Spring and summer

These are my two little trees done on 4x4" framed canvas. I got worried when I saw this picture because the horizon looks so off on the second one, and it is a tiny bit off, but not as much as it looks like in the picture. I decided it's not so off that I can't live with it.

Which is good because the blooming tree has already been redone a couple of times. The first try is here and I got carried away with the stippling and it got so you couldn't see the structure of the tree any more and I hated it. So I actually sanded it down a little since there was so much paint on it, and gessoed over it and started completely over. Then on the next try, the transfer didn't take right, so I had to do it a third time. And I went back just now (which was after this picture was taken) and did a tiny bit more stippling on the right side of the tree because I thought it looked too flat on that side. I used very little paint and just rounded it out a tiny bit. So now I'm stopping, even though I'm not real happy with the lettering at the bottom.* If I put it up on the wall and I really hate it - the lettering, I mean - I guess I could go back and try again later. But I'm not doing anything else to it right now.

I got the third one mostly done last night, too, the autumn one, and it looks pretty good. I used Altered Orange for the background and Modern Red (which is a very orange-toned red) for the tree. I finger-painted the tree like I did with the green one. I'll get a picture of it eventually. I want to lighten up the background because right now I think it's going to look too dark compared to these two. And I have to decide on a word to put on it. Anybody got any suggestions? I've got "grow" for spring and "bloom" for summer, and all I can think of is "shed" for fall but there's bound to be something better than that. And then I was going to put "renew" or maybe "restart" or something like that for winter. (The winter tree should be comparatively easy to do because it will just be bare, of course.)

On the whole, I think stippling worked really well for the blooming tree. I used two colors of paint to keep it from looking too dark - it was Dash of Red (which is basically a dark magenta) and then I think the other one was the same color lightened up a bit, like I did with the pink heart. I did this a week or so ago, which is why I'm already forgetting.


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I have an ongoing project, that I've been working on practically since my mother died three years ago, to scan a lot of her old pictures, and get rid of at least part of them. She took a LOT of pictures, and a lot of the time I know she had duplicate sets made - like, for me, or for the people she went on vacation with, and such. And the pictures of vacations she went on just don't have much meaning for anybody else. I mostly end up keeping the pictures she's in, and throwing out the rest. Scanning at least some of them makes it easier to do the throwing away. I'm a hoarder by nature, and throwing things out is something I have trouble with, but I live in a two-bedroom apartment and you just can't keep everything. So that's why if you look at my Flickr photostream, there are long stretches of things like my mom in New Zealand. And then there are the quilt pictures - several albums of those, too. Her quilts and other people's quilts. I don't know if I'll ever finish this "project" but I work on it from time to time and at least I can whittle it down a bit.


* I did the lettering with these stamps, which I really love, and a Black Soot Distress stamp pad. The quality of my stamping is another question.

Wired and wirework

I just took a test for my class (medical coding) and I'm too wired to sleep yet, so I'll write for a while. I made a 92 on the test, so I'm happy. This is not an easy class.

Let's see, I was productive on my schoolwork but I didn't get any jewelry-making (or photographing, which I also need to do) done today. I had what I thought was a really good idea about what to do with some pretty aqua-colored beads I have - only then I got sidetracked and never tried it out. I am a major procrastinator so that's not unusual, but on the other hand, I find that if I go and just do something right when I have an idea, that often has a better outcome!

I didn't mention earlier that I did work for a long time Sunday night on a wrapped pendant - it looks pretty good but of course (as mentioned above) I don't have pictures yet. I do have one of the piece before I really got started with the wirework:

I really love that teardrop-shaped piece of onyx, and I'm happy with how the bezel was going, although I think I made a mistake with the wirework late in the process. It's yet to be determined if that's fixable - it was late by the time I got to that point and I decided to put it down since I was tired. I figured my judgment was a bit suspect. (I know with quilting I used to think that if I worked too late at night I started making mistakes, so I figure jewelry is probably the same.)

And that reminds me that I was putting out a few fall decorations (they always go up when the Halloween stuff comes down) and one thing that I put up was a little quilt of my mom's:

It was hanging on her door when I took this picture; she had a double door - a wooden one behind a glass one - that was perfect for showing off little quilts like this one. I could have brought the quilt hanger you see here home with me when we were cleaning out her house, but it was rusted and I decided to throw it away, since I didn't really have a place to use it anyway. (I really ought to get another hanger setup, though, and find a place inside the house to hang these.) But since I didn't have anything set up to hang it with, I draped this little quilt across the back of a recliner that we don't usually sit in, and it looks very nice.