Caro's Lines

R&F Encaustics Arrive!

2012-01-12T16:01:00.000Z

This morning I saw a bright red van promising "the most fun kids can have" and as I was taking a photo of it I happened to also get a yellow house and a blue car in the picture too... three primaries converging... it felt like a good start to the day that I was expecting my encaustic paints to arrive!

When I got home a delivery van was just leaving... but that turned out to have been bringing Teasel's next 5 month supply of kibble!

I had to wait a little longer for my parcel....

I'd been taking ages to decide on what to order or indeed whether to order at all... but a few things helped me make up my mind...

I discovered that the current prices on the R&F website were, when changed into £s, now much the same as the current prices from Jacksons.... that I would also be likely to be charged 20% Import VAT, plus postage, plus maybe another £10 to the carrier for the pleasure of having them collect customs duty from me!(Thanks Ros for warning me about that £10).
From Jacksons Facebook page I knew that their prices were very likely to be going up as soon as their new catalogue comes out soon...
And finally in my fantasy ordering at one point I accidentally put in two of one colour and got a message that they didn't have enough in stock to meet the whole order... whereas with just the one it had been okay... when it said "low stock" it really meant it...

I also discovered that when Jacksons show "special offers just for you" under the shopping basket they can indeed be bargains... the only one that interested me was for some angled Hakes... I got three for the price I've paid before for one!

I also ordered a couple of R&F pigment sticks to see what they are like - here are the Hakes and few of my new goodies:

Avoid Alizarin Crimson!

2012-01-08T15:10:00.002Z

Over time we expect a rose to fade... we do not expect the same from our paintings!

In my previous post I gave two examples of colour palettes: one from Arthur Stern (for oil paints) and the other from Michael Wilcox (for watercolours)... both were focussed on choosing paints that will mix well... both palettes included Alizarin Crimson.... however, on a little further investigation, it turns out that this is really a pigment to avoid, especially in colour mixes!

I was looking at the R&F encaustics information about individual colours and here is what it says about Alizarin Crimson: "Not sufficiently light-fast in tints."

This rang an overdue alarm bell for me!

I looked at Winsor &Newton's information about their Artist's Quality oil colours and found this:

Of the 120 colours in the range, 119 are now classed as 'permanent for artists' use' [AA or A ratings from Winsor & Newton] which aids in the longevity of paintings. Although Alizarin Crimson is only given a "B" rating ( moderately durable), it has been part of Artists' Oil Colour for over 130 years and is still considered a key colour by many contemporary artists.

But knowing myself and how long its taken me to get around to reading the boring stuff about permanence etc I don't think that artists are expecting any "Artists' Oil Colour" to fade... so the fact that so many consider it a key colour is only through ignorance of its properties....

Before Christmas I bought several Artist's Quality oil colours from several different manufacturers to make homemade encaustic paints... I was looking at the data sheets to check on opacity and translucency which is something I think matters a lot in encaustics. Somehow one of the paints I bought, Carmine Deep (an expensive one too!) has turned out to be non-permanent... my excuse is that as it was from Sennelier the data sheet was in French... but the real reason was that I did not expect a series 3 oil paint from a reputable paint manufacturer to be unsuitable for use in art!

I'm even more shocked that Micahel Wilcox recommended Alizarin Crimson in Blue and Yellow Don't make Green (1989 edition)... though it looks as though more recent editions avoid it... I now have his later book "The Artist's Guide to Selecting Colours" (1997) bought direct from his website - The School of Colour - (thanks to Sue for telling me about this website). In this book he has clearly done his research on permanence and not just mixing.... he says Alizarin Crimson PR 83:1 "has failed all lightfast testing in all media"... in particular it fades when used thinly or when mixed with white....

Okay so R&F alerted me to this, what do the other encaustic paint manufacturers say?

Enkaustikos do not give a plain English warning... to find out the truth you need to look at their codes: "Alizarin Crimson Pigment Color Index name PR83 - III"

So that III is the clue... I = Excellent lightfastedness, II = Good and III = Poor.... who really wants to buy a colour, no matter how beautiful if in a few years time its going to fade? Especially if it is beautiful!

And its the only paint they have marked as being a III....

The major UK encaustic paint maker does not give the pigment numbers though there are pigment names... They use a different scale of lightfastness... and I'm pleased to say they are not offering anything called Alizarin Crimson at all.

The lightfastness scale they use has 5 = excellent, 4 = very good, 3 = good and they say they do not offer anything with a worse lightfastness than 3... also after a quick look the ones only rated 3 are neons + pastel cream...

But there is a general warning that adding whites to colours may make them prone to fading... which, as it is given as a general warning, apparently applies to all their colours... and therefore makes them all useless to me.

Sigh... I'd love to be able to buy the local colours... but I don't want to spend money on any paints to which I cannot add white... I may not want to add it all the time but sometimes I do!

And what about making my own encaustic paint directly with pigments?

I now understand a tiny bit more about paint making... enough to know that paint makers do rather more than just throw in some pigment and stir it around a bit... which is all I'd be able to do.... whether that matters when the medium is encaustic I don't know...

How to see Colour and Paint it

2012-01-04T18:32:00.002Z

I'm wondering about what colours to buy for encaustic painting... indeed I'm beginning to worry that I may have to make my own colours using pigments...

Sometime in the 80s I got Arthur Stern's "How to see Color and paint it" (now sadly out of print). I worked through many of the exercises at the time... but I don't seem to have kept any of the still lives (in oil) that I painted... the greatest tool in the book was what he called a spot screen - to make one cut out a 2" x 4" piece of neutral grey card - I use the backs of old sketchbooks - and punch a small round hole centrally about 1" from one one end:

Spot Screen held at arm's length

You use it to observe what a colour really is rather than what it appears to be when seen in context.

To do this hold the spot screen at arms length, close one eye and half-close the other - look through the hole in the spot screen at the colour area you want to match - name it - he uses a system based on the colour wheel and one that I've used ever since - red, red-orange, orange, yellow-orange, yellow, etc...., its luminosity that is light, medium or dark, and its saturation e.g. bright, middling, dull... then of course if one is painting one mixes a colour to match what one has observed... but what is so illuminating is that one looks at something one would say was obviously red, then when looking through the spot screen it turns out to be a shade of blue!

Which is all a lovely diversion from what I'm really looking for today... I want a palette of colours that I know how to use and that will give me the whole range of colours I've been used to paint in... which is why I originally got this book off the shelf...

Stern's oil colour palette suggestion is:

Alizarin crimson (see warning below)
Cadmium red light
Cadmium orange
Cadmium yellow pale
Phthalocyanine green
Phthalocyanine blue
Ultramarine blue
Titanium white

For me now there is a huge over-reliance here on cadmium... I would prefer to avoid cadmium... I may end up with a little in my palette but really its a substance that I'd prefer not to be a consumer of... in any sense...

Another book with a similar take on the mixing of colours is Michael Wilcox's "Blue and Yellow don't make Green"... though it doesn't have that great spot finder tool in it... it does go into great detail about how colours work... he also covers transparency and permanence which are important aspects of pigments though in his examples he uses a lot of cadmiums too... his principle however is to have a warm and cool version of red, blue and yellow which is what I've always aimed to have since doing Stern's exercises.

BTW the pedant in me has always wanted to change Wilcox's title to "Violet-Blue mixed with Orange-Red doesn't make bright pure Green".... though I realise that lacks a certain punch!

Wilcox's suggested palette is:

Orange-biased red - Cadmuim red
Violet-biased red - Alizarin Crimson (see warning below)
Green-biased blue - Cerulean Blue
Violet-biased blue - French Ultramarine
Orange-biased yellow - Cadmium yellow pale
Green-biased yellow - Lemon yellow (Arylide yellow preferred, otherwise he suggests cadmium or barium).

He specifically excludes the strong staining colours... so now I'm wondering if in fact one of the things I might benefit from is strong staining pigments... you see the problem is that colour mixing is not the only consideration... pigments have all sorts of other attributes apart from colour.... of course how they mix with other colours matters but also how transparent / opaque are they? How permanent? Good for staining? Glazing? and so on... no wonder I end up wanting the whole shop!

Doing a virtual shop from R&F for encaustic paints:

Orange-biased red - unfortunately the most obvious choice is Cadmium Red Medium, though an orange-red that looks worth playing with instead is Alizarin-orange, if one could cope without the sheer redness of the cadmium... also worth a look is Rose Madder... which is the one I like the look of most but there is a warning about it not being light fast in tints...so not suitable as the only orange-biased red in one's palette...
Violet-biased red - Quinacridone Red...
Green-biased blue - Phthalo Blue...
Violet-biased blue - Ultramarine Blue
Orange-biased yellow - hard to avoid the Cadmium Yellow medium here... though Indian Yellow (quite orange looking) might be worth using
Green-biased yellow - Cobalt Yellow

I don't seem to be much closer to choosing which encaustic paints to buy...

I would like to know which pigments people have had most success using to make their own, Judy demonstrated using Titanium White for instance... anyone have any other really good choices for home made paints?

Update: Warning about Alizarin Crimson - see next post - Avoid Alizarin Crimson!

Encaustics in the UK

2012-01-01T12:00:00.004Z

Ammonite (detail) in encaustic by Caroline

In 2011 I began to paint in encaustic. I took Judy Wise's on-line class in Hot Wax, which ran for four weeks. There were new videos every weekday and a round-up of questions and answers on Saturdays. It was marvellously inspiring to see the new video each day and to wonder about experimenting with all the techniques. Quite a few of the techniques relied on materials that I prefer not to use, on personal health grounds, but it was good to see them in use anyway and gave me other ideas for how to work with wax.

Indeed one of the reasons I wanted to work in encaustic was that I hoped I'd be able to cope with them better than acrylics to which I seem to have developed an intolerance... and although Judy suggested using oil paints with the wax there was no need for turps or other solvents.... heat is the wax's solvent.

Judy and many of the participants are based in the US. This meant that I, and the few of us from the UK on the course, had to source our materials ourselves. I'll update this post (if I remember) with any new UK suppliers I find. (There were people from all over so we were not the only ones having to do our own sourcing - it was part of the fun!).

Making medium

Medium cooling

To start off one needs to make medium. Encaustic medium is generally made from a mixture of beeswax and damar resin (also known as damar gum... but NOT the same as damar varnish).


Beeswax

Suppliers of beeswax who have confirmed that their beeswax is filtered rather than chemically bleached:

Endless Green - these were the best suppliers for large quantities but their webpage is currently not working... their ebay shop is still available though only selling 1kg bags... their website is forwarding to "That Flaming Candle Shop" which does not have the 5kg bags either
Summer Naturals - in 500g bags

Damar Resin or Gum

Suppliers of Damar Resin:

L.Cornellissen & Son
Lawrence Artist Materials - they supplied the ones in the photo above
Baldwins

To make medium one needs a heat source. I used a double boiler on a separate mini hob... Lloytron E833wh Table Top Mini Hob.... I started out just using a saucepan on the hob but when I found, in a charity shop, a steamer that I could use like a double boiler with my saucepan on top I moved to that as it won't get too hot... so its safer... but slower!

There are several tutorials on how to make encaustic medium on the web for instance Andrew Gott's Making Encaustic Medium, Rick Green's Making Wax Medium, as well as recipes from books. Lissa Rankin's book Encaustic Art has a recipe based on 10 lbs of beeswax that takes more than a day to melt.... I've been making either 1 lb or 500 g of beeswax based batches and these have taken more like an hour....

I used silicone moulds of various sorts to shape the wax. I found that some things sold as silicone moulds could not stand the heat as well as was needed and others were just too thin. My preferred moulds at this time are:

Kitchen Craft Colourworks Silicone Cupcake Cases, pack of 12 (bought from amazon.co.uk)
Cool Cook Mini Loaf Moulds 4 cup (bought from my local Kitchens shop)

One of the frustrations for the beginner is that everyone says that the amount of damar to beeswax is variable... for instance there is a great chart giving the ratios by weight and by volume.... though as I prefer to work in grams I made my own chart for the same ratios - if you click on it you should get a more readable version:

Mostly I've used 8:1 as that seems to be a fairly standard starting point. If you need your medium to be harder you might go for 9:2 or even 4:1... whereas if you are working thinly on paper you might not add any damar at all...

