and the winners are….

I know and I apologise…I’m late.  The run up to school has suddenly included (among other things)  a complete overhaul of the kid’s rooms, including a paint job.  I’ve been meaning to paint their rooms since we moved in (4 years ago, says she with a red face) and it seems that now is the time.  The benefit is that now they can help with the job and learn about the joys of cheap renovation via painting!  Max’s room is a wonderful bright green which rejoices in the name of ‘Lime Freckle’.  Suits him…he has wonderful freckles, though not green ones.

   
                                                                              

A couple of shots of Max’s new green womb…he coils himself in there and reads for hours…

                       


Rachel’s room isn’t quite finished, but you can see the blue she has chosen.  It looks too Madonna’s robe blue here and is actually a little greener in real life.  My camera doesn’t do blues well.  Here is a demented shot of the wonderful (if a little sinister) Victorian doll’s house that Rachel inherited from her great aunt.  Yes, it is filled with miniatures…

My wonderful daughter also cut out all the entries for the draw and I folded them up into small bundles.  Somehow we like this better than the old random number generator, possibly because we are luddites at heart.  My daughter is no friend to technology (although she can work her way around a computer just fine, thank you…) and I’m seeing at school that it isolates you from your peer groups if you’re not connected.  But that is her choice – we all have to use technology in a way that works for us!  But I digress…you’d like to hear the winners, no?

                                         


                                                         
                                                     
                                            
         And the winners are.......Peg Gerrard and Linda Sudimack!
 
I don't have email addresses or shipping addresses for either of you, although I see that Linda has an Artfire shop linked to blogger, so I'll try sending a message there.  If either of you see this please contact me through Etsy or this blog so I can get your mailing addresses and send out your winnings!
And please, check in with me tomorrow as I’ll be adding my first video (made by me…) to my blog.  It will be up tomorrow barring any more unforeseen technical glitches.  Oy, the world of video formats and converters is horrible….

Quiet scene

 

I 'll just finish off the the year with a few pictures of the creche my daughter has been making since she was 7.  She is 13 now.  I realized that polymer has been around in our household for longer than I thought...

 

The angel..

Such earnest wise men...

 

The small shepherd and his tiny flock..

We are all proud of our children...

 

The cat watches from on high...

 

The dog is so happy, you can just tell...

I hope you are all happy too.

It's almost time!

The last gasp of summer is upon me and today we are off to the waterpark to slide.  This jaunt is very timely as the temperature is supposed to go up to 33 C today!  School starts on Wednesday and it's going to be a hot first day too.   No autumnally crisp first school day for this year!

I'm a bit saddened by the pathetically small amount of work I've mnanged to do this summer.  Except for a tiny bit of experimentation here and there, there simply hasn't been time with the number of trips we've done this summer (small trips requiring, it seems, VAST amounts of preparation!).  I've been trying, with some sucess, to train my children to be a bit more self reliant in the cooking, cleaning and preparation for activities department, with some success.  While also realizing that any lack of competence in this on their part is completely my fault - note - start training them early!

However, lots of ideas are percolating inside my head.  It remains to be seen if they can be dug out of the sludge.  I even fell down on the sketchbook documentation of said ideas.  I have enjoyed reading the blogs I follow when I had time to get on the computer (somehow, there is always time to check one's shop), and I salute you all on your regular blogging habits, and the great posts.  That small injection of the crafty life did a lot to help me feel connected.

Must go and get wet, but I will return, hopefully regularly, starting September 1st.  I leave you with pictures of a hollow bracelet I seem to have been working on ALL summer!  (And it shows in the overworking, too) .  It's on a pearl base and I've discovered I have a love/hate relationship with pearl clay.  When it's right for a project, it's great and when it's not -  it is purely and simply - incredibly tacky looking!

 Sorry about the number of shots.  Hard to find a good one, am out of practice!

So moved

Start of a new decade, feels fresh and squeaky clean, doesn't it?

The last decade was an oh so transitional one for me which I'm going to leave quietly behind and try not to dwell on (except privately). It is wonderful to have a direction again.




Since my last 10 years have been full of child raising (they are 10 and 12 now) it is wonderful to be able to show a small thing that moved and touched me at Christmas this year - my gift from my 12 year old daughter. She is very like me in some ways, always fiddling and experimenting with materials - and fearless (oh, for youth before doubts creep in!)! We seem to bounce ideas back and forth, and I absolutely owe some of my more interesting tangents to her. It is a casual process: We sit and play with stuff and make small honest comments to each other. She really seriously considers everything I show her. SO valuable, and it's something I never expected, believing, before I had children, that parenting was more of a one-way street. (I teach YOU, not we learn together...)




She made me 5 napkin rings, each one different so each member of the family could keep their cloth napkin until it was dirty. They are loosely related to crystals, and roughly red and green coloured. (Christmas, you know). Then she made a little cabinet for them to live in, with separate shelves and doors - and this was made out of a toilet paper roll. I was so entranced by this use of the materials at hand. Also interesting, though perhaps not evident from the photos, is the way some of these these are strung to be squares. You can pull them into rounds, but then they spring back to being square. Lovely, and so simple.





She does spend hours in her room figuring such sorts of things out, but fortunately, this tendency is balanced by her love of basketball - such extremes, phew....I never expected child-rearing to be so interesting.

As for me, since polymer is such a new substance for me, anything is fair game! Technique-wise, that it. I don't even know enough about any of it to know if I would like it. Although, perhaps I have a small antipathy to caning - not the work done by others, not at all - but as a technique with which somewhat slapdash me could be comfortable - Yes!

Currently, I'm working on altering, painting and colouring image transfers, some of the alteration in photoshop, and some after the transfers. I'm getting closer to what I want - somewhat the look of an encaustic painting in miniature. More on that on Monday.