We recently made the acquaintance of Claudine Hellmuth, a very creative artist with a very unique craft, collage art! It’s very cool, yet very hard to explain, but we love finding exciting new forms of custom art and sharing them with you.
The way it works is, you send Claudine some pictures of you and your friends or your family and tell her your story and give her ideas about how you envision your artwork. You can also specify color and even send fabric, wallpaper or paint swatches to include and Claudine will match her paints to colors you prefer.
It’s fabulous and Claudine has been featured on HGTV and has even published books and instructional DVD’s sharing her techniques for creating “Hip Art for Playful Hearts!”
Please visit her website to see her gallery of work, learn more about the process, and how you can have your own collage art – they make amazing gifts, by the way!
The best thing about meeting Claudine for us was finding out that she is also an animal lover and learning about her friend, Bernie.
Bernie Berlin operates A Place to Bark, an amazing no kill foster and adoption rescue which focuses on abandoned and abused animals that are classified as “hard to place,” due to their special needs or behavioral problems.
A Place to Bark is currently in desperate need because next week, Bernie is going to drive 60 little lives to Chicago and Wisconsin to be adopted — these are little puppies and kittens who were on death row and would not be alive had Bernie not pulled them from animal control. These 60 fur babies will be adopted out at no-kill humane societies, when she does this, all the puppies and kittens find homes within 3 days of her taking them there!
But Bernie needs our help. The cost to run the transports will be around $1500. The air conditioned cargo van to rent costs $600, gas is $240 to Wisconsin and back and $180 to Chicago, she goes through approx 40lbs of Dog food A DAY and the transports take about 2 days each min. Then 20lbs of cat food a day + medical certificates and shots for all the animals. You can imagine how it adds up. She gets no monetary help from the humane societies and relies on outside donations alone.
We have put the banner on the right on our blog to help facilitate donations to Bernie, please give if you can and please tell your animal loving friends too.
You can read more about A Place To Bark on their website and on Bernie’s blog.
hi there! thank you so much for the sweet mention! mucho appreciated!