Shadow Shot Sunday

One of my colleagues at work is having twins. Yesterday she was given these by another lady-twin grapes! I offered to preserve them in resin and she liked the idea, so they are in resin now. In case it went wrong, I took their portrait first. This photo was taken by Chinameze at Forest School last week. I let him borrow my camera. He takes great photos.

For more shadow shots from around the world, visit Hey Harriet here.

Strange Animal Friendships

We have been watching a programme all about unlikely animal friendships-a sheep and an elephant, a polar bear and a dog, a dog and a leopard. This film is of a bear, a tiger and a lion who live together. They were found in a raid on drug dealers and rescued all together. They are just so sweet!

Rosebud and Nature

Meet Rosebud. Rosebud likes crochet, recycling, the colour grey, storms, red lipstick, and sleeping in the afternoon. She is made of plastic and her eyes open and close. She is about five inches high and is nearly able to stand up on her own. She has delicate little hands with a tiny little finger which looks ready to be held up as she holds her teacup.

Nature in the form of sweet peas, battered by some of the heaviest rain I have ever seen. It went on for ages and there was thunder and lightening to go with it. There were huge puddles on the roads as I was driving home, and people were recklessly speeding through them!

Also nature in the form of a little frog. Brought out by the rain and chased by Cassie, then rescued by me. I think he was alright-just a bit stunned. He managed to jump back into the pond from my hand and hide away under a rock. I love frogs and have no worries about picking them up. I could not do this with a spider but I can with a worm or a snail. I don't mind slimy things but am a bit scared of scuttley things!

I found out today that the Tamil alphabet has 247 characters and 12 vowels. How does anyone ever remember all those?! Having just read a bit of this wikipedia page, assuming it is right, there are thirty one letters and 216 combinant letters making a total of 247. It looks beautiful-lovely elegant shapes.

Pretty Things

I have been making little glittery resin birds-using a silicone mould. Yesterday I made a ring out of one of them by pushing a ring mount into the back when the resin was tacky. I really like it.

There have been such interesting cloud formations over the last few days. This one looks like a fishbone.

This pretty window was next door to one of our home visit homes today. The home visits are going well, though my voice is starting to go with the constant talking!

I think this is the ash cloud-the very faint lines above the normal cloud.

I know this is Tiger.

Wandering

Home visits all this week-so the chance to walk around in the fresh air and take photos of the local area-some of which will be used in a display. This is the sign in the first flat we visited this morning-straight out of the 60s it looks like. I love the font. This is our local Sikh Temple-a really lovely colourful building.
This is a roof of a building just up the road near the shops-nearly as beautifully decayed as the one in Greenwich the other day.
The cheery Corner Cafe next door to the building above. A very friendly cafe.
More of the same all week-such fun.

Disparate

This weekend has been busy and pretty sociable really (despite lots of work!) I have chatted to strangers (about knitting socks, vintage buttons, buying beads in Afghanistan, and coming from Maidstone)-in a junk shop and on the market. My brother came up, as he was riding his tandem in a charity event today-for stroke victims. He had his friend who had had a stroke, on the back of his tandem. They survived the day-it sounded pretty hard work to me as half of it was just my brother riding the bike with a heavy passenger. Good thing to do though! He was telling us about something he hopes to compete in next year in Colorado, called the Leadville 100. ("Where attitude meets altitude")It is a run of 100 miles high up in the mountains. He did a similar thing in Scotland last year-45 miles-with his friend who wants to do it. Apparently it is invitation only but his friend has a plan! We looked at the stats of the 2009 race and I was actually quite excited on his behalf-and in awe as I could never do anything like it.

This animation isn't about sociability-well unless talking to dolls counts as being sociable or is it just a bit mad? Anyway, Apeironia, the second doll in the TDP I have worked on, is finally done and packed ready to leave. This is the little postcard in progress that I made to go with her. The animation makes me think of the brain teaser thing that Kat sent me on Friday to test my brain age-it is 41-yes! (I am a secretly very competitive person) My real age is 45 ha ha! Here is a link, should you wish to measure your brain age! There is a game where you have to identify what is changing in the picture you are looking at-starts off quite easy-not as much so as my animation-but becomes very difficult quite quickly. A fun way to spend 2 minutes.
I made another sale-I get very excited when I sell something-and very grateful that I am not trying to make my living through making things! Little felted horse is off to Connecticut tomorrow. Weird to think these things end up in houses of people I will never meet, in places I most likely will never go.

I keep meaning to get some business cards made, but never get around to it. So each time I send off something I have sold, I improvise. Today I used this lovely old postcard of Buckingham Palace, with a pogo photo of the horse on the back.

I love the way the trees frame the building.

These roses are a gentle and lovely thing to calm you before you see what comes next. As I said-it has been sociable-today Andy's Mum was at his Aunt's en route back from her holiday. We popped round to see her and his Aunt. His sister was there, and also cousins, children and some visitors from Malawi. We had a lovely lunch and a fun time. Andy's cousin is taking a practical nursing exam on Tuesday and he had this doll to practice on. It is an amazing piece of equipment-with a peelable front revealing organs, holes and places to put tubes and things, injectable bits and a scarily realistic mouth. I was interested in it as a doll I suppose-it was semi ball jointed. What makes it so disturbing I think, is the fact that it is really big, yet to me it looks like a baby. I wish I had tried to see if the legs could go in any other pose. I was so busy poking and prodding it, and being shown its innards by the four year old son of Andy's other cousin, that I didn't think of it.