Another problem I have had is in filtering the medium. The damar tends to contain a lot of twiggy, dirty bits that need removing. Lots of different suggestions for filtering are out there but I've not found any entirely successful.... Judy recommends using paper paint filters but I've not been able to find any... my coffee filters didn't work.... the jelly bag melted when I accidentally touched it with the saucepan.... the local make-your-own-beer shop's muslins are too coarse and let lots of bits through.... the sieves I've used are also too coarse.... etc!

At least the bits settle on the bottom so one can clean up the pieces of medium once its set.

One of the hardest things to source was a suitable hot palette. Originally I got an Andrew James Teppanyaki Grill:

Note the silver foil shielding the thermostatic "self-controller". My first thermostat failed after less than 6 weeks. They replaced it but said that as my use was "non-standard" they would not replace this one if it too failed. This was cramping my style as I was worried about it breaking...

So I have now splurged on a vastly more expensive hot palette - the A2+ Encaustic Hotplate from encaustic.com. This is a German made catering warming plate that is meant to be good at maintaining constant, relatively low temperatures compared to the Teppankai grill which was made to cook things on. If you are in Germany this is the same model, though not specifically sold for encaustics....

I have an anodised aluminium tray on top of the hotplate so that I can see what colours I'm using.

Of course if I don't need an especially large hot palette then a frying pan on top of the mini hob is good too.

In this country if you mention encaustic to someone, if they've heard of it at all, they will imagine you mean painting with an iron. Sometime ago I got a kit with an iron and some sticks of encaustic paint and the strange shiny card that is recommended to use with it:

I find the iron uncomfortable to hold for long and I do not like the card so its not surprising that I have not taken to this style... though the paints smell lovely.... you can see my efforts on my Flickr stream here... I do know that many people love painting this way... its just not for me... the iron doubles as tiny hot palette if one just wants to mix a little colour...

Colour... oh yes colour.... in the Hot Wax class Judy showed us how to mix medium with oil colours to make encaustic paints. Here is a colour wheel I did this way:

I started off with a cheap set of oil paints (which I used for the above wheel) and since then have bought some more expensive highly pigmented good quality oil paints, especially ones with good transparency. In class we just added the oil paints to the medium (whilst it was melted) but quite a few people advise soaking out the linseed oil beforehand on paper towels or other absorbent material.

There is a very big difference between using homemade colours and the ready-made ones. I only began to really appreciate this when I attempted to do some monotype prints (having watched Paula Rowlands wonderful DVD). My homemade paints, although they looked strongly coloured were full of medium and made the paper very wet and not very colourful whilst the bought sticks made very strong marks that transferred well to the paper:

Encaustic paints available in the UK - there do not seem to be any artist quality encaustic paints made in the UK - the ones available are:

Series of 48 colours in small blocks from encaustic.com... the same colours seem to be available from Wakes Waxes...
25 colours of "Dehan Wax" from here....
Sets of Hobbyring (German?) encaustic paints from greatart...
Purple Cows wax blocks available on amazon.co.uk and from hobbycraft are, I think, an American import similar to the above.

In the US there are some makers of encaustic paint that use named pigments, a couple of these are available here:

R&F - 80 are available in the UK from - The Art Palette on Amazon and Jacksons. They also ship to the UK but then there will be the possibility of customs duty to pay... the Art Supply Shop looks like it is a UK based shop but turns out to be in the US

Hot Cakes made by Enkaustikos - 14 of their colours are currently available in the UK on amazon.co.uk... though with a very high shipping cost so they may be being shipped from the US... if prepared to order from the US another source is the FineArtStore

Brushes.... I did not like the cheap bristle brushes from the local hardware store that are recommended by many but I found some brushes I like a lot:

The big wide ones are Hakes (from local art shops) and the others are white and black goat's hair brushes from Daler-Rowney. My local art shops had the Daler-Rowney brushes on offer so I stocked up after finding I liked them. When full of wax they simply let the colours glide on - here is the underpainting I made using them before covering it up to carve out the ammonite shown at the top.

Smaller brushes are useful when painting detail. Here are two version of mistletoe that I painted for Christmas. I did my drawing on the computer so was able to print out multiple copies. The first I attached to a thick piece of ply, the second I mounted, once finished, behind a hole cut from a canvas so that it was supported but let the light through.

In painting both of them I used encaustic as a resist for watercolour. The first one I then added pastels and more wax. The second one I left to show the translucency of the paper where it had been waxed. I was especially delighted that my green-gold paint was such a good mistletoe colour.

Mistletoe mounted on plywood

Mistletoe on paper mounted to let light through

Depending on how one applies the encaustic to the support one may need to fuse the most recent layer to the ones below. I started out using an embossing heat gun... this was slow and noisy. After a week I got a gas blow torch from my local B&Q. It is great to use for fusing but I find myself slightly reacting to the gas... so back to an electric heat gun.... this time in the form of an old paint stripping heat gun:

Gas blow torch

Electric hot air guns

I actually now use all three of these at different times. If applying the wax with an iron it may already be sufficiently fused... unless one uses it in my favourite way which is to melt the wax from a height and drip it! Then it needs further fusing... Similarly if one is using a heated stylus the wax should be fused as you go... but that's another tool I've not really got on with. My mother-in-law whilst here before Christmas much preferred it to all the other ways of working with wax we tried during her stay - she is used to using a dip pen and she loved this way of working.

My favourite supports so far are the cradled plywood boards that Jim has been making for me. I also buy thicker pieces of plywood form my local hardware shop when they are in their remnant section... as I'm now interested in monotyping I'll have to expand my paper collection... but that is something for this year!

Cradled plywood boards made by Jim

Encaustic Abstract on cradled board

One year on...

2011-10-23T13:41:00.000+01:00

I am currently playing with encaustics - I'm taking Judy Wise's on-line course and making a huge mess in the basement!

I finished my 365 of photos related to dream images in September:

You can see all the images in this Flickr set.

Then released from that - which was a wonderful project but did consume a lot of time - I bought an IR filter to use with my iPhone:

And played with Carla Sonheim and her Silly drawing class:

And clearly I've not been blogging!

:)

Sky Weavings

2010-10-23T10:47:00.000+01:00

It was buying a "Kids kits" Christmas decoration pack that got me going all sparkly.... ;)

A brush with the law

2010-10-13T17:43:00.001+01:00

Last night's dreaming involved Jim handing me a new paint brush. The strange dream part of this was that as he handed it to me he was clearly dressed as a policeman, which is not a normal part of his wardrobe... I was planning on taking a photo simply involving him handing me a brush... then as I came home from the shops I noticed that there was a police car in the street... the police man was very obliging and, after checking that the brush wasn't stolen, allowed me to take the above photo.

When I woke up from the dream I thought it was a great way of being given permission, by my dream self, to paint.... it was Jim who pointed out the pun.... and that it was "a brush with the law".

I have been thinking about doing some finger painting... which, rather than brushes, would involve recording my finger prints. :)

Following on from recent dreams about the Dalai Lama and blue-breasted buddhas I thought the least I could do was call in at a fairly recently opened Buddhist shop near me. The man who cleans our windows is also a sculptor and told me I should go in and see his Krishna sculpture.

Whilst there I photographed their Namkhas and discovered that in November they are having a Namkha-making day... I might go along.

I didn't know it was called sky weaving until I looked it up on their website - the woman in the shop had simply referred to them as Namkha - but the idea of sky weaving seems to have got itself into the reflection:

Lucky Leaves

2010-10-12T13:59:00.002+01:00

Lucky Leaves

Yesterday as I was taking leave of Kim two leaves fell on me. I mentioned that as children we'd often attempted to catch falling leaves in the Autumn since in our school it was said that each one brought a month of good luck.

We'd been discussing schools and she'd mentioned being C of E but having gone to a Roman Catholic school. Whereas I'd been unbaptised and gone to a C of E primary school. In my case this meant I was excluded from opening the advent calendar doors or being entered into the end of term draw for the Christmas tree though I still had to sing hymns, say my prayers and attend RE lessons etc.

I've been re-reading old detective stories recently. Yesterday I read the last of the Dorothy L Sayers that I have (though I'm missing some) and decided to read an Antonia Fraser instead... not quite so old fashioned but still firmly 20th century. This one wasn't with the others so I got it out with the idea that I might read it or might not, but would at least file it with the others.

Last night I only got as far as being reminded that Jemima Shore, Antonia Fraser's fictional detective, was described as having been, like Kim, C of E but taught by nuns in a convent.

Quiet As A Nun by Antonia Fraser

This afternoon I picked the book up again and got to this description of Jemima's return to visit her old school:

...It was autumn. In the sunshine the convent grounds were immaculate. It was the season in which I first arrived at Blessed Eleanor's as a day-girl. I walked with my mother from my parents' leaf-strewn autumnal garden, which had a kind of rich self-made compost under-foot throughout this season, through to gardens where evidently no leaf was permitted to rest for very long before being tidied away.

"The nuns must catch the leaves before they fall," said my mother jokingly, to leaven the slightly tense atmosphere of a new school. She paused and gulped.

"My God, look at that." We both stopped and observed a nun - young? old? who could tell? - carefully catching a leaf long before it fluttered to the ground. She put it carefully away in a pocket, or anywhere somewhere in the recesses of her black habit.

"Catching leaves is lucky." My mother was quick to seize on an occasion for optimism....

And so should I... :)

Photographing Dreams

2010-10-11T15:32:00.001+01:00

Poor neglected blog!

Today seems to be a day for catching up with old friends.... so I thought I'd continue the trend on here too.

My most recent project on flickr is a 365 one - attempting to taking daily photos sparked by dreams, preferably from the night before, using Hipstamatic on an iPhone.

Last night I dreamt I was looking at graphs of happiness in a canteen. When I talked to Jim about this he produced a recent New Scientist which had just those sort of graphs in them... so I decided to take it to my local cafe as the nearest thing I could find to a canteen...

On the way I stopped in the Amnesty book shop. And bumped into someone I hadn't seen for a year. She was also aiming at Coffee #1 so we went there together. (Hello Kim if you are reading this!).

#19 Photo Graph

Today I also got some rainbow shoe laces:

This was spurred on by a dream in which the Dalai Lama appeared and told me I needed new shoe laces. The ones in the dream were rainbow ones. I had to photograph some far less colourful ones for the 365 project but now I've got pretty ones!

I like to take my dreams as literally as possible :)

Attempting to manipulate translucent polymer clay

2010-03-22T17:12:00.002Z

Over the last two days I've been struggling with some translucent polymer clay (Cernit) it was VERY soft, even after spending the night in the fridge... it made it impossible to use as I'd planned in thin slices... so I had to adapt what I was doing... these two are the results.

I wish I hadn't put the opaque blue dots in the second one - they don't really work... I think it worked better in the swirled first one which also had standard white in so not so translucent anyway... I might chop the blue bit off or drill them out... not yet decided.

These are also the first pieces that I've attempted to sand and polish.

Experimenting continues

2010-03-21T19:07:00.001Z

Yesterday, being the spring equinox, I wanted to make a tortoise that was coming out of hibernation - that's the big one above. Jim has named him Vern.

Craft Mark

2010-03-18T10:07:00.004Z

At the beginning of February I drew this wren - it was my first attempt at designing a maker's mark. I'd like it as a sort of signature on handmade jewellery.

Handmade jewellery you cry?

Well you probably don't as I'm sure any of my past readers have long since gone... but anyway... I know its a long time since I blogged anything let alone anything vaguely artistic or crafty and I don't think I ever showed any jewellery... even though in the last few years I have strung together the odd necklace, like this one:

In the much dimmer past I used to do quite a lot of beadwork... from very simple strings to weaving with beads:

(I can't find anything that I wove... it was rather a long time ago)

But something I have never done is work in polymer clay.... and that's what I was just starting to want do at the beginning of February.

These are my first ever polymer clay beads:

I made them on the first day of the year of the tiger so I'm calling them tiger beads.

