Lavender Lemon Sugar Cookies

I found this photo of beautiful lavender lemon sugar cookies on Flickr,

which in turn led me to the When Harry Met Salad Blog. The entire entry is as lovely and well presented as a magazine article. I am featuring it on my Sugar Cookie Recipes Squidoo lens to celebrate spring.

Drawing a Rose Using Flickr and Photoshop

How do you go from this

to this


using Flickr and Photoshop?

Go to my How to Draw a Rose
Squidoo lens to find out.

White rose photo by kostas.v on Flickr.
Drawing by me.

Image Transfer - A Cool Art Technique

I first fell in love with the look of image transfer while reading about it in Somerset Studio magazine. The technique itself, though - despite reading numerous how-to articles in the magazine - escaped me. In the beginning people were using toxic substances such as acetone to dissolve the toner on copies. Or, to get a colored image they were using Polaroid pictures and expensive equipment. So although I admired the look I didn't use it.

A couple of years ago an artist friend of mine asked me just what an image transfer was. Googling to find the right information was so frustrating that I decided to create a lens as a sort of bibliography. Since then the lens has grown quite a bit and includes many different methods for image transfer as well as my own "faux" image transfer technique that I developed.

Check it out for yourself by clicking on this link: Image Transfer on Squidoo.

Image courtesy of "T" Altered Art on Flickr.

Altered Art Vintage Valentines

A couple of years ago, with the kind encouragement of a friend, I learned how to use Photoshop. There was a steep learning curve but then one day something just clicked and the other pieces of the Photoshop puzzle pretty much fell into place. Getting a Wacom Graphire Bluetooth 6 x 8-Inch Tablet for my computer helped immensely as well. In fact, that alone was life changing! Suddenly I was free to try all sorts of things artistically that I couldn't before.

About the same time people in the mixed media/paper arts world started using a lot of vintage 1920's era images of people in their work. I found Tallulah's online where I could download them for a reasonable price and use them commercially. Then I started playing around with digitally altering some flower photos I'd taken to turn them into backgrounds. Valentine's Day was coming up so I set a task for myself of creating several valentines from the formula I'd invented. That was the key moment in my learning of Photoshop. From there I created a Zazzle shop for them and now with the handy Zazzle module on Squidoo, a lens that is just the beginning of my altered art Valentine adventures.

Altered Art Vintage Valentines on Squidoo

From Goddess to Groundhog: The Evolution of a Holy Day

In the United States, Groundhog's Day is sort of a silly made up holiday whereby a large rodent that lives in the ground is said to be able to predict how many weeks of winter are left. Groundhog's Day is really the last remnants of an ancient Celtic feast day dedicated to celebrating their main goddess, Brigid, who was a seer of the future. It became Christianized as Candlemas which represents different things to different denominations. These days pagans have revived it as Imbolc, a day to celebrate Brigid and the first stirrings of spring with the noticeable strengthening of the sun in the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to see it as a time to celebrate the fruits of the summer and the light that will soon be waning. After all, Brigid is a goddess of hearth and home as well as enlightenment. In all ways, even Groundhog's Day, it is a festival of light.

I have personally encountered Brigid as a presence. For most of my life I've been interested in deities from different traditions but I was never really sure they existed. Then one night I was at work and suddenly I felt a powerful energy right in front of me. The name Brigid popped into my head. For years prior I'd had an interest in things Celtic because of my northern European ancestors, but I really knew very little about Brigid. I immediately Googled her and what I found spoke directly to my life at that moment, and also my life in general. If you haven't experienced something like that I know it can sound delusional. I even questioned my own sanity for a while after. But that was the beginning of a long initiation process that I'm still in the middle of. Now having the presence of Brigid around isn't so overwhelming. But I will never forget being "called" like that.

One of the first Squidoo lenses I made was about Brigid. With it I have tried to collect the most relevant information about Brigid on the Web and put it in one place for reference. Check it out here: Brigid - Celtic Triple Goddess.

Make a Free Online Vision Board Using Squidoo

Vision boards, or dream boards as they're sometimes called, are becoming more and more popular as a way to visually map out your goals and dreams. They are often part of a philosophy called the Law of Attraction made popular by The Secret. I have to say I'm getting a bit tired of the overuse of the Law of Attraction, but since I am an artist I still like the idea of creating vision boards. Apparently even Oprah made one to add energy to President Obama's campaign.

Originally to make one you cut pictures out of magazines and glued them onto poster board to make a collage. Now there are online sites where you can create vision boards. I thought why not make one from a Squidoo lens? You have modules to add pictures and modules to add text, and not only that you might make a little bit of money from them if it's a topic lots of people are interested in.

See what I came up with at my lens here: Create a Free Vision Board With Squidoo

And although I am a bit jaded about the "LOA", I've found a new book that puts it in a more down-to-earth perspective. I made my first Squidoo "SquidLit" lens about it. Check it out here: The Law of Attraction in Action .

(Just a note to any other Squidooers reading this who are thinking about trying the SquidLit template. I'm tempted to say don't. It seems to have a lot of bugs. Don't write too much in the introductory template because I lost most of it in transition to the regular workshop.)

Just Desserts: Sugar Cookie Recipes

I just have to take a moment to toot my own bright orange Squidoo horn. If you are part of the Squidoo community you know that making it into the top 100 Lens ranking is a big, big deal. So I was thrilled when my Sugar Cookie Recipes lens made it there earlier this week. I then set my sights on the Top 50 so I could put another shiny new badge from Lens Candy on my lens (having just proudly "hung" one for Top 100). But I didn't really think it was possible. Lo and behold, much to my wondering eyes did appear a lens ranking of 49 when I checked this morning!

If you think this was an overnight success it isn't. I created this lens in November 2007 based on my grandma's Christmas lemon sugar cookie recipe. It got close to the Top 100 last year but never got over the threshold.

And to those of you who don't have a Squidoo lens this may seem like a lot of hoopla over nothing, but I've spent countless hours crafting my lenses and it feels like, as the title says, just desserts to be rewarded in this way. Oh, and I actually make money from it! So if you're inspired to join in the fun, click on this link to start creating your own.