What is Artsy Lion! It is me!! My name is Christine and I have been doing crafts for over 20 years. I started to get crafty once my daughter was born with sewing and making stuff for her baby room. It was so much fun! I realize now that I hadn't really done much in the craft area for awhile. I was always interested but in the 90's I was too busy doing other stuff. :) Don't get me wrong, I have always loved art and crafts and photography, just about everything to do with being crafty and creative. I did Art all through MS and HS and loved it! So, having a baby jumped started my creative juices and I have been doing many, many projects since!
Artsy Lion has migrated from doing parties at home, invitations, and painting. I started selling on Etsy. I started small with a big item. I make these wonderful Fictional Location signs. Boy are these signs cool!! Maybe I didn't market them right but I sold about 2 a year. It was a fun way to make a little extra money doing something fun. This one is a Harry Potter themed sign, it is all hand-painted and it amazing!! I am still surprised I didn't have more people buying these like crazy. Maybe they were too expensive but I considered them to be work of art. I may start selling them again because I enjoy hand painting and designing the fictional locations. But oh well, I migrated to other hand-painted signs and my business on Etsy started to grow.
While doing the signs on the side, I got exposed to a Cricut while I was working as as a library assistant for a middle school! It was a great job! I loved working with books and being creative with so many parts of my job. There were hard parts too but over all, it was great! The Cricut was so fun to explore and play with! Once I bought my own, I could do things at home and I started to learn to do more and more things. Working at a school, I was able to sell teachers on putting their names on their laptops. It was a great way to start playing with the Cricut and learning how to manipulate vinyl (the material used to make decals & stickers), designing and so much more and I started selling on my Etsy site! It was fun to start getting busier and busier. I was getting really good at layering the vinyl into awesome stickers and decals! The Artsy Lion website has come about from all my work on Etsy and wanting to have my own website.
It has been a wild road and I hope in a year or two, I will come back to this first blog and be astounded and astonished with how busy and fun my website and work has become. I am a jack-of-all trades and really good with just about everything I do and I hope this website will incorporate not just vinyl but some of the other projects that I want to explore. For instance, I have been having fun with alcohol inks! It is something new and I am not sure where it will take me but it is fun just to DO! That is my motto for this year, just DO, but that is a blog for another day!
Thanks for checking me and Artsy Lion out! Oh.. I meant to tell you where the name came from. I did mention my name is Christine and I live in central Texas. I have this crazy mane of hair that was referenced by my mother at a young age as a mop. It hurt my feelings back in the day but now I realize that it was a total compliment for my crazy, wacky, wild, thick hair. :) So the Artsy Lion was born! Have a GREAT wonderful day and I hope to see you again soon!
Christine
Here is a picture of the fam! Sam, Marvin, Jade & me! Jade got married last year on the eve of the pandemic (March 2020) and it was a wonderful, awesome wedding!
