Mosaics

I've been so busy working on my ABRR that I haven't had time to create anything else in the past two days, so I thought I'd show some of my mosaic ladies.

Both of these have been sold, the gallery keeps asking for more but they are very labour intensive. You never get your money back for the hours of work that goes into them.

I enjoy creating them but until I have more time, I'll probably stick with my jewellery and altered books.


The bird bath was a present I made for one of my daughters. The ginger cat on the stand is her cat.

Altered Journal pages

Three more pages from my altered journal. This is the book I use for teaching my workshops, hence the hinge and eyelet connections.
For anyone wanting to start a journal go and visit Suziblu, what a breathe of fresh air this lovely young lady is, she makes videos of her journal making and has a new video each week. Thanks to Judy for putting me on to her.
Another site I've just discovered for anyone who loves pattern and design like I do is print and pattern They have some great designs that could be adapted for stamp or stencil making.

Mail Art and altered book class

What a lovely surprise arrived in the mail on Friday. This lovely package from Sharon as a thank you for visiting her blog and leaving comments on her 'Art Party' weekend. If you haven't visited Sharon's blog it's definitely worth a visit, she produces some great art.



Last Thursday night was the monthly get together of our altered book class, these are all students who have taken my altered book workshops. We meet for three hours once a month and work in our books, swap ideas and goodies and I go over the things we've covered in the workshops. Sometimes I teach them something new, as I did on Thursday, I showed them how to carve their own stamps from Ezy carve blocks.
What a fabulous group of ladies were there, Margaret, Sue, Patsy, Claudia, Nicky, Pip and Cheryl, the owner of the store. We did a swap of paper napkins and anything else we had more than we could use ourselves. The photo above is my collection that I received, including two art books that were no longer wanted by Sue, and three fabulous optical lenses from Claudia who so generously gave them to me after I'd complained in the previous class that they were hard to find.
This really is a fantastic group, so inspiring, I love seeing their enthusiasm for my recycling of anything that can be painted or glued, they never throw anything out now. Show and tell is also a fabulous part of the night too, Patsy always has so much beautiful work to show and gets us all going.
Can't wait until the next one.



This is a new metal cabinet that my brother in-law dropped off to me a couple of weeks ago. I've had to re-arrange my studio to accommodate it, but now my studio works so much better. I have three of these cabinets and the tops make great work areas, as you can image by now the drawers are almost full, it doesn't take me long to fill them.



This is the top of the cabinet, as you can see it's already well in use.



This is the collection of 'stuff' that sits on my jewellery bench top, it's ever increasing, but it's amazing how seeing things jumbled like this, helps when it comes to putting items together.

Necklace and Photoshop art

I haven't been well for the past two days. I had a massive dose of food poisoning, I felt like I was going to die on Monday night.
Thankfully I'm over the worst now, I still feel weak but hope to be able to go back to work tomorrow.
The necklace above is one I completed over the weekend.



The paper above is a piece I decorated a couple of weeks ago.



This is one of the beautiful tiger cubs I saw at the weekend, he's about nine months old. He was busy watching a very large goldfish in the water.



I scanned the paper into Photoshop, changed the colour with hue and saturation, then added some background with brushes, some from this site. I then added the tiger and faded out the background, it took all of a half hour, the wonders of Photoshop.

Thailand?

Continue down to the last post for today for the answer. Blogger won't let me load more than five images at a time.

Indonesia?

Japan?

No, good old OZ

What a fabulous day we had today. We went with my husband's son and his family to our local Melbourne zoo. It's over fifteen years since we'd been there and what major improvements they've made in that time. The photos in the above posts are all in the gardens. The buildings look so authentic and serve a useful purpose. They've created rainforest gardens to walk around with great new enclosures for the elephants, gorillas and tigers.
There's a Japanese garden with all the blossoms coming out at present, that was a picture. There are fabulous pieces of garden art wherever you look.
One of my favourites I have to say was the sculpture in the Australia animal section. It's made out of old junk from the outback and farms and it has the first verse of the great Australian poem written by Dorothea Mackellar on the spokes. I know the poem by heart as we regularly had to recite it at school, but it still remains one of my favourites.
It goes like this:
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of rugged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewelled sea,
Her beauty and her terror,
This wide brown land for me.

She described this magnificent land of ours so well.

What a Bargain

What a find I had yesterday, I took some crockery I couldn't use in my mosaics to the local Op shop (charity shop) near work, I'm always rummaging through their jewellery and book section, and look what I found on one of the shelves. The book was published in 1911, it even had someone's name written inside with the date 1916 added, it's in very good condition considering it's age and the book is full of coloured plates of wildflowers, all for the grand total of three dollars.
I thought it was interesting that as I took photos of it on one of my benches, the colours emulated the piece of paper that I had been decorating.
I couldn't finish without adding some real colour to my post. This is another page from my altered book, this time I've used a stencil I made as well as lots of layers.

Welcome guest?

Sometime ago, some one emailed me, I can't remember who it was, asking if it was true we have huge spiders in Australia. Well here's a Huntsman spider we've had wandering around our bedroom for a couple of weeks now. He/she has been too high up for us to reach until today when it was resting on the window ledge. We try not to kill them as they are relatively harmless, so my husband, occasionally me, puts a container over them and relocates them outside.
The first photo shows the underside and you can see the quite large fangs. Sometimes they rear up at you, I think they're the females, they don't always make it to the outside world, if they show me aggression. That's my husband's hand holding the container so it gives you an indication of the size.
More art next post.

Pins and pages

The pin above is for a friend, this is the third one she has ordered and I still have another one to go. Jo provides me with the raw crystals and then I wire them and add the rest of the beads and objects. The pearl drop was an old earring I picked up from the 'broken jewellery' oddments jar in the local op shop, it has rhinestones around the top. I bought a real crystal necklace,three strings of pearls (I think they were imitation, I have to test them) and a necklace that was made of carved cream beads that are in the pin, all for two dollars, true finds.

The pages are two more backgrounds from my altered book. They are the basis for more added texture and layers. The bottom one again uses old torn up pages from the yellow pages phone book.

We had a great day today, we went into Melbourne for breakfast at one of the numerous cafes along the Southbank, which is on the Yarra river. A glorious sunny spring day. Then we went to the writer's festival at a beautiful old buiding called the Malthouse, which is what it used to be. There we listened to a talk by one of my favourite authors, British writer Alexander McCall Smith, who's visiting here at present. His books are about a fictitious lady who started the first lady detective agency in Botswana. He writes from the female point of view and his books are extremely light and as he says, there is so much violence and action happening in the word today that his books area bit of light relief, not a lot happens but they are enjoyable reading. I'm reading the third one in the series and was able to get him to sign it for me, he's a very entertaining and jovial character, with a beautiful, easy to listen to voice.