Photo by Graham Cullen Ashley Henley is a do-it-yourself artist/crafter and will exhibit her work at Artscape.

The lifelong crafter, who now resides with her husband in Frederick , jumped on the opportunity to sell her wares, and will do so Friday, July 18 (look for her at C05).

Although she learned to crochet when she was 7, thanks to Grandma, and to sew in eighth grade, thanks to her math teacher, Henley didn't sink her heels into the business end of crafting until two years ago -- that, thanks to Etsy.com, an online store that's kind of like the Google for handmade and vintage items.

"After a while I just had too much stuff," she said, seated at her sewing machine. "I had to start selling."

Henley works in a one-room basement studio, complete with shelves lined with bins full of supplies -- fabric, buttons, yarn, paper -- all neatly labeled and tucked out of sight. A few items are displayed nearby -- books with her screen-printed art, miniature plush toys filled with lavender, and vintage found-object pins and pendants.

Before buying a house, Henley's growing collection of supplies and finished products was out of control, landing in buckets and bags underneath her bed. There's only so much room for crochet bags and tea-bag holders, Cat-fish hybrid stuffies and Gocco prints.

"I'm really big on cute," she said.

Think flowers, humpback whales and cupcakes.

She draws a lot of her inspiration from childhood colors, objects and designs.

"I'm really interested in childhood. I loved my own childhood and I'm really into things that would appeal to me as a child. I still see something pink and sparkly and run to it at the store."

She's also big on reusing materials and buying second-hand. She frequents antique shops because "they are everywhere here," and she re-purposes her own items when she can.

To diminish an ever-growing button collection, she created her now-trademark button bouquets.

"I kind of pick them (buttons) up everywhere I see them, and my husband," she admitted, "organizes them into colors."

The bouquets, about eight inches tall, were a hit on Etsy and got her some notice in the online D.I.Y. community. She just sent off 22 of them for a wedding.

"That consumed about two months of my life," she said.

She ended up having to buy 5-lb. bags of buttons on eBay, just to complete the task.

Her enthusiasm for buttons began around the time she fell in love with her Viking sewing machine, bought with babysitting money and used for after-school lessons every week with her eighth-grade math teacher.

"I was sort of an outcast kid," she said. "I'd always get along with the teachers more than the students. And it was really nerdy, because I used to haul my sewing machine to school." She laughed.

The first thing she ever made was a Christmas vest.

"It was really bad."

Lacking the patience for patterns, she never got into clothing but aspires to.

Nowadays, she learns the majority of her techniques online. Most recently, she bought a screen-printing kit and started designing journals and notecards.

"It's an outlet for me," she said. "It's kind of the only thing in my life that I take responsibility for, but I don't have to."

The 24-year-old is married, recently bought a house, has a full-time job in Bethesda as a tech writer and is getting a Master's in fiction from Towson University.

But there's always room for her art.

Artscape will be her second craft show; the first was in Richmond, Va., a few months ago.

"It's an awesome experience to be with all the other crafters," she said. "I'm inspired by all the women doing this. ... The crafting and D.I.Y. movement got so big. In high school, it wasn't cool, and then it started to become cool in college, which definitely worked out for me."

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Visit her Etsy shop at www.theriperadish.etsy.com.