you all. I plan to make some spinning and carding videos for my YouTube Channel once I get my drum carder on Monday. So STAY TUNED!

Rubber Stamp Sale and Bonus Giveaway!

Offer Good thru May 15th - Receive 25% off your purchase of the Art Doll Stamp Set when you mention this blog post in the message to seller portion at check-out! Include your PayPal email address in the message and I will send you a revised invoice with the discounted price. You can also go directly to My Etsy to make your purchase.

Giveaway Bonus - comment on this post now thru May 15th and enter to win a handcarved Monarch Butterfly Stamp!

In addition to my love of all things fiber, I am also very active in ATCs and Mail Art trading. My interest in ATCs is what led me to creating my own hand carved art stamps. Recently I joined a Mail Art Swap on ATCsforAll to create five 4x4 chunky pages featuring people themed art dolls.

I created these stamps specifically with this swap in mind.

Here are the 6 Art Doll Chunky Pages I created for the swap.

I used a vintage digital collage sheet of children and a 1 inch circle punch to cut out the faces and glued them inside a bottle cap which I then filled with Diamond Glaze.

I decorated the backgrounds with randomly selected papers, scraps, Sharpie markers, and Bic Mark-it pens.
I hope you have as much fun creating your own unique ART DOLLS as I did creating mine :)

Happy Stamping!

Raspberry Tweed

Here is a little bit of eye candy for the yarnies and fiber addicts (myself included), who frequent the blog and to the new visitors out there WELCOME! and enjoy :)

First off I must share the Antique Skein Winder I scored for $15 when I went to a local antique shop with my Grandma, Aunt and Cousin. I found this wedged behind a couple of old shovels and a wooden crate. At first glance I wasn't sure if it was what I thought it was, but when I heard it was only $15 on sale that day, I bought it on the spot. I used it already, to wind up the skein of Raspberry Tweed I finished spinning this weekend.

This is a skein I just listed on my Etsy today! I spun it up and plied it all on my top whorl drop spindle made by spinsanity on Etsy. It was spun from an Angora Merino batt I purchased from Wiley Woolies at the Fiber Fest at Cornwells Turkeyville this past fall. It is 294 yds of a heavy worsted / light bulky weight yarn weighing in at 5.4 oz / 150 grams. I am in a little personal competition with my cousin who fills her spindle to such capacity I have yet to surpass her in total yardage of a single skein. I thought for sure I would do it with this skein, but her last skein was 295 yds! I missed it by 1 yd! She also told me that she found some extra fiber after plying her skein and if she had been able to add that in she was sure she could have hit 300 yds in a single skein. WOW! Her success with spinning keeps me striving to excel in my own abilities. Someday I would like to own a wheel to make spinning faster, but there is a real sense of satisfaction knowing that this HUGE skein of yarn was spun up on a humble little stick and whorl!

Now that spring is here, I am pulling out all kinds of roving and fiber that has been stored away during my winter knitting phase. The Holidays really wiped me out with all the knitting they required. Now I can get back to a relaxed pace of spinning, knitting and sewing. Currently what is keeping me busy is spinning and knitting, sewing only falls in here and there when I get a free moment from everything else.

So currently, almost all of my spindles have fiber on them. I am spinning up some more flax. I have 4 ozs of flax fiber that I spun just a small amount of last summer, I navajo plied it, and then it sat around in a tiny skein (I think about 90 yds) for this past year while I was a gloomy gus, disappointed with how much it resembled a bunch of sticks in color and texture. Well, I finally pulled it out and decided I was going to knit something with it and see if it would really soften up like I have read and been told, that it would. Surprise Surprise! I am knitting a napkin, yes.....a napkin in a basic stockinette with a garter stitch border this yarn has gotten softer and softer the more I knit with it. I can only imagine how much softer it may get once the napkin is done and I launder it a few times. So I have been encouraged by this little bit of knitting to spin up the rest of the flax and maybe make something a little bigger than a napkin with the finished yarn.

