Want to earn extra money without working? Ever wondering how to get rid of those junks in your closet? Do you want to have a clutter free domain but are clueless as to what things go into the trash and what remains? Then its time to organize your things, keep those things for keeps and open up a garage sale right in front of your house.

Garage Sales are second-hand sales or thrift shops wherein an unused item is disposed at a lower price. In this way, a neighbor who is in need of one of your items but does not have enough budget to buy a new one can buy yours at a lower price. Stuffs sold at garage sales are usually second hand items in good to excellent working condition. Now dont be pressured in selling your favorite stuffs on garage sales as you can label them as for keeps. You have the option as to what you can sell and what you want to keep.

Garage sales are a fast way to earn money and the same time tidy up your home. There are actually items that we attained in the past without really thinking about its necessity so it usually ends up in our closets collecting dust. These items can move on and find new owners in garage sales. Sellers are on an advantage too as he/she can enjoy an organized house and a fatter wallet.

Usually the money earned in the garage sale is used to buy new furniture pieces in the house. Furniture pieces are also being sold in garage sales as well as baby cribs, baby furniture, old toys, etc. which would not be used anymore. Garage sales are also a time to get to know your neighbors well and keep up with whats happening to the people around you.

The All Town Garage Sale will be at Abita Springs, Louisiana this year. Head off at the garage sale and see useful pre-owned (or pre-loved) items on sale at fair prices. Who knows, you just might get what youre looking for!

Many people like terracotta in its natural form, but if you do want to decorate it, this is intended as a general guide.

This is fairly easy to do and you will also find it quite enjoyable. So now I will give you a list of your requirements to achieve nice, colourful items. A soft pencil, scissors, a black felt tipped pen, cartridge paper, tracing paper, masking tape, some fine nibbed poster paint markers and one with an extra broad nib.

You will find that these poster paints are wonderful. Not only do they give you good results, they are useful as you can use them on other surfaces too. If you have a porous surface they will mark this permanantly, but they can also be used on fabrics and wood.

However, I would not recommend washing them. They are not permanent on glass, plastic, rubber or non absorbent surfaces, but at least you can change your design. So in this instance, it gives you some flexibility.

As an example, if you need to make your design permanent, say on a non porous surface, all you need to do is to apply a coat of acrylic varnish.

With cartridge paper, using the poster paint markers, start working out your ideas of design. It is probably better that you make quite a few, as you need to experiment with shapes and your chosen colours.

Before you get around to painting your chosen design, first look at your design against the terracotta. Remember, it has to fit a certain space. The next step then being to get your tracing paper and draw the outlines of your design with your black felt tipped pen. Position them on your article, but make sure that you leave a space around the outside of your design.

Now you have to keep them in place. To do this, use some masking tape, but double it over. This way you can move your motifs any way you choose. If you are satisfied with your motifs start eliminating them and draw them freehand.

We are just about ready to be set free with the colours now. If you have filled in all your outlines, the colour markers can then be used for filling in. You will soon see that the markers will dry very quickly. A word of warning though, it is so easy to smudge your work with the side of your hand, so do be careful not to fall into this trap.

Now looking at your sketches, fill in the insides of them with a fine nibbed paint marker. Then you can continue filling in your motifs with, say, your second colour. Of course you will need to fill in your background colour with a broad nibbed pen, but take care when you are near your motifs.

The motifs themselves need to have an amount of space all round them that has not been painted. Also the background you use does not have to reach right to the top or the bottom of your article. Terracotta often has a decorative edging to it which adds a finishing touch.

Scrap booking is an art that has been around since the 16th century. Scrap booking is craft making using photographs and accents on photo albums. Scrap bookers or Scrap booking crafters is earning a lot from it by turning their simple hobby into a money making opportunity. Scrap booking is a womans hobby though some men nowadays enjoy making one too!

Scrap booking is a fun and artistic way to dress up, organize and be creative with your photo albums. There are endless possibilities to do in scrap booking; from having fun with your baby pictures to decorating family vacations photos. Scrap booking is generally a womans hobby though some men are getting the hang of it too!

Basic materials involved in scrap booking that a beginner should know are: a photo album, photos, art or patterned paper, scissors, adhesives and art pens (for journal). You may want to be extra creative and place embellishments such as buttons, ribbons etc to make it more creative. Some scrap books uses thick adhesives to give the photos a layered effect.

There are many available albums that can be used for scrap booking and the most important is to plan ahead what kind of album you would wan to use for your first scrap booking project. There are 2 basic kinds of albums and those are: ring bind and book bind albums. Ring bind albums are bounded by rings and can come as a three ring to multiple ring bounded albums. Book bind albums are those where leaves are adhered to the books bind.