They are a very minor variation on a bead from Ancient Modern Polymer Clay and Wire Jewelry by Ronna Sarvas Weltman - a book that I've found very encouraging.

I purposely added in a very thin layer of the orange clay into the spiral cane (jelly roll) and I didn't know not to use the very distorted end bits - which was lucky as that bead is my favourite and most tigerish of them all!

These beads were made using Cernit (from EJR Beads), over balled up aluminium foil.

Since then I've mostly been reading and learning more....

FarmVille... don't pay real money for "beta" games...

2009-11-12T12:56:00.009Z

Its a week since I've been able to access my farm on FarmVille. Zynga's support has been very unhelpful - only suggesting that I turn everything on and off again. When the problem I have is rather more universal than that.

Firstly, Jim, who has been farming alongside me can easily load his farm on my computer, using my software.

Secondly, none of my neighbours are able to access my farm either. Jim is fed up with the way FarmVille sends him off to "help" on my farm but won't load it. None of my other neighbours have been able to get in either. The nearest anyone has got was this:

She left a note on the empty space that used to be my farm but when she returned the note had gone too.

What most people see is this:

Some of them have complained that it then hangs and they have to leave farmville and come back in again, others haven't had that problem.

What I see is this:

There are other people in the same situation. And we have something in common.

We had all thoroughly overstuffed our dairies.

There a was a bug that made it possible to put in more than the notional limit of 20. I thought it hilarious to put in lots of alien cows as well as a full compliment of the normal ones:

Jim had been more restrained, he'd only put in one or two more and the day that I was unable to load my farm his slightly over-filled dairy was showing just the 20 it ought to have, not the 21 or 22 he'd had the evening before.

Zynga had clearly "fixed the dairy bug" but in doing so had made some people's farms unloadable. Mine included.

One of the replies I got was:

"Please be informed that we do not ban any players for gaming bugs. All the issues you specified may just happen because of the loading problems so kindly follow the steps below"

And then they proceeded to tell me, yet again, to disconnect from farmville completely, log out of facebook, clear my browser's cache, quit the browser, restart the computer, etc.

They also suggested downloading the latest flash player - I looked I already had the most up-to-date version - but for the sake of completeness I did it any way.

At no point had it occurred to me, before they said this, that I might be banned... as a programmer I'm aware that fixing bugs often has side-effects that are in effect new bugs... I still think its more a technical issue than a political one.

But there was one strange thing.

One of the other people with an over-full dairy had put a post up much like this one on the Zynga forums. I'd replied and said I had the same problem. Several others did too. I was watching the thread so when I got an email saying there was an update I went looking for it. The whole thread had been removed. This does not seem like a technical issue, but more like a political one... I've been unable to find any official reference to this being a "known problem".

I'm now regretting that I spent real money on this game - it is possible to play it for free - but if you want any of the pretty things, like the flying saucer at the top, you pay using farm vouchers - you only get a few of these slowly through game play. I was happy, at the time, to pay real money to Zynga as I know how expensive such games are to develop. Now I'm less so because I cannot play with my toys even though I paid for them.

I have asked for any of these:

1. My farm as it was, presumably with dairies reduced down to 20 cows each, and playable.
2. A new, empty farm, credited with the FVs I'd purchased.
3. My money back.

They have not replied to this.

Here is one last shot of my farm as it was for Halloween:

Update: Zynga finally fixed it. My farm was dead but I am able to play again. However the support did not contact me to tell me it was fixed - one really does have to attempt to get in to find out...

Cleaning up...

2009-11-09T19:52:00.002Z

On Saturday, Ellen, blogged about cleaning by including a clip from Withnail and I.

At the time it made me realise that we really could do with a purge ourselves - we've not got to the wonderfully graphic stage illustrated there but really we would do with cleaner carpets. But the vacuum is on the blink and in any case we need something stronger...

Did you ever have a school teacher who'd respond to your protests about the quality of your art equipment with

"A poor workman always blames his tools"

well today I had what seemed like a moment of enlightenment, I realised that the answer was because

"A good workman would never have consented to use those tools in the first place"

And so, following on from that I went virtual shopping for carpet cleaners...

And its with such fantastic leaps of logic that I turned feeling guilty about the carpets into the need to buy a new usable carpet cleaner... or two...

Incidentally what really struck me about the clip was how young Richard E Grant was then... so I've just looked it up on IMDb and found it was released in 1987... I suspect we all looked a bit younger then

FishVille

2009-11-08T06:34:00.015Z

If you read my previous post you might be expecting me to completely break down and post about FarmVille - but instead I bring you FishVille!

After writing that post, Jim got our connection to the web back up so I could publish it - unfortunately I was then unable to get into my farm and haven't been able to since - I'd thought it hilarious when I'd got 27 green alien cows into a dairy that was only meant to be able to take a maximum of 20 cows in total.

From browsing the web it appears that they have fixed the bug that allowed this to happen but that those of us who had seriously overdone the stuffing have not been able to load our farms since. Whilst searching for more help on the issue than was coming from the makers of the game (Zynga) I discovered that they had just launched a new game on facebook - FishVille.

So rather than sulk too much longer I thought I'd play with fishes instead. And it is very relaxing - just like watching a fish tank - well almost.

I didn't take any really early screen shots - but here is one when I'd got to level 3 and my first neighbour had joined me:

The idea is to buy fish eggs and feed the hatchlings enough that they reach maturity when they can be sold - in fact they can be sold as soon as they stop being babies - but for some fish that in itself takes a day - for others it takes as little as 3 minutes. - you get more for them if you keep them growing and sell them as full grown adults - provided you can keep them alive!

They let you know when they are hungry like this:

But they start clamouring for food like this well before they actually need feeding... I did notice one neighbour had a fish with a red bubble asking for food - presumably it was really hungry. If you don't feed them in time they die and you have to clear up the dead fish.

Neighbours I hear you ask?

Well that's a concept from FarmVille and being fairly closely modelled on FarmVille, FishVille also has neighbours. People who are your friends on facebook and playing the same game can become your neighbours.

You can visit each others tanks which is fun in itself also your neighbours (or rather neighbors as its an American-written game) can send you gifts to decorate your tank:

What you are able to send increases as you go up levels.

The variety of fish eggs you are able to buy also increases with levels:

My goal yesterday was to get to level 8 so I could buy the clown fish. I managed that (just) and got up to saleable clownfish overnight:
The image at the top of this posting was how my tank looked when I started to write. Now after writing all of this the fish have grown:

Oh oh... no matter how intriguing I've made this sound I must also tell you that the screen is now saying:

Update: I was suspicious from the wording of the above notice that the issue might be political rather than technical and it appears that facebook has pulled the plug on the fish tanks because of advertising violations. At least that's what they are saying at techcrunch.

Poor neglected blog!

2009-11-06T08:41:00.003Z

So... I'm going to attempt at least one posting a week for a while - see if I can rekindle the blogging habit / rabbit / hobbit (choices from my spell checker - you decide).

I'm not sure how long it is since I've blogged - the internet is currently down (thanks to an "upgrade" that Jim installed a couple of days ago.... it requires him to have woken up before I can actually post this). Certainly not since (or not much) since I started to play FarmVille on facebook - I couldn't see the point of facebook a year ago and now I'm spending far too much time on it playing this sim-type farming game - and if you are not playing FarmVille you won't want to add me on facebook... I'll try not to mention it again in this post...

Summer here was not very summery... lots of rain and only a few days of heat. I don't like the heat but I'm not that keen on rain either! We mostly spent summer in Bristol and enjoyed it despite the weather. The main casualty of the weather was my photography - hardly anything to show for it.

We went to Westonbirt Arboretum's Festival of Wood in August.

Jim's mother and her friend Ted were on a coach tour that meant they were in Cheltenham for the day. We popped up there and took them for an airing on Cleeve Hill. They were glad to get away from yet another day of potential shopping!

Autumn has been much better for weather, except the week we took on holiday - we seemed to pick the wettest week for that! But again it was fun and as we were on holiday I took photos anyway.

For my birthday (though not actually on it) we went to see the Autumn colour at Wesonbirt.

Our week up in the Yorkshire Dales was a prelude to a surprise 70th birthday party for one of Jim's aunts. She was indeed very surprised but also delighted that so many people turned up for her. We then spent a couple of days with Jim's mother before making our way back home... and to more FarmVille! (??? words before I gave way... ;-)

Whilst in the Dales we visited some caves - ones with a guided tour, there was a lot of stooping but no crawling through water ;-) - there were lots of fantastic stalagmites / stalemates (my spell checker again!) amd stalagtites (no guesses for that one...) - hard to photograph but wonderful to see. The guide even extinguished the lights briefly for us all to see the caves by candlelight as the Victorians would have seen them when exploring them. And then he blew out the candle so we had utter darkness too.

Jim had discovered the existence of a small turf labyrinth only 20 minutes from his mother's house - despite the nearness it wasn't a place she or he had been before - so we explored it whilst visiting her.

One of the advantages of taking a dog on a long journey is its an excuse to look for interesting places to stop where one can let her out to have a bit of a run. We'd stopped at this place before but not discovered the topiary before!

See all the photos from the mosaic in this flickr slideshow:

Ilustration Friday - Magnify

2009-09-04T09:21:00.005+01:00

What would it look like if you could magnify people's thoughts?

A rather late entry to Illustration Friday for last Friday.

The Book of the Beasts

2009-08-20T10:52:00.002+01:00

This is the cover of a book I've just made, inspired by Mary Ann Moss's Stiched & Stencilled class. The class got me going though I went a way off from the suggestions - all part of the fun!

I was intending to buy some canvas to make the cover, as suggested, but I hadn't got around to getting any and suddenly I NEEDED a cover so I used this purple foam stuff that I had around - previously I'd been using it for making colourful nonshiny backgrounds for photographing object on - I also used a couple of pieces of yellow foam inside the book.

All the Celtic Knot type stencils came from a set I bought recently from a local art shop. The horse comes from a children's stencil set from the local toy shop.

The wolfish animal is one I cut. In the book there is also a toad stencil that I rediscovered - I'd cut it around 8 years ago.

I've sewn in or glued pieces of jigsaw in places. Some of them I attached before stencilling and others I used as masks then sewed them into other parts of the book later.

I've also used a star cutter to make stencils and masks. The stars and the stencil have been added to the book too.

I couldn't resist also using and then incorporating a chemistry set stencil.

I didn't actually get around to using my sewing machine as I decided hand sewing suited this book best.

You may be able to see inside the book here:

Book List

2009-08-08T18:02:00.005+01:00

Just to let you know I am still alive... I found an easy post to make:

I reposted this entry after reading it on Mixed Media Martyr's blog

The BBC says most people will only read 6 of these 100 Books.

Instructions:Cut and Copy the list into your notes... then...

1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. (remove other persons X's)
2) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot X
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres X
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins X
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson X
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro X
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total 39 I think... there are some that I might have read but can't really remember reading e.g. Far From the Madding Crowd and Wuthering HEights - I think they were both texts at school but I've forgotten them so completely that I haven't counted them. Mind you some of the ones I know I've read I'm a bit hazy on too...

And it looks to me as though reading the complete works of Shakespeare gives you both 14 and 98.... unfortunately the ones I have read aren't on there...

The balloon in the sky was spotted over Bristol this morning...

Hope you are all enjoying yourselves.

Yin-Yang, Light and the Moon

2009-07-21T14:16:00.004+01:00

I seem to have difficulty keeping my blog up-to-date in the summer... you can see from my archives that it is a repeating cycle... yet in the winter its much easier. So this may, or may not, be a post that will have to stand alone for a while... At least I've a few photos (mine and others) to decorate it with.

To see all the coloured lights I caught with the yin-yang light catcher (in a friend's house) see this flickr slideshow

Another photo I've taken recently is of the Paddington Bear statue at Paddington station:

In fact I took it last night... I managed to miss my train by just 2 minutes... luckily other people also seemed to have problems on the tube and I was allowed to use my ticket that was meant to be just for the 8pm train on the next one at 8.45.

