"Home Sweet Home" ICAD2 for 6/21/12

Ok, I might be making the Index-Card-A-Day Challenge a little more challenging than I hoped and/or planned. I've just been so inspired! I didn't realize my brain needed a little discipline to work on something everyday, and now I am hungry, hungry, hungry for art all the time. I LOVE this!
This card is from June 21, 2012. It definitely took me more than one day to do this. I'm not getting a card a day done -  and I gave myself permission to do that at the start. However, I do believe I am still benefitting from this challenge like crazy. If I'm not getting one card a day done then I am at least working on one (or two or three at a time) each day. AND THAT COUNTS.


This house, bird, and nest image is something I've worked on before in different formats - for domino pendants and ATCs. Now I felt it needed an ICAD2 work-up. 
I started by making a house shaped template that fit the index card. I cut the house out of another index card, pasted scrapbook paper over it, and added the tissue tape. Then I stitched around the edges on my sewing machine.  
The sky is layered torn dictionary pages secured with matte medium. I added some watered down blue paint then splattered really watery gesso over it. I left the torn edges because they reminded me of deckled edges on handmade paper. The edge was then shaded with a darker blue Copic marker. 
The lettering is hand stamped in red pigment ink - which I had to stamp a billion times because I always mess up the last letter and ruin it. It's matted with dark red cardstock. The edges are inked to "age" and soften them. 


The bird and nest images are from flickr's collage images group. I love the detail and texture in these pieces. My printer went light on the ink for this printing - not sure why. I went back over the pictures with colored pencils to bring out the color more. The gleaming highlight in the bird's eye is a dot of white gel pen. I also highlighted the eggs with white gel pen. 


After I adhered the bird and nest to the background it all looked very flat. I used colored pencils to shade around the bird and nest for some dimension. It really perked the piece up. I also ran a thin line of dark brown pencil to the very edges of the paper of the collage images to bring them out more. 


Oh, how I love using foreign postage stamps in my collage! I have about 20 pounds of old stamps (anyone need any?). I chose this one for the color and the country of origin - France - so it would tie in with the tissue tape behind it that has French on it.  


The back of the index card has the stitching I did with my sewing machine. I love sewing on paper. I'm stamping the date the card is finished on the back. I should go back and add some more details to the information of the piece. 

"home sweet home" Index-Card-A-Day2
Mixed media & paper collage on index card
3"x 5"
© 2012 Victoria Porter/In My Head Studios

This ICAD2 looks adorable on a tiny easel I found at the craft store! 

I am a bit behind on posting more ICADs that I have finished. There's much more to come!

- Vickie

“Little House” Collage

I posted earlier about my class with Claudine Hellmuth. I learned a lot from her about resist techniques. All the parts for this collage are finally put together! It’s a Little House!

I really love how this turned out. At first I was doubtful that I had cut all the parts correctly and it wasn’t going to come together. But it did! It involved hammering in about 50 silver eyelets. That was actually more fun that I thought it would be. Guess I had a little aggression to get out! Ha!

On the house at the top and the “M” I got a chance to buy and use Tim Holtz’s Distress Crackle Paints. They are amazing! It crackles as the paint dries in a lovely porcelain way. Really nice product! No more waiting for double or triple step processes to get crackle! Now I’m going to have to buy more colors! Can you tell I like it by the number of exclamation points I use?!

The bird image is printed directly through my ink jet printer onto the Sticky Back Canvas! I love that about this canvas. So many possibilities!

I told my niece that we would make a Saturday Play Date and make one of these together. I think she would like to learn about how I make things since she says she wants to be an artist like me. I want to encourage that as much as possible. She’s pretty good at drawing for her age.

Now I have to find a prominent place to hang this in the house. Might have to move something for it. We have a lot of artwork hanging in our house!

click images to see bigger over at flickr

It’s All Green, Baby

Spring is springing here in lovely Rochester and where I am in Irondequoit. The trees have filled back up with leaves. Hostas are sprouting. Lilacs are blooming!

Plants are making their way up in my flowerbed in the backyard. This is our first spring in our first house so I have no idea what is “plant” and what is “weed” just yet. I’m letting it grow wild until I figure it out. Never really had anywhere to do any weeding or planting so I’m actually looking forward to getting dirty out there. Mr. M says his duty is the grass and I should tend to the other plants outside. Fair deal.

Mr. M bought me the tomato plants I asked for. And he got me surprise strawberry plants. I must find a way to keep the voracious and abundant squirrels here away from them so I get to eat the fruits of my labor.

The raspberries I told you about last year are also coming up. There are more plants this year on our side of the fence! Yay!! Our neighbor who owns the plants has Crohn’s so he cannot eat them anyway due to the little seeds. The berries won’t be out until July I think.

I adore this time of year here. Life is retuning to abundance instead of cold scarcity. My soul thrives on the green lushness around me. We got so lucky to have tall trees in our neighborhood so they can surround me. I love trees. They’re magical! I’m known to literally hug trees.

