One of my favorite days of the year for three reasons. 1) I have Irish heritage in the way back and it does stir something in my blood. Just like the veil between life and death is said to be thinner on Halloween, the veil between my everyday life and the Irish family past is thinner on March 17. I can feel the mist in the air, and ... 2) The scent in the air of the green, growing things there soon will be. It comes from both the rolling green land of collective family memory

Another eccentric titled person from the early 20th century who let their freak flag fly and drained the family coffers to do so! And again, because this is 2026 and you are now obligated to issue a tiresome disclaimer before liking anything: I don't admire the profligacy, just the determination to publicly be his crazy damn self no matter what. I'll skip the early bio again and get to the point: Henry was a young boy when enough people in the family line died to give him the

The Magic Attic Art Company has been around in one form or another for four years, and in that time, my tastes have changed, including in what I make. Some of the things I've made in the time since I got started no longer conform to the present-day Magic Attic aesthetic, so I am ready to move on and sell them off at a discount. To clear out the old stock, The Magic Attic's first clearance sale will start later this year. I will offer these older items at a 25% discount for ab

We've got a live one here, folks. The Marchesa Luisa Casati was a true eccentric, another Bohemian like Peggy Guggenheim who led a romantic life - though hers was ultimately sadder. by Augustus Edwin John, 1919 Now, this entry I must start with a disclaimer. When The Magic Attic Admires a person or thing, the admiration doesn't extend to everything they did or said, every decision they made. The admiration is usually limited to their willingness to be publicly, genuinely, t

Between 1936 and 1962, Diana Vreeland, editor of Harper's Bazaar, wrote a series of articles for the fashion magazine. These articles were full of whimsical, fanciful, outrageous, wildly unrealistic suggestions to make your life more stylish and pleasurable. Examples below: Why don’t you… put all your dogs in bright yellow collars and leads like all the dogs in Paris? Tie black tulle bows on your wrists? Have two pairs of day shoes exactly alike, except that one pair has thin

There is much in store this year for The Magic Attic Art Company, but there are a lot of personal projects too. Since I hold to the concept of "moving in silence," I won't share too much, but I will share a little now and more once they're done! I am redoing my bedroom and to that end, I bought a 36" by 48" canvas for that big wide open space above the bed. It will be an abstract in jewel tones and gold. I'll be brushing up, no pun intended, on plotting out abstracts beforeha

Or you can click here I look forward to January every year. I know many think I'm crazy; it's still winter, but all of the "fun" is gone. Well, after the frantic Christmas shopping, getting the decorations up, traveling around, making the dinner, cleaning up after the dinner, returning gifts, getting the decorations down, eating lots and lots of sugar, etc. is all over, finally, finally , it is January and I can take a breath. There is no real stress over January (aside from

I'd intended to make my own Christmas cards, either a linocut or my own photos printed onto cards, as I mentioned here . Photo cards are now, as with everything else, expensive so I thought a linocut would be more fun. And I know that if it had worked out, it would have been. I follow a lot of artists online and something I don't see often is posts or remarks about a failed project. Well, my linocut Christmas cards were a failure and I'm posting about it! I drew something I l

You can find me here, of course, but there are other places to find me and my work or socials for The Magic Attic Art Company. The sister site for Magic Attic on Etsy : where it all began four years ago, and where I have over 100 sales with a 5 star rating. Dania Hurley on Flickr : Where it really all began. I got a point and shoot in January 2006 and wanted a place to share my peripatetic photos with friends and family. It developed into a passion, leading me to create the n

I don't often send Christmas cards anymore. I used to. There was a time in the late '90s and early aughts when a friend and I would sit down on Thanksgiving night with two boxes of cards each (that we'd painstakingly chosen in the weeks before), two books of stamps each, our lists of recipients, the Christmas quotes we'd chosen to go inside, stickers to use as seals, green and red pens, and work our way through the lists together. We'd knock out our entire lists by 10 o' cloc

