Train's golden-voiced singer, Pat Monahan and guitarist Jimmy Stafford (who lives part-time here in Las Vegas) do an incredible acoustic version of their latest single Hey Soul Sister with just a ukulele. I've loved them for years and of course, when I heard this song .... well they spelled my "sol" wrong ... but otherwise this so screams me with its infectious, cheerful vibe.

A few more pics of Queen Candy Cane

Do you have a small item in your shop you can afford giveaway? If you have a decent size twitter following - say 300+, a tweetaway is a superior means to drive traffic to your shop and your blog or facebook fan page. This is a very inexpensive way to introduce new folks to your store, just in time for holiday shopping season.

To conduct a tweetaway:
Decide which item you want to give away and copy it's URL. You will need to cover shipping costs, so don't pick something heavy or awkward.

Have 30 minutes or so available.

Select a question that readers can answer quickly from your blog or facebook fan page and note it's URL.

Alternatively, you can do a random winner from among the first 10 people to become fans of your facebook page or follow your blog.

Start tweeting and watch your Direct Messages and replies for the answer.

Here's how I use this:
My sister's website http://www.overallbeauty.com sells an up and coming brand of nail polish at $9 a bottle. She has a dedicated twitter following of 700+ that are into beauty and nail care/polish. We have her twitter auto-post to her facebook page. To start the Tweetaway, we do a series of three tweets...

"win a bottle of (Color Name) nail polish (short URL)"
"answer (trivia question pulled from blog/fanpage post). answer here (blog/fanpage URL)"
"first correct DM reply wins a bottle of (item URL)"

We kept re-tweeting them until we got a correct answer, which takes about about 10-20 minutes.

Kim was watching the site traffic live. Within 10 seconds of the first tweet she had 50 people on the nail polish color page. During that 10 minutes, she had over 100+ visitors to her site and blog.

I think that exposure is worth the hard cost to her of $8 for the item and shipping.

What do you think? Any suggestions you care to share on using Twitter for business?

Strangely, it's actually just about Halloween, but that hasn't stopped Her Majesty, Queen Candy Cane of Christmas Isle, from dropping by to help with the gardening. I believe we'll be planting peppermint .... by royal decree, of course!

This started with a white lace dress my mom made for Holly's 5th grade graduation earlier this year. Now where else is an 11-year old going to wear a plain white lace dress? The teacher insisted the dress be PLAIN white and of course, we couldn't find anything at the store.

So, making the best of money already spent, I added the sheer glittery candy cane underskirt right to the original lining in the dress. We had originally planned to be Snow princess but didn;t find sheer snow fabric ... so switched gears.

We made the scepter out of a cardboard tube and part of the reel some of the garland came wound on. It was covered in tin foil, tape, and the attacked with hot glue and a huge number of pipe cleaners, glittery snowflakes, Christmas garland, plastic peppermints, two holiday peppermint sprigs and silver bells, plus pipe cleaner candy canes on top.

The crown is a base of red and white craft foam that suffered a similar treatment with glitter glue and stick-on foam candy canes, 3D pipe cleaner candy canes, star garland and more plastic peppermints. I even used some odd white eyelash yarn around the base for a little snowy feel.

The treat bag was in my christmas box from last year. A few stick-on foam candy canes and some glitter glue to write with finished that up.

Her stole and cape is just more translucent fabric with glittery green, red, and silver dots. The big candy cane on the front was a foam kit that took about 5 minutes to glue and attach to the dress with a few stitches.

Thermal red shirt and gloves plus white long johns, awesome candy cane knee socks and silver shoes were purchased from Target or Walmart. All can be worn again after Halloween.

Minus the articles that can be worn again, this cost about $80 plus time. Had I shopped at the dollar store for the Christmas decorations instead of Hancock's and Michael's it would have come in even cheaper. The most expensive thing was those lengths of sheer fabric.

Photoshop Tutorial: Dull Color Fix: Duck girl
Level: Beginner
Demo in Photoshop CS4

Click on images to enlarge.


This picture of my daughter was taken by a professional photographer - my cousin Brian Pedersen. We went to a local park in Las Vegas. It was late in the day and the light was going, but it is otherwise a great picture — if we can fix the dull color. Although this seems challenging, it's actually a pretty fast fix.

