I've been busy.

So, my mother's forty-ninth birthday has absolutely crept up on me! Tomorrow night we're going out for dinner as soon as I finish work. So, after getting home tonight at 11:00, I had to get busy. Since I am building my new baby (more on that to come - perhaps in the next post), I am absolutely broke. Besides that, I don't usually like spending a lot of money on presents anyway- at least not on people that have a lot of money and can pretty much buy themselves anything they want. I feel terrible because my mother wanted some earrings, and I easily could have made her some, but I didn't have any good beads laying around and I didn't have the time/money to go out and find some. All the bead stores in Ottawa are severely overpriced. I used to have so many awesome beads to make jewellery, but I guess I slowly used them all. Luckily, I had some canvases laying around that I bought on sale at Wallacks for a dollar each. I really like the small, fat, cube canvases. They are really easy to paint and they stick out from the wall, which is cool.

So, here is what I have accomplished in the past hour or so:

I found this hilarious picture of a fabulous lady on the cover of National Geographic, so I decided to make a card out of it. Unfortunately, I only had sketchbook paper, so the card kind of curled and I had to tape the sides. It is a seriously ghetto looking card, but I think that's what makes it funny:

I also spent time on (one of) these paintings:

I had already painted the sunset a while ago at a craft night (more on the craft nights later). I know the sunset is an uncreative and easy cop-out, but it was fun to paint and I think my mom will like it... it's not so ugly that she won't actually hang it anywhere. I quickly painted the second one with just the clouds tonight. I think they make a cute pair, and I really like paintings that are a continuation on several canvases. Unfortunately, I only bought two of those size. I painted the clouds on the second one with highlights on the top so that they could hang like this:

Most of my acrylic paints are almost gone; I had to squeeze the yellow out of the tube like the last of the toothpaste. Unfortunately, I squeezed out a little too much and had some left over. I also had the last "artist trading card" in the pack. It was a pack of six little square watercolour papers. Thankfully it was on sale, so I think it was only 2.50 or something, but as soon as I bought it I realized what a stupid waste of money it was. I could have just cut up my own from watercolour paper. However, I don't own a paper cutter, nor do I own a book of watercolour paper because it is quite expensive and I don't usually paint with watercolours. I quickly flipped through a National Geographic to find a cool collage-worthy photo, and I made this:

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with this, but I think it will make a cute little tag or something for the bag that I made. I had some cool scrap fabric that I wanted to wrap the gift in. It wasn't quite wide enough to pin or tie at the ends--plus, it wasn't hemmed--so, I went to the sewing machine and made this cute bag, which I think will re-use quite nicely for anything, especially for gifting a bottle of wine:

And, that is all my DIY action wrapped up with a pretty red bow!