Baby is here!

My Fairy Girl arrived 3 weeks ago Monday!!  We are so glad she is here and just adore her.  Big brother is wonderful with her and so helpful around the house.

Obviously, there are a lot of details to fill in, but I'm typing one handed as Serafina ("Little Fire") sleeps on me. :)

This pin shows ways to stimulate your 0-3 month old for those brief periods she/he is awake. Given that I find pouring a bowl of cereal difficult, I was only going to try to get out Angelo's baby mirror (ok, try to convince Angelo to get it out of his room)... like I'd already planned on doing for weeks anyway.  The high contrast prints are "old news" to me too and I only bring them up to point out that my girl was highly interested in the butterfly printed receiving blanket I had folded up next to the wall on her changing table, the rather low contrast print on the couch and the face on the lady bug pillow pet on top of the couch.  None of these things did I put up with the intention of getting her attention; she just naturally noticed and found them interesting.  My point is not to criticize this blog post, but to make sure I and no one else feels like an underachiever for not stimulating their newborn enough and to just use the information to be aware of what new babies are interested in and use what's convenient at the time... because it's already tough getting enough food, water, and if you're lucky, a shower at this point, right?  Oh, and you may get lucky like I did and happen to find an older sibling's finger puppet on the floor for him to entertain your littlest while you change her diaper.

Also, I chose this pin because I still haven't done anything about the "no more free photo storage" thing, and I can embed pins. ;-)  Remember you can follow me on Pinterest and Facebook (where my profile pic is of the littlest one and me.)

Are you on Pinterest too? LMK! :) 

Source: playfullearners.co.uk via Narah on Pinterest

Art Journaling Pages

I've been doing some art journaling lately- all downstairs away from my studio because I'm tired and need to keep my feet up often to avoid water balloon feet.  It's a lot of doodling on pre-painted backgrounds, but I did get some new backgrounds made using Angelo's watercolors (they're actually high quality paints you have to mix), some water color pencils from his Faber Castell Modern Masterpieces kit and his Crayola marker air brush.  Not that you can see any of these right now because I've not put most of the pics on my computer.  There is this one that I got going before the swelling got too bad... and this one too.  Since I can't really show you more right now, I thought I'd share this interesting slide show of Orly Avineri's work.  Enjoy!

Paleo Almond Chocolate Chip Cookies

These cookies are yummy.  They are Paleo treats, so there's no grains, no refined sugars.  So, you can eat as many as you want!  Ha!  Just kidding, but they do allow you to have something sweet without feeling like you are destroying yourself.  The only change I made was that I used melted virgin coconut oil instead of macadamia nut oil.  It's a bit weird if you haven't made these sort of treats before in that they start as these tiny little smooshed balls of stuff and then spread out a LOT.  The directions say to form into balls and then flatten, but I ended up doing a combination of both at the same time to get everything to stick.  There are no eggs or any other sorts of binders.  So, it makes it interesting to try to form, but it means you can lick the spoon and not worry about salmonella issues.  If you decide to make them, enjoy! :)

An Artful Green Tara Shrine

Well, preparing for baby has really taken top priority around here, but I wanted to let you know I'm still alive.

This Green Tara shrine is made from mono prints, ink sprayed wax paper and dyed paper towels I made.  The drawing of Green Tara is mine; I used the Kat Von Dee method of portraiture- traced a photo of a statue and filled in the details myself.  Prisma color pencils and Pitt pens were used for coloring and outlining.

Remember you can follow me on Facebook and Pinterest since there's not much blogging these days.  Adding "what to do about that" on top of getting ready for baby has really been a low priority, unfortunately.  But, when I'm too tired to think or do much, I do get on those sites and find interesting things you will probably be interested in.

Maybe you'll be surprised by a link to my new blog the next time! :)

Holiday Countdown '12

Since I haven't paid to post more pictures and haven't done anything more than download wordpress, I will link to the picture of our "countdown calendar" here.

It is really simple.  I googled "free mini envelope template" and chose one I wanted.  Then, I printed it out at 60% since even though they all said mini and I unchecked "fit to page", they still were giant.  Once printed and cut, I traced 24 on Christmas scrapbook paper.  Angelo actually cut most of them out and helped to fold them.  After the glue dried, I put in strips of paper (cut from one sheet printed from Word) with an activity that would work for that day.  Some are simple and could be done any day and some are days that I will need to be teaching or taking advantage of weekend hours to make gifts and DH will take Angelo out for a while. This was one of my rare moments of planning every day for a month.  The last time was this time last year... and I still switched some activities as needed.