The first step is a little clone on the face to even out the skin tones on the right cheek. This is done on a new layer and merged down once you are happy with it. To clone on a new layer, create a new layer using the sticky note icon at the bottom of the layers palette, select the clone tool and make sure Current & Below is selected in the options bar. Alt/Option+click on a clean area very near the area to be repaired in order to match the color and lighting.

Next you'll need to use a threshold adjustment layer to find the lightest and darkest points in the image. To do that, select threshold from the adjustments panel and follow the steps on my digital teeth whitening tutorial. You should end up with two of these small target markers.

Create a new curves adjustment layer and click the white eyedropper. Click in the center of target #1 in the duck's hair. Then click the black eyedropper and click target 2. Now comes the "eyeball" part. This image doesn't have an easy to spot neutral gray such as concrete paving or a metal object. I clicked around a bit and settled on a spot in the upper left by the very fuzzy car bumper. When you do this, watch the skin tones and anything that should be white. It's easy to introduce a color cast if you are not careful. It is also easy to turn skin too magenta or too blue.

You may need to reduce the fill or opacity of these adjustment layers to reduce the strength of the effect and create a more natural change.

Now this looks pretty good for 3 minutes of effort, huh? But we can do more. How about we pump up the yellow in the duck and her shirt?

I created a new curve and on the BLUE channel dragged the mid-point down. This brings in more yellow. On the red curve, I dragged very slightly up to warm it up even more. To have this only effect the shirt and the duck, fill the layer mask with all black then using a soft edge brush, paint over the shirt and duck with white.

Next, let's darken and enhance the green in the background to make the child pop out. Create another curves adjustment layer. On the green channel pull up slightly. On the composite channel, pull down slightly on the bottom of the curve, and up even less on the top half of the curve. Fill the layer mask with white and paint over the girl with black. To soften the mask, you can run a gaussian blur on it.


Next, create a new regular layer. Sample a dark green from the grass. Fill the layer with the dark green, Set the blend mode to multiply. Select the eraser tool and use a huge fuzzy brush to erase all the green except the corners. This darkens the edges and makes the kid pop to the front. Lastly, create one more curves adjustment layer and don't make any changes to the curve. Change the blend mode on the layer to screen and lower the opacity. Fill the mask with black and paint over her face with white. This creates areas of target lightening that preserve skin tones very well. See my Painting with Light tutorial for additional explanation.

Here's the final image.


Here are a few other before and afters using these techniques or slight variations on them.


This one had a trip through LAB to pull the colors out of the canyon and a sky replacement in addition to curves.

Questions? Post below.

I'm down in San Diego this week. One of our stops was Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery to visit the grave the Pearl Harbor Survivor who inspired Dana's book. Ben F. Boosinger was quite a guy and the cemetery is quite a place. The almost perfectly placed lines of identical stones stretching off into the distance surrounded by the huge sheltering trees wrapped in marine fog pierced by the late afternoon sun made for a somber, but beautiful setting. We saw graves of Generals and Commanders as well as veterans from every war back to the Spanish American War in 1898.

There are also monuments to notable events in San Diego's long military history. The obelisk commemorating the USS Bennington was especially striking. In 1905, an explosion aboard the ship while in harbor killed most of the crew.

The cemetery now has so many graves that they have begun to build long walls called columbariums that have spaces with elegant plaques to hold the urns. It is in one of these, overlooking the gorgeous San Diego Bay, that Ben and his wife Edith are laid to rest.

Of course, my handmade jewels come with me wherever I go. These lovely blue freshwater pearl drop earrings came from Jen at The Blue Dress. She included them with the Wild Vines Earrings I ordered as a bonus because there was a small snafu with my order. So elegant and beautifully made. The gorgeous multicolored gray freshwater pearls came from Cary's Boutique. I am also wearing my sister's handmade mineral make up in Chocolate and Summer Wheat.

Here's a few quick things you can do to get your etsy/artfire shop holiday ready.

1) Make sure you are set up with Paypal to accept credit card payments from those who do not have or do not wish to have a paypal account.

