Before getting to the “good” stuff, I’d just like to thank everyone who visited my blog, left comments both effusive and terse, and especially thanks to those who signed up for my feed, FriendConnect, or email subscription. It’s been a wonderful experience again (this is my second year participating) and I’ve found several blogs I’ll be visiting again and hopefully made some new online friends along the way.

I also want to thank Lisa Swifka for her tireless effort in hosting this blog event and organizing all the details, not to mention how she visited every participant herself.

Onto the giveaway–

Last year, I had my children draw names out of a hat (literally). This year, I really didn’t want to cut out 178 little pieces of paper, so I went with the Random Number Generator for the winners. And the winners are:

Serendipity Handmade: the pig notepad

Tara: the star notepad

Lyndy Ward: little black notepad

AJ from the Phillipines (no blog): the heart notepad

Zan Asha: I Heart Ewe Sheepicle

Congratulations to all the winners! If you’d like to find out a little about these winners, you can click on their names and visit their blogs (you may recognize some of them from the magic carpet ride).

I will be contacting the winners today by email (or through their blogs). If I don’t receive a response by midnight on February 16, I’ll have to assume they are no longer interested in the items and will draw a new winner for that particular item. Items will be mailed by the end of the week.

Thanks again for all the visitors and my new subscribers!

Visit A Whimsical Bohemian for other One World One Heart participants.

For this part of the ride, you’re visiting me (Eva Buchala, Lady Artisan) here in Texas. It’s been a balmy 60 to 70 degrees here in San Antonio for the past several days and most of us South-Central Texans are happy to be in shorts again! Take your jackets off, kick your shoes off and dangle your feet over the sides of the carpet as you join me for some bookbinding and sculpting fun. We’ll be servin’ up some ribs, tamales, chili and refreshing iced tea (sweet or unsweet, your choice) for refreshments.

Rules for the giveaway are simple:

1. Leave one comment on this post to receive an entry into the drawings (yes, that’s plural).

2. Make sure your comment includes your name and contact info so I can find you if you win.

3. Wander around and check out my other posts, Flickr, my website, etc. Feel free to leave comments on other posts, too

4. Send your comment in before midnight CST on February 14 (Happy Valentine’s Day!) so you’ll be included in the drawings.

5. Enjoy yourself! Don’t forget to pick up your snacks before the Magic Carpet heads off to it’s next location.

Entry into the drawing must be submitted before midnight Central Standard Time on Sunday, February 14, to be included. I will be drawing the winners (yes, that’s plural) on the morning of Monday, February 15, and announcing them during that day. I’ll probably use a random number generator this year.

Now to the good stuff–the giveaways. I’m offering up four leather matchbook notepads (refillable) and one Sheepicle–a small sculpted sheep, this one is ready for Valentine’s Day. I will randomly (of course) pick a winner for each item and post that information on Monday, February 15. If the winner of an item doesn’t respond by midnight on Tuesday, February 16, I will choose a new winner for that item. On to the items:

First up are the matchbook notepads. I came up with this idea one day looking at the smaller pieces of leftover leather from making books and wondering what I could do with them. I’d seen the matchbook notepads on Etsy, usually for promotional purposes, but thought it might be neat to have a nice, mini leather notepad to carry in a purse, pocket or bag (I’m always searching for note paper in my purse). The downside to making a matchbook notepad out of leather is that the materials cost way too much to sell them as inexpensively as the paper ones, of course. Plus, I can’t make one without wanting to carve, decorate, dye, etc., so the time involved would be a bit more. Solution? Make them refillable. So, paying more won’t matter because you can simply get one and refill it over and over.

The first matchbook is a cute little Piggy on a Spring green background. The notepad is made from hand-dyed leather and has a cute little pink piggy brad on the cover with two matching pink brads in the back. Filled with 16 pages of scrap drawing paper.

The second matchbook is Patriotic. This one sports a white start with red dots on it gracing a deep blue background. Again, the leather is hand-dyed and the brads on the back for this one are red stars. Paper inside is also scrap drawing paper, 16 pages.

The third matchbook is this Little Black Notepad–a simple and classic black leather with lovely little pearl hearts trimmed in gold (not real pearls, not real gold, just in case someone wondered). The paper included is 16 pages of scrap drawing paper.

The final matchbook I’m giving away is a perfect Valentine’s item, although it’s never out of style to carry your heart with you. This matchbook is a thicker leather with a hand-carved heart on the cover, dyed red on a pink background, the back sports two sparkly, glittery red hearts for brads. The paper inside is, once again, 16 pages of scrap drawing paper.

