Join Me and Other Local Artisans in The Etsy Market Hosted by the DFW Etsy Artisans Team

A dozen artisans are part of the DFW Etsy Artisans team (an independent team of artisans who sell their creations on Etsy.com) that is hosting one of the virtual Etsy Markets this year. The Etsy Market: DFW Etsy Artisans will run from 6pm Friday, Nov. 6 through 6pm Sunday Nov. 8, 2020.

There will be opportunities to watch live streaming sessions with different makers. Check out the schedule on the event page. You can see a preview of which Etsy shops are participating, including my EDCCollective and EclecticSkeptic shops, by flipping through the lookbook below.

Holographic Photographic Art Pegasus Sticker

Even though I have not keep up with my blog posts with one exception for about eight months, I was able to create some new items during that time. I started out by sewing masks for friends and family. I completed some new magnets, started a couple of projects that are still in the works (one item for me and one item design for sale) and added another sticker to my sticker offerings. A couple of pieces of my photographic art were in a virtual show over the summer and some pieces made it into in person exhibits this fall.

Today I want to share some information with you about my stickers. This is a new product for me. I created the artwork for my first sticker just before the end of last year. Early this year I had some produced from that artwork. Even though I have had them for a while, this will be the first time for me to share my dragonfly decals with you on my blog. They are supposed to be very weather resistant and able to go through the dishwasher if you attach them to something like a travel mug. I have been testing out the weather resistance of the dragonfly sticker in my garden. I attached one to each side of a ceramic disk made for me by my friend, owner of CiCi House of Clay, and hung the ornamentation from a hook. It has been there for months. The water still beads up on it and the colors are good.

I created my second sticker a couple of months later. Instead of an image on an oval sticker like the dragonfly, I decided to try a holgraphic die cut sticker. I thought a flying horse would make a good candidate for this type of sticker. I started with some images I took of a flying horse model. I digitally created essentially a line drawing from one of those images that I used as the basis for the sticker. The printer added the holographic magic. Watch the short video clip below to see how the rainbow of the visible light spectrum plays across the decal depending on the angle of the light falling on it. These decals are available in my EclecticSkeptic Etsy shop.

Summer Vegetable Recap

As I am sure it did for many people, 2020 allowed me to focus on some things that I have wanted to do the past several years but barely or never got around to. I am still trying to get to all of the weeding in my gardens that needs to be done from years of some degree of neglect, but I have made a lot of progress.

In addition to my flower garden, I was able to focus on a couple of small vegetable patches I have not tended for a while. As you read in my previous post, I had quite a crop of basil this year. In this post you can see pictures of some of the other vegetables I had success with, green beans, summer squash, cucumbers, eggplant and a second small crop of asparagus after the early September rains.

In addition to eating them fresh, some of the cucumbers were made into quick pickles. Many of the eggplant flowers dropped off but the fruits we got were delicious. The pole beans did not set much before the hot summer temperatures set in but we got a bumper crop after the temps went below 90 degrees again. Some of those were canned and some frozen because we could not eat them fast enough. The squash did not produce as much as I expected but we did pick some yellow summer squash, golden zucchini and regular zucchini. In addition we enjoyed cherry tomatoes and small sweet peppers. While we did not grow enough produce to supply our needs, we relished the fresh picked additions to our food supply