Friday, November 30, 2012

De Tour Village: A Village Christmas

Join us on December 1, 2012 for A Village Christmas!
 
It's a Village-wide event, featuring various artisans and crafters from the Eastern Upper Peninsula.  The Village merchants join in the fun too, offering sales and great deals during this festive day.
 
See the official Facebook Event page for more information, and plan a trip to De Tour Village!  If you haven't been here yet, it's time you came to see what all the excitement is about.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Magazine Flower Bouquet, Magnets

Writing is my preferred creative outlet, but every now and then I need to relax and disengage my mind a bit, and create something...else.  Of course I love paper, and words, and words on paper, so my creations usually incorporate these elements somehow.

It all started with Pinterest.  Somehow Connie Stewart's Upcycled Magazine Flowers drew my eye, and I started punching out all magazine pages with interesting colors.  I didn't have any gifts to wrap or cards to  make (Connie used hers to embellish gifts and cards), so I quickly devised a way to add a sturdy support (beer bottle cap) and stem (large paper clip).  Once I started making these little lovelies, all I wanted to do was stay sequestered in my craft room hunched over my pile of used bottle caps, hot glue gun in hand.
photo.JPG

Start with Connie Stewart's blog and make the flowers--she has an excellent step-by-step tutorial on there, which I won't try to duplicate here. 

Once you have several flowers made, gather some bottle caps, paper clips and a piercer.  And a hot glue gun, with lots of glue!

photo.JPGPierce each bottle cap in the center, and bend the end of a paper clip to insert it in the bottle cap and glue it in.  You'll have to hold the paper clip in place for a minute until the glue hardens as it tends to move around a bit.

Once the paper clip is secured, pull the trigger on that glue gun until the bottle cap is about half full of glue.  Insert the flower, pressing carefully in the center.  The bottle cap will heat up quickly!  The tricky part here is to avoid burning your fingertips off.  I haven't lost any fingerprints yet, but I can't guarantee you won't suffer a minor burn during this step of the process.
photo.JPG
After the glue is hardened, adjust/trim the paper clip stem as necessary to create different heights for the bouquet, and place them all in a small vase. 

Voila!  Flowers that will never rot or die. 

I also made some into magnets by gluing the flowers into bottle caps, then gluing a magnet on the back (instead of installing a paper clip stem).  There must be other possibilities out there...see what you can come up with! 

Meanwhile, I must get back to my book.  No more procrastinating.
 

Friday, November 23, 2012

Superior Sacrifices: It's Here!

has hit the shelves of several fine stores in Northern Michigan, and Amazon.com! 




A tale of betrayal, redemption and the consequences of silence by the author of Bookworms Anonymous and The Word That You Heard. This is the story of Mitch and Marcia: twins, best friends and local celebrities in the small town of Iron Falls, Michigan. Mitch’s superhuman dedication to his detective job and Marcia’s near-obsessive focus on her family and bookstore business appear ordinary until the secret they’ve shared for three and a half decades threatens to surface.
 
Also available on Kindle.