And Prickles the Hedgehog goes home with.....

Determined by the awesome power of the random number generator provided by Random.org.
The WINNER, and new owner of Prickles is.......

Darleen said...

I think he would love to cuddle with another hedgehog I found that I called Tickles! She is so lonely and would love some company with a little character!!!

February 25, 2010 3:29 PM

Thank-you to every one who entered my giveaway drawing! I was very pleased to actually get to use the random number generator this time around (there's been give aways hosted on my blog in the past where I literally just had to flip a coin to determine the winner, hahaha)

I am already thinking ahead to future give aways.........

Darleen, please email me at
throwthis@alittlecharacter.com
with the address you'd like me to send Prickles to.

Thanks again everybody, smiles from me Tracey

DRAWING CLOSED: Prickles needs a home....

Once upon a time, a couple weeks ago, I was overrun by hedgehogs. The little critters were popping out of my clay left, right and center!

One of the shy fellows, as he lay curled in the palm of my hand, whispered up at me that his name was "Prickles".
I knew then he was different, destined to be given to a home in need of a little prickle.

If you'd like to be entered in the drawing for Prickles, just leave a comment on this post!
Drawing will be held on Tuesday, March 2nd at 6:00 pm Pacific Coast time.

Check back then to see who Prickles is going to live with! He's soooo thrilled about this that I swear his little quills are quivering with nervous excitement. He's never traveled by USPS before after all...

If you're a big fan of hedgehogs, you may want to see some of Prickles' relatives on my web site. Just click here.

Comments are moderated so don't be alarmed if yours doesn't show up right away!

What to give to the Etsy Artist who has everything and can make anything?

A website!

(Sample pages of website styles, featuring my own work as stand-in)

I have the pleasure of introducing the most awesome program in the world (healthy amounts of justified marital bias here) to the blogging world.

Blogging world, meet Artuit!
Artuit, meet your future fans!

My husband, the architect and web developer behind my own website,
ALittleCharacter.com
has just launched Artuit, the Artist's Website Creation Tool!

http://Artuit.com
http://Artuit.etsy.com


Artuit lets Artists create their own website, easily (can NOT stress that enough)
It automatically imports all your Etsy store information, photos, tags, categories, profile information everything, but allows you to go further than the limitations of an Etsy store.
Five photo Etsy limit?

Ha! DOUBLE HA I say!

Artuit has no limits on how many photos you can add for your items, as some of you who've visited my website have seen. I personally can't show enough photos of a character I've made, if it takes 50 photos to introduce the world to a hippo I made, then Artuit lets me do it!

(This is the edit page of Artuit, showing my own work as example. You can add photos, text, tags, item name, price, special tags, search your categories... ALL KINDS OF STUFF, here!)

Artuit connects your new personalized website to your Etsy store so that customers are redirected back to Etsy to complete a purchase when they click buy. It automatically updates your website to show an item as sold when it sells.

(This is the ORGANIZE page in Artuit. It allows you to decide in what order items are on your site, by double clicking an item you can then further arrange the order of it's photos to your liking! my favvvvorite part of this organize feature, if you have a lot of items, there is a work area to the right. You drag your items or photos there temporarily while you decide where to put them.)

Everything that I, as an artist, wanted and needed in an easy to update website, my husband has created and turned into a tool that EVERYONE can use.

Including a FREE trial version! Artuit is already available now for the public to use, including a generous free trial option that lets the user play around with all the features, but limits their items they can add to their site to just 10.

There are ready made "Styles" that users can personalize with their own photos, text as well as choosing background colors that compliments THEIR work. Switch styles to suit your changing mood and art! I LOVE THIS! I love the flexibility of getting to change my website's colors to suit my mood, of even changing the entire website's look. You could switch "Styles" a zillion times a day if that was your preference, or snuggle up with one you fall in love with and feel it out for a few months, picking the absolute perfect shade of vintage green to accentuate your artwork..... *sigh*

(This is the Setup page in Artuit, the section where you decide on what Style you'd like, where you can pick background colors etc.)