Tonight, or rather, early this morning there will be a full eclipse visible from the Pacific Ocean.

Have you ever wondered what the moon looks like on its far side? Jim did and found this on wikipedia:

Isn't it cratered and craggy! So different from the view we get (also from wikipedia):

If you are lucky enough to be able to see the eclipse either partially or totally I hope the clouds stay away for you.

Mountain Love

2009-05-19T20:51:00.003+01:00

This is one of the pieces I made inspired by Mary Ann's Stencilry class - she'll be running another in July. And Stencilry 2 sometime in the summer too. I can't wait!

This has been such a fun class - Mary Ann exudes enthusiasm and encourages one to play - keep going, never mind you've made a mistake, it'll probably be fine... you can always paint over it... etc. My only problem was that my computer is so old I had to borrow Jim's laptop to be able to see the videos properly... guess that means I need a computer....

The above uses stencils and masks based on a couple of photos from Jim's mountain adventures in Scotland. I also ad libbed with some torn paper to make more mountains...

Jim's not been to Scotland this year but we did spend a week in Dartmoor and Teasel went up several tors - here's one that I went up too:

Though as I didn't actually go to the very top of the rocky bit Jim doesn't count it as properly bagged by me... I consider having got myself up as far as I did quite sufficient! Teasel clearly had the same urge as Jim to reach the absolute top.

Does the rock they are standing on look like a TORtoise to you?

Wishing Away!

2009-04-15T13:41:00.003+01:00

Wishcasting Wednesday's prompt today is: What do you wish to clear out?

Last week in my full moon dreamboard I gave the story of how we tried and failed to sell this house. I mentioned that Jim had "unearthed a whole cache of wonderful things" but didn't say where he'd found them...

When we moved back into this house we were still anticipating putting it back on the housing market so we put some things into a storage unit.

What a mistake!

Its cost us a bomb.

And depressed me.

And, it turns out, hidden quite a few of the things that I've been missing, presumed lost in the moves.

Don't ask why I didn't think to look there - I think I was blanking out on it because the prospect of clearing it seemed so enormous...

So my wish this week is:

To clear out the storage container and to find all the lost treasures hidden in there!

All non-treasures to either find new homes easily or to be disposed of at long last.

To enable this wish to come true I need to maintain my resolve and the energy and bodily strength necessary to enable me to play my part. And the same for Jim too!

Hands

2009-04-12T18:51:00.003+01:00

Here is a two-page spread of spread hands from my altered book - Shamanic Marks - Inspiration!

Hands were one of the most obvious things to work with in this book - for these two I've included a variation of spiral and line symbol found near rock art hands. I've included both wet and dry sgraffito.

I was planning on just using the dry sgraffito and I started off with oil pastels on a piece of cartridge paper then used black poster paint (thanks for the suggestion Tinker - my "gouache" turned out to have acrylic in its formulation) over them.

I used sgraffito to chip out a hand shape which worked rather well and the spiral symbol. I then rolled the paper and the black poster paint flaked off so much that the sgraffito became much too subtle amongst the rather bright contrast of yellow, orange and black. So I cut the hand out instead and realised I could use both the positive and the negative like this.

I used wet sgraffito for the spiral symbol on the left hand page.

I've also been experimenting with blowing paint around a hand:

I made the black background by monoprinting from the overwet posterpaint used above.

When I came to use the mouth diffuser (atomiser/atomizer) I found it quite difficult to get it to work at all - the angle of the two components is all important - having got it working with water I moved onto dilute poster paint and found I had to blow extremely hard to get a good spray. I've done three variations and am wondering what else to do with them before they too find their way into the book. I might make a lino cut of the spiral symbol.

I also discovered why the hands are generally done with the fingers splayed - if you don't it doesn't look much like a hand...

First Day of Stencilling...

2009-04-10T20:11:00.003+01:00

Mary Ann's (Dispatch from LA) on-line Stencil course has begun! And this is what I've done so far. I'm not sure that they are finished but the light is failing and I'm stopping for now.

This first week is working with "found" stencils - so that means not having to cut one's own yet.

I'd gathered quite a stash to play with but constrained myself to a few to begin with. Though just choosing to use the big jigsaw pieces added in rather more complexity than I'd been expecting. They are gigantic pieces from a child's floor puzzle - it was one that had pieces that had been mended and was reduced in a charity shop. It was quite easy to do when the picture was visible. This is what it looks like now:

I used one of the big plastic "lace" things and it picked up the jigsaw pattern rather well:

Though having used it like this for both these pieces I feel its a bit too static and would move a smaller piece around instead if I was using it for a background like this again.

So far its been lots of fun!

Chocolate Full Moon Dreamboard

2009-04-09T15:56:00.003+01:00

Careful What You Wish For... Even When You Don't Realise That You Are...

Today Jim unearthed a whole cache of wonderful things... like the A3 paper for my printer that I've looked EVERYWHERE for, well except I hadn't, obviously... and some art materials that I've been missing... and this cutting from a magazine.

Jim had cut it out because it has a tortoise on it.

When he was a child he wanted a pet but his parents weren't keen. Then a stray tortoise turned up and, even though they found its owners, Jim got to keep him.

Scroll forward to Valentine's Day 2004.

At that time the Guardian newspaper's Saturday magazine had a column called "That's My Pet!" - it featured three people, sometimes celebrities and others too, and their pets. The idea was to match up the person with their pet(s). Jim was good at guessing whose pet was whose.

In this cutting, not especially carefully saved, but saved nonetheless, were a tortoise, a cat and two dogs. But not any old dogs, though in those days neither of us would have recognised them without the useful caption:

It took a few years but I think the seed was sown without our realising it then... Here is Teasel, the Miniature Schnauzer, that's my pet now:

And the cat? Well it was called Luna.

At the time of that column, early 2004, we were just about to move out to a rented house in Minchinhampton. Whilst we were there we got this house done up and on the market but it didn't sell... there were lots of strange things going on... for instance:

The only people we managed to attract through private advertising turned up on a day when there was a thick bank of fog... which almost never happens... and it most definitely detracted from the views we enjoy:
The first set of estate agents proved strangely incompetent - given that they are still in business, even now during the huge downturn in the housing market, I suspect they are normally much more efficient. Things that happened included: the brochure having mislabelled photos, inaccurate descriptions, no photos of the views (our major selling point), price reductions failing to be advertised in their own window, etc.

After three months we tried some other agents.
The second set of agents were better but also unlucky. Their brochure was accurate though they also failed to show the views. And during our time on with them our house, which we visited frequently, slept in occasionally, but were mostly away from, was burgled twice. Very little was taken... we'd left the house looking furnished but no TV or computers or expensive Hi-Fi. One mini-hi-fi was taken but as it was broken we didn't mind - it had simply been "dressing" the house! Not enough was taken to make an insurance claim on... and both thieves were caught.
Just before we moved back to Bristol there were some people who seemed really keen. On the last day we were on the market, they left us a message via the agents that they'd have loved to have put an offer in but their own house sale had just fallen through...

The burglaries were 2 moons apart... (2-3 days before new moons)...

I've been cautious about wishing again for the house in the Cotswolds that I still yearn for... but now I'm daring to once more... right now its just the seed of an idea, a dream, a reflection lapping in the mirror of my mind and my cocoa:

Join me in a full moon cocoa with a dream of a house in the Cotswolds.

For more full moon dreamings and to add your own in too visit Jamie's blog.

What do you see?

2009-04-07T12:16:00.004+01:00

This is a double page spread in my current altered book. After spending lots of time playing with possible page backgrounds outside the book, this is the first I've applied within it.

1st two layers - palette knifed on white gesso - keeping the texture building up
2nd layer - yellow liquid acrylic rubbed on all over
3rd layer - yellow ochre and phthalo green applied with palette knife, some rubbing in and rubbing off and more yellow ochre spread over whilst still wet - this was a very messy and fun phase!

The title of this book is "Shamanic Marks - Inspiration" and I'm planning on using a cave art style - so now I'm looking at this textural background to see what animals, or people, or ghosties I see there.

One of the techniques the cave painters (as opposed to the scratchers) used was spray painting around stencils - the most obvious being the hand prints found in caves. So I've signed up for an on-line stencil course with Mary Ann of Dispatch from LA.

In preparation I've been scouring the neighbourhood shops for doilies!

No I don't suppose its true cave art but they have holes in and make interesting stencils. I've been collecting various supplies since I signed up for the course:

Whilst on my trek looking for doilies, sequin waste and anything else that has stencilling potential without being too expensive... I saw these:

Notice that cake stand. On my way home, laden with my purchases, I came across, on a garden wall, a cake stand and lid that had a label on it that said "Please Take Me", beside it was some bubble wrap and a carrier bag... so of course I did! (I forgot to photograph it though - sorry - I was just too surprised and excited.)

And talking about cakes and celebrations Teasel was 8 months old on Sunday and Jim has been blogging in her dog blog about that and her first 6 months with us.

She's changed our lives so much and its so much for the better!

(Though her birthday cake was a Liver Cake and not something I fancy...)

Fluiditity

2009-04-03T15:51:00.004+01:00

Yesterday's prompt on Blissfully Art Journalling was about how fluid one felt. This was my response. This time after scanning in my original page and adding a photo I printedit out on card then added some gouache, then submerged the whole in water! It took quite a while to dry... Finally I also added some gold and silver but they haven't scanned well.

Yesterday I noticed this in a charity shop window, after closing time:

Its not a perfume I'm familiar with but looking it up on the web it appears to come in a curiously shaped bottle that might be described as a bust... in which case this bust was bust... :-)

I felt the moral was that if one feel's shattered it may be because of something that's been bottled up.

Yesterday I forgot to show the niche I'd made for my Spirit Doll of the East:

I happened to make her at the Vernal Equinox so the others will have to wait their turns: South at the Summer Solstice, West at the Autumnal Equinox and North at the Winter Solstice. At least their niches are ready for them.

Now any suggestions for finding really hidden bottled up things and releasing them gracefully?

Prompted

2009-04-02T08:20:00.009+01:00

The above is my response to a prompt on a yahoo group I've just joined - Blissfully Art Journaling - the prompt was to describe one's meal choice for one's last ever meal - a Last Supper. My immediate thought was something that would take a very long time to eat.

Then when I was in the bath I started to sing (luckily this went unrecorded!) but the words included "I'd pick a meal that would last a thousand years" and later I realised this was picking up on Scheherazade's tactic of telling stories to prolong her life by telling a 1001 stories. I had a favourite version of the Arabian Nights book when I was a child and at the back it had suggestions for dressing up and meals... the only part of which I currently recall was a drink called a Sherbet... And when a child one of my favourite sweets (candies) were Lemon Sherbets... hence Sherbet Lemonade. The Very Hungry Caterpillar also came to mind...

I started off in a "normal" journal, scanned it, added some colour digitally, printed it out onto card and added some paint. I rather like this process and so yet another style of journal is begun... and I have the very place for it... the other day in a charity shop I bought a book that was in the form of a ring binder...

Yesterday in saying hello on the Blissfully Art Journalling group I boldly claimed that I've done something which might be called art journalling for years and years... though I always start the books with a promise to myself that no-one else will ever see what I put in them... and then overnight the doubts crept in... was I boasting to say I'd been art journalling all this time?

So I picked one of my old journals at random (1991) and these are a few of its pages (never before shown to anyone!)

Now I'm definitely not claiming they are great art but I think art journalling is a reasonable term to describe what I was doing... and some even had colour... though most do tend to be in pen... and there is plenty of ordinary written journal in there too.

In the Altered Book course that Elizabeth, Altered Book Lover, is currently running she has suggested trying both wet and dry sgraffito using acrylics in our books.

I've used dry sgraffito successfully when working with enamels on copper and painting on glass - in both cases the "paint" is applied to a smooth impenetrable surface and is very easy to scrape off - its then fired in a kiln which melts it enough to make it permanent but without losing the detail. Its possible to do both very bold and very delicate work like this.

Doing dry sgraffito with paint on paper is clearly somewhat different and quite a challenge.

Its something I'd love to get to work.

I experimented...