There are a lot of ways on how to save money for crafters. One tip is to use recycled glass jars as container boxes for buttons or other embellishments. A used silverware tray may also be used to separate scrap booking knick knacks. Cigar boxes, candy jars and juice bottles are also excellent storage for embellishments.

Kansas has often been said to mean “People of the Wind” and the title has been derived from the Indian settlers originally in that State. Why were they called people of the wind? Perhaps it was because of the sporadic tornadoes that went through the area. Maybe because of the way they lived their lives; I have this image of them in my heads, doing everything as fast as the wind.

Whether or not people in Kansas lived like that, the farms down there are anything but rapid. Life moves along at a comfortable pace here, going smoothly and surely. Naturally, the people living in these parts find some things to do in their idle time to occupy themselves. More often that not, the folks in Kansas find time to go into one hobby or the other.

You can find a lot of diverse crafts around here if you just take the time to meet people. You’ll be able to see finely carved wooden sculptures and even amazing woven cloth. Kansas practically has a sampling of every craft you’d want to see. And there’s no better way to see all these crafts in one place, but in one of the numerous craft shows happening around Kansas.

Because craft shows happen in droves every single day, you’ll be well-advised to know beforehand which shows to go to. Not all of the will be worth your while, as some will have lousy organizing. But how can you tell which will cater to your interests best? The best way is to go on the Information Superhighway that is the Internet.

Of course, you’re online as of this moment. That makes it much easier! Just go to a search engine (Google or Yahoo! works) and search for Kansas Craft Fairs and you’ll very soon have a number of websites that keep a list of all fairs that are scheduled to take place within the year.

Colour wheels play a big part in art. The wheel itself is made up of six basic colours. The first side contains red, orange and yellow, and the second side, blue, violet and green. The first set of colors have a warmth to them and seem to come to meet you, with the second set moving backwards, with a cool feel to them.

You could use this to advantage if you were doing a landsape painting. If you used blue and green for trees at the back, it would make them look distant and far away. When you use colors that are opposites in the circle they are called complementary colours.

So, if you place them side by side, one works against another to dominate the space you have. This is very effective when you want to produce contrast and vibrant colours to your work.

Bear in mind that light is the main way we perceive colour all about us. To a lot of people red is red, blue is blue etc., but it does not stop there, you only need to look at the sea or the skies to decide upon that.

Or look at the ocean with differing shades of blues, greens ect. How we see these in our minds eye, is down to the light.

So, your colour wheel contains the colours that go to make up a rainbow, for if the sun shines through the raindrops, it gives you the spectrum. Now we will move on to colour mixing.

The primary colours and also the, what we call pure colours, are red, yellow and blue. Note these shades cannot be made up from any other colours. Orange, green and violet are the secondary colours, with these are made from a 50/50 ratio of the two primary colour neighbours in the circle.

This can be stretched even further by mixing in any of the three primary colours with any of the secondary colours. So, as an example, turquoise is the result of blue and green being mixed together. Mixed colours generally seem to have their names derived from flowers or stones. You only need to look at a few labels to see this.

As you may have come to the realisation, the wheel does not include black and white. In essence, when the light shines on to something it soaks up part of its wavelengths, this results in some coming back to make up the colour we are seeing.

Black, if you like, extracts them all and then white throws them back again. Therefore, black vanishes and white is a mix of all the colours.

If you take brown as an example. Mix the primaries together and see how many shades you get.

By now you must surely agree that colours are vital to our work. I think it is fantastic that they can be used to portray so many things. Emotions, space, realism, excitement, just some things that come to mind. However, they can also be vibrant, dull, opaque, impasto, textured, matt, gloss, flat translucent, light or dark.

Sanguine can be a chalk or crayon which comes in a flesh colour, it can also be a reddish or blood red shade. The pigment has oxide contained in it and is usually made of clay or chalk. This can also be the name of a drawing done in this medium and is really the main colour in conte crayons. The description red chalk also refers to the shade.

Sandy Paste is a very interesting texture which also spreads very well. It is often used with pastels and is a gritty acrylic type of paste that is the colour of sand.

Scale – As an example, if I was to say I am drawing a quarter scale, my drawing would be a quarter of the size of the original drawing. Therefore, the scale is the ratio of dimensions of one object to another, so in art it is the ratio of your work in comparison to the original.

Triptych can actually be a set of three carvings or pictures, which also share a definate connection. Usually the central piece is the largest and has a piece of art both sides of it. These can be hung side by side, mounted sometimes, or even, in some instances, are hinged together.

