Do you love creating amazing projects that showcase skully goodness? Wanna get some traffic to your blog and share your obsession? Join Smeared Ink and the Smeared and Smudged Forum on June 4th for one wild blog hop event! We will be celebrating Skull Appreciation Day 2013 by featuring handmade projects that spotlight the much-loved cranium. We will also be giving away lots of freebies during the hop! 

 How can you participate, you ask? Well, there are a couple of ways to get in on the action. To spread the word, grab our button here and post it to your blog, Facebook page, or website and share the info. Then come hop through the amazing projects on the 4th starting HERE. 

 To join in, simply make a homemade project or craft that features a skull and sign up to be included in our hop list. This is open to any crafter or artist who would like to feature a handmade skull-themed project, it does not necessarily have to use a stamp. 

You can sign up by visiting the forum HERE.  All participants will receive this awesome free Smeared Ink Skull Appreciation digi image to add to their collection, drawn by Alexandria S. 

After you sign up, the hop list will be posted in the event thread on the forum. The deadline for signing up as a participant is Friday May 31, 2012. We will post the hop list of participants on Sunday June 2, 2012. Then just share your project on the 4th along with the list of participating blogs! 

During the hop we will also be giving away freebies, so that is even more incentive to participate or hop along. 

 If you or someone you know would like to sponsor the hop with your own freebie giveaway featuring a skull (and get advertising on our forum, blogs, and other hop information posts like facebook shares), please contact us 
at smearedinkstamps@gmail.com. When you sponsor, we will add your website/button to all of our hop advertising. 
 Thanks for joining us in this event and spreading the word, and we look forward to a fun skull-filled blog hop on the 4th! 
 


*for more information on Skull Appreciation Day, please visit Skull-A-Day.


Happy Saturday everyone! I actually got the chance to work on a little something yesterday just for the fun of it, and I'm so happy to share it with you today. Way back when before my big move, I started playing with plaster and I designed and poured my first shrine. The dried, unfinished shrine was packed away and made the long trip from Washington to Virginia, amazingly in one piece. Yesterday I pulled it out and got to work.

 I was inspired by two things. The first is my oldest daughter, who is almost 20 years old and absolutely HATES butterflies. They rank third on her greatest fears list behind teeth and aliens, go figure. Don't ask why, I have no idea where the phobia came from, but it has something to do with their legs. Anyways, that is where I got the idea for the decoration of this little hanging shrine. It's all about the realization that what one person finds beautiful, another can find morbid and disgusting. It's about recognizing and being accepting and respectful of all views and opinions. We are all hard-wired differently.

 The second thing that inspired me was an incident that happened earlier this month when one of our Smeared and Smudged Forum members, Fiona, was attacked on her blog for linking one of her projects in a challenge. I won't go into details, those who saw it know what I'm talking about. Once again the "attacker" demonstrated how close-minded and unaccepting people can be. The difference of opinion was not the issue, but rather the vile way that this person presented their opinion. It was demeaning to Fi and heavily demonstrated how judgemental and snide the attacker was. It made her and her challenge blog look bad and needless to say, I WON'T EVER be participating there.

 So, the point of all that was that this shrine is about seeing it from someone else's perspective and being accepting of it, whether you agree or not. Hope you enjoy taking a look. Click the pics for a larger view.