Gelli Arts Artist Spotlight: ME!

If you've been reading along then I don't have to tell you how much fun I am having working with monoprinting. Printing has always been in my blood in some form or another - from lino block cutting and printing, rubber stamping (it is too a form of printing), making my own stamps out of anything and everything, creating collographs, screen printing, and now making monoprints with a Gelli plate.

The joke around here is that if it sits still long enough I will either print on it or ink it up to make a print on something else. Nothing with wonderful texture is safe around my inky and painty fingers! Yes, I've been caught inking up interesting cracks in the sidewalk and making prints from them!

Right now I'm having such a blast with my Gelli plate that I've hardly had time been able to stop printing long enough to fill you in on some extremely cool news! 

I was contacted by the folks at Gelli Arts, the company that makes the Gelli printing plate, about the prints I posted to my Facebook page and blog. They enjoyed them and asked for some images to feature me in an Artist Spotlight on their Facebook page. They posted 18 images from various pieces I have made in the last few months. 

How cool is that?! 

Rendered even more speechless by the response - thus delaying this post further - I am still at a loss for words over the number of comments and "likes" my work has received. 

(The album itself currently has over 100 "likes" and 13 shares. One piece has 125 "likes"! The amount of traffic here and almost every other site I have for In My Head Studios has roughly tripled.) 

Gelli Arts, I cannot thank you enough. To have my work shown alongside the work of many of my favorite artists is intensely humbling. The positive response is icing on the cake, next to which I have been doing the Happy Dance of Joy for more than a week. 

Several people have had questions about how I make my prints. I don't currently have a tutorial about gelli printing on this blog to share, but I am working on a few ideas for showing you how I do the printing. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, check out the rest of the Gelli Arts Facebook page for some awesome artwork and a ton of resources about printing. Their Pinterest page is chock full of eye candy, tips, and tricks, too.

As for me, I am headed back into my hermit hole to make more prints! 

- Vickie

Buried The Humble Meter

Honestly, I kind of don't even know what to say about this wonderful piece by Jonathan Everitt. My “humility meter” has me wanting to duck under the covers. Yikes! Attention! Run away! The fact that anyone is even remotely interested in what I do amazes me every time. I am go grateful for the community I have around me.

Jonathan’s blog called “Originals: An Occasional Look at Cool Creative People” features local artists. Some of the talent he has written about is utterly unbelievable. To be in this kind of local artistic company is awesome! Happy Dance!

Thank you, Jonathan, for all you do to promote our local artsy peeps! There is “shameless self promotion” and then there is something more miraculous… the coming together of people, community, and “The Right People Who Will Shamelessly Promote Others”. I think The Universe lately is putting my right-people in my path. How cool is that?!

Happy Friday!

- Vickie

I've Been Examined by The Examiner

You can’t make art in a vacuum. I firmly believe it takes community. Rochester, NY has one of the finest art communities in the nation. Having made the foray into doing local art and craft shows, I have had the opportunity to meet many fellow local artists. I find this group of people to be excellent networkers, sharers, and cheerleaders. I can’t believe some of the opportunities that have come up for me as a result of all this art love here.

Today I am especially grateful for a local connection I made with a reporter named Kathleen Landers from The Examiner at the MayDay Underground Arts + Crafts show in May. Kathleen has written a deeply humbling story about my artwork and me. She really took the time through phone calls and many emails to get to know me and what fuels my artistic passions. I could not be happier with how her article turned out. Click the screenshot of the article above to go read it.

“Kathleen is a Rochester native who owns her own decorative painting business and displays her work in local shops and art shows. Inspiration is fostered when seeking out area talent and she loves sharing concepts she's learned.” - Kathleen’s Bio on The Examiner

The Examiner consists of local news, events and attractions, real estate, shopping, and more where you can find local top breaking news and perspectives by trusted local experts. The Examiner serves 240 markets in the United States and Canada. The site is broken down into local pages, such as the Rochester, NY Examiner. There is probably a local Examiner for your area.

To keep the celebration going the Rochester NY Etsy Street Team (RNEST) is holding a giveaway on their blog for one of my new domino pendants (pictured below). Check out the post on Wednesday, June 16th for details and a chance to win! Many thanks go out to Michelle of The Quilted House for organizing the RNEST giveaway and blog post!

"Sophisticated Squares" Altered Domino Pendant you could win. The contest starts on Wednesday, June 16th on the RNEST blog.

This domino pendant was created from a larger original work of art I made especially for my line of domino pendants. It is printed on high quality photo paper and ink. This process allows me to create stunning detail on a small scale.

So hop on over to The Examiner post and get to know me better! And don't forget to enter the RNEST giveaway on Wednesday! I'll post about that again so you don't miss it!

Have a happy day!

Featured Artist: Purple Lemon Designs

Kelly Rinehart, of Purple Lemon Designs, is a fellow Etsy Twitter Team member. She creates custom stationery and rubber stamps. Her shop is filled with lovely paper goods for weddings and everyday correspondence. She makes custom address stamps, monogram stamps, and wedding stamps. And you all know I love paper and rubber stamps!

