2 Greetings For 1

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I hope you're all wearing green!

(but if you aren't, don't worry, I'm not a pincher)

But more importantly---

HAPPY BIRTHDAY 

Grandma Wilde!

Etsy.com Treasury Obsession

It's official. I am obsessed with the Treasury feature on Etsy.com. Now that I know how do do one I can't stop thinking about what my newest treasury will be. What to title it? Which items to include? Is it worth staying up until 2 am creating and then emailing the featured sellers? I was just going to check my email quick and then go to bed, but when I saw that the main Treasury was about to open I figured staying up a little later wouldn't hurt me. It did. It was Saturday night---daylight savings. This photo was my inspiration. DD has been shopping around for London decor for her new office if she ever transfers over to financial aid, and this is something I stumbled across last week. I loved it! Hence the new Treasury.

Bear Lake House

My Grandma Wilde grew up in Garden City, Utah. Her childhood home is right on the main drag at Bear Lake, right next door to The Pickleville Playhouse. Almost everyone who has visited Bear Lake has seen this house. It is quite a house. Originally it was a grain silo. It has had many additions over the years and the staircase has a lot of character. No step has the same width. The third step from the bottom is extremely slim. The carpet can be a little slippery and many a visitor has slipped down the stairs, crashing and causing the entire house to shake. I could tell so many stories---perhaps another time.

I took a photo from this angle a few years ago. It's different from every other photo taken of this house from straight on. I've talked about doing a project with this house forever. First I thought I would do a colored pencil rendering on mat board. It was one of my favorite mediums way back when. My first excuse being that I needed new colored pencils. My set mysteriously got depleted when DD used them for projects at MUD a few years ago. I got new colored pencils. My second excuse was I had no mat board to work on. So, since I've been trying to paint more (I still have unfinished paintings I'm getting up the motivation to  complete) I decided to try a watercolor.

The artist is always the severest critic of their own work. I'm not too happy with the results. I know better than to use white paint. It is too opaque and changes the properties of the paper. The house is very white in real life and leaving the paper to be the color of the house wasn't an option since the paper is very ivory. I thought at one point I had ruined the whole thing, but was able to sort of salvage it. The painting might get matted and framed. I'll have to see what the family consensus is this weekend.

As is pretty typical with me---if there is anything I really like about a painting I do it is usually some small part. And oddly enough it is almost always a tree. I love trees. So here is the part I like best.

Grandma Wilde's birthday is next week. I'm not sure if she'll get this as a present or not yet. She's my grandma, so of course she will love it. I just don't know if I want her hanging it in her house for everyone to see. It will still be a surprise if no one tells her about it. And since she doesn't blog I'm pretty sure my secret is safe until the big day. Shhh!

The Saga of an Etsy Treasury

I love the Treasury feature on Etsy.com. I've been featured in Treasuries for both of my shops, but never tried to create one myself. Some of the ladies on Twitter were counting down until new Treasury listings opened up, so I hopped on over to Etsy to try my luck. Now, I could have done something wrong, but after I created my Treasury the whole system froze and it wouldn't load my page. When I checked back later only my title existed, but the wonderfully yellow collection of things I had gathered was no longer there. Grr!

Instead of trying to recreate my original Treasury I created a Treasury more appropriate to my title, "Yellow Submarine." Check it out for all things Beatles, submarines, octopus, and underwater fantasy.


I LOVE The Beatles. Was raised on The Beatles. Am listening to The Beatles right now.