Another Place for My Art: Distinctively Different Decor…

Sophie Keeps an Eye on Things, photo © B.E. Kazmarski

Interior designer—and fellow cat rescuer—Bonita Farinelli and I met yesterday to consign a number of pieces of my artwork and prints to her Boutique at Distinctively Different Decor & More in Carnegie.

Borzois, pastel © B.E. Kazmarski

And you can have the chance to see it at her March Open House on Sunday, March 25, 2012.

Biding Time, print © B.E. Kazmarski

I’m so glad when my artwork can be out in the public, and when I’m not there with it I especially appreciate when it’s in the hands of a person who understands and respects it. Bonita is a fellow business owner in Carnegie and has converted a solid but sad unused building into a lovely place to look at, and plied her many skills and inspirations with fabrics, patterns and colors into works from handmade pillows to entire houses of unique colors, furniture and draperies.

Taking Flight, print © B.E. Kazmarski

I learned she was a cat lover when in her display for an event at Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall last year she included a pair of breathtaking modern-styled feline-themed lamps. At that event and subsequent events and mixers we began trading cat stories and creative ideas and knew a partnership would work.

Are You Looking at Me? © B.E. Kazmarski

Got art? How much do you want? You have the space, I can fill it up with many different styles and sizes and subjects from abstract black and white photography to highly detailed realistic paintings to whimsical layered and textured “white collages”.

Gateway Center, Pittsburgh, white collage © B.E. Kazmarski

I have a number of cat and dog works there as well as landscapes and photography, a mix of originals and prints, small and large, all framed and ready to hang.

Sophie and Ellie Being Very Good, print © B.E. Kazmarski

I hope to see you there at some point on Saturday! And soon I will be writing about Bonita’s animal-inspired creations as well!

Burnished Waves, pastel © B. E. Kazmarski

Bonita also has need of a framer so we’ll be working together on a number of things.

Sunset on the Bay, watercolor © B. E. Kazmarski

See you there!

“Reorganizing Sale” February 18 at Portraits of Animals Shop in Carnegie Antiques

About one-third of the shop!

In the next few weeks I’ll be completely reorganizing my shop in Carnegie Antiques, taking home things that haven’t shown any interest and heaping up things that have, moving furniture in and out and restocking with new framed art and packaged sets of cards.

The sale will be this Saturday, February 18, between 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.

I’ve moved my greeting card printing to a new printer who uses new paper stock which doesn’t match the older stock. Select individual greeting cards will be $1.00 each, reduced from $2.50.

All matted photos are $2.50, reduced from $5.00.

Everything else is 10% off the price that is marked including other individual greeting cards and sets, crocheted pawprints and flowers, tote bags, framed and unframed wildlife, nature and flowers prints and anything else you can find there.

Carnegie Antiques and Portraits of Animals are located at 423 West Main Street in Carnegie, PA 15106.

Open House October 22 at Portraits of Animals and Carnegie Antiques

About one-third of the shop!

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22
Judi and I will join forces and open early, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and will both have discounts for visitors!

I’m offering 10% off your entire order of items from my Portraits of Animals shop including greeting cards, crocheted pawprints, tee-shirts, tote bags, unframed prints and anything else you can find there.

As a bonus, I’m offering 25% off framed artwork over $25.00, both originals and prints! I’ve been framing even more prints of my feline, wildlife and nature art as well as photographs, including views of Pittsburgh. I’ll be bringing in a few originals as well, so if you’ve had your eye on something, now is the time to get it! If the cost is less than $25, the 10% discount still applies.

ETSY PURCHASES
You can see a good bit of what’s in my shop in my Etsy shop. And for recipients of this post who can’t make it to the open house, I’ll also extend FREE SHIPPING for any items in my Etsy shop through the end of October. It will be as if you bought it in person! Enter “OPENHOUSE1011″ in your shopping cart and it will automatically deduct the shipping.

Carnegie Antiques

In addition, Judi has been packing her shop with so much new merchandise I can hardly keep track of it all, and she’ll be offering discounts as well. There’s new furniture large and small, sets of dishes, hand-painted china, novelties, jewelry and more. Make sure you take time to visit Carnegie Antiques too!

Carnegie Antiques and Portraits of Animals are located at 423 West Main Street in Carnegie, PA 15106.

Open House December 18, 9 to 4!

About one-third of the shop!

One more open house before Christmas plus gift ideas for the animal and nature lovers on your list for any holiday! Click here to find my December e-newsletter on the internet.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18
Hard to believe Christmas will only be a week away! Judi and I will join forces and open early, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and Judi will be offering deals on all the beautiful things she has in the shop. Carnegie Antiques and Portraits of Animals are located at 423 West Main Street in Carnegie.

I’m offering 10% off your entire order of items from my Portraits of Animals shop including greeting cards, crocheted pawprints, tee-shirts, tote bags, unframed prints and anything else you can find there.

As a bonus, I’m offering 25% off framed artwork over $25.00, both originals and prints! I’ve been framing even more prints of my feline, wildlife and nature art as well as photographs, including views of Pittsburgh. I’ve brought in several larger originals as well, so if you’ve had your eye on something, now is the time to get it! If the cost is less than $20, the 10% discount still applies

10% OPEN HOUSE DISCOUNT EXTENDED TO ETSY PURCHASES
You can see a good bit of what’s in my shop in my Etsy shop. And for recipients of this newsletter who can’t make it to the open house, I’ll also extend the discount to items in my Etsy shop! I’ll apply the discount after your purchase.