I love freedom, in everything. I love not being stuck with limitations. I can update the text on any of my pages in seconds, I can switch out my profile photo faster than I can take a new picture! Artuit lets me put as many tags on my art as I want. If I think a customer might search for pink polka dotted invisible giraffe hats, then I can tag my pink polka dotted invisible giraffe hats accordingly!

Feeling really creative?
There's a Custom option Alan, my husband aka web site designer, has included for customers who, like me, want a completely unique look just for themselves.
A professional-quality, custom-made portfolio web site can cost thousands of dollars with monthly management costs as high as $50 per month. But now, Artuit makes it possible to offer custom designs for just $250 with monthly costs as low as $23.
It's possible, all because while building this program that was initially for MEEEEEEeeeeeEEEeeeeEEEe (yay), we've refined the process for converting anyone's artwork into a custom style.
We've already developed the software needed for creating and updating your site. All of which means it now costs very little for anyone with an Etsy store to have a custom website, designed by themselves, that they can update on their own, easily.
You can design your website out of paper, glue and sparkles, knit your buttons, sculpt your page, sew your website design and the developer of Artuit can convert it into a working website!!!! You can scan it, photo it or mail your website deisgn to Artuit and before you know it you've got a website that really and truly compliments YOUR artwork!

There are even ways to earn a FREE custom website design through referral credits! http://artuit.com/refer.html SEE! I told you this was awesome!


I could go on and on and on, and probably will in the future but I am just so excited that I had to share the good news.

There are already 4 Styles available to play with, these are the templates that allow the user to have a website in moments!
(Playing with the styles is addictive, I keep changing the colors of backgrounds...today I feel mellow yellow but then atomic purple...no wait pastel pink...no wait....LIME green! There's no end and there doesn't have to be!)

We are bursting at the seams with a million and a half new ideas for more. Again, combining our two talents and preferences.
But for now the 4 templates available allow new users to quickly get familiar with Artuit and see their art showcased in different styles. And as new styles are added Artuit users are free to play with them!

The easiest way to learn about Artuit is to TRY IT! Check it out!
www.Artuit.com

So, all that said if you're looking for the perfect gift for someone, whether for the holidays or birthday or that Valentines gift you still didn't get...yikes..... how about something really original, something you can order from the comfort of your home... Artuit!

Give the Etsy Artist in your life a gift they really won't be expecting this Christmas.....give them a website!

Wholly excited about Art Doll Quarterly

Hi, My name's Tracey and you might know me from such places as:
The ice cream aisle of any and all super markets within reasonable driving distance of my house.
The parking lot with the parallel parking spots behind the grocery store.
And now, for the first time ever, from pages 46, 47 and 48 of Art Doll Quarterly, Autumn edition.

I am thinking of having shirts made.
I know I always threaten to do it but I am so precariously close to the tipping point on this one that I may actually do it. In fact typing is becoming increasingly harder as my fingers pause and twitch, as my neck spasms from resisting the urge to turn and stare at the doorway leading to the back room where my iron on tshirt transfer paper awaits. I am not sure but I think I just heard a soft, papery whisper calling out "Tracey, Tracccceeeeey, print me. Do it."

And the next sound is my resistance dissolving, and finally breaking altogether as I decide to make true the dream of a tshirt that really speaks to me AND for me.

5 actual minutes later.