I am also spinning a bit of australian merino wool that I Hand dyed when I was visiting with my cousin a few weeks ago. You can see her hand dyed rovings on her blog at Holly Marie Knits. Here is just one of mine currently on the spindle. We have just been practicing our dyeing with some Wilton Icing Dyes, but I plan to purchase some Greener Shades Dyes for my next batch of fiber dyeing coming up in a couple of weeks.

And....I am just starting to spin a burgundy batch of Merino/Alpaca fiber I purchased from Jehovah Jireh Farm at last years fiber event at Cornwells Turkeyville in Marshall Michigan. My grandmother wants a wimple like the one I knit for my cousin and so I thought this would make a nice yarn for it if I spin it up lace weight. The pattern Ice Queen from Knitty.com

Well, I'd love to stay and chat a while more, but with all the photos this post has taken me longer than I anticipated. The new women's bible study with the ladies from my church starts tonight and I need to get a move on or I will be late! More updates to come later this week........(including some video of fiber dying and a knitting tutorial for one of my patterns)

Collage-a-thon ATCs and a Postcard

This weekend I have really jumped back into creating ATCs and Postcards. I used to trade regularly on ATCsforall and am really excited to get back into it again. I have joined a few swaps that are due in March, but since my nieces were here with me this weekend I spent some time doing art with them on Monday and this is what I made.

This is a postcard I made for my Aunt Mary. It is a little more sedate than most of my other artwork. I did not want to shock my Aunt Mary with the clown cheeks and crazy embellishments of my usual style, I thought I would ease her into it. Even with all the color and embellishments on this one, I really did restrain myself a little bit. My Aunt Mary taught me how to knit, so I thought it would be fitting to create a card that resembled a group photo of a ladies Knitting Society or Guild. This postcard was created using images from a 'Vintage Victorian Ladies" Collage Sheet I purchased from DKMRamay15 on Etsy. Basically I used every lady on the sheet for this group photo.

I think I should mention right away that these cards were made courtesy of some free ephemera I found here on Flickr. Her username is Autumnsensation and you can also check out her blog

Basically I downloaded the Cabinet Cards Images I liked, opened them up in my PictureIt program and printed a sheet of them at Trading Card Size 2.5 X 3.5 on matte photo paper. Then I cut them out and glued them to lightweight cardboard (cereal boxes I had already cut down to 2.5X3.5 ATC size). This gave them a good weight reminiscent of real cabinet cards, and then I sanded them lightly to give them a more worn look and then I altered them as I would a traditional Cabinet Card. It makes it a little more challenging than just using clipped images and piecing them together for a collage. For the Elephant Rider, I actually used an exacto knife to cut around the face and then gently peeled the layer off the cardboard, so the card stayed intact and I just lifted out the face area leaving the backing in place. then I covered it with decorative papers and continued as I normally would in creating a background. The images shown here were printed in B&W, but I also printed them in color, which gives them a more authentic look.

The Elephant Rider ATC

This is an interactive ATC. The elephant and rider are all one piece and it is attached to the card through a slot and then a piece extends over the top and connects to the tab on the back. I glued a big button to the back for easy gripping and you can slide it from side to side and make the elephant and rider move along the card. I really like it and will definitely be making more in this style for trading.

Portrait of a Woman

This one is just a standard ATC. It was made using a cabinet card image and various collage papers, sharpies, BIC mark it pens, gel pens and some ephemera.

This was the first ATC I made yesterday. I thought her facial expression was rather somber and I had some book pages with text that seemed very fitting. I embellished the card in a whimsical way to give it more of a dreamy effect, like she has withdrawn into a dream rather than face a harsh reality. Maybe it is a little deep. But it was what got me started again. My final card was the Elephant, so you can see, the layout and ideas just got better as I went along.

Please check out the links I have noted here and have fun creating your own ATCs and Postcards!