You know how you see art on just about every product available in stores, from greeting cards, to tee shirts, to kitchen dish towels? Five years ago, after putting my fiction writing on the back burner, I wanted to focus on my artwork again, and I really wanted to be one of those artists who licenses my artwork for use on products people use every day. I started taking Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator classes to help me along. But then I took a wire jewelry class and I happily skipped off down a whole new path!

Yet while developing my wire skills and selling Kell’s Creations jewelry, I continued to work on my drawing and painting, uploading designs to gifts and apparel in my Zazzle shop, And from time to time I also included the occasional art-focused piece in my overall jewelry collection. That included the Fire Mountain Gems silver medal winning piece, “Faerie Carnivale,” which combined one of my fairy paintings with my metal clay and wire work. Since then, I’ve sold several fantasy art jewelry pieces at shows, and people who have seen the full-page ad featuring that contest piece have tracked me down to have me create pieces just for them.

So last summer I decided to take the hint and get serious about a new line in my Kell’s Creations collection focused solely on jewelry featuring my fantasy art combined with the wire work I love so much. I reserved a domain name, FaeFinery.com, and a shop on Etsy called FaeFineryArtwear, which remained empty until late December. It’s taken a while, but I finally have several pieces in the new shop. All the pieces feature the wire work I love, and I’ve resized and transferred some of my fantasy art paintings to the polymer clay focal pieces. I have ideas for more paintings for more pieces, and best of all, I’ve already had a couple of sales since listing the first items in the store!

I think the fiction writing is now burned to a crisp, and I still have a long way to go before my Fae Finery line is fully in focus with the vision I have for it, but I am excited about where this new journey might take me!

This is Virginia, wearing her new masked fairy piece. We had a great conversation about her love of fairies and about her maternal grandparents who were from Venice, Italy, where the mask is a centuries-old Carnevale fashion tradition.