End of summer

My son starts school today and my daughter the day after, and the nights are getting cooler.  This is exciting to me because I am by nature an 'any season but summer' kind of person.  Probably due to the reduced guilt about staying inside and working cosily in my studio in cooler weather.  Not that summer isn't beautiful, but it was a hot one as many of you can attest....ready for fall, is all I can say!

I just had a few wonderful pictures from the summer to post and somehow never got around to it.  They will work well as a summary of what this particular summer offered.  Currently, my favourite blog for enjoying seasons, moods, atmosphere and a big peek into someones life is Kerry Bogert's blog.  I never miss a post!  Her photography is fun, free and thoughtful and evokes a mood so well and her commentary is at one with my thinking lately. I like the fact that it is life presented with its attendant joys and  frustrations. The sneaking away to work (or the wanting to sneak away ), oh, I know that one well, the mother/artist dilemma!

Swimming at our lake, a piece of land with nothing but a deck and some stairs....

A perfectly  preserved and dried out insect exoskeleton...

The trailer ( on our land) which now has the happy name 'Mouse Palace'...no longer usable after our sojourn of  4 years in Nova Scotia.  Nature will have it's way!

Sneaking through the bush from the lake to the trailer...such a beautiful path!

This beautiful but sinister thing was inside the trailer when my husband opened the door - fortunately no sign of the skin's former occupant inside the trailer.... I have never before seen one whole and intact, it was about 5 feet long in total!

Lovely echinacea plants with butterflies at a friend's cottage...

Our girls are becoming lovely young women...(one mine, one the daughter of a friend made in prenatal class)

And finally, the rainbow after the torrential rains on the 24th of June (St Jean Baptiste Day in Quebec, a provincial holiday), which caused terrrible flooding through the region.  The camera doesn't even begin to capture it.....

A few moments from my summer.  Happy autumn!

Giving in

Sometimes you just have to give in to the urge to work something through - even if the timing couldn't be worse!  In the last few days I've been struggling with the ongoing paint job at the house (enough said), listing on Etsy, making some custom orders and helping the kids finish their Halloween costumes (required for school tomorrow).  I swore I would not help them this year, but somehow last night I helped my son make a matador hat and today I have to finish the edges of a bird costume that my daughter has almost finished.  She is actually becoming quite handy with a sewing machine - an essential life skill in my little world...

When those serendipitous things happen in your work, it is such a gift that you should just accept it and work with it instead of struggling.  Sometime ago I bought a set of metallic paints to use with polymer, but every time I tried them the result was so disappointingly garish that I would throw all the results away and curse my inability to resist temptation in art supply stores.

These new beads came about as a result of using up scrap bits of transfers and putting them onto the surface of my hollow beads.  It occurred to me that this might be a good way to use metallic, because there is some movement in the action of applying the metallic tile to the bead which removes the static quality of painted metallic.  It's this quality that I think I've identified as being the one I dislike.

It started late one night (after cleanup) with this set of beads -

You can see the tile and the random texture I used to fill the intervening spaces - nature abhors a vacuum and so, apparently, do I!

Then a couple of days later I dragged out the metallic paints...do you ever have an idea you think is great and might work but you are almost afraid to try it because  you will be so disappointed when it doesn't work?  That mindset, that's how it was...this little fellow popped  up because stripes are on my mind.

I liked the fact that the metallic paint was visible, starting to break up, and married well with the texture.  So then these followed, all  taking little tiny steps towards other ideas.

I do like the painterly landscape quality of this particular set.  What's fun is learning to control the degree of spread of the tiles, and you do have a LOT of control - which I like.

This is the last one so far -

It has a quietness about it because the metallic is buried under translucent. Just one of the literally hundreds of possible variations for this technique.  I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in a tutorial on this technique, or if it is just my current enthusiasm that is making me a little blind here?  Do let me know!

Sorry for the long post - if I could discover how to put photos side by side on Blogger I would be a happy woman!  I think I must be missing something very obvious...