And the final giveaway item this year is a little sculpture in a series I’m calling the Sheepicles. This little guy is terribly cute and he’s holding a heart that says “Love” on it. It’s called “I Heart Ewe” and is a hand sculpted sheep in air-dry clay. I painted it with black, white and red artist acrylics. He’s looking forward to sharing his love with you…

Leave a comment. You’re welcome to tell me which item you’d prefer if you win but I can’t guarantee to accommodate everyone.

If you like the Sheepicle here, don’t forget to stop by the Art Dolls Only blog where the team is giving away 17 (yes, SEVENTEEN) doll and art items. I made a Sheepicle for that giveaway as well called “Smooch.”

Comments are moderated for those posting for the first time so if you don’t see your comment right away, it probably still needs to be approved.

Red. I’ve been using Eco-Flo for dying the leather–they’re water-based colors (dyes and highlighters) for leather sold by Tandy–and their Scarlet is a nice, rich red. Their All-In-One stain and finish is awful but the dye and highlighters are pretty nice, although getting a really even spread on the dyes isn’t always easy unless you’re using a darker color. For me, they’re perfect, though, because I much prefer the less even look anyway.

These designs always start out simple and then grow into rather complex and involved projects that have me researching something online and spending more time than I ought on detailing a piece. On the upside, I find a lot of really fascinating websites that I never knew existed. For instance, e-Leo, which is an online archive of da Vinci’s diaries and papers (you have to register with this site for access–I imagine they’re protecting copyrights with that–but it’s well worth it).

Although da Vinci is well before the Victorian era, where most Steampunk seems to live, the inventions and ideas he came up with fit rather neatly with the “feel.” And, considering that the mechanical clock was invented in the 13th or 14th century (at least a century before Leonardo), it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch for me to land on da Vinci at least once while working on one of these.

Truthfully, though, the idea came because I had some stray black marks show up on the inside of the journal and I didn’t want to dye the inside covers this time, so I started thinking about what kind of design I could do on the inside to incorporate my mistakes rather than cover them up. It started me thinking about some of da Vinci’s journal pages with the sketches and mirror writing, so I decided to do something along those lines.

I’m not going to show the whole of the inside covers yet…once I’ve sold the book and the customer has a chance to look them over and “decipher” them, I’ll post them on my blog.

As for the rest of the book, black is such a nice complement to red, so I went with black velvet for the spine and black suede for the strap. The clasp/closure is part of the watch band from the watch cover I used on the front (the bottom cover with the clockwork gears). It makes an interesting closure and works surprisingly well.

The molded decorations that help hold the watch face  and watch cover in place are made with Apoxie Sculpt (a two-part epoxy clay), then painted with blackened bronzer. I used molds for part of the decoration, a leather stamp for part of it and did the rest by hand.

The paper is a mix of ivory and beige pastel paper, tea-stained watercolor paper and some naturally aged Arches watercolor paper that I got at an estate sale. The clockwork design, this time, is simpler than usual. If I’m not careful, I can spend literally days laying out a good clockwork design, so I opted for simple to reduce the time spent. Which turned out to be a good idea after I added the da Vinci aspect.

As usual, these journals give me a chance to practice my storytelling. They always seem to have some kind of “history” behind them, which is part of the appeal for me, personally. I enjoy coming up with the background to explain what their purpose is and what kind of person might have owned them. For the background on this one or if you think you can’t live without it, check my Etsy shop.

And, finally, a picture of the book “in action.” I know the listing says that the sellers have never tried it out but how can anyone resist having a couple of “extra” hours to get some things done?

My Steampunk designs have been relying on combining lots of metal with paper and leather. I’m very particular about how I place the watch parts inside a watch cover on my main designs. I am not quite skilled enough yet (and I haven’t really had the time or made it) to figure out how to make a clockwork design on one of these journals that actually functions, but I like them to LOOK like they might work or might have worked at some point in time. My eventual goal is to make some that have functioning parts, gears that work, a crank that turns, etc., but I’m not quite there yet.

One of the hardest aspects of all this is securing the watch parts, metal tubing and other base metal pieces to the leather or book board. I can’t wrap wire around everything to make it stay put so I’ve been relying on some good, strong glues (JB Weld, for instance) that work fine but sometimes leave me thinking that I could be doing something further to secure these pieces. I’ve even gone so far as to try soldering (on my last TDB, I used quite a bit of soldering) but will likely not do that again very often since I found my control of the solder was pretty lame.