Attempting to do the dry sgraffito technique the first time didn't work for me... I couldn't get down to show the colour (bright lime green!) I'd applied underneath and only managed either a rather dull scratch or a rather brutal (and hard to control) scrape that went through to the paper.

However the wet version was excellent.

I added some acrylic matte medium to the top layer of acrylic to make it thicker. And worked with the non-brush end of a brush.

Over the wet sgraffiti, once it had dried, I also experimented in some areas with another colour on top, applied in various ways:

I can see how this will have fabulous applications but I'd really like to get the dry sgraffito to work too.

Here is the first experiment of black gesso over wax crayons:

The two smallest tipped metal tools (sold for embossing I think) were the most successful. The gesso was hard to apply in even, single, thick coat ( I do normally use it thinly and multi-coat... here I was hoping to find a technique that wouldn't require too many coats!)

The next is black gouache over wax crayons - I added a little drop of washing up liquid to help the gouache cover the wax.

The gouache took MUCH longer to dry than the gesso - otherwise the results are similar, though the pointy wooden tool (top) worked much better in the gouache than in the gesso.

Both of these were more satisfactory than my first attempt at dry sgraffito.

The next set of experiments were all total failures! I used acrylic followed by PVA then one of these: Gesso, Gouache, Acrylic + Matte Medium (50:50 approx), Black ink. Then I used the same things over a piece with acrylic followed by a thick layer of polymer gloss medium. It was possible to peel and hack but not in a controlled way and mostly taking off layers of paper. I also tried black ink over Caran d'ache Neocolor II with no luck.

So far then the only success has been with paint over cheap wax crayons...

I've read about working on clayboard so maybe the solution is a very soft, thick layer of something under a thin, scratchable top coat.

Anyone have any other suggestions?

Mandala ATCs

2009-03-28T11:16:00.008Z

Sorry my blog has been neglected recently... I've been making things and not getting round to showing them...
Above is what my table looked like whilst making some of the affirmation mandalas for a swap... its over 3 years since I did my first (and previously only) ATC swap... at that time I felt really uncomfortable with the format... but I don't like things beating me... so here I am having another go... and for this swap we've over 20 to make!

The ones at the front which say "Mandala Swap" on them are examples of the backs I printed out onto card.

I experimented in a bigger format first, in my Soul Journal and on a larger card:

For the second one I took the crocus kaleidoscopic mandalas that I'd made and printed out and then folded them to make holes - like the snowflake decorations I'd made as a child. This meant that the tissue I put underneath showed through.

Kathryn asked if anyone was noticing mandalas all over the place. I have. Here is one I saw on a car:

And here is one I made as a tarot cloth four years ago. I kept on looking at it recently and suddenly realised it was a mandala too:

You can see a reading I did with it and posted to this blog in my first month of blogging.

Mandalas, Altered books & other Work In Progress

2009-03-18T21:19:00.003Z

This book arrived today. I was prompted to buy it by Kathryn the Collage Diva who is giving a copy away on her blog... I felt so drawn to it that I ordered it. Here is a sample page:

Its a while since I showed any of the computer generated kaleidoscopic mandalas that I'm so fond of... so here are six, derived from a crocus photo I took a couple of weeks ago:

Having made those I printed out a bunch and used them in what's called tea-bag folding... only I can't show you that as the dog ate my homework... I mean Teasel ate what I made before I'd photographed it...

Here are two more mandalas I made, digitally, though somewhat differently:

I also realised that something I'd been working on a week or so ago might well be in rather mandala-like:

Its made from torn up atlas pages in the middle and surrounded by torn up AS Maths papers around it. Both then painted. I'm not yet sure about the colours... Its on a 1m square canvas and is the 4th in a sequence of circles in squares that I've been working on since sometime last year... none of them entirely finished...

Another project on the go is an altered book for a class that's being offered on line which started on Sunday. This is the book I started with:

And just to finish up this is rather like a natural mandala too:

Secret #9 of 12: Transcending Rejection and Roadblocks

2009-03-07T09:19:00.008Z

Its week 9 of the 12 Secrets book.

I thought that as an antidote to rejection slips I'd make suggestion cards.

Because I'm currently focusing on art most of these are simple art suggestions... but not all of them... sometimes what's needed is a change of focus. None of them require me to feel that I'm "good at drawing" or any of those things which can get in the way of actually making something.

If you would like to print these out for yourself here are the images I printed:

These four are uploaded to blogger - if you click on them you'll get a large version of the image.

I printed them out on white card and then sliced them up.

If by any chance you do want to use them you may wonder what some of the terms mean.

For instance:

blind contour drawing - there are several ways you might choose to do this:

* look at an object, let a pen or pencil draw on a sheet of paper as your eyes trace around the contours of the object
* close your eyes - imagine a drawing and let your hands simply draw
* look at an object - attempt to draw it without looking at your drawing but occasionally allow yourself sneak peaks!

Another term you may not know is what I call doing a "feelie". Put a pen or pencil in your drawing hand and let it draw whilst with the other hand you trace the outline of the image of which you are doing a feelie. You might like to also try this with the pen or pencil in your non-dominant hand.

You can also do a feelie of a 3 dimensional object though that isn't on these cards... it can help with something tactile to put it out of sight whilst you feel it so that you aren't tempted to draw what you see, just what you feel.

Jim has been feeling creative too - go to his blog to hear his song - Dog Park.

Starting a Moon Journal

2009-03-02T16:31:00.002Z

Jim's photo of last night's moon

Last Tuesday, just before the new moon, I decided I'd like to keep a moon journal... I'm curious to see if there are any patterns I can spot, maybe moods or energy levels or level of dream recall, etc., that are in synch with the moon's cycles.

Couple this desire with my recent refound enthusiasm for altering books and journaling in them and it was obvious that I needed a new journal made from an old book. I was imagining a book of days... or maybe that ought to be nights.

I settled on this book - Origins Reconsidered by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin:

Its about Richard Leakey (a bit too much about him actually) and his thoughts on the origins of humans.

In order to make this like a book of days I wanted to be able to make notes in it in time with the moon's phases. And this was my first difficulty.

Looking at lunar calendars the moon doesn't fit all that neatly into our more solar-oriented calendar.... for instance the moon's cycle averages 29.5 days (which means having 30 sections). But this varies... so I may have to pay a bit more attention to exact timings... or not mind being out by a day here of there (probably this later!)

Also when looking for pictures of the phases of the moon, they tend to be given for 28 days:

I found that link via the useful Phases of the Moon 2009 from Woodlands Junior School which shows great images of the moon for each day of the year.

I may well be going for far too much precision here... It might be sufficient to divide the whole thing into 8 - new, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full, waning gibbous, third quarter, waning crescent - but I started off with this thought of it being like a book of days and that's how I got here.

So... the next task I set myself was to carve up the book into 30 sections with some sort of index to make it really easy to find the appropriate page for each entry.

I thought a how-to would be worth making (not least, in case I choose to do another!).

How To Make A Step Tab Index

First decide how many sections to cut, in this case thirty.

Measure the height of the page and decide how big each tab needs to be.

Consider how many banks to cut, in this case I went for two of fifteen each, if you want bigger tabs then more banks may be needed.

This made each index tab around 1.5 cm (approx 0.5 inch) high.

The other measurement to decide on is how deep to cut them. Remember the deeper the cut the narrower the pages. In this case I went for 1 cm (approx 3/8th inch). This turned out to be a really excellent choice as my cutting mat has a 1 cm grid on it.

I started by cutting a piece of card to the height of the book page and cut into it the tabs spacing.

This was to check that the sizes were okay and that my calculation that 15 would fit was correct too. (There really is nothing like mocking something up to check such things!)

I then used this to help me mark up the book.

I went through the whole book and penciled in the tabs where I thought they ought to go. This was probably unnecessary but it reassured me that I was right to think I could use the number of pages in each section that I'd calculated. And it was useful to have the pages marked when it came to cutting - useful but not essential.

I decided it was easiest to have the same number of pages in each section (12) and that this ought to be an even number so that each section always started on the left hand page.

(If I complete this as a moon journal I may decide I want more pages in certain sections, and/or fewer sections, for my next journal based on my experience with this one.)

Next the cutting started.

I found it easiest to cut the short first and then the long.

Remember to use a metal ruler and don't try to cut through all six sheets in one go.

Using the ruler as a guide just cut lightly down as many times as needed.

Its very important to put a cutting mat (or equivalent) under the last page of the section for the tab you are cutting.

Having cut the first tab I thought it looked a bit too square and likely to get dogeared. So I looked for a template for a curve.

This big paper clip turned out to be perfect.

Here is the first tab with the curve cut.

Because I had penciled in all the tabs, once the mat was removed it was easy to see where the next tab was to go.

Just another twenty-nine to cut!

I also cut the full 1 cm off the pages at the front from the pages before my sections as this made the first bank of tabs easier to see.

Its quite hard to get a good photo of the finished cuts... maybe it will show up more once I've marked up the tabs.

But that's a job for another day... before then I'm gessoing all the pages.

Last week Inspire Me Thursday's prompt was, wait for it.... MOON!

Though I think this is a project that'll take rather a lot longer than a week to complete it was clearly the right time to start.

Most Viewed

2009-02-28T12:53:00.007Z

Dru has just posted about which of the images on her flickr stream get the most views. So I thought I'd show my top ten too... a very motley collection they are too:

In 10th position (731 views) is Purple Confetti:

This was an experiment in photographing purple.

In 9th position (846 views) is Holiday Cottage - Welcome In!:

This was a great holiday cottage to stay in at St Fillans in Scotland - we were there for a week in 2007 so that Jim could complete the Munros.

In 8th position (937 views) is Eden Project's Solar Panels:

From a different holiday in 2006 when we were in Cornwall. It good to see that Solar Panels are almost as good to look at as mermaids....

In 7th position (940 views) is Mermaids:

A display Jim had spotted this a hairdressers window in Frampton Cotterell and as we happened to be near there soon after that I got this photo. I especially like the MerKen.

In 6th position (1,285 views) is Scratched Negative:

This is someone else's negative that I found in a book, Jim scanned it and I made it monochrome and put it into a texture's group or two.

In 5th position (1366 views) is Red Buddha:

In 4th position (2186 views) is Wire Sculpture:

My one attempt at wire sculpture (so far) - it hurt my hands too much...

In 3rd position (2443 views) is Birthday Card:

With renewed thanks to Spitzgogo_CHEN (Nokia 6230i) for the Cake , Miss Loisy for the Bike , Jeff Kubina for the Balls , brokenchopstick for the Bubble.

This is a SoulCollage card blogged in my card blog.

In 2nd position (6,734 views) Water Droplets on Car Texture:

A texture that I took - the original was a boring colour so I made it warm.

And in the top spot (9,283 views) is Background:

This one was in the top spot long before I got around to making it available with a creative commons license... This background was inspired by Try It Tuesdays - and blogged here.

It seems quite odd that my two top images are ones which aren't really of anything...

Flickr's idea of "interesting" is not the same as most viewed though there are overlaps. If you want to see my most interesting photos I have a dynamically created set of them on Flickr.

If you have a flickr stream I'd love to see which are your most viewed images!

Do let me know if you post about them.

Secret #8 of 12: Selecting Empowering Partnerships and Alliances

2009-02-27T17:31:00.007Z

My digital tweaking of iwadesu's Hear, See, Speak no Evil

Empowering Partners?

I love collaborating with other people like iwadesu. She isn't someone I've met and I've not used any of her photos before (at least I don't think so) but she was kind enough to put this image on flickr with a creative commons license that allows reuse and manipulation which means when I searched for something to show hear no, see no, speak no evil hers was one of the images to come up. This sort of loose association of collaborators is one I really appreciate and one of the reasons why I like flickr so much. Most, though not all, of my flickr images are available for others to play with too and are some of my most popular images.

More formal partnerships?

Well there is my husband - he and I do quite a lot of things together, some of them creative. Right now he is in the process of writing Teasel's dog blog. We planned to do this in "real time" but somehow it didn't happen and he's been busily posting back-dated entries and is currently up to mid-December last year. He keeps a diary and has relied on that. I'd taken lots of photos (and he's taken some too) and many of those are in there.