Vets Trip Excitement

As I pulled up to park in my normal spot near the vets tonight, I was amused to find this going on. A mini film crew with a sound man, a camera man, a girl with a clipboard (modern clapper board-I know nothing about filming!) and another woman, who may or may not have been the director, were attempting to film a woman and her dog get out of a car. The dog was a little white curly haired thing in a decorative coat. His owner was a tall, well tanned lady, in big shades and a stripey mini dress. She had a companion in the car just sitting. While I watched (I had a few minutes to spare) they attempted to film the dog getting out of the car with the woman about eight times. "We haven't got our shot yet and you've got to go in ten minutes, let's do this!" the director said helpfully. I went in the vets, Cassie was inspected, injected and weighed, and they were still all there when I came out! I wish I knew who the woman was and then I could look it up!

Look at this fantastic collapsed garage-in the middle of the really posh bit of Greenwich-it looks great but is a massive job waiting for someone. Imagine the spiders in there-and in the ivy growing all over it.

Lilly looking a bit sweet and dopey behind the basil-probably relieved it wasn't her turn for the V.E.T.

An Array of Legs

Below is a copied and pasted post from The Saffron Sea-which you may or may not have seen in the sidebar. It is another temporary-well short lived-blog about my current journal-like the one before for the sketchbook project. I just wanted to share this story here as it made me laugh-I hope it does you too! "I met this guy and he was gorgeous. We were dating and we'd had a few dates and guess what? He had a leg missing. Yeah, when he was a child his mother had left the garden gate open and he'd been hit by a car. He was lucky to be alive. He had an array of legs. A dancing leg, a walking leg, and a hill climbing leg and he used to leave the shoe and the sock on them. I found he'd been cheating on me so I got a hacksaw and I cut his dancing leg. Yeah. I hoped he'd be dancing and his leg would...
I told him I'd chuck his legs in the Thames."

This is the best overheard conversation (monologue) I have ever overheard. I heard it on the train from Littlehampton to Brighton and I had to write it down super quick so I wouldn't forget it. The phrase 'an array of legs' is just inspired!

Resin Experiments

This is my first resin experiment-I learned not to pick it up after only a couple of days, as, although it seems set, it is easy to make a big thumb print in the middle of it! I also learned that mica flakes disperse into a kind of shimmery layer at the bottom-an effect I like.
I read in my resin instructions that silicone moulds are good as they don't need to be coated. I do want to make things other than just boxes so I have given it a try. I used cupcake moulds-wrinkly ones(a charity shop purchase intended for school but not taken there) and non-wrinkly ones. The resin comes out so easily.
The seventies here I come! Do you remember all those resin paperweight type things with dried flowers and seashells in? Resin must have been a bit of a craze then. I never liked them but maybe I was wrong! These flowers are not dried-they are picked straight off of the primula in yesterday's post. In my head I imagined the fresh flower, perfectly preserved in all its beauty. As this is as much science as it is art this was only one theory. I wondered if the flowers would somehow rot or be damaged in some way. What actually happened was this-they are preserved perfectly in shape and detail, but bleached to a creamy yellow. The bleaching happened really quickly. Then I remembered that the catalyst for the resin is peroxide-aah-ding-lightbulb!

Small crinkly cake mould and china.

A bead and a piece of wire and-hey presto-a pendant I will never wear!

This is a book with a circle cut out of the cover and lots of layers of paper, china arranged in it, and then filled with resin. I was going to keep the other pages but as it was such a thick book I have taken them out and will have a go at making my own sketch book to put in it. I used tinfoil to make a barrier between the resin and the rest of the pages and then glued many more pages to the back of this where the resin had leaked.
The next thing I am going to try is glitter birds-I have two small bird moulds from Hong Kong-I don't know if they sent me two by mistake or I ordered two by mistake-they have the added bonus of being sent in two separate string tie envelopes-I love those! I am going to add glitter to the resin. When these are dry I am going to encase them in more resin in a box. I think!
Googled resin art-found one I like so far-Brooks Salzwedel

Quick and Easy

A scrap of chintzy cloth fell out of my fabric box the other day. I put gesso on it in a rough face shape, and later used inktense pencils to draw a quick face. It was really quick, which makes me think-should I take more time over things? I do often take more time, but get just as much enjoyment out of the quick doodly things too, so maybe not! Inktense pencils are very intense colours-hence the name I suppose. The wet colours are so lovely and you cannot tell from the dry colour.

More quick and easy-this time in the garden-primulas for £1 each from Morrison's-where I also bought some ready grown sweet pea seedlings for £1 each-bargains! I love these primulas and also love sweet peas-but never have much luck germinating them.
Below is some greek basil-with the added colour of a ladybird. This basil is so delicious. It is stronger in flavour I think than the larger leaved basil. These two plants were supermarket basil and completely pot bound and dying because of it. I split the plant and re-potted them and they are thriving. It makes a delicious addition to a cheese omelette-a quick and easy tea!

Two more quick and easy recipes-carrot and coriander soup-a bag of carrots, a stock cube, an onion and a bunch of coriander. Cook the onion in a little oil until soft, add the dissolved stock cube and the chopped carrots. When the carrots are cooked, add the ripped up coriander, blitz in the blender-done-delicious!
Fruity milkshake-handful or two of soft fruit of your choice, enough milk to make it as thick or thin as you like it, a bit of vanilla syrup if you are being bad! Blitz in the blender-yum!

The Moon in the Clouds

Just before bed last night I went to get a drink of water. The light in the kitchen was off and I looked up and saw the moon in the clouds-I love the dramatic look of it when it is like that. The way the clouds have a slight orange tinge.

The Princess and the Pea Story Box

I nearly forgot the pea!