A showcase of handmade items by local Miami artists....

A pearl and crystal pendant necklace by Renaissance Designs.

Cheep Cheep's set of 4 one-inch magnets covered in retro-inspired fabric.

A mother of pearl bracelet by Ana's Jewelry Design - very colorful, very Miami!

More electric color in the above Zebra giclee prints from Bee Chic.

And so many cute matchbook notepads by Caprichos de Papel that I couldn't choose just one!

When I was preparing my post on Etsy pouncing this past week I stumbled across an interesting shop called Eclectable showcasing the work of Michaella Ruffino. The bottlecaps in particular caught my eye because Jonah loves collecting them whenever he steps foot outside our door.

Remember I mentioned that good photography is essential to selling your creations online? Not a problem here -- Eclectable has fabulous photography! In fact I like some of her photos as much as the actual objects themselves!

Plus, she gutted the face of an old watch and filled it with little treasures:

So I had to meet this person... and here she is!

Michaella, tell us a little about yourself and your shop, Eclectable.

I live in the beautiful hill country of Texas. My horse, Prince Albert and I compete in Dressage. It is a very elegant sport and I really love it. I like to read, eat healthy, and be with friends and family.

Eclectable offers lots of fun bottlecap art, bottlecap art jewelry, and vintage/unique jewelry. I use pieces and parts of vintage jewelry (like the gutted vintage watch) to create my own unique jewelry.

I love the gutted watch idea – what inspired it? And where do you find your inspiration for your other pieces?

I was shopping at my local junk store and I found a couple of watches with no faces. They caught my eye and my mom said, "Whoa, Michaella, you could take these and put in junk and resin!"

Where do I get my inspiration from? Mostly, if I am surrounded by found and vintage objects and supplies then the inspiration just comes. It's really fun! My first inspiration for the bottlecaps came the summer of my sophmore year in highschool at The Attic Gallery in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The stingy and determined highschooler that I was, I asked the lady what "the shiny stuff was (resin)" and went home and made some of my own. Vintage odds and ends also really inspire me!

So where do you find the raw materials?

I buy the resin (Easy Cast) from Hobby Lobby/Michaels and I get the vintage and found objects from thirft and junk stores -- I treasure hunt. As for the bottlecaps...at first I went to my local Taqueria and asked them if they could collect their Coke bottlecaps for me for a while, and they did. I was pretty surprised. Also, my best friend is always finding me rare bottlecaps and giving them to me in bulk! As for the vintage bottlecaps, my pastor gave me a huge, HUGE batch from Canton, and when those are gone I'll buy my vintage bottlecaps from Etsy. Now that I'm picking up my production pace again (thanks to Etsy), I've been buying a lot of my supplies from other shops on the site.

What is your approach to creating art – do you assemble it together in your head before your start? Or work with and through the medium and see where it takes you?

Sometimes I'll get an idea/inspiration and I'll write it down or sketch it. And sometimes I work with what I have and let it take me through to the finish, I do not create it in my mind first.

Overall, once I touch my supplies, the end product is always different from the start...which is fun!

Also, I have created several custom bottlecaps. People send me pictures and ask me to make them into necklaces or bracelets.

Michaella’s workspace

What are your plans for the future - for both Eclectable and your life in general?

I’d like to become a history teacher - I already teach art at an educational co-op and that's a lot of fun! I'm excited to see where the Lord takes my life.

For Eclectable, all I will say is that I have a pretty neat piece coming out as soon as my supplies come in... Come check it out in a couple of weeks!

Thanks Michaella! I look forward to seeing more of your creations at Eclectable!

Previous artist interviews.

Do you like window shopping? Peering through windows to get a sense of what sort of goods a shop offers? Browsing for inspiration and ideas, always finding something you can’t live without...?

I just discovered a fun way to window shop online: pouncing on Etsy. You click the “Pounce” link on the front page and images of three items appear – all from recently updated shops that have not yet had a sale (“Undiscovered”). Click “Pounce Again” and you get three more. Or, you can click “Just Sold” and view images of three items from stores that have made recent sales.

There’s a good reason(s) why many Undiscovered shops are undiscovered: the photographs of their items are terrible. (Well, a lot of the items are ugly and/or useless and/or way overpriced as well, but...) Since the internet relies only on the sense of sight, your photos must be good or people will look elsewhere. And I’m not going to feature a terrible photo on my blog because it reflects as much on me as it does the seller.

So here are some of my favorite finds (with photos that do their items justice) from recently pouncing Undiscovered stores:

I love this bright and colorful quilt block from Down South Treasures. If you can sew better than me, you could incorporate it into a quilt – maybe with blocks from several different people. But I think I would just frame it and hang it on the wall!

Wooden Horse of Texas' charming alligator push toy is made from wood and left unpainted – instead of worrying about lead-laden paint, just skip the paint altogether!

I love the fabric in this tissue cozy by A Rude Girl – what a great little gift!

A cute flower headband for young girls by A Bug, A Bub, and a Bean – the crocheted band is actually stretchy making it more comfortable to wear:

Two cool photos from KatenLow (the small size below doesn't do them justice):

These brilliant colors created by Wilson Design are printed on note cards, but four framed then hung at different angles would be a cool wall display.

This elephant onesie by Urban Hen is adorable! One thing (and maybe the only thing!) I’ll miss about baby-hood are the cute onesies!

So go and pounce away - just know you have to wade through the muck a bit to find a treasure!

Google Earth has opened up a new type of artistic expression. Not only can you find letters created by various man-made and natural structures, now people can create works of art that can only be truly appreciated from the sky. People such as Henk Hofstra.

The above two pictures are of his creation entitled “Water is Life.” The artist’s description:

"In April 2007, het Moleneind, a road in Drachten, The Netherlands, is painted blue to symbolise the water. It is 1000 meters long and 8 meters wide. It was created to form an urban river and recreate the path of a waterway that used to be where the road currently runs. They will start to dig a new canal here in 2008. The text WATER IS LEVEN is written on the blue road. The water will bring back life again in the centre of Drachten."

And for the next six months Hofstra's latest installation, "Art Eggcident," will be on display in the city of Leeuwarden, The Netherlands.

Even better than discovering these on the internet would have been to just be walking down the street and stumbling upon this – ha!  This is Street Art, defined!