Today I bumped into an old work colleague... he's someone I enjoyed working with though we didn't do much together. He now has his own business called Business with Heart - what a great name! His presence in my day reminded me that once I used to really enjoy the people aspect of my work life.

However with art work its not been the same. I've attempted twice to share studio space and found both times that it was disastrous for my creative output. This may be something to do with my needing to avoid words too much when I'm in picture space. And the converse that talking shifts me out of picture space...

But I really get a lot out of the way we all spark ideas in each other via our blogs. Yesterday Leah of Creative Every Day mentioned Angel cards - I thought of these, the Angel cards that are available separately but also as part of the Transformation Game. I decided I needed to play it:

Normally one plays it with other people but I've also got the Solo version and I've adapted that to play in other ways too. Yesterday I played it with 2 hands - my conscious self and my dream self. It was amazing - I love the things that come up through playing it though I won't bore you with details!

Last week Kathryn, Collage Diva, called this process of sparking ideas back and forth the Inspiration Spiral. I love that name.

Secret #7 of 12: Consulting with Guides

2009-02-20T15:15:00.007Z

Thanks to Leo Reynolds for winged figure of Peace and GoYurt for GoYurt at night
both with a creative commons license that allows alteration.

Onto week 7 of 12 Secrets... For me the idea of consulting with guides is about listening to my inner guides... looking and listening for answers from within.

Right now my intuition is that I need to play with labyrinths again.

And I decided I needed to carve them. So I used lino.

One worked, the other didn't. I rather like the symbology of both a working, followable, labyrinth and one that is merely superficially labyrinthine but in fact quickly turns out to be a dead end.

I am amused at one synchronicity. This week's interview is with Melba. And it was when I was taking part in Melba's Mixed Media Memoirs (an old challenge that is no longer running) that I last showed images of labyrinths on this blog!

For those prompts I was tending to scan things in, manipulate and glue them together digitally, before I printed out the completed whole to stick in my memoir. This time around, with the inspiration of altered books and Soul Journals, I'm using more real glue. And maybe also because the novelty of doing everything digitally has worn off a little...

And I have really been getting my hands dirty this time. These are my first lino prints since school!

Here are the next two I did:

Sorry this is all a bit stilted... my words go out the window when I'm in strong image space.

Wednesday Wishcast: Where do you wish to go?

2009-02-18T13:46:00.004Z

Two photos manipulated and combined using Corel Painter

This Wednesday's Wishcasting prompt from Jamie is: Where do you wish to go?

Good question.... really I'd like to get my (night time) dreams to be more productive.

The last time I attempted to dream myself somewhere exotic I spent the whole night at the airport!

So I wish to go to more beautiful, interesting and healing places in my dreams.

And whilst I'm blogging here are my latest Soul Journal pages.

I journalled all over the page opposite the armour but when I put a wash of it my pen turned out to be rather soluble - I rather like the look of it like that.

The purple page with little squares is in response to Sarah's Whitmire's prompts for day 5 and day 6.

It reminded me of a technique we'd used at school of cutting up images and then pasting the bits back down. I used that to make this page:

I especially liked the way the black gesso worked here when I blotted the pages together.

Secret #6 of 12: Conquering Saboteurs

2009-02-15T13:08:00.007Z

Suit of Armour, featuring pwbaker's girl warrior of the 15th century
with a creative commons license that allows alteration.

We are onto chapter 6 of Gail McMeekin's "12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women" hosted by Jamie Ridler.

This chapter is about Conquering Saboteurs - and what better for that than a protective golden suit of armour! This is a partially completed page from my SoulJournal done in response to the 3rd day of Soul Journaling prompts from Sarah Whitmire which is about our critics, both internal and external, and building some protection for ourselves from them.

I started working on these prompts last week but was struggling to find suitable armour. On Saturday Radio 4 had a play about Joan of Arc and I thought that I might try a search based on her... I love searching through flickr using the advanced search so that I only find images which are available for manipulation - but you need some idea of what to look for!

The Soul Journalling has been inspired by some of you - thank you!

I love mixed media work and have had a couple of goes at altering books. I'm loving playing with these prompts in what was once a Colour Me Beautiful Style Guide book and is becoming my own Soul Journal!

Last week I was inspired to re-organise my art materials after watching Art by Chrysti's video tour of her studio. I did a lot of sorting out but I realised I was rather short of storage furniture. So imagine my joy at finding these outside someone's house with a sign on them saying "please take".

Jim was kind enough to collect and install them for me - Thank you Jim!

They fit into a previously unused space and are perfect for my paints.

Chrysti has been doing a whole series of Giveaways, the most recent was Day 21 of the planned 29. That one is open until February 20th, 2009. And she has the rest of the 29 yet to post. So do check out her blog.

Another freebie I was lucky enough to benefit from was on Thursday... Bristol Zoo were celebrating Darwin's 200th birthday by offering free admission to anyone sporting a beard - whether real or fake.

Of course that did mean I, and lots of others, had to wear a beard to gain our free entry:

The centre photo is of Jim wearing the beard he uses when playing bass when the band he is in covers ZZ Top's "Sharp Dressed Man" - their band is called the Macaroni Penguins - so here you see a penguin, in a beard, at the zoo.

There are six photos around the edge of me which also involve the same beard.

Teasel, being a dog, is not allowed into the zoo (they don't even allow assistance dogs in which must be rather hard on those that rely on them) so Jim and I took it in turns to wear the beard and go into the zoo whilst the other took Teasel for a walk nearby.

The interview this week seemed extra-specially relevant to me too - I take my camera out the way Andrea Scher describes and love seeing my local neighbourhood in a new way daily both with and without my dog! Being grounded by what is around me really helps when I'm feeling that I'm going through a low of any kind and is something I tend to enjoy doing whether I'm feeling "creative" or not. I don't worry about whether my photos are any good whilst I take them - then I'm in the moment and attempting to capture some aspect of it. Whether I have or not doesn't really matter.

Here are some of the things I've photographed locally recently:

My eye is drawn to quirky things - like the daffodils labelled as Lavendula! And you really wouldn't believe the number of suitcases that have been put out on the streets recently.

This post has taken me so long to write that I've already altered the armour a bit - here is a close-up:

Happy Valentine's Day!

2009-02-14T09:50:00.004Z

I took the theme of "Birds of a Feather" and put little chocolate eggs into golden heart boxes... Please take a chocolate and join my page for the Valentine's Day party!

I've just joined the Soul Journalling Group on Yahoo and am beginning to make some mixed media pieces based on the original prompts by Sarah Whitmire.

Somehow I got quite carried away and have wandered well away from those prompts.

Here is what some of the pages look like at the moment, in no particular order, most have just had a new thin coating of gesso:

The last one of the pages above has a trace of a suit of armour on the left... I've gone through various versions of this and am wondering just where its going to take me.

But the strangest part of the process for me, so far, has been my tendency to doodle instead of write!

That and the sheer joy I'm getting from playing this way.

UPDATE: I'd written this last night and scheduled it to post this morning. When I woke up I just had to add this to one of the pages:

And yes, even spelling correctly is clearly optional.

And since I'm adding an update - look what I got for Valentine's Day:

Jim's Valentine card features the bay in Cornwall where we were married in 2000! Isn't that sweet.

And wonderfully not-too-sweet is the 99% cocoa bar - as I avoid sugar as much as possible this is definitely my type of chocolate.

Do have a square if you'd prefer it to one of the eggs.

And then go visit more partiers at the Birds of a Feather Party

One World.....One Heart Giveaway! - Winners

2009-02-12T06:05:00.004Z

Today is the day when the winners of the One World... One Heart Giveaway are all announced.

I thought it would be easiest to pick the winners using a random number generator - but with 189 comments (after deleting a couple of duplicates from when blogger when bonkers) I soon realised I'm not that good at counting... Jim then wrote me a perl program to count the comments for me... so I could tell exactly which the 78th, 52nd and 102nd comments were... wonderful man!

The three winners are:

78: Viv (VivLyn) of Viv Lyn Designs - USA?
52: Janet of Planet Janet - Canada
102: Jodi of My Creative Expressions - USA?

What fun - thanks again to Lisa Oceandreamer for organising this event.

If you didn't win and would like to make your own calendar the number photos are all available, with creative commons permission to use them, in my Calendar Project set on flickr. I've been adding more so there is a greater variety there than when I printed the giveaways.

If you use them I'd love to see your calendars (or any other art work you make using them) so please do feel free to let me know - though that's not a condition of use ;-)

Wednesday Wishcast: What do you wish for yourself?

2009-02-11T09:44:00.003Z

I wish that with each breath I take I breathe in love and each time I exhale I emit love!

For this Wednesday's Wishcasting.

Secret #5 of 12: Committing To Self-Focus

2009-02-06T08:54:00.004Z

"Eye Candy" for February's MSH on Flickr

We are onto chapter 5 of Gail McMeekin's "12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women" hosted by Jamie Ridler.

My first thought on reading this chapter was that I'm already self-focussed... then I wondered if I was just kidding myself and I noticed how hard it is to put a whole day aside to just make things.

There's the dog to walk (so I take my camera and usually get photos too - most of my house numbers have been taken that way), there's shopping to do (even then I sometimes get photos - today I got this photo of a butterfly cake) and Jim to be with (not time I plan to give up!)... We are pretty good at sharing the cooking but I do seem to do most of the laundry... He might point out that he does most of the DIY... We have no children and are not especially house proud so really there isn't much to bind me.

I think rather than focussing directly on Self-focus this week I'd be better off focussing on:

Spelt using Spell with flickr

Because Self-Forgiveness is what I need to improve my Self-Focus.

I have been reasonably productive in the last week or so.

Those of you who haven't yet commented on my perpetual calendar giveaway have until noon GMT Feb 11th if you would like to be in with a chance of winning one of the three that I'm giving away... make sure you comment on that specific post as I'll be doing the draw from the names there.

I'm still collecting new photos of numbers and have started to collect photos of letters too... though as yet I haven't a full alphabet so am relying on tools like Spell with flickr for colourful words!

With the unusual amount of snow we've had this week I've built a snow totem:

And I've taken lots of snowy photos... most of which have yet to get on flickr...

I've made a couple of new SoulCollage® cards, one of which - Goat - is on my card blog. I've realised that an excellent way to get a good usable set of cards would be to send them off to be printed as postcards... I'm still thinking about that as it would be a complete change in feel to the cards I've previously made.

And today I even bought myself a present:

The chapter did get me wondering what more I could do to support the creative women I know... especially those I know who aren't bloggers... I thought maybe something creative from me to help them...

What would you suggest?

Vibrant!

2009-02-03T10:44:00.004Z

"Vibrant - Some mornings you have to make your own rainbows"

Lots of you seem to have chosen a word for the year... I haven't... but I have chosen a word for this month. Its:

Spelt using Spell with flickr

I've chosen this as a photography project with the idea that I'll either take or nominate one of my archive photos each day as Vibrant. At the end of the month I'll make a VIBRANT mosaic!

I'm doing this to join in with the Shutter Sisters (blog and flickr) first oneword month.

I felt that February could do with a bit of colour and some good vibes!

If you fancy joining in there's still time, choose your own word for February and start snapping.

Secret #4 of 12: Surrendering To Creative Cycles

2009-01-31T01:25:00.000Z

"Fish on a Bicycle" by Darren Greenhow

We are onto chapter 4 of Gail McMeekin's "12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women" hosted by Jamie Ridler.

And today I've got my copy of the book at last!

A couple of days ago I found I could read parts of it on google book search, which has some way of monitoring how much one's read and limits it, but it seems to let one dip in wherever one likes.

But its much better to have a real physical copy in my hand at last.

This week is about surrendering to creative cycles...

And talk about creative cycles....

Our household is currently being turned upside down as Teasel, our not yet quite 6 month old puppy, has just come into season for the first time...

She is so frustrated that she is not being allowed to run free in the park... indeed yesterday she showed us that she is able to leap the puppy fence that we thought was keeping her safely constrained within our back garden...

