I've been artin' hard for the majority of 2017. So, now that we just finished up the 7th month of the year, I want to make a little gallery of my most popular images of the past 7 months. It's really interesting to see my style develop and change without me actively thinking about it. 

Just so you all know, these are the original scan versions and not the tidied up print versions , so please ignore the visible animal hair, and be assured that is not on the prints available for sale. 

Mrs. E's Beauty Hints
1. Combine mashed bananas and peaches worked together in olive oil. Use this as a mask. Then rinse off with tepid water after 15 min.
2. When your skin looks dreary use egg white, unsaturated oil, apple cider vinegar, water and lecithin. Your skin will drink it up. 
3. "Tone" up or zip up circulation
1 part cider vinegar
8 parts H20 also add some grapefruit juice or lemon or watermelon
good pH balancer - splash on after cleansing/splash on often

(not 100% on a couple of those lines, so let me know if you think I've made any errors)

Hey, everybody. If you've checked out my shop recently, you may have noticed that I don't have many of my collages available for sale at the moment. This is because I got myself a new, fancy-schmancy art printer, so I'm going to back away from selling my original pieces and instead focus on selling prints--which means I'm in the process of updating and changing 35 etsy listings, and I still have to work on getting all of my work up and available for printing. 

So, for right now the store is under some construction and I'll be adding in more items as soon as I can. In the meantime, if there is an print you would like to purchase that isn't currently available through my etsy site, please reach out to me through the contact page, or by e-mailing me at [email protected] and I'll happily make a listing for the image you're looking for. 

Thank you for your understanding, everyone. Hope to be back to a professional-looking shop by the end of the month. 

Have a happy Tuesday, y'all! 

For the past couple weeks I've had a month long mini-staycation before my summer classes start. I've been working on a lot of different projects, but as I was updating the site earlier today I was amazed by how many pieces I've finished in this time. So, I put together a little slideshow of my May creations. These aren't actually all of them, but these are some of this month's highlights. 

 The semester is finished which means I've been enjoying relative freedom for the past couple weeks. I've been so happy with the LEEP program at University of Illinois this past year, and have been really excited that in addition to learning a lot about libraries, information organization and intellectual property, I've also had a lot of opportunities to create interesting creative projects.  I wanted to share a couple of my projects I've worked on for school this year. 

This first one I made for my Libraries & Society class. It's a zine about libraries that carry unconventional items for patrons to check out. It's a pretty simple little project, and it's far from perfect, but I'm relatively pleased with how it came out. 

This next one was made for my Storytelling class--which turned out to be the best class I've ever taken. After work shopping the story a bit with my class and rehearsal group, I put together a digital story based on a trip I took to Prague almost ten years ago. 

Parts of the story have been fictionalized to better fit into the constraints of the assignment and for clarity. (P.S. Sorry about the 3 minutes of blackness at the end. I really need to fix that and re-upload)

Nothing too fancy, but it's nice to see my artistic skills grow along with my librarian skills. Hopefully there will be much more art in the weeks to come while I enjoy my time off from school! 

I want to do a real blog post soon, but I'm getting too close to finals to get it together, so instead I'll add some more shameless promotion.

​My home is slowly filling with collages, so some of 'em gotta get out of here. I added a few new collages to the etsy shop. So make sure to check it out if you're interested! 

I added a few new pieces in my etsy shop this week! So make sure to check the Little Room Collages etsy page! Some of the pieces that are for sale: 

If you have any comments or questions about these pieces, or anything else, go ahead and fill out the form on my contact page or e-mail me at [email protected]

Going through as many books as I do, I often come across pages that I know have to be saved for posterity. These are some of my favorites: 

The Communism entry from Art Linkletter's Picture Encyclopedia for Boys and Girls (1961)

From My First Golden Dictionary by Ellen Wales Walpole, Illustrations by Gertrude Elliott (1966)

From The New Golden Dictionary by Bertha Morris Parker (1972)

I honestly can't remember what book this fat dog is from now, but I absolutely love it. 

This is from an ad for DDT from the 1940s or 50s. Unfortunately I didn't use to keep very good track of my sources, so I can't say for sure what magazine it's from.

Hope you enjoy these small bits of weirdness. More soon! 

I go through a lot of books, both at work and in my free time. This year alone I have used almost 100 books to create my collages (and, yes, there is a spreadsheet with their titles and all sorts of other information). I thought I would post a list of some of the stuff I've found. 

This one was in an issue of Science News from 1952. Someone has written yes by questions number 5 and 17 (answering yes to three questions or more indicates alcoholism). Seeing this was one of those moments where I really was in awe of how objects get passed along, and how someone held this book at some point over the course of 65 years, saw this quiz and was worried enough about the outcome to write down their answers. 

I found this list for a camp out inside a 1960s Boy Scout Handbook. 

I found this note written on a taped page of a 1960s issue of the American Nursing Journal. It reads, "I should change my major" 

I found this little typing exercise inside a volume of the 1949 Childcraft education series. I want to frame this one someday. The poem is Telephony by Laura Elizabeth Richards. 

That's only a small sampling of the things I've found, so I'll be sure to post some others soon!