What inspires Kelly: “I am inspired by so many different things. It can be a poster I see walking down the road, an email I receive, or a pretty font. I also am inspired by fabric (for some crazy reason!). My juices just start flowing and then I just start drawing ideas in my sketchbook!”


She wants you to know: “Probably more than anything I love creating a custom piece that is uniquely a customer's own. When I have a customer that is pleased with the final project, that makes me so happy!”

She started her business because: “I was feeling very creatively stifled at work. I desperately needed a good creative outlet. So, I started designing stationery. That quickly led into creating rubber stamps. I love that Etsy gives artists a way to be creative and earn money at the same time!”


Read her blog: purplelemondesigns.com/blog
Follow her on Twitter: @purplelemon

Etsy: Your place to buy & sell all things handmade purplelemondesigns.etsy.com

Etsy Twitter Team: Shop of the Week: That’s Headley!

Ginny Headley Maserang, of That’s Headley!, creates artisan jewelry, mostly one-of-a-kind pieces in semi-precious gemstones, art glass, and sterling silver. Her shop features bracelets, necklaces, earrings, jewelry for special occasions and holidays, and has a unisex section for jewelry for everyone.

The “Hope for Whirled Peas” section of her shop has cute green pearl “pea pod” items whose proceeds go to benefit Fisher Houses. For more information about this fundraising effort by Ginny, please see her blog.

“I am dedicated to crafting pieces that are fun, well-crafted, and timeless in design for a lifetime of enjoyment. I make the jewelry I wear, but I like to share with folks who appreciate color, texture, balance, and uniqueness.

My creative inspirations most often come from the beautiful materials I work with - I've loved pretty rocks since I was a little girl, and nothing pleases me more than to pull all my treasures out like a glittering box of crayons and have them tell me what they want to be. I love, too, the color combinations in nature, and can't keep myself from looking at a sunset or garden and imagining the colors coming together as a work of wearable art.”


About Twitter: “I admit I'm pretty much a novice at Twitter, but appreciate so much its community and sense of shared experience. I love its search function to find folks talking about the same things that interest me, and then follow to find out more about what interests them.”

Custom work: “I love to do custom work, too, so if you have something inspirational you would like to have a custom piece to wear with, send me a picture or description of what you would like and we can be creative together!”

She is happy to ship internationally and offers free shipping to the US on all her items.

Follow her on Twitter @thatsheadley
Read more on her blog

Etsy: Your place to buy & sell all things handmade ThatsHeadley.etsy.com

Reposted from my original post at: Etsy Twitter Team: Shop of the Week: That’s Headley!

Etsy Twitter Team: Shop of the Week: A Cagey Bee

I like the creative name for this Etsy shop. The artist is Kris G. Brownlee – or KGB = A Cagey Bee! Very clever!

“I'm a painter, so my first love is creating the actual paintings - from sketching to swirling the paint around my canvas. But because I know a lot of us can't afford to buy original work, I try to offer a variety of lower cost reproductions: prints, notecards, and even little pendants with my characters!

I want my customers to know how much heart and soul and pure joy is poured into my work. I think most of my customers *do* know this, but it's not always easy to get a sense of who someone is via the internet. I was a very quiet, shy child and spent years creating elaborate stories for my imaginary friends. It's really no wonder that I've started to bring some of them to life in my paintings. The idea that I get to share that with my customers? That new friends from all over the world look at my girls and smile? I couldn't have dreamed up a better possibility for my life. :)”


What inspires you to create? “Everything! Favorite storybooks, movies, lyrics to songs, interesting characters I meet in real life... my biggest fear is that I'll never have enough time to paint all of the things I want to paint. If I ever run out of ideas, I can just walk out my front door and almost always see *something* interesting. There's this one woman in my neighborhood that I see every so often who I've been itching to paint since the first time I laid eyes on her. She walks this pack of 6 or 7 dogs - those giant long haired Afghan hounds! It looks like a scene straight out of a cartoon with their hair swishing and bouncing and swirling along!”

What are your Twitter tricks of the trade? “My newest favorite Twitter trick is installing Friendbar. It adds a toolbar to your browser so you don't have to load the Twitter page to tweet plus it makes it really easy to just click 1 button & tweet about the page you're currently viewing, including an already shortened URL. You can set it to update your Facebook status too. Very handy!”

Read her blog at www.acageybee.com
Follow her at Twitter: twitter.com/acageybee

As a special thank you to her Twitter pals, all prints in her shop are 2 for the price of 1 this week. Buy one print and simply enter the name of the second print you'd like in the notes to seller box. Double the cuteness!

Etsy: Your place to buy & sell all things handmade acageybee.etsy.com

All photos copyright to Kris Brownlee/A Cagey Bee

Reposted from my original post at: Etsy Twitter Team: Shop of the Week: A Cagey Bee

Etsy Artist Feature: Wildflower Hill

One of my favorite things about Twitter is meeting local people. I find it fun to manage to “bump into” someone from the Rochester, NY area in the big, big online world. To run across a local Etsy seller is quite rare in my own experience. Being a firm believer in shopping local even if the shop is online, I wanted to let more people know about this great shop, run by Cindy Macca, called Wildflower Hill. This shop is chock full of gorgeous and very unique beads.