Well, this small Steampunk matchbook notepad that I’ve been sharing pictures of throughout this post has given me a new vision. I had to carve a circle in the leather–just enough for the watch crystal/cover to sit down in it and be secure. The clockwork design was glued onto the natural leather in the center of the circle and then I glued the watch cover over it and attached the copper tube on the outside. The JBWeld worked great for holding things in place but the design of this particular notepad is different than a solid front cover with book board under the leather. The matchbook has to open and close which, of course, bends the leather. As soon as I opened and closed the book once, I could see a problem–the top of the watch cover was coming lose because of the folding/bending of the leather. NOT a good thing.

I’d never had this particular situation come up before, of course, so it was the first time I had to figure out a solution for it. Which might explain why it had never occurred to me that I could use Apoxie Sculpt (a two-part epoxy clay that sticks to EVERYTHING) to help secure these metal parts to my books. But that wasn’t actually the epiphany. I started working with the clay, putting a snake of black clay around all the edges of the watch case (why not add extra security) and making a bigger snake at the top to help keep it from separating from the leather everytime the book was opened.

As I was working with the Apoxie Sculpt, adding some designs to the top portion that would be more visible, it hit me (yes, I’ll admit I’m a little slow sometimes). I can use the Apoxie Sculpt for attaching the clockwork parts and metal pieces AND I can sculpt with them a bit so it’s decorative! Ok, so it’s not much of an epiphany but it was a pretty good one for me since it solves my securing/attaching concerns and it adds some great design elements to my books.

Which brings me to this little beauty which will be going in my Etsy shop soon. I’m calling it the Clockwork Kladde (a German word that’s supposed to mean book, notebook or jotter). It’s a technological wonder–designed to take notes for you automatically. Of course, it doesn’t function anymore so you’ll have to take those notes yourself, but it sure looks cool.

Everyone knows that the first and most important key to selling online is to take good photos. Buyers are likely to be making a decision to purchase something based mainly on the photos you share and, only secondarily on the description you give. If you don’t catch their eye with the photo, then you’ve already lost the sale. I’ve recently realized how important this visual element is while doing some online shopping myself. I find myself hesitant to buy anything online if there isn’t a photo in the listing showing me what I’m buying. I’m talking about more mundane things, as well–not just artwork/handcrafted items (which is a no-brainer when it comes to needing photos) but also for things like supplies I buy online. Eyelets, for instance. They don’t normally look any different from one manufacturer to the next. Other than color or size, do I really need to see a photo? But I still find myself more willing to put those items in my cart if there’s an image associated with the description. I find myself going back more regularly to the online companies with color photos in their shops rather than the ones that have simple text listings of their items or even black and white sketches (although American Science & Surplus is one exception to this rule).

I’m not going to even pretend that I can tell you how to take better pictures from a technical perspective. Heck, I don’t even have the technique part down myself–I use the flash on my camera way too much because I’m too lazy to actually put my head into setting up a proper lighting and background set in my current studio.

What I really want to talk about here are teaser photos. Which is my name for those abstract detail shots that a seller uses as their main photo in their listing. The idea is to show just enough of the item to catch a buyer’s attention and make them wonder what the rest of the piece looks like. Do they always work? Probably not. And I’ve never done any in-depth, or even cursory, studies to see how effective they are. I have seen that my items tend to get more views if I use a more dramatic main shot for the listing rather than a full item photo showing the whole piece at once. I think that for some items, it’s more effective to show the whole thing and for some items, people will be more apt to check it out if they can’t quite see it all.

So, yes, I’ve been sharing various detail shots that I took of my new Steampunk Journal. One thing I do for my abstract shot is take several different ones. When I first started doing the detail shots, I would take one or, at the most, two different details. Occasionally, I got really lucky and came up with something excellent, like this shot of my Serenity journal (which could almost be considered Steampunk–velvet, leather, and a watch crystal on the cover):

I’ve found that I don’t get lucky that often so I started taking numerous detail shots to make sure I get at least one that I like. In this case, I like almost all of them but decided against a couple of them because they showed too little. The corner detail shots have too little of the book in them and I don’t feel like they inspire people to actually go look at the item to see the rest.

The front cover at an angle seemed to have too much in it–too much of the overall book and too much background. So I decided against using that one. I finally opted for one of the spine shots because it showed a little bit of a hinge rod, some of the copper sheet and hinges, a bit of the copper tubing and a tiny sliver of the clockwork design on the cover. The background is subtle enough to not get in the way.

