Hello friends! So last week I mentioned on social media that I was working on something exciting and now I am ready to officially share it: I am opening an Etsy shop!

At the moment I would say that I am about 75% ready to open up the shop, but am just finishing up some final things and making sure I am all ready with shipping, packaging, etc. I would love to be able to tell you that I will be 100% ready for next Sunday, but I don't want to overpromise. So I will say that I HOPE to be ready by next Sunday, but don't be surprised if it's actually 2 more weeks :)

I am going to be starting out easy with some things that are light and relatively easy to ship: canvases, yarn hangings and canvas bags/pouches. I do have some larger/heavier things that I would love to add in the future, but I am still trying to figure out the best ways to ship things and not have it be cost prohibitive. I've decided that I want to offer free shipping on my Etsy shop so I have been figuring out how to price things to cover the cost of shipping and find shipping options that are reasonable. Thank you to Cara from SeptemberSunStudio for giving me many "Etsy for Dummies" lessons!

So that's the exciting announcement! This is something I have been working on for a few weeks and is why I haven't had much crafty content to post for a while. I will be back in action soon and will hopefully have an update next week or the week after letting you guys know that the shop is live. Thank you all for your patience!

 - Rebecca

P.S. Today's photo on the homepage is from Pexels user Markus Winkler: 
 www.pexels.com/photo/typewriter-with-paper-5227049/

Happy Sunday everyone! So before we get started on the crafty content today I just wanted to share a fun update in case you had not seen it on Instagram or Facebook. We have a new logo! I am so in love with this logo and it was made by the lovely Cara over at September Sun Studio: www.etsy.com/shop/SeptemberSunStudio. Go check her out for all your custom art, adorable sticker and pretty yarn weaving needs. 

Now on to the craftiness! So a few blogs ago I shared some watercolor rain paintings that I made. I was still on a watercolor kick and my mother was getting rid of some old Stampin' Up! watercolor crayons which I happily snagged. 

Although my other watercolors work well enough, I was very excited about these crayons as it is much easier to control how much you use and how dark or light you want the colors to be. I wanted to do a sunset painting just for myself so I started by coloring some of the pastel colors onto watercolor paper. You can then apply water directly to the paper and blend the colors together. 

I wanted some real contrast between the watercolor and the other details in the art, so I used acrylic paint overtop of the watercolor. I sketched out and painted some mountains and the setting sun in the valley of the mountains. 

I then cut the paper down and put the art in a wooden frame I had painted black. What an easy art piece!

I really liked how this came out and wanted to make some more paintings that used both watercolor and acrylic paint. As of right now I have 5 additional paintings made and have cut each down to 8 by 10 inches. I figured they could be sold at a craft fair as art prints that people could frame on their own. For 4 of these, I used the same basic technique of doing watercolor first and then adding detail with acrylic paint, but for the flower bouquet painting I did something a little different. My mother had the smart idea of drawing directly on a rubber stamp with the watercolor crayon and then spraying water on it. This allowed me to get the basic shapes of each flower using a rubber stamp instead of having to freehand them. 

And here are the 5 paintings I have at the moment! They are very simple and pretty quick to make so I'm sure I'll be doing more of them when I want a small project. 

What do you guys think of these paintings? Let me know in the comments below!

 - Rebecca

Today's photo on the homepage is from Pexels user Jadson Thomas: www.pexels.com/photo/pain-brushes-inside-clear-plastic-cups-542556/