Now I need to convince Mr. M that I need a laptop so I can work on the patio and enjoy my lovely weather and deciduous companions!

Yard News and Garbage

If you saw my tweet at Twitter yesterday then you already know we had the yard aerated. This means that a guy basically pokes big holes in the dirt for the grass roots to get some air. This is after they roll a 1200 ton (I’m exaggerating… a little) roller over it to make it more flat and compact. Now it’s all flat and compact. It needs air! So he rolls this medieval looking thing over my yard and out pops all these little plugs of dirt that measure about three inches long by a half inch round. It looks like hundreds of little dogs pooped in my yard now. And I think this is funny because, well, poop things make me laugh. Yes, I'm that grown-up.

I was going to give you a photograph of the dirt poops but it snowed last night and now we cannot see them. Lucky you!

My grandfather used to have an herb garden. He grew mint, oregano, sage, parsley, basil… you name it, he grew it. He would dry it all, crumble it up into a bag and call it Grandpa’s Garbage. We would season everything with it and it made all food no matter what 100% better!! After he died I found a big glass jar in his basement with the recipe for it on the jar in his handwriting. I cherish this jar. It calls for amounts of each herb that can only be had by growing it yourself. Anyway, just after he died I took some mint plants from his yard to savor his memory. We kept them alive very carefully in pots inside until we bought our first house. Now we have them planted out back in the yard. I’m telling you this because the darn 1200 ton roller nearly rolled all the new spring buds of mint down. And I nearly had a heart attack. But you can rest assured our future mojitos are safe. And a batch of Grandpa’s Garbage may be mixed up by summer’s end!

Just Got Dark In Here

Our roof needs to be replaced. The crew is here doing it right now. They have covered about half of the outside of my house with a blue tarp. Now it’s really dark inside and everything has a blue cast to it. They tell me this should take a few days. Ugh.


It sounds like we are under siege. Maybe I am going to my mom's house for the afternoon.

Sign Your Money Away

Finally the Macintosh is up and running and I have Photoshop back. So I made a little mortgage signing collage for you!



Mr. M must have signed his name 50 times. The lawyer thought I was nuts for taking so many pictures of my hunny signing his name. No one in his office has done that before, which surprised me as so many people blog about such momentous occasions. I’m not an owner of the house so I didn’t have to sign one thing.

I did have a chance to look through the abstract about the property. I wish I could remember more dates to tell you about right now, but the abstract went back to at least Civil War era. The mystery of whose last name is etched on our front door knocker was solved. It belonged to the owners previous to the owners we bought the house from. We must get this remedied as I feel the house is “marked” by another family’s name. Who really lives here? I would take it down right now, but the front doorbell does not work, and the knocker is the only way we know if someone has stopped by.

We are still living in Box Town, but less so as the garage is now filling up with empty boxes. We’re saving the empty ones for our neighbors who will be moving soon. Sad to see them go as they are super nice. They were having a Father’s Day BBQ on the day we moved, and they brought us hot dogs, BBQ, soda, and dessert!

The Move

We have arrived at the new house. We’ve been here for a week and 2 days. (Sorry, little blog, for neglecting you, but there has been too much on my “to do” list to tend to you. Please forgive me.)

I just love this house and so does Mr. M. It’s adorable and spacious and still filled with boxes. My main Mac computer still is not set up and I am blogging from the crummy laptop. I say we need a new Apple laptop so I can blog and Etsy from my lovely patio.

The kitchen is all done and we started on the living room over the weekend. Slowly but surely. The studio is about half set up. Most of the furniture is in the right places and now all I have to do is unpack boxes and set up my computer desk and work table.

We got a “trial by water” into new homeownership these past few weeks. We had a microburst come through and drop a lot of rain in a short time. The dining room window’s storm window was up so the windowsill filled with water. It seeped under the window and filled my dining room with water, about 1/4” deep on the wood floor. We were not living here yet so this water sat on our wood floor for a day until I stopped by to check on things and found the puddle. It had seeped down into the basement ceiling by this time. There was no landlord to call to come fix this. It’s now 100% our mess! Yay!

All is well now and the damage was not bad. Cleaning out the gutters seems to have fixed the water coming in the house problem. The water damage is giving Mr. M a reason to tear out the finished basement ceiling and replace it with drywall. He needs a project or two.

We had four owls in the backyard this weekend. They were beautiful. Our whole neighborhood is well covered with huge trees, one of the reasons I wanted to live here. I love trees. I have heard owls here but had not seen them until they landed in our tree. I tried really hard to get a picture for you but my camera would not focus in the dark. Grrr. Are owls good things to have around? Will they eat mice?

OK. Enough with the really long post for now. I’ll catch y’all up over the next week and will have pictures of the new house and studio as soon as I can get the Mac going.

Box Town, USA

Have I mentioned we’re moving into a house? A house of our very own? Our first house? I did? Well, I’m sure you’re just dying to hear more about it!