Diptych – A set of two pictures which often can be united in the centre, or if you prefer it, they can be hung with a gap between them. Polytych, on the same theme, only with four or five works of art.

Automation or Automatic Drawing. Surrealists probably started this as it is drawing and painting for people who do not like to conform to traditional methods. This is using a brush or pencil without any real thought behind what you are creating.

Working like this you often arrive at Abstract Expressionism, as this on the spur of the moment type of art often produces fascinating results.

Graphite used to be called black lead years ago, but in essence, it is a form of greyish, black carbon. It, at one time, was used for writing and came in sticks with lumps on them. Clay and graphite makes up the pencils. Interestingly enough, even now, some pencils are named wrongly and are still reffered to as lead pencils.

Conte crayons are a mixture of clay with graphite. These have variants which will produce differences in the degrees of hardness. These crayons date back to the 18th Century.

They are a bit like chalk, but slightly greasy, so they do not crumble as much. Available usually in a few colours, namely brown, black and a red. These are used for drawing. Conte invented the modern graphite pencils, but when he was young he was a portrait painter.

There is such an assortment of these terms to wade through, this really is a continuation of my first article.

Opaque – If your paint covers your surface concealing the underlay, we say it is opaque. Opaque is just the opposite of transparent. You will find that you may need to make some pigments opaque, only because the pigment is fairly transparent. This can be achieved by adding a bit of white to it, or adding a binding agent such as beeswax.

Masking – This is a very useful fluid to own. For this is a way of keeping your ground colour, or in fact, any other parts of your painting, clean and clear by protecting them with a masking fluid. You can then paint where you like on the unmasked areas without having to worry about overlapping. Many artists will actually mask out large areas of their canvas. Then they can paint liberally and have tidy mapped out shapes.

Stippling – To do this method you need a stiff bristled brush that is pretty thick, which will make paint marks. Dip this brush in the paint, while making sure that your brush is held at right angles to your canvas. What you do then, is to put short, light dabs to the canvas, leaving paint fleck, sort of, circular impressions.

Scumbling – another technique whereby you brush a layer of semi opaque or opaque paint over a previous layer of another colour, but in a manner that you can still see some of the under layer. So you will have glimpses of your under covering coming through.

Gum Arabic – which comes from Acacia trees which grow in Australia, Asia and Africa. It is a medium which usually comes in liquid form. Sometimes it can be bought in a powder form or in a lump. This gum is one that is water soluble. This is often used as a binding agent for ceramics. More often then not, this solution is used with tempera and water colours.

Poster Paint (Gouache), has to be diluted, then you can use it for silk, paper or card. This is a watercolour which is opaque. Artists often use it as a preparation for oils and acrylics. This will leave no brush marks, it dries quickly and is relatively cheap. Most stores stock this type of paint.

Terracotta – the name itself originates from Italy. The colour of this can be an ochre or a reddish brown. It is a clay which is of a roughish consistency and porous too! Terracotta is a clay which can be fired. This is used to manufacture many items besides pots, ornaments, tiles and bricks to name a few.

Greece had the terracotta figures in the Bronze Age, so this material is and has been worked worldwide. Often used by potters, doesn`t actually need a glaze, maybe because of it`s rough surface.

When you live in Maine, you will agree with me when I say that fairs and festivals are fairly common in this State. These are famous events; here you can see livestock shows, animals, games, rides, and even a dash of horse racing! When you attend these events, though, there is one more aspect of it that you should not ignore.

Of all the things that could be seen in fairs and festivals, nothing beats the booths delegated to arts and crafts. Mostly maintained by the very talented people who made the crafts themselves, going to these craft shows will make your visit to the fair even more satisfying. You will get a chance to see their very creations showcased, and who knows? You may be inspired to begin a hobby in crafts yourself.

There are a multitude of crafts available for you to spend your time perfecting. Among all these, I would advice you to just pick one at the expense of the others. This way you specialize in one rather than be mediocre at everything. Your choice of whether to specialize in wood, or clay, or any other medium is up to you.

Of course, there are some who would prefer to just relax around the fair. You may eventually get an inch for shopping; in this case, craft festivals will act as your cure as well. You can spend your time checking out the crafts one by one, and the festivals are also studded with food booths that may cater to your needs.

By now, you have probably decided if you do want to go to a craft show, whether as a participant or as a spectator. In either way, you ought to check out the Internet for listings of all craft fairs occurring in your area. These will lead you to a website that catalogs all events happening annually, which will in turn lead you to the contact information of various event organizers.