2) Review your item titles. Titles should be packed with every key word a buyer might use to find your items. This is also how Google indexes your items so make those titles count! You should also be using every tag you can.

3) Review your prices & shiping fees. You may need to raise or lower slightly. Do you have a good range of items and prices? Do you have a few things in the impulse buy range of $20 and below? What could you add to fill this need? Is your shipping fair and correct for each item?

4) Update your blog/facebook/twitter with any holiday specials you are offering. If you have a mailing list, now is a good time to send an early holiday special out to your customers.

5) If you have facebook, install the Artfire Kiosk or Sellit app.

6) Create a facebook fan page for your business and add lots of pictures. Once you get 100 fans, you can change the URL.

Any tips you'd like to share with other sellers?

This mini-messenger bag I made up a while ago is going to a new home. Of course, it's always nice to make a sale, but this one has a bit of a twist. The buyer asked for my number so he could give me his credit card over the phone. So he calls and tells me that it's Chris Browne, son of Hagar the Horrible and Hi and Lois cartoonist Dik Browne. His father passed away and he now draws the Hagar comic while his brother Chance draws Hi and Lois.

Chris says he remembers when this fabric was licensed and was tickled to find a bag made from it. He wanted the bag for his wife and would have been happy to buy three more if I had the fabric to make them. Shame mom just had the one yard piece!

How fun is that?

There has been a rather abrupt change in my life this last week. I made the choice to leave my boyfriend some months ago and move myself and my daughter out to a rental house near where she grew up. It wasn't an easy choice, but a necessary one. He is a good man, but just wasn't MY man.

Obviously, since I have a child and the better part of a house full of stuff that I was unwilling to abandon, this required planning and of course, it didn't all come together quite in the way I had hoped. Besides the emotional disruption and strain of ending a 2 year relationship with someone whom I no longer love, but do care about, you can't just up and rent an apartment or house when you have a foreclosure on your record. First you have to find a landlord willing to consider the whole credit picture, not just that black mark. Then you need to gather up cash for deposits and 1st month's rent - all the while keeping your bills current and paying your part of the expenses at the boyfriend's house.

I had to tell him several days before I had the final lease signed. As a courtesy to him, I moved EVERYTHING out of his house in just 2 days — before I knew if I had a place to go for sure. I had just put down the deposit. It turns out that my new house won't be ready for move in until this Tuesday because the downstairs carpet had to be replaced.

So now here I am, a capable adult, living at my mom's, while I wait. It's odd to be an adult kid at your mom's house (where my adult sister also lives) and even weirder - always having had a place to call home - to be in limbo like this. My stuff is living in a friend's garage and some at storage, plus some here at mom's. I feel so disconnected — heaped on top of the guilt and emotional upheaval of ending a long term relationship. Thank goodness for the support of my family and friends.

So anyway, if I didn't respond to something you sent me or asked me in the last week or so, I'm sorry. Things should be back to normal soon.

Heaven Can Wait just opened their brand new low cost spay and neuter clinic here in Las Vegas. This group is outstanding in their efforts to reduce pet overpopulation at the source by providing access to spay and neuter services and conducting those services for feral and abandoned animals all over Las Vegas. The new clinic's first few weekly feral cat clinics have sterilized almost 1,000 animals and they have already done 2,400 low cost operations for the general public.

Image by bobster855 via Flickr

A dog is just $115, which includes rabies and vaccinations. Cats are $75 (girls) and $50 (boys) which also includes rabies and vaccinations. No cost operations are available if you qualify. The location of the clinic is 546 N. Eastern Suite 175 and the phone number is 702-227-5555. This facility is being rented, but the City of Henderson just granted HCWS 2.5 acres to build a permanent clinic. It's about time Las Vegas/Henderson got serious about reducing the number of pets killed every year (approx 30,000 just in our metro area) because of overpopulation.


You can help raise some cash to put an end to this by bringing your dog (or just your kids) out the to the annual Lose a Pound with your Hound Walk on October 18th at Bunker Park. Note incredibly cute IBOL DOGGEH TAYLOR (owned by sister Norah) on the right. And yes, Team Norah will be walking and we'd love for you to join us. More on that later.