Screenprinting, Sewing, Leathercrafting & Jewelry Making

A bit of what I've been up to lately. Check out the shop for more details.

Desktop Background Wallpaper Art

While searching for a vintage mid century style desktop background and found a great website for desktop wallpaper art. They've been doing a Desktop Wallpaper Project Series featuring some awesome wallpaper from some great artist. I got sucked in and ending spending way more time than I'd like to admit searching through the many posts. Definitely check it out if you need something refreshing and inspiring on your desktop.

I decided on the one above for the time being. Here are some other ones I loved (and saved for later) below:

Though I'm not the biggest Sheen fan, I had to include this last one because the design is pretty awesome. :)

Vintage Style Senior Portraits

My little sister asked my to shoot her senior photos this year and I gladly obliged. We wanted to do them in a bit of a vintage style yet still keeping it pretty modern. We picked our favorite locations around Richmond, packed up a few outfit changes and off we went. 

For most of the photos, to apply this vintagey style in photoshop, I played around with the curves, contrast, saturation etc, used the burn tool for the edges, used the sepia and magenta filters, and applied the lens distortions for a vignette effect. Here are some of the final pics. 

Ain't she a doll? This was the first time I've done senior photos and I'm pretty pleased with the result as was my sis. It's nice that we could doing something that to fit her personality for her senior pics.

And finally, congrats to the grad! She's coming to VCU this fall so she'll be down here with me in Richmond for the next 4 years. Yay!

DIY Thrift Store Jewelry Display

So as you can see from the above photo (clump of jewelry thrown into a gifted but boring, sorry!, jewelry box), I was definitely in need of a new jewelry holder and I looked for ideas on online about making a DIY jewelry holder out of upcycled thrift store materials. Though there were a wealth of amazing and original ideas for DIY jewelry displays (just google DIY jewelry displays) and I decided to just wing it and see what I could up with from a quick thrift store trip.

I found this. I wish I had an original photo before I spray painted, but this thing (I'm still not sure what it was) was painted white and had pink wooden heart attached to the ends. I thought it would be great to hang necklaces from so I took it home and spay painted it with some left over green spray paint. Super easy and super useful.

Yay! Easy to get to, non tangled necklaces!!!

While I was at the thrift store, I also found this little mini cabinet display that I also spray painted with the same green spray paint. The screen is perfect to hang earrings on and it opens up to little cubbies where I now stash my rings. Mission accomplished.

Other really great thrift store DIY jewelry displays:

-Old window screen to hang earrings (can be painted or left rustic if you find an old wood or metal screen)

-Wooden shutters are a great display for earring also. I find that these are abundant at thrift stores for some reason. They can be painted for left as is.

-Large frames can be a great display for necklaces. Just take the glass out and cover the inside with a great fabric or lace find, stick in thumbtacks and hang your necklaces on them.