The keys in this chapter are:

Learning Patience
Surviving the Void
Navigating in the Darkness
Watching for Clues
Trusting in Creative Re-emergence

1. Patience

How can I tell the difference between patience and procrastination?

Is one person's patience another's procrastination?

I love to read cards of various sorts:

Am I putting off doing something else when I do this?
Am I just playing?
Am I finding ways to let clues come through to me?

Photo: "Butterfly Inspiration" - a toy butterfly with the Inspiration card from the Enlightenment Pack by Chuck Spezzano

2. Surviving the Void

Each void that I've faced has been different and needed different coping strategies... the main thing I've learned is that what worked before may not work again.

If you don't like where you are, you need to do something different... 'cos more of whatever it is that you were doing, no matter how beneficial it was before, may be currently digging that hole deeper.

Letting go of everything is sometimes what's needed... and that's really scary!

Image: Collage and digital manipulation. Blogged in Novemeber 2006.

3. Navigating in the Darkness

I'm not sure that this is a useful concept for me.

It makes me think about things like destinations and maps...

But what if what's really needed, especially at times of darkness, is to realise there is only what is here and now...

When I'm in the dark it is a time when I feel that there is no meaning and no purpose... and the fact that at other times I feel differently doesn't really help me then.

Accepting where I am at such times is never easy but, so far, reaching that point of acceptance is what has then enabled me to see the light at the end of the tunnel...

Photo: "Little Lost Butterfly" - a pram toy found on the pavement (sidewalk).

4.Watching for Clues

One of my favourite activities...

As I've mentioned before I love synchronicities.

I also look out for other sorts of signs.

Sometimes I ascribe meaning to them.

Other times I simply enjoy them.

Does God play dice?

Or is it simply that we cannot see the pattern?

Or feel the connections?

Photo: "Butterfly Brain" - graffiti of Einstein and a butterfly spotted in Bristol

5. Trusting in Creative Re-emergence

Does a caterpillar know it will become a butterfly?

Does it dream and yearn for wings?

Or does it just get on with being a caterpillar?

Photos: "Paper Doll - 1" & "Caterpillar dreaming of things to come"

I hadn't previously realised quite how many butterfly images I had on my flickr stream. And as there weren't quite enough I popped out to get a couple more before finishing this post ;-)

If you click on any one of the thumbnail below (or any of the other images in this post) it will take you to that photo on flickr:

The Start of A Year Full of Art

2009-01-29T16:14:00.003Z

Yesterday I wished for a year full of art and was very glad to have so many others wish it along with me - thank you.

And look its already started!

This morning I got this hand-painted dog box from Andrea (of Colouring Outside The Lines). Andrea is one of my longest standing blogging-buddies and she's sent this to me, unasked, as a "pay it forward" art work. The idea being that I'll be inspired to send some of my art on to someone else to keep the ball rolling.

I hadn't really thought that my year of art might be kick-started by someone else's art but of course its a fantastic way to begin it!

Thank you Andrea!

A wish to create

2009-01-28T20:11:00.004Z

This Wednesday's Wishcasting prompt is "What do you wish to create?".

Well as a manifester of my own life that's a pretty big question!

Health, wealth, love and happiness would all be worth mentioning...

A little more specific?

Well in that case I wish to create a year full of art!

One World.....One Heart Giveaway!!

2009-01-28T10:54:00.010Z

Lisa Oceandreamer has organised another huge giveaway event.

Hello to everyone - old and new - what fun to be part of this!

I'm offering three perpetual calendars inspired by photojojo. They will all be somewhat, though not exactly, like this one:

Sign up for the draw by commenting below - make sure to leave sufficient contact details so that I'll be able to let you know if you win.

On Thursday February 12th 2009 I'll use a random number generator to select the three winners and each will receive:

A packet of Lomo Lomography Fotoclips
Seven 4 inch square photos - with a day of the week indicator on it e.g. SU, Monda, etc.
Thirty-One 4 inch square photos - one each of the numbers 1-31
Seven 4 inch square photos of blanks to fill in potential gaps at the beginning or end of the month - you could use any 4 inch square image for this
Suggestions for how to use them

I've also made all the number images available for use on flickr in my Calendar Project set. Like most of my photographs on flickr these are available for reuse with a creative commons license - I love seeing how people have used my photos so do let me know if you do!

~~I'll be closing comments on this posting at midday GMT Feb 11th 2009.~~

UPDATE: COMMENTS ARE NOW CLOSED - thank you to all who have commented - the winners will be announced tomorrow - the 12th Feb on a new posting.

Other participants in the giveway can be found on the One World, One Heart giveaway blog.

How to Photograph Orbs

2009-01-25T17:56:00.005Z

Jim's Icicle Photo

To get orbs it helps to use a compact camera with its flash on.

Then go into a dusty atmosphere, or rain, or underwater, or a swarm of midges, or pollen - if you can't find them you can make your own:

The above was after shaking a dusty rug in the air.

The next are from water droplets sprayed into the air:

And maybe you can see the backscatter from flour here:

Update: It just started to rain so I got this:

Secret #3 of 12: Following Your Fascinations

2009-01-24T09:00:00.003Z

Gosh its already Friday! The start of the 3rd week of 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women - and no, there is still no sign of my copy of the book... of course that means there's more time to read your blogs and glean both inspiration and ideas from them!

I feel like I'm being influenced by the group despite having no idea what is coming next.

You see yesterday I took a big, expensive, step... one that I had been putting off...

I went out and spent rather a lot of money on a new camera... its not that I don't already have one (or two...) but that what I had meant I kept on compromising - I don't often take my D-SLR out with me because its too heavy for me these days and although I like my compact a lot its quality is not that of an SLR's. Jim had found a potentially really good camera for me a couple of months ago but I was hesitating about buying it, I hadn't even looked at it... but then I got a series of little nudges that pushed me and yesterday I got it!

When I say nudges I mean things like this. I'd actually started to seriously consider going to see it though I'd let a day or two go by without making the time to go to the shops. Then on Wednesday I got out to the park earlier than usual and there wasn't anyone there that I knew.

But it wasn't long before Teasel decided to play with a Spaniel (they are giving my shadow far too many legs in the photo above) and I started to walk around the park with the Spaniel's owner. It turned out she was just about to drive up to Pershore...

Once upon a time, I was a member of Pershore camera club (despite never having lived there) and that year I won their photographer of the year award... At the time I was printing my own black and white photos and taking colour slides... All very serious stuff and a long way from the sort of photos I've been taking recently...

All of which brings me to one of my major encouragers - synchronicities!

When I did the Artist's Way for the first time in 1996 I really got into synchronicities and I haven't looked back since. Some I note with amusement, others get me thinking, all of them help me feel supported.

Another real encourager is to do something different. Anything.

Break a habit. Try something new. Switch media. Switch from words to images or vice versa. Change subject matter. Play with something.

Walk a different route - taking new paths is a great metaphor for getting unstuck - I recently discovered a strange little footpath I'd never been down before - and we've lived here since 1996!

Jamie suggests that we be brave and take a risk this week - having already been brave and bought the camera I'll have to pick a completely different sort of brave to do next... now I have been wondering about putting streaks in my hair... or buying some different clothes... or dyeing some of the clothes I've already got... mmm... seems like these are all about changing the way I present myself... and yes they all feel potentially risky...

Saturday Update: Today a book came. Unfortunately it is the wrong book.

Looks like the creative urge got in and muddled up the packer!

The original seller had it for sale on amazon again - this time I emailed them before ordering it - they say they do not have it in stock - however they are still advertising it now!

I've now ordered it from somewhere else - wish me luck!

Casting a wish for space

2009-01-22T11:30:00.002Z

A little late I've decided to join in with the Wednesday Wishcasting for this week. The general idea is to add wish power to everybody's wishes by commenting “As (insert name) wishes for her/himself, so I wish for her/him also.” so for me that'll be:

“As Caroline wishes for herself, so I wish for her also.”

(Just to make it easy and because I got it wrong when commenting on someone else's wish last week... ;-)

My wish for my space is that I honour Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, with all the changes we make whenever we make them.

Since beginning to work with Jane Alexander's book - The Illustrated Spirit of the Home last year I've adopted Hestia as one of my pantheon of guides and have begun to work with her.

My ideas are ranging from quite a big overhaul, to odd little details that would make life cosier, calmer and generally more fun. I've not worked out all the details yet at all which is why my wish is that as I do, and as the changes manifest, they are all in tune with Hestia.

Secret #2 of 12: Honouring Your Inspirations

2009-01-18T12:21:00.003Z

8:59 Admiring the Rainbow

Tinker recently did a lovely posting on her word for the year - delight - and ever since reading it I've been thinking about what delights me too... and realising that light is indeed one of those things. So when I saw that there was a wonderful splash of sunlight in a dark stormy sky this morning I rushed for my camera - then I noticed it was raining and looking away from the sun I found the rainbow.

However I'd hardly managed any photos of it before I had to close the window as the storm hit and hail started to bounce in.

I was so glad I had honoured the inspiration of the moment of light and caught the rainbow.

I still have no copy of the 12 secrets book - the people I'd originally ordered it from cancelled my order (though as yet no refund!) and I've had to order from the US which means it may take several weeks... I guess that means I'll have to be creative about what I do without it!

One of the things I've spent time doing in the last week is collecting photos of house numbers to make my own version of a perpetual calendar mentioned on photojojo.

I'd begun to notice that one of the things that had been consistently stirring my interest were displays of multiple images in grids. I know I've been making mosaics for ages so some of you might think I ought to know this about myself already but the ones that are inspiring me right now are collections of images hung on walls. And the best thing about the photojojo site is they mentioned a type of clips to use:

I ordered some Lomo Lomography Fotoclips immediately from gadgetpoint and they came next day!

I may well make the calendar numbers rather more colourful before printing them but here is a mosaic of the first 1-12 as they currently are:

I've also been tidying my bookshelves. One of our problems is that we have too many books so the shelves are stacked 2 deep. This time whilst resorting them I've also been photographing the books that will be at the back. These will then make a photographic index, hung with the clips, to help us find our otherwise hidden books. And maybe also make an interesting display.

There is more yet to do on the calendar project and the books but once done these will all be going off to be printers - what fun - I can hardly wait to get them back!

Secret #1 of 12: Acknowledging Your Creative Self

2009-01-10T16:05:00.003Z

Artist SoulCollage® card - see card blog posting for attributions and description

I felt a sudden urge to join in with the 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women group... organised by Jamie Ridler, Sacred Suzie's sister... so I haven't got the book yet. Lets hope it really is "in the post".

This first posting is about where I am in my creative journey.

I wish I knew!

I can tell some of where I've been, but where I'm going, I've yet to work out...

My mother was a trained artist though by the time she met my father she'd stopped earning her money that way... and by the time I knew her not making art often at all... so make that a blocked artist...

My sister is an architect - which means she did at least get to do an arts degree...

My sister-in-law is an art teacher and my mother-in law, Mary, a retired art teacher and active painter. Incidentally, when I showed some of my SoulCollage® cards to Mary, she noticed that in the Artist card (at the top of this posting) the woman shown just happened to be wearing the same blouse that Mary herself was wearing whilst looking at the card! I love synchronicities!

But me? Despite having always wanted to be an artist (or an astrophysicist) I did a Maths degree and worked for years in computing. Perhaps inevitably this led to illness, diagnosed as M.E. / Chronic Fatigue and leading eventually to an early retirement.

During the time I was working I exhibited art work a few times and got one piece into a juried show.

I also had a reputation for being creative. I was in research so you might think that was good... it wasn't... the people who got on were those who did "solid work" rather than people like me... which is odd because we were encouraged to play... I suspect it was partly the problem of working in an American company in the U.K. British values pervaded whilst the rhetoric was American.

In the early days of my access to the internet I played around writing stories and poetry and posting them on news groups... indeed searching to see if there was any trace left of my activity from that time I find this from 13 Dec 1989:

Poems pour out of people
Like water flows
From eyes
Some cry easily
Others wait for the damn to break

I doubt that I really meant damn rather than dam... more of a poetic slip...