It’s a lovely 3 bedroom/2 full bathroom colonial in Irondequoit, NY. It’s not very far from where we are renting right now. The best thing is that it is about 8 blocks from my twin sister’s house! Yay!! So we’ll be seeing more of her and her adorable family. I love her so much. We are inseparable.

Other great features of this house:
- First floor laundry – need I say more about how happy this makes me? It makes me very, very happy because I cannot carry laundry baskets up and down too many stairs these days.
- Detached garage – one word: woodshop!
- Huge bedroom that I am turning into my studio. It will have room for more than one work surface. More about my exhilarating organizing efforts soon!
- It is in “move in” condition and needs no to very little work
- The front of the house faces south meaning lots of light for Mr. M’s plants!
- The kitchen counter top is teal! Not boring off-white or tan. Color! In my kitchen! I love this!
- Working fireplace in the living room
- Half of the basement is finished - good for cooling off and hanging out in the summer months
- Closet organizer in the master bedroom
- A yard to plant flowers and dig up stuff, have a compost pile and a rain barrel

But, for now, we are living in Box Town, and will continue to do so for about 2.5 more weeks. I do not like Box Town. I cannot walk around our place to get to the other stuff that needs to be packed. Also, living in this half-here and half-there limbo is stressful to me, as I like things to be constant. So I’m learning some new coping skills, like walking around the apartment with my fingers in my ears and my eyes closed repeating “this will all be okay soon” over and over again. Deep breath. Okay. I’m good.

Moving stinks. The process is way stressful. I’m hoping the payoff of living in our own home is worth this craziness! The studio will be the last thing to be packed, as I need it to de-stress in and create calm in my head. Trust me when I say this… this is the last time we EVER move.

{ no place like it }

Staying up this late paid off! I managed to snag an Etsy Treasury!!

See it HERE! If you click on each item or comment you will be my new friend!

Bye Bye, Renting!

I’m trying not to be that annoying person who has nothing to talk about except house buying. I know it can be boring for those of you who have either already gone through it or have no idea of the stress I’m talking about. But I have more exciting news! We put a bid on a house and it was accepted after a little counter-offering banter. The inspections were today. So barring any complications there, we have bought a house! We bought a house after only being in it for about 30 minutes. Seems a little hasty to me, but I guess this is how it’s done. I am in looooove with it!

I am both exhilarated and terrified. Did we do enough looking? Can we afford this? Are we going to be happily-ever-after in this house? Will I ever be able to sleep again due to the excitement?

I do know one thing for certain… we are finished with renting. We had a pipe under the kitchen sink literally crumble in my hands last week and were without the use of our sink for three days until our landlord could come replace the pipe. If it were OUR house, it would have been fixed the next day. I’ve never seen metal crumble in that way. It had leaked so much the downstairs neighbors called with a question I have dreaded since we moved into a second floor apartment. She asked, “Do you have something leaking in the kitchen?” Panic stricken, I went to check, and everything was soaked under the sink. It was dripping down into their sink through the ceiling. I am so glad it wasn’t worse and the ceiling did not cave in. All is back to normal though I doubt the landlord fixed anything in the floor or ceiling. Not my problem after June!

Working Under Stress

We didn’t get the house we wanted. Oh, well. Wasn’t meant to be. I think we got outbid. We’re looking at three more houses today.

This entire house buying business has put my work motivation into overtime. I need something to do to keep my mind busy. I bought three skeins of yarn to knit my way through this. I am making another felted bowl on circular needles in red and deep purple. In two days I have glassed, taped and soldered 9 pendants, made proofs for a custom order, and painted up some new art designs for pendants. That is getting a lot done for me these days.

Pendants waiting for solder.
I am happy with the pendant art I’ve been doing. Painting and drawing is a different way to make them for me. Now they are more like miniature works of art behind glass! I challenged myself to make five designs very quickly just to see what would happen. They turned out to be my favorites of the bunch! They are mostly just torn paper and some line drawings. Leaves and floral designs are popping through my head all the time now that spring is poking its head up.

Hurry up, Spring! I have missed you!

A Very Very Fine House

We began our search for our first home last week. We fell in love with a house online. An internet crush, if you will. We got to see it in the real world Sunday. We love it and are thinking about placing a bid.

This house has a lovely dining room that will accommodate our very large table, lots of closets (I think I counted about 8!), three bedrooms, a sunroom, a great yard, and a garage. The kitchen is a bit out dated but we might have it redone someday. It needs new appliances right away.

We don’t even have an agent yet! We did not expect to find something only into our second week of searching. Today and Tuesday bring appointments with realtors so we can pick one.

This has me doing all sorts of dreaming about what my studio space in one of the bedrooms will be like. I have studio space in our apartment, but my room will be bigger in the new house. (I’m speaking like we already own it.) The bedroom I already chose has southern exposure!! It’s all bright and sunny. Great for photographing my Etsy items. We’ll need to get more shelving for my supplies and maybe another table for sewing. Good heavens, I cannot wait!

Wish us luck!!