Ramping Things Up for Summer

I have my first show of the summer in just over a month so I'm busy getting ready. Part of it is a total overhaul of my display. One thing I absolutely had to have was a new canopy because my old one is in bad shape which will teach me not to buy a cheap canopy that wind can tear apart. This time I went for sturdy..

I also feel so much more professional with the display busts and earring card racks I bought too. I like to make my displays as much as possible but these were things I thought it was better to buy. They're all black so they will go well with the trays I made last year and contrast with the light color of the sea shells and glass I have too. I don't have them assembled yet but I'm going to put half spheres of styrofoam in fishbowls and use that to display my hair sticks which I think will be really cute.


I also just got these great stamps made. They're for a lot of things but one thing I'm planning is to use the big logo stamp on paper bags for the shows to put purchases in.

Zazzle Designs

I have a little store on Zazzle when I have tshirts and stuff of my designs and I just added some with the cuttlefish illustration form my logo. They're in the original green and also one in red. Zazzle is a lot of fun and I've done some printing of business cards and a tshirt with them and the quality is very good, I highly recommend them.

Green Cuttlefish Shirt by NoadiArt
Create Custom TShirt on Zazzle.com

Noadi's Art Logo

After avoiding it for a long time I decided that Noadi's Art really needed a logo. Graphic design isn't something I have a lot of experience and it took me a while to get the hang of using Inkscape to trace and color the sketch I made. I like how it looks though.

Here's the full color logo on the background color I use in my shop banner. I have several versions like the grayscale, and black and white along with a few others. One of the nice things about using a vector program like Inkscape for this is it made it very easy to do the color swapping. Of course my logo is of a cuttlefish.

Little Fun with my Steampunk Cephalopods

So I just got done making, photographing, and listing a bunch of new steampunk cephalopods jewelry in my Etsy Shop. Along with the distressed gray metal look I had been doing I created a more fanciful and feminine steampunk look in a deep burgundy red with antique gold edging that makes it look gilded. I'm very happy wiht how these turned out and how popular my steampunk cephalopods have been recently.

I decided I wanted to do a slideshow of them and this is what I created using animoto.

New Books Again

I love when boxes from Amazon arrive. This month I used my affiliate earnings to buy 3 books I've had my eye on for a while, Faux Surfaces in Polymer Clay, DIY: Design it Yourself, and Craft Inc.

I'm excited about doing some cool faux surface cuttlefish and stuff. The other two are more to help me on the business side of things and I'll be reviewing them on the Handmade Business Blog in the next few weeks.

Fun Supplies

Twitter is a wonderful thing, I was talking about how I wanted some old mechanical watches for parts and one of my friends put me in touch with a store that sells vintage items. I got 12 lovely but broken ladies watches.

Now what do I use these for? Well the innards get used for my steampunk cephalopods, I now have cuttlefish, octopus, and squid in this style. The cases are all quite pretty and I'm thinking of using them so make mini shadow-boxes. Whether they'll all be necklaces or if I'll use the wrist watch cases for bracelets I haven't decided yet. In any case I'm having fun taking the watches apart.

I have some ideas for switching up the steampunk cephalopods a bit. First of all a more feminine version in red an gold rather than gray and brass.