But, depending on how long this one hangs around my shop and studio, I may switch out the detail shots to see how they affect the number of views I get.

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Looking for something you can buy to get your name into the BEST drawing this holiday season? I’ve just added some new personalized journals to my shop.

I’m also working on another Steampunk journal–this one a little larger than the last. It’s coming along nicely and I’m hoping to be able to list it sometime this weekend. Here’s a teaser:

Small dragon skeleton fossil

Dug up in West Sweden, Texas by an amateur paleontologist, this small dragon skeleton is over 50% complete. By the size, it’s been determined that this is an immature Draco Pygmaei (Pygmaen Dragon).

No, I haven’t gone bonkers. This is actually a bas relief piece that I’ve had in my Etsy shop for some time now. I decided to pull it and try it out on Ebay but it’s not getting many hits so I figured I’d do a little blog post about it. This piece took me around 10 hours to make and includes a pound of polymer clay, sponge coral, and an amethyst. The spine bones from the neck through the tail are all sponge coral. All the other bones were sculpted out of polymer clay except for a couple of small bones in the wing.

I have it permanently mounted in a black shadow box frame and plan on including a COA by the Draconus Reliquiae Magister from 1947, when the skeleton was “discovered.” I’ve debated putting together a small photo album showing photos of it’s discovery as an extra gift with the item but I haven’t really convinced myself to do that yet.

Meanwhile, you can check out the “discovery” pictures right here:

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You can find him on Ebay here.

EDIT: He’s back in my Etsy shop.

I don’t remember how I initially found out about this call for entries  (probably the Etsy forums) but, I remember scrambling to submit a couple of items, scrambling to get the release forms together, and not having much time to do it all. I think when I found out about it, the deadline was almost upon me.

And then I kind of forgot about it until I got an email from Garth earlier this month letting me know that at least one of my submissions had been accepted and the book would be published soon. Happy Dance time!

At the beginning of the year, I was drowning in a studio full of THINGS, STUFF, and all those bits and pieces that I just KNEW I could use someday. I was keeping almost everything. Mom needed matches once so she bought a ton of those little promotional boxes of matches from a flea market one weekend. I stole all the boxes and gave her the matches thinking I could make a book or something with them. I bought some high-dollar root beer (Virgil’s Root Beer) and could easily imagine a nice thick book with the Virgil’s box as the cover so I kept that. Coasters from restaurants I’d been to recently, a set of educational pictures on learning about weather from a garage sale, my mom’s cigarette boxes (books made from a cigarette box or made to fit in one), an antique school slate from the early 19th century….I was on a repurposing binge at the time. Although my work isn’t usually focused on environmentally conscious materials (I was using polymer clay for most of my work), I kept seeing books in everything, so I kept the materials in case I could figure out the time to actually work on these ideas.

One of the things I did get to were a series of paint chip notebooks. These were tiny little pamphlets that I made using some old paint chips I had in my studio from when we were thinking about repainting our room, painting the bathroom, and from when I did miniatures (paint chips are excellent for miniatures). I had quite a few of those strips with four colors on each strip so I cut them in half and folded them so there was one color on the front cover and a second color (tint or shade from the same strip) on the back cover. Did a quick pamphlet stitch using leftover paper from various books and other projects. And, voila! I had a tiny notebook.

Well, actually, I did quite a few of them at one time so I ended up with A LOT of tiny notebooks.

I had to get some more recently for a project I was working on so I’ll be making a few more of these. The originals sold out pretty quickly. I may keep these to send as little thank you gifts instead of selling them this time. Anyway, that was “one” of the items I submitted for the Creative Reuse book that was accepted.

The other item was a pretty cool mini book I made from a pair of leather gloves I found at a garage sale. They were lovely brown kid gloves in a size too small for a normal human to wear (ok, maybe there are some women with hands that small). The gloves were short gloves, right at the wrist, with a decorative strap and gold buckle on the back of each. I had to use both gloves to make one 3″ x 2″ book. I also used one of the straps and buckles to make a closure strap on the little journal.

Not only did this one make it in the book, but it’s on one of the pages that Amazon displays on their site. Maybe not quite as thrilling as having your item on the cover, but it’s cool enough for me. And I have two more pairs of gloves that I found at another garage sale…

I don’t have a copy of the book yet but you can bet I’ll be getting one soon. The other pieces I’ve seen included in the book look wonderful, so I’m definitely in good company and look forward to seeing it all in person.