Cindy chose her shop name by taking inspiration from her Bloomfield, NY surroundings where she lives in a log cabin among a big hill of wildflowers that bloom in spring, summer, and fall. She is a wife and mother and has two dogs, five cats, and a guinea pig to care for. Running Wildflower Hill takes up much of her time and is her full time job. She openly admits that her house “looks like a bead factory exploded in it”. Her father and a brother are gemologists and appraisers of fine gems. One might call her bead store just part of the family business of working with precious and semi-precious stones. Her shop offers “a wide variety of stone, shell, fresh water pearls, coral, and glass beads along with copper, sterling, stone and ceramic pendants”.


What struck me most when I first visited her shop were her absolutely gorgeous photographs of her beads. Honestly, are these great pictures or what?! Plus the beads themselves are quite distinctive. I haven’t seen such a unique variety in many small business bead shops online, and trust me when I say I’ve spent a lot of time in online bead shops. The “Matched Set of Beads” section of her shop is genius. She does all the work for you by selecting great bead combinations and coordinating pendants.

I highly encourage you to stop by Wildflower Hill and to take some time to look around. You won’t want to leave empty handed!

Etsy: Your place to buy & sell all things handmade wildflowerhill.etsy.com

Etsy Artist Feature: The Midnight Orange

If you have been reading at all then you know how I just love paper. And I love paper crafters. So when I saw The Midnight Orange’s work at the Buffalo Indie Market on Sunday I knew I had to share her work with you!

Also known as Dana Truesdale, The Midnight Orange has a nice selection of objects de art in her shop. But what captured my attention most were her altered assemblages. She makes little match box dressers out of chipboard and paper. They are cute and useful at the same time! The legs are made of things you would not normally think of as legs. This one has seedpods for legs!

I asked Dana how she got started making the matchbox assemblages.

“We had a primitive childhood and lived out in the woods. Often we made our own things to play with because the store was just so far away! I had an entire dollhouse full of handmade miniatures, and I used matchboxes for anything in the home that had a drawer. The tables were the front-runners in terms of aesthetics, and I still continued to make them for fun as I grew up. Later on someone recommended I use chipboard to reinforce the top and bottom, and it really perfected the design.”

Her favorite source for inspiration:

“My kids. They are just like me when I was young, and it helps me stay true to my roots. I often will give them a few basic things to play with and just watch them use their imaginations to make it fun and functional.”

What she wants you to know:

“My work is very eclectic and the variety is diverse. My hope is that my browsers and buyers will see that the message transcends the medium and within my shop they will find whimsy, high emotion, and ordinary things turned extraordinary. My shop sections will allow people to experience my work with more consistency and help them target what they may be looking for. Lastly, I want to say that I am humbled. Just humbled beyond compare to be here and be doing this. It is a privilege to be able to feed people's art souls.”

Dana also makes something I believe is really great for healing or get well gifts... a spoonful of sugar!


Go check out her shop! She has more lovelies than I covered here!

Featured at Bloomacious!

My altered domino ornaments are featured on bloomacious.com today!

Carrie Leber, Editorial Director of bloomacious, contacted me last week after seeing my dominos on flickr. She wanted to know what my inspiration was! Go check out the post to read more about it!

I’m so excited! Can you tell? So many wonderful things and connections with my online community have been happening this week. I feel so blessed to have my work validated in this way. After a couple lousy craft shows this year I have been asking myself “what am I doing wrong?” That’s when I decided to let go of my expectations for this business and just do what I love doing. What happened? Sales online increased, several great opportunities have come my way, and I’ve made many new friends online. Who knows what will happen next?

Etsy Artist Feature: Beadwork by Amanda Preske

I met a marvelous artist at the Community Nursery School of Irondequoit Craft Show today by the name of Amanda Preske. She makes the most striking, intricate beaded jewelry.

In addition to being an avid jeweler, she is a chemistry student at Rochester Institute of Technology. Her work reminds me of complex molecular structures, almost like she is weaving atoms together. I find it interesting how artists’ lives play out in their work and always enjoy when the two marry so well, as in Amanda’s instance. This piece especially makes me think of long, crystalline chains of atoms.


Her work has been awarded a silver key in a scholastic art competition in the jewelry division. She is a member of the Etsy BeadWeavers Team.

A free pair of earrings accompanies every purchase from her Etsy shop. How nice! Specify what colors you want when you check out. If you find something in her shop you like but want a different color, just ask. She’s open to custom orders.

Amanda offers jewelry parties in your home with some really great deals. Hostesses receive 20% off purchases at the party and an additional 5% off for every $100 in sales. Everyone who attends receives a free gift. I’m sure you and your friends will enjoy her work. More information is available here.

Her website has a page of some of her creations that are not yet offered in her shop but are incredibly nice. They are worth a look-see!

Visit her site for a 20% off coupon good at a craft show or mention this offer in a message if you purchase an item from Etsy.

Amanda, I wish you much joy and success in all your endeavors! I’m looking forward to seeing you again at the craft show at Irondequoit High School on November 29th!

Images used with permission from the artist, Amanda Preske.