Tuesday

First Recipe Card- Swiss Roll

click for full view



This is my first in a series of little recipe cards for y'all c:  It's good and it's easy! You can nix the cocoa powder and make a vanilla version!

Saturday

Christmas Fuckery with my BFF

We tried to make a Gingerbread house from a kit.
We failed.
Snow Blob wishes you a happy holiday season

After carefully icing all the sides, Kate ( <- BFF)  stuck the house proudly together and admired her results. Just as she started to say how surprised she was that it worked, the side closest to me fell over, bounced oddly off my lap, and landed on the floor in several pieces.  We just stared at each other for a few mortified seconds before collapsing into possibly the most hearty fit of giggles I have ever been a part of.

She broke another wall about 5 minutes later, after we had decided we'd just fake it by only taking a picture from the front to disguise or missing back patio. It wasn't as funny the second time, but making super fucked up iced gingerbread cookies, dicking around with icing and marshmallows, and laughing at our utter and complete ineptitude was way more fun than making a lame ass gingerbread house anyways.




 

Friday

Oh,Home - 7 craft tutorials of cozy,home-y goodness

In a little less than 8 months the Spook family will be moving into our very own first house! I need FURNITURE! I need like.... shit to put on my walls, and shit to sit on...and spice racks and shit!   


I've made colour palletes via colourlovers.com to help me plan for the big move! 
This first palette is the basic color scheme for my house, with the exclusion of the last wine-red color, which is just a kitchen thing:
 Spooks_Kitchen
Color by COLOURlovers
Color by COLOURlovers


These 2 are the extras,to make the rooms "pop"
  Felix_Felicis
Color by COLOURlovers

Iroh
Color by COLOURlovers




Use your imagination with me, and lets see how The House of Spook is gonna look c:


1.Chair Makeover from Domestic for Dummies




For The House of Spook: Cream+Dark wine upholstery


2.Fabric Tapestry by CraftCuban on Craftster
For The House of Spook: Keep the super sweet Indian/middle eastern imagery but in neutral creams, whites and yellows

3.Chevron Pattern Fan Blades on DesignSponge


For The House of Spook: Spray the whole fan creamy-white and stencil yellow floral swirls

4.DIY Dessert Tray by Ladypie on Craftster
For The House of Spook:  just change the color to a blackish-brownish-red

5.Pompourri Rug on Cut out + Keep
For The House of Spook: Peaches+Cream colored!



6.Checkered Floor Tutorial from Craftzine








For The House of Spook: Dark Wine + Cream



7.Paint-Dipped Cutlery by Oh!Crafts

For The House of Spook: All my chosen colors, plus maybe a few teal ones....

Saturday

On the house: Free graphics for personal and commercial use!

So I made some fun little handmade badges tonight, now available under my new "On the House" page, wich will feature the graphics that I have made, 100% free for commercial and personal use.



        





Have fun,y'all!

Wednesday

Reaching International Customers

Second to the U.S., the most hits I get from my etsy shop are from France. Parisians like bug jewelry, who knew? I have other hits from places like Latvia and Romania, which I could honestly not pinpoint on a map for you. (No child left behind in geography class!)  All my shitty cartography skills aside, there is a real thrill in knowing that other people in the world are viewing your products. It's so cool to know people who speak a different language and are from a completely different cultural background are interested in your hand-made American goods.

So, how do you get more international views and thus international customers?
Fish where those exotic little fishies are. 
I think my biggest draw for international views is DeviantArt. There are many excellent professional and aspiring artists on this site, ready to be supportive of you and your awesomeness! It's not hard to get people to pay attention to you on DevArt, while great artists share a bit of their portfolios, there are *many* heart-wrenchingly awful MSPAINT files uploaded to this site and called art.


How else can you connect with people overseas?

Rape and pillage your analytics. Find where your international customers are and learn more about their locale. It can't hurt.

Online art/craft communities such as Crafster, Cut out + Keep, DeviantArt, ect.

Social networks like Twitter (best bet), Facebook and Myspace (I include myspace because I hear people still use it)  - Follow/friend some people from around the world- blogger is also a great place to meet new people from different places.


SEO for overseas- try tagging your items with alternate spellings- jewelry is jewellery in the U.K.

Show some good-old-fashioned Etsy Love to 'foreign' sellers  Poland makes pretty much the best goth/metalhead clothing in the world. 

 Like what they like, make what they're making.- Decoden is JUST NOW getting some kind of popularity here in the states, and even the people wearing it have never heard the term before. Scope out trends in other countries (my favorite is Japan) to see what will be popular in a few years!

 
Good luck, y'all!