Enter “HOLIDAY10MERCHANDISE” in your shopping cart and it will automatically deduct the 10%.

Enjoy! Perhaps I’ll see you at one of my events this holiday season.

Holiday Events and Gift Ideas from Portraits of Animals

Holiday Lights.

It’s my holiday e-newsletter including events for the month of December plus gift ideas for the animal and nature lovers on your list! Click here to find it on the internet.

It’s short notice, but I have an event Sunday, December 5 at a really neat place. I’ll be at the Enoch Wright House in Venetia 12:30 to 6:30 p.m. for the Peters Creek Historical Society’s annual “Candlelight Soup and Stroll”. We vendors will be on the second floor.

The historic 1816 house will be trimmed in Williamsburg-style decorations and visitors can browse the exhibits such as the Colonial Kitchen, Museum of Pre-history, which features artifacts as old as 10,000 years, and the Museum of Mining including photos, stories and maps from the region’s biggest industry. You can read an article about the place and the event in the Washington Observer-Reporter.

Enjoy! Perhaps I’ll see you at one of my events this holiday season.

Pre-Thanksgiving Open House at Portraits of Animals and Carnegie Antiques

Mirror, Mirror © B.E. Kazmarski

I’ve been framing and packing and wrapping and tagging items for our holiday shopping sales at Portraits of Animals and Carnegie Antiques!

Join us Saturday, November 20 from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. for an Open House. Cookie will be with me for at least part of the day too!

Pistachio Pawprint

I’m offering 10% off your entire order of items from my Portraits of Animals shop including greeting cards, crocheted pawprints, tee-shirts, tote bags, unframed prints and anything else you can find in my shop.

I Like Your Spots

As a bonus, I’m offering 25% off  framed artwork! I’ve been I’ve been busily preparing several dozen small framed prints of my feline, wildlife and nature art as well as photographs, including views of Pittsburgh. I’ve brought in several larger originals as well, so if you’ve had your eye on something, now is the time to get it!

You can see a good bit of what’s in my shop in my Etsy shop.

In addition, Judi has been packing her shop with so much new merchandise I can hardly keep track of it all! There’s new furniture large and small, sets of dishes, hand-painted china, novelties, jewelry and more. Make sure you take time to visit Carnegie Antiques too!

I'm not an antique!

Join us:

• Saturday, November 20
• 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
• 423 West Main Street
• Carnegie, PA 15106

Cookie will be waiting!

Clearance on Current Tote Bags!

"This is my sink. Go brush your teeth in the kitchen."

At “Art What You Got”, the Polish Hill Arts Festival I attended last weekend, I totally enjoyed watching people stroll by my table, stop to read the tote bags and break out in hearty laughs. Clever Mr. Sunshine, with caption-writing help from author Allia Zobel Nolan, got the most laughs of all the bags with comments like, “That’s my cat!” “That’s just what he does!”

"Sophie Keeps an Eye on Things"

I sold several bags, and now I’m ready to move on to the “real” bags.

What? These were just “pigments” of my imagination? (Sorry, artist joke, poor one at that.)

No, they were just to stop myself from wallowing in indecision at choosing a bag and just getting the designs out there. After all, you can get tote bags anywhere, often for free, so the bag itself isn’t the important part in all this, it’s the design. And the designs were a hit, but the bags were just a little too small. They were a good deal, a clearance item at JoAnn Fabrics I found hard to pass up for the sake of experimentation.

"Everybody in the Pool"

This was after the first experiment with the eco-cotton bags that were bigger, but were simply unbleached cotton muslin, the sort of thing I’d destroy in about a week. I didn’t want my art on those because I want my kitties to be out there for as long possible.

"After Dinner Nap"

This time, I had purchased all natural-colored bags and dyed half of them black. Then I dyed them again. And again. And finally, they were finally black enough. That was a lot of dye and a lot of time and I truly tired of rinsing out my washer with bleach.

"God, I'm Cute."

But it bought me enough time to introduce the designs, to see if tote bags generally were popular, to research available totes and to learn the differences among all the myriad iron-on possibilities.

So now, what’s left of the initial run of bags is on clearance, nine designs, reduced from $15.00 per bag to $10.00 per bag. Not all of them are pictured here—please visit my Etsy shop to see which ones!

See You at the Polish Hill Arts Festival, July 18!

"The Goddess" will be well represented on my table!

I don’t think there is one level spot anywhere in Polish Hill, but last year I managed to balance everything so that nothing slid off my table in this wonderful little one-day festival.

Still, that means I carry a lot of “soft” things, like crocheted washcloths, tote bags and greeting cards! Nearly everyone who visits has a cat or dog, and many dogs visit the festival with their people.

That obviously means I’ll have a lot of my animal-inspired merchandise! I love to show it off to an animal-loving population.

Join us July 18 from noon to 8 p.m. for a variety of vendors, local music all day long both ethnic and alternative (including a drum corps that will vibrate your very bones), lots of food made in the church basement and hopefully as nice a day as we had last year.

Read more about the festival in this flyer, and read more about Polish Hill, one of Pittsburgh’s traditional neighborhoods, on their website.