Every Day IS Earth Day. Just saying, yo. Love your Mama and treat her right.

This painting is an original, made with gouache on a nice thick watercolour paper. It’s in the etsy shop and we think she has just the right look for the cause of making everyday a day you love the planet. Do it. Or she’ll give you sad eyes!

I may be rambling this morning Dear Reader. I slept in too late and now I have to get my head in shape for a run. On that note, Happy Weekend!

A~

We’ve been busy painting and cooking and spring cleaning here. I’d love to paint the living room and yet I hate painting so I am at cross purposes in that regard. While doing some garden cleaning I found our ants are up and at ‘em and I’ve seen a couple of very sweet ground squirrels out and about so in theory we will have some warmer days soon.

Oh yeah, we had a listing up to raise some funds to donate to the Red Cross for Japan relief and those sold so big thanks to the peep who helped us get that done!

I’ll check in soon with some new art and a new burfdae card soon but once again, the garden calls…

A~

I leave the foliage intact in the Autumn for something they call “Winter Interest” but we go SO MUCH SNOW this year that everything just got bent over and crushed. C’est la vie as the french say.

Anyhoo…here is my favorite photo currently for sale…it’s at the zibbet shop…

http://www.zibbet.com/buttonempire

Come on over and see us. Buy something and you’ ll recieve some awesome treats added in.

We love buttons as a favour because just about everybody loves a button! And we’ve had a tonne of interest from wedding blogs and magazines in the last little bit. I guess that means the season is soon to be upon us in full swing. Huzzah!

You can find these and other wedding sets @ http://www.buttonempire.etsy.com

Ummm…we’ve expanded the empire to include a shop at shoply, icraft and we just started a shop on weebly.   http://buttonempire.weebly.com

Other than that we’re up and running again (6 k on Sunday!) with just a little bit of pain. I look forward to the snoworama melting away and getting back to scented runs on clear roads. Like most Canadians I can’t help but reflect that this has been a looooong winter.Long. As in too much snow and cold and not enough Chinooks. However, spring will come and I will run surrounded by wild roses again. Woot woot!

Woot!

A~

What am I on about? I’ll tell you Dear Reader…recently etsy.com edited it’s public forums down in what I suspect was an effort to sanitize the open communial spaces in preparation to go public in the not too far off future.

Anyhoo,  the biggest loss imho was the Etc Forum, a sort of catch all for the many wacky minds that used the forums. I myself had a deep affection for The Deja Vu thread and I had the great pleasure of making the last post there before it got closed forever. (Yay!) Along these threadkiller lines, it was CarlosSebastian who got the last word in the Etc forum in.And because of that he was sent these ooak badges with our best wishes and congrats! Way to go CS! You are the winner! Woot woot!

Etc had it’s own language and history, oh so many trainwrecks and general creative mind driven madness. If you were on it at the right time you might have seen quirke drop her cane, heard about counter fridays or read any number of threads about the workings of the human body. It was a magical realm now gone forever. Thankfully the community has the Unofficial Etsy Forums to migrate too and we seem to be settling in nicely over there.

But even with the UEF it will never be the same without the ETC Forum…fare thee well Mallory, we hardly knew you. Rest in Peace Hair Splinter thread, you will never be forgotten…Nike shoes 60% off, designer sunglasses spammer I trust you’ll survive the passing and so on and so on…

Ummmm…anyways…other than that I’ve been busy adding some high intensity training to my routine and I am loving it. Thank you wbl for the Sparticus workout heads up. That stuff rawks hard!

Peace Out Peeps,

A~

Finally, it’s the modernized version of the classic “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” that the world has been clamouring for!!

You can grab this at our etsy store @ www.buttonempire.etsy.com .

We made this today and kept it on the down low or the low down depending on how hip to the jive you are. I know it’s got something because when Bruno saw it he lol’d!  Huzzah! We’ve got our Green Beerz card in the shop as well. I’m part Irish you know. I wish I’d have been blessed with the red hair the Vikings left after raping and pillaging but noooooo…I get the baby brown of the mutts of Europe…

Anyhoo…wandered off into hair bitterness there. Not unusual if you know me!

I trust any Dear Readers are having a good lead up into the next season. My thoughts are with all the peeps getting pounded by Big Mama right now! A special shoutout to our Aussie clients. Stay safe, dear friends!

Peace Out For Now,man…

A~

I’m not a big fancy day person. I like every day that goes well. That said, this year I’m going to make a wee effort to be more valentinsey. I believe we’ll have some nice red wine, some fake meat beef stroganoff, a bunch of vanilla candles aflame, a roaring fire in the woodstove and I think we’re going to watch Robin Hood and snuggle. Not bad for peeps married for nearly 17 years! I wish I had more to add but I must away to do a gazillion chores. I’m seriously looking into reopening our shop on ArtFire so that we have more irons in the fire.Wedding season is coming up and that’s a make or break time of the year for us and etsy has made some  major changes that I’m not sure will be helpful to me as a seller at the end of the day. ArtFire also made some major changes, they’ve got a much more attractive front page and they added an etsy importer so you can easily move items from one venue to the other. In the end, we need to make a buck…or get a real job…and if we get a real job, who will make hot lunches for Bruno? Crisis! ;p

Happy Vday Ya’ll!

A~

for sale at buttonempire.etsy.com

Last week this card made it to the front page of etsy.com. In the hour it was there we sold out of existing stock and we had to pull out the gocco to make more. It got over 800 new views and over 80 new users added it to their favorites. The doll over at the “Books,Paper,Scissors” blog added it to their page where it got 777 notes from their readers and reblogged a bunch of times.

This excites me! I have this fantasy where Hallmark ask me to run my own teeny tiny division of lolcatz cards for them and stuff like this is how you get found!

Here’s the link to the BPS blog in case you fancy seeing the power of the internetwebz for sharing cool schwag.

http://bookspaperscissors.tumblr.com/post/2849345433

Anyhoo…I’m on a running break after hurting my tootsies while running on deep snow and slippery surfaces. To make up for it I’m walking up and down a rather steep hill multiple times. It’s pretty neat in it’s own right. My heart rate gets up way higher than when I run. Even after my feet can handle the runs again I think we’ll work the hill in as intensity training. It has 2 things going for besides the increased heart rate…it has a spectacular mountian view and unlike the stairmaster at the gym, it’s free to use.

Thanks for dropping in dear reader.

Be well.

A~

This original ACEO is still available from our etsy shop. It’s got a nice oddness to it. I found the brain image  in an antique encyclopedia and the lady comes from a vintage knitting booklet. This piece was the first in our series of recent collage works, including the Hollywood series.

Yesterday I cleaned up the piles of resource materials that had taken over my work area. I figured it would be nice to have a break from the mess before a lot of old film star magazines arrive and the whole thing gets going again.

And now, I must away to stoke the woodstove and make some pizza dough.

Cheers,

A~