So, the list includes:
See holiday trees at the Carnegie art museum
Put up our tree
Make gingerbread houses at the library
Make small crafty gifts
Make cards
See gingerbread houses on display at Market Square
Help make gifts for our baby and baby cousins
Ride Shenley Santa train
Make hot chocolate (from scratch) and read a Xmas book (we checked out a bunch from the library)
Decorate paper grocery bags for gift wrap
Package, address, stamp and mail gifts and cards (he's been getting a big kick out of writing things out for family, so it's not as boring as it may initially sound.)
See "Wreck it Ralf"
Put up lights
Make ornaments
Train ride at Station Square
Science kit (been saving one- he loves them!)
See "The Guardians"
Make cookies
Color and glitter Christmas coloring sheets (tons of free printables out there)
Make a mixed media winter/holiday themed painting
Eat a cookie and read a Xmas book (we'll read these as he's interested too, but the cookie will be a little extra something)
Go to open art studio at the library
See miniature railroad at the Carnegie Science Center
Open one present

Since we have a membership to the Carnegie museums and we have all the materials/ingredients for making things, really only the Shenley Santa train ride (not very expensive at all), the train at Station square (only $1) and the movies (ok, movies are expensive these days) cost anything.  But, we will all have fun and spend lots of family focused time together.

Since all this making and fun-having will take up a lot of time and since I'm likely transitioning my blog elsewhere, I'll be taking a bit of a break here.  Be sure to check back to see where the Vinegar and Glitter blog ends up! :)

Free Shipping in My Etsy Store Through Cyber Monday!!

OK, this is totally lame.  Apparently, I'm out of storage space on this blog and have to pay to put any more pictures up, so I don't have a picture to go with this really cool bit of info I have for you.

However, you can go to my Etsy store: www.bellyartsmama.etsy.com and see all of the pictures of my listings there.  There are a few costuming items, a few very gift-able items and more listings coming soon- hopefully tonight!!

Through Cyber Monday, I'm offering free US shipping (shipping in the US)!!  Offer ends Nov. 27th and all orders placed Nov. 21st - Nov. 26th will be shipped Nov. 27th-28th.

Buy handmade for the holidays!!  Please share this to help spread the word!

Enjoy your Thanksgiving, friends!

With the picture situation and all, I may be moving this blog soon.  Will let you know!

My Piano Lamp

From approximately 3rd-4th grade, I took piano lessons.  Sometimes I really liked it.  Sometimes I would hide quietly and hope my mother forgot to take me.  Since I had 2 younger siblings at the time, that happened pretty often.  Really, I'm glad I had the lessons.  It helped me easily learn to play the xylophone, marimba and chimes in middle school band- which meant I got to go on the King's Island trip... honestly, my entire reason for joining.  But, also, I believe it really helped me to feel and know music more easily when it came to dancing.

Regardless of how I felt about the lessons, I was really happy when my Mom uncovered the lamp to my piano.  It sits on my art table now.  It's a red-head dancing... apparently, I see myself in her. :)

Sadly, I'm still on the look-out for the interior pictures of the house we stayed in in Cass.  I synched my phone and it said all was well, but can't locate them on my computer. :-/  Mercury is in retrograde, so hopefully it isn't a permanent issue.

Speaking of Mercury in retrograde, besides being a time of miscommunication, confrontation, misunderstandings and other nasty things, it is also a good time to re-work, re-do and finish what you started.  Unknowingly, I started going this direction yesterday when I started working on cleaning and organizing our hall closet again instead of going to the fabric store to buy cute stuff for the baby toy patterns I just bought on Etsy.  Even though buying the patterns is a way to start projects, I decided I'm going to use as much fabric as I can that is already in my sewing room.  Initially, I started planning ways to use the orange fleece left over from a Halloween costume a couple years ago.  That's re-working/picking up where I left off.

Anyway, since progress on my closet isn't very exciting, I found these lamp pictures that I took a couple months or so ago and forgot to share.  :)

Hoping you are able to re-work, re-do and put old issues (which come up during Mercury in retrograde) to bed.