Ahhhhh, that's better. Nothing like doing a bit of bragging, er I meant blogging on a warm summer's evening in the cozy comfort of a freshly ironed tshirt. (Wondering why I didn't do a tank top and wondering if I forgot I'm in Southern California and it's the end of July for goodness sake)
By the way, lets just ignore the slapdash job of tshirt logo-ing, ignore the fact I have left the kitchen in disarray, transfer paper, warm iron and ironing board all blocking access to the fridge. Lets also overlook the fact that in my excitement I forgot to trim out the transfer and now the entire front of my shirt feels like a rubberized bib, in fact lets go WITH that concept and considering I'm supposed to be bragging about my arty-ness lets say that I have in fact created a new sort of bib/tshirt combo for adults who slurp their coffees too violently. Waterproof adult bib tshirts...I am on to something...
But anyways we are forgetting ALL of that because lets for one moment pay tribute to the fact that I just asked my husband to take a photo of my chest so I could put it on the internet.......and he didn't even blink an eye, though maybe there was the slightest twitch when he saw my shirt and realized we were going a whole other direction than what he might have assumed.....

So, where was I? Ah yes, as if I could forget.
I AM IN THIS AUTUMN'S ISSUE OF ART DOLL QUARTERLY.
You saw the tshirt? That proves it!!!!!! I am not sure I have ever seen 3 more beautiful pages of a magazine. I am not sure my family has ever heard the words "Art Doll Quarterly" so much in all their lives. My brother is expecting a baby and I am wondering if I could convince him to name the child ADQ? That's sort of multi gender sounding right?

Speaking of babies this issue of ADQ, though I'm sure the creators of the actual magazine probably feel otherwise, feels like MY baby. I've been waiting for months now. It's been worse than Christmas, sleepless nights, finger drumming, constant googling to see if someone out there managed to get an early copy of the magazine and I could maybe live vicariously through their words before I got mine.
I resisted, ignoring all impulses directing me otherwise, the desire to print the preview images that the managing editor of Art Doll Quarterly emailed me and sticking them in the older issues of the magazine I already have so I could experience the glory of MY work in that magazine. But I thought about it sooooo hard that I am surprised I didn't develop telekinetic mind melding powers with our printer and awaken some morning to find them printed all by themselves.

To pile awesome on top of awesome the Stampington headquarters is only an hour away from home and I happily picked up my art dolls just the other day and when Jana Holstein, the managing editor of ADQ, handed me a copy of the magazine, MY MAGAZINE, I about burst into a shower of Tracey atoms, taking the magazine with me into a cloud of us to hover in all our sparkling, molecule split glory, above the building, finally united. ONE thing, me and my magazine.
I swear, no person has ever been as excited and thrilled to have their work in ADQ as I have. And should any one try and challenge me on this fact then I call "Duel, lets art-doll-off." and then we can have a merry crafty time figuring out the rules of an art-doll-off and maybe just skip the whole thing and make more brag tshirts as we await for the TWENTY copies of my issue to arrive. Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy. I can't wait, if one copy is as satisfying as described above then I am guessing being surrounded by 23 will be downright...illegal...yeah, illegal cause anything that good has gotta be illegal (or taxable). Oh yes, you're wondering how 1 plus 20 gets me 23, well I have a subscription so that's one more magazine, plus the one they said they mail me so TWENTY THREE ISSUES....I could paper the walls.....hmmmm....
Most likely I'll just hand them out like candy to my relatives and of course with the ones left over have a blog give away! I promise to only give out the copies I haven't drooled on.

In anticipation of the magazine I kept myself busy by updating my website. Er...well I designed some new pages like a profile and welcome page and my husband updated my website. Going a few steps even further and giving me a searchable database among other things! Woo and hoo!!! BEST web designer in the world, I figure out what I want it to look like and what I want things to do and he does his code-y magic and it works!

By the way I have figured out that this being published in the Art Doll Quarterly magazine is a 3 month cow sort of deal. I am milking it for all I can, every second word outta my mouth will be ADQ related, it being a quarterly magazine and all, that gives me 3 months until their next, non-me, issue comes out.
You know what that means don't you? I gotta figure out what part of my body could use a tattoo that says "As featured on pages 46, 47 & 48 of the Autumn 09 issue of ADQ"

In the mean time I will celebrate this magazine awesomeness the Canadian way, with little sandwiches!