Boris and Barrowman

The good people at Etsy's Dark Side have featured my wire-wrapped spider pendant 'Boris' on their MySpace blog!



Boris is 'Item of the Day' today, which is fab, and has lifted me out of my post-Christmas moop somewhat. I have no reason to be in a moop really - I have things to look forward to, such as seeing family over the coming days. My man and I are also going to see the fabulous John Barrowman in panto next Tuesday. We saw him in Aladdin last year, which was great, and can't wait to see him in Robin Hood :D

New Christmas decoration - Skully Tree

Christmas is getting ever closer, and over the past few weeks I've been listing a few festive goodies. The latest to arrive in my Etsy shop is a piece called Skully Tree:



If you're a Gothic type, you might want a darker look to your home at Christmas, or if you like rich colours and quirky details, this piece would also fit in well. It's made of steel wire, red glass beads and plastic skull beads, and it has a hanging loop of red ribbon. It could be hung by a window to catch the sunlight, on a wall or perhaps on a door, or of course on your Christmas tree.

Take a look at my Etsy shop for more Christmas goodies:



And, if you live in the UK, you can also buy my Christmas goodies at Folksy:



Plus, take a look at all three of my shops for unique handmade Christmas gifts:

http://sneddonia.etsy.com
http://sneddoniart.etsy.com
http://www.folksy.com/shops/Sneddonia

Looking forward to autumn

Rather than wanting the funny weather we've been having lately to go back to proper summer, I seem to be in the odd position of wanting it to get colder. At the moment, in the house at least, I'm trying to keep warm, which puts me in mind of cosy yet stylish clothes. I want it to be autumn so that I can wear my little tartan skirt with opaque tights and a big chunky cardi, or snuggle up in similarly lovely warm clothes, such as the two H&M cord jackets I now own (one's a rich purple, the other's a mossy green, in case you wondered). This is partly the fault of fashion magazines such as Elle. I'm reading all about a/w fashions, my favourite being Goth of course, and wanting to wear them all.

I love this photoshoot from Elle:



I love tartan, and the way they've styled it there is great. Dark, playful and glamorous all at the same time.

I read a lot of fashion mags and sometimes the fashion does not inspire me. I'm not really a dedicated follower of fashion, so the fact that summer's all-in-ones and nauticals didn't interest me was not really a problem. But when what I see in those glossy pages strikes a chord, I'm all over it. I'm loving this new Dark Romance trend. That kind of feminine-with-a-hard-edge look that says Goth to me is one of the strongest themes that runs through my work, so the fact that this look is in fashion is a bit of a bonus.

I've dedicated a large chunk of my moodboard to this new, darker mood in fashion:





Inspired by this, I have created this Gothic Rose charm necklace:



I love the combination of black and red, as it always looks striking. Plastic stars and skulls add a bit of fun to the piece, while a vintage Lucite rose adds a little old-fashioned romance. Find it for sale here.

For more Gothic pieces, search Goth in my shop. Also, for more work from my fellow Dark Side members and myself, search etsydarkteam on Etsy.

Thank you for reading.

Glass Moon - a painted suncatcher

Just last night I finished a new suncatcher. I make lot of suncatchers, usually from wire and beads, but this one was quite different. It involved painted glass, which is a technique I haven't used for quite a while. I used to do it all the time. This time though, I've not done it in the usual way. How you're supposed to do it is put the outliner on the glass then, after it has dried, put the paint in between where the outliner is, to look like stained glass with lead. I instead just painted onto the glass straight away, painting over the outliner in places and using it on top of the paint in others, to give it extra texture and colour.

I started off with a rectangle of glass, which was originally in this frame. I don't like to waste anything! I painted this glass with blue glass paint:



then painted a moon onto that with white glass paint:



After I'd let that dry, I then wrapped steel wire around the edges of the glass to form a frame, and also something from which to hang this piece:



I then painted a tree onto the glass, painting over some of the wire. This wire forms a frame for this painting and also gives more texture to the tree. I also painted silver-coloured outliner on top of the tree to echo the colour of the steel wire, and add to the texture. This suncatcher measures 17cm (6.5") wide by 13cm (5") high.



It's for sale here.

Batty Moon - a mixed-media painting on canvas

In the end, I didn't add bats to that sketchbook piece, but I did draw this, using charcoal pencil and normal HB pencil, to get an idea of how the painting might look:



So, using the above sketch and my previous moon painting as inspiration,



I painted this piece, Batty Moon, using acrylics, silvery poster paint, liquid watercolour and blue glitter glue. It depicts a cloud of bats, silhouetted against a bright full moon, in a dark blue night sky:



The dark colours of the sky continue over the sides of the canvas on which this is painted, as do the shimmer of the blue glitter and the bat detail, to give one continuous block of colour. This means that this piece does not need to be framed. This square box canvas measures 15cm square by just under 4cm deep.



Find it for sale here.