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Seaglass always gives off an aura of its watery origins; cool, calm colors, undefined edges.  Scoop up a handful and hold it up next to your ear and you can almost hear the gentle lapping of waves.

My youngest likes to take off by himself and head to a secret spot somewhere north of Santa Cruz and south of Half Moon Bay and spend a few, solitary hours in the meditative process of gathering seaglass.

He has quite a collection of it – it would probably fill a half gallon milk carton.  I keep urging him to experiment with jewelry making but for now he is content just to gather and admire.

In the meantime, while I wait for his creative spark to fire (or for him to get tired of me going on about it), I’ve discovered one of my online friends has an Etsy shop, KahiliCreations with designs, while not made from seaglass, evoke the same calm, cool, watery essence.

Her work stands on its own but she has gone one step further and given each a name, in Hawaiian, that perfectly descibes the piece.

Can’t you practically feel the sand between your toes?

Edited to add:  Whoops!  My bad – I posted a link to a contest that was over long ago in March.  I thought it was May.   I need to slow down….

This is the state of my studio kitchen at the moment.  I have an assembly line going to create the rest of the tags and I’ve taken over the entire counter.  I just have to apply the embellishments on the tags so I’m in the home stretch.

I don’t know why I took a week off posting.  Work was at a crescendo this week, which is part of the reason.  The other reason is, well, crafting failure.  Takes the wind right out of my blogging sails.

Last year I saw a beautiful frame at Anthropologie.  It was dove grey with white, raised scrolly designs on it.  It was really pretty (comes in yellow and green too, I think).  It was out of my price range but it kept thinking about it.  Then I decided to see if I could recreate it.

I went to Ross.  I know!  And found a likely candidate for $8.99. 

This frame is a wee bit more dimensional than the Anthropologie frame – which had more of a two dimensional look to it.  But what the heck, it’s only $8.99.

So I painted it grey.  Then tried to paint the raised bits white.  I wish I had taken a picture.  Let’s just say it didn’t work out.  It was hard to know where to put the white and where not to.

I decided to try something out of my comfort and normal decorating zone and repaint it turquoise.  I saw a picture of an ornate building in some Carribean country and wanted to recreate that vibe.

Umm.  No.

We just aren’t turquoise people around here.

Thank goodness it’s just paint.  I still wanted to elevate this dumb old frame to something other than it’s typical, baroque origins.  So I decided red.

Maybe not.

Sheesh – can we just get a breeze around here?

Marie Antoinette inspired tags for my niece’s 2nd Annual Mother’s Day/Birthday Tea Party. 

Each guest brings a wrapped tea cup and one of these tags will be attached to it.  Then each guest picks a number (little round tag up there) and matches it to the wrapped tea cup.  Then I do believe the person with number 1 opens her gift.  Number 2 can either take number 1’s teacup or open her own gift ~ and so on. 

I was going to take a picture of the process of making them but it’s such chaos that I decided to spare you.  Rather than an assembly line approach like I would normally do I am making each one from start to finish.  And evidently I need to spread out over the entire house to do this.  I’m not kidding.  I have a mess in the dining room, the living room and the kitchen counter to clean up.

So let’s just talk about the tags, shall we?

First I take a standard shipping tag (bought in bulk at the stationary store).  Attach bits of patterned paper.  I scanned the backs of old French postcards, an old ledger sheet (also in French), and used bits of scrapbooking paper.  Then I embellished with stamped images, bits of lace, velvet ribbon and other trims.  Buttons, millinery flowers, crystals.

To make the glittered numbers I printed the numbers on a printable adhesive-backed transparency sheet (I just found this today at my favorite stamp store – I can think of a LOT of things to use this with).  I printed using grey ink and then went over the numbers with glue using a fine tipped paint brush.  Then poured on some German glass glitter and let dry.  Cut out, peel off backing and apply.