I have some various works in my personal life that I thought I'd share. My company has a pumpkin decorating contest every year, and finally - this is my third Halloween there - I was able to participate. My pumpkin was inspired by this fabulous pumpkin by Vanessa Valencia of A Fanciful Twist. (Look for her in a future installment of The Magic Attic Admires). My initial idea was to set the pumpkin on a brass candlestick, but it ended up being too small for the pumpkin. I found

On Sunday, October 26, I attended the Art For Life fundraiser in downtown Columbus's new Arts District. This event occurs every two years and benefits AIDS research. Artworks are chosen from submissions and auctioned in either the silent auction or the live auction. All of the proceeds go to Art For Life. My photo, Speak the Truth, ended up going for $610! I'm very pleased that my small effort (very small - 6 X 6!) was able to raise that much for such a good cause. It was an

This is a repost of my Halloween post for 2011 on my photo blog, All Eyes And Ears. I drove around central Ohio and took the photos, and it's still one of my favorite pieces I've done. It's a strange feeling standing directly over the grave of a known murderer. I've done it a couple of times now for these old Halloween features. Original Post Date: OCTOBER 31, 2011 “On Tuesday, February 19, 1918, Forest Bigelow, a forty-two-year-old agent for the Ohio National Life Insurance

Vincent Price with his art collection, 1940s Yes, Vincent Price! And while I am A Halloween Girl and I've called him one of my "October boyfriends" for a while (I see a LOT of him, Peter Cushing, and Christopher Lee every October) that's not even why! I mean, there's a lot there to admire. He had a classic, upwardly mobile Old Hollywood career throughout the '30s and '40s - Dragonwyck, Laura, etc. - and was then graylisted during the McCarthy witch hunts . This altered the

I love and work in (not nearly often enough) a number of different aesthetics and I'll cover them on the blog, explaining each as I have my names for them and don't expect anyone else to know what the hell I mean by them. One that I love is vintage Halloween. The early part of the last century's ornate, odd postcards, the creepy-that-was-cute-at-the-time style of the '20s and '30s, on up through the '70s and '80s. And don't forget the Beistle decorations! Crimson Peak Anothe

I sell a lot of digital download photos, collages, linocuts and paintings. I've bought a fair amount of it as well. Most of it is very inexpensive, since you do the work of downloading, having it printed, buying the frame, etc. You're not paying for a high-quality giclee print or a lithograph, so there is a discount inherent there. That being said, whether you paid $1, $5, or even as high as $20, there is definitely a process to getting your money's worth from your download,

While I won't be debuting an autumn line of products on a given date like I did this summer, I will add new fall themed items throughout September, October, and November. Here's a sneak peek at what's coming. Lynd Fruit Farm Sets of four tiny, delicate, sparkly seed bead stretch bracelets in Halloween black, orange and gold in each size - small, medium, and large. The beads are 2mm and the orange and gold beads are silver lined for that Magic Attic glow. Three linocuts, in bo

All photos mine I love autumn. The sounds of football games - the whistles and cheers. The sound and smell of crunching leaves. Pine cones and acorns and apples and caramel. Pumpkins - orange and white and bumpy and smooth; real and velvet and plastic blow mold. Mums and coral bells. Hot tea and slow jazz and pumpkin spice lattes. Deepening and becoming richer as September passes through October on its way to November. The chill in the air - mornings where there's finally fro

I'm not normally a coffee table book person. They're big, they're expensive, and I usually think they're boring. For some reason, I had a thought the other day; what if there were coffee table art books on psychedelic art? They exist on every other subgenre. Why not my favorite? So I looked into it and found - while few, very few - there are a number of them. The below are the ones I found most interesting. While I'm definitely interested in Maison Assouline's line of books -

This morning, I was going through my nail polish and old sets of fake nails I've painted. (If I like the color, I keep the set once I've taken it off to clean them up, spruce them up and use them again ... except I never seem to actually do it.) I had them all in their beat up old ziploc bags ready to go in the trash when I thought, hold up, I can reuse all those old bags. I try to keep as much out of the trash as I can. So I poured all the nails out of the bags and stacked t