Monday

Quit yer bitchin'

Sell-able Graphics Ideas

Know photoshop? Maybe you can create these customizable products and sell the files to online customers:

Logos
Business Cards
Banners & Icons for online stores such as the ones on Etsy, Artfire, and Zazzle.
Clip Art
Scrapbook Printables and Paper Sets
Printable Toys and Paper Models
Patterns, like sewing or crochet
Stencil Sets
Recipe cards or Cookbooks

Sunday

I have Chlamydia!

Meet Chlamydia, the life-size art doll love-child of my two homoriffic friends- I tell you they're homoriffic because who else would name a giant creepy cloth mannequin "Chlamydia" ? 
Anyways, Chlamydia has been taking a little arty vaycay at my house for the past few months. I originally borrowed her to photograph my jewelry on, but she was a little too eerie for my Etsy shop, which is saying something.

Friday

Custom Order, Da-da-da-dun!

Alyssa, a super-cool lady who owns an Apairy, sent me about 50 of her bees to use my jewelry    :)

I've made her 2 pairs of earrings:


2 Necklaces:





AND
A Queen Bee brooch :
















More insect jewelry at www.etsy.com/shop/killjarjewelry

Tuesday

Always do unto others before they do unto you.

Thursday

Happy Thanksgiving,Assholes!

5 Adobe Illustrator tutorials I'm loving:



5. Create a balanced T-shirt Graphic



4. Create a Cute Creature



3. Create Wood Grain



2. Create a Gruesome Zombie Illustration



1. Combine texture and vector


Tuesday

What I've been doing (that's not blogging)

Keeping it real with my Etsy: 









 Creating designs for my Zazzle store, Simon Spook:







Being ill. Don't have pictures.

















Saturday

Lookie what PapaSpook brought home!

Beautiful, isn't she? My hubs caught her with no gloves on! I was kind of freaking out the WHOLE TIME I was putting her in resin.

Sunday

This is what I did today.....

Had lunch with my BFF Kate and my good friend Yolanda (who is sitting on the other side of the table) at a Vietnamese Bistro
Went to the National Funeral Museum with said friends. Took a picture in a coffin. Saw some super sweet old school hearses, caskets of various materials, a history of embalming annnddddddd:
I GOT TO KNEEL IN FRONT OF A MICHAEL JACKSON SHRINE. This was just randomly stuck in the Dia De Los Meurtos exhibit- the candles on the floor are those cheap "Jesus" candles but with Mj's face- there are also a few photographs and on the table sits a jar of Peter Pan Peanutbutter emblazoned with Michael Jackson! I can die now, I've seen everything I need to see.


Sunday

♥ ColourLovers ♥

Why was I not told of the infinite awesomeness of this website? You can create patterns, pallettes AND NAME YOUR OWN COLORS.
THAT'S RIGHT, BITCHES.
NAME.
YOUR.
OWN.
COLORS.


Fiend
Color by COLOURlovers
Vector Patterns by COLOURlovers
Geo_ModAnima_Owls
Vector Patterns by COLOURlover

Wednesday

Hump Day: Latex!

I'm blogging about latex?!  Ugh- I'm getting so tame!

Hump Day: Latex

teehee..
This drool-inducing photograph was shot by fetish photographer Martin Perreault

Sunday

Bug Process

I'll give you a not-so-enlightening glimpse at my bug jewelry process today!
These are the bugs I caught last Saturday:
From left: Grasshopper and (dead) Damselfly, crane fly, Damselfly, cuckoo wasp

The Damselflies still in molds. I decided to pose the one on the right to look more alive than scientific.




The cuckoo wasp and crane-fly, unmolded. Crane fly has now background yet, and I used a marble effect for the background of the cuckoo wasp.




Here are the finished products!  Click the image to see the listing at my Etsy store.

Damselfly Necklace
No-kill Damselfly Necklace






The glue on the crane fly isn't dry yet, so I'll post it when it's listed

Tuesday

Artist's brain damaged by illness and healed with...Crossword Puzzles?


Artist Lonni Sue Johnson contracted viral encephalitis in 2007 that destroyed her hippocampus and parts of her left temporal lobe. When she re-learned how to speak a year later, she could not use nouns. Johnson became obsessed with words, language, and word puzzles. It has helped her to start creating art again. Read the amazing, heartbreaking, bizarre story.  

Via KUHF News

Saturday

GO OUTSIDE!

Went on a bug-huntin' excursion today, here's the booty:
Damselfly OR Dragonfly nymph

Freaky mosquito-hawk looking thing

Cuckoo Wasp - He is covered in dirt but is a bright blue color. It took me and Aaron ages to catch one, illusive little bastards!