And from Jan 1990:

Haiku! Haiku!
Is that a breeze through the trees
Or an unfortunate's sneeze?
Haiku! Haiku!

Since stopping work (and stopping playing on the news groups) I've taken quite a few courses in life drawing and painting, stained glass, enamelling and water colours. Maybe some others...

Actually I did recover from the first bout of M.E. and returned to work however I then did the Artist's Way for the first time (1996) just before going down with M.E. again, and from which I never returned to computing.

I'd felt that the AW had really opened up everything, and this new sense of spirit and art combined with having got together with Jim would somehow protect me from getting ill again. As it didn't, I not only got M.E. again, I also got depressed. That was a real problem as so many doctors find it difficult to distinguish M.E. from depression in the first place... however having had them both, separately and together I know the difference within me.

Besides, for me, M.E. has always started with a flu-like illness whilst depression tends to start with a big disappointment. The second time the M.E. kicked in and the depression came because I'd truly believed I was all set to be healthy!

This second bout of M.E. led me to explore more alternative health stuff and to qualifying as a Health Kinesiologist (see my Beyond Health Kinesiology blog). HK certainly has been a huge help (especially in curing so many of my allergies) but the problem I've found, from the artistic point of view, is that the sort of energy work I've needed to do has taken up lots of my time and all my intuitive channels.

However I think my last long bout of energy work really is over (at least for now) and I've started painting again. At the moment I'm keeping the paintings private as I'm preferring to let myself explore without being influenced by what others might (or might not) say about them.

However I take lots of photos - some of which might be considered creative at least...

So I'm ready to play - though I may prefer to keep some of the products of my play hidden!

Woo Hoo - Shopping in the Sales!

2009-01-07T17:36:00.008Z

What yummy footwear - they arrived today - but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you the story of how I happened to buy all of these...

In December my knee was playing up - and I mean that literally - it hurt when I went up hill. Not every day, but often enough to be a problem - especially with a dog to walk.

Eventually I went to see Ian Willmot, the McTimoney Chiropractor who had helped me so much earlier last year (incidentally if you've only ever tried a standard Chiropractor do try a McTimoney one - I'd never go back to the brute force stuff - it hurt and didn't work - what's more they attempted to keep me seeing them week after week despite my lack of improvement, in contrast to Ian who sorted out the problem in a few sessions and leaves it up to me when I turn up for a check-up).

One of the things Ian does is recommend other people and treatments if he thinks they might help. It was through him that I went to see Sarah of Balance Holistics who gives wonderful hot stone massages and extremely perceptive and beneficial reflexology. (If you go to see either Ian or Sarah please tell them I sent you.)

Ian said he thought my knees might benefit from some sort of foot support and suggested I see a podiatrist. He didn't recommend anyone in particular but I rang one up and went to see her.

I've thought about blogging it before but haven't because it was an essentially very negative experience. She charged me £36 for what amounted to a sales pitch during which I mentioned that I mostly wore clogs and that this sort of insert wouldn't work in them.

She really got my goat with some of her comments too:

Part-way through she handed out a sheet with the costs involved though without an explicit indication of the full-cost which I later calculated is a minimum of £425, plus maybe a few additional £36 sessions.
When I came to paying I asked whether she took credit cards, she said she did, but then asked me to pay with a debit card... not the same thing at all... especially since I get half a percentage back on the credit card...
She was rude enough to assume I wouldn't be able to afford the inserts without "putting a little aside each week". It is a lot of money but I felt she was challenging me to prove I could afford it... not a sensible tactic with me!
She was surprised when I told her I was retired and it would have to come out of my savings - she hadn't taken a complete case history so she had no idea of my employment status or possible occupation.
She assumed none of my shoes fit me - despite my straight, uncrunched up toes - she seemed to think it would be news to me that there ought to be wiggle space at the toe end... I'd gone in wearing the most recent shoes I'd bought which were trainers from one of Bristol's excellent running shops - where they had specifically tested for sufficient toe space themselves and videoed me running on the treadmill in them to check for correct posture.
And worst of all, on explaining that my retired status was a result of Chronic Fatigue - she then told me that she got a bit tired herself and implied that the foot supports would cure me... (though her own supports obviously weren't stopping her getting tired... ) I wished I'd called it M.E. which would have been less likely to provoke such comments. She didn't even ask me what my energy levels were currently like - they happen to be the best they've been in years - and that was despite a knee that had been hurting before I saw Ian...

Well that's enough of all that complaining! I came home, got myself balanced and did some testing on the foot supports. The questions I asked myself were:

Was it appropriate to buy some of this sort of support? NO!

What about from a different podiatrist? No!

Some new shoes? Maybe....

And so the hunt was on for what might suit me... I started off simply looking for some new clogs like the ones I already had... however the shop I'd bought them from no longer stocked them.

So I started to research supportive footwear on the web. I was amazed at all the different possibilities now available. But the ones I was most drawn to were the Earth ones.

They are only available, in the UK, from a few shops none of which were near me or from Love Those Shoes on-line. I was very wary of buying shoes without trying them on first but I looked at their return policy and decided it was worth it - they only make one delivery charge no matter how many pairs you buy and provide return labels in case you need to send them back. I was looking at their website whilst they were closed over Christmas but the benefit of that was that by the time they were back from their holidays their January sale had started!

I ordered a pair of clogs, a pair of sandals and a pair of boots - the boots were in clearance because they had, apparently, some sort of marks on them - I thought they'd probably do for dog walking - as it is now they've come they look perfect to me and I'm loath to get them all muddy in the park (again - I have already been out in the park in them once ;-).

I love all of these shoes! And each comes with its own cotton bags for storage - that's one per shoe. I need some hooks to hang them from.

I'm already thinking about my next order, whilst the sale is still on!

If you are interested in ordering from this site, and are not yet a customer, I can get you a £10 off voucher, which if you use it will entitle me to a £10 off voucher too - winners all round!

My knee is much better since seeing Ian and today wearing my new boots in the park I was running around very happily.

Review of 2008 in books

2009-01-05T09:00:00.006Z

This post has taken me over a week to write! Who knew it would be so hard...

I started out by narrowing down the books I've read in 2008 to the 12 most influential on me over the whole year. They don't fit neatly into months but 12 still seemed like a good number.

The Holographic Universeby Michael Talbot
Erica White's Beat Candida Cookbook: Over 250 Recipes with a 4-point Plan for Attacking Candidiasis
Wyrd Allies: Harnessing the Chaos in Your Relationshipsby Tom Graves
Salad Plants for Your Garden (Plant Chooser)by Roger Philips & Martyn Rix
Becoming Drusilla: One Life, Two Friends, Three Gendersby Richard Beard
Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviourby Kate Fox
The No Diet Diet: Do Something Differentby Fletcher, Pine & Penman
The Dog Listenerby Jan Fennell
Choosing the Right Dog for You: Profiles of Over 200 Dog Breeds (Hamlyn Reference S.)by Gwen Bailey
Don't Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Trainingby Karen Pryor
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenmentby Eckhart Tolle
The Illustrated Spirit of the Home: How to Make Your Home a Sanctuaryby Jane Alexander

I blogged reading this book in January.

I like the way The Holographic Universe helps me think about reality in a scientific sort of way that also happens to allow (maybe even explain) some of the weird stuff that I actually experience.

Weird stuff that all too often is rejected out of hand by "scientists". I put that in quotes since in my experience real scientists don't reject evidence, but plenty of people attempting to seem scientific will reject anything that doesn't fit with what they perceive to be the accepted scientific world view.

Luckily there have been people throughout history that, having noticed that whatever the current orthodoxy is doesn't fit with their own observations, have been brave enough to investigate - indeed many well-known scientists were such revolutionary thinkers e.g. Galileo & Darwin.

I didn't have this book, Erica White's beat candida cookbook, at the start of the year but I wish I had!

Talking of scientific orthodoxy - its the orthodox view that only people with severe immune problems (e.g. HIV/AIDS) are at serious risk from Candida overgrowth. Luckily in the alternative health world there are people who have experimented with how to reduce candidiasis in otherwise healthy people. This book is the consequence of such work.

My new year's resolution last year was to give up sugar and I did. One of the consequences of this was getting terrible insomnia and almighty aches and pains. It was only when I got this book that I even realised there might be a connection between having given up sugar and getting these problems and that they could be a consequence of Candida die-off. The insomnia in particular reduced my ability to think, I hope I'd have understood sooner if I'd been a little less tired! Though in that case I might have been tempted to go back to consuming sugar...

I'd had two main reasons for wishing to remove sugar from my diet - the first was that one of my aunts became diabetic and I'd rather not, the second was that I was suspicious that I had candidiasis which mostly manifested as a very white tongue in the mornings.

Luckily I stuck with it and am now both sugar free, pain free and pink-tongued. I now only get a white tongue if I have refined carbohydrates (e.g. white flour) or fruit. I haven't followed Erica White's advice entirely so I may yet have to go through some more Candida die-off... I really hope I don't... but if it happens at least I won't be wondering why.

I blogged enough about Wyrd Allies at the time.

Salad Plants: Jim and I spent a lot of time growing vegetables this year. In previous years we'd simply grown salad leaves and these were the most successful of the things we grew this year too.

If you have a windowsill to spare buy a packet of mixed salad leaves and plant them in a trough - water them enough (but don't waterlog them) and you are almost bound to succeed. (Windowsills are good because they tend not to host slugs or snails.)

We thought we were doing well with our tomato crop - indeed we ate quite a few - but the summer was so wet that we ended up with blight and had to remove the plants without harvesting most of the fruit.

Becoming Drusilla: Dru has a blog and is an active member of flickr.

This book was written about her and their changing relationship by her friend Richard Beard.

I thought it very interesting, thought-provoking and beautifully written.

It is also a travel book as it describes a hike through Wales.

Watching the English: Kate Fox is an anthropologist who has stayed home to observe the people and culture that surrounds her.

Its full of remarks about this or that in one's vocabulary marks one out as upper/ middle / working class... or even more precisely in some cases. Making fine distinctions between middle middle and middle lower or middle upper for instance.

For instance what do you call the large upholstered object upon which two or more people might sit and in which room is it?

My mother was far more class conscious than I am, I think. For instance we were only allowed to call her Mummy, not Mum. The word toilet was strongly discouraged in favour of lavatory and I moved to calling it a loo as I grew up.

Reading this book helped me get a bit more of a grip on the cultural programming that my childhood had subjected me to. And helped free me from some of the prejudices that came with it.

Poor Kate Fox admits she will not have drink mats or coasters in her house as these are such a non-U thing to have - she even had to claim her table surfaces weren't worth protecting... I happily admit to having lots - indeed it helped me realise I seem to collect them! Maybe I'll photograph some soon...

The No Diet Diet has easily been the most influential book of 2008 for me. And I've posted a lot about it. The copy on the right is a more recent edition I found recently - it is very interesting as they include more case studies in it. However the original is more widely available and the version that I followed.

I'm now over 20 pounds lighter than when I started and still doing things differently.

You might think some of the weight loss would be due to having given up sugar.

I'd certainly hoped, when I gave sugar up in January 2008, that one of the consequences would be weight loss. However in August when I started the no diet diet I'd already been avoiding sugar for over 7 months and was exactly the same weight that I'd been when I'd started the year.

The Dog Listener: Whilst actively following the initial four weeks of the No Diet Diet I started to walk around the neighbourhood more.

I confronted my long held desire to own a dog with my also long held thought that this would only be possible if I lived in the country.

I realised there were certain aspects of dog ownership that I needed to rethink. In particular, living in the city I wanted a smaller dog than if I'd been in the country. I must confess this is, in part, due to the need to pick up the dog's poo - something I'd never had to do when living in the country as a child.

Reading The Dog Listener also introduced me to current ideas of positive training and staying calm and assertive around dogs. It was the first of a whole stack of dog books that I read before and since getting Teasel.

This blog and especially my flickr stream is still reeling from the impact!

Choosing the Right Dog For You: Having made the decision to get a dog there was the question of what sort.

My initial thought was to get an adult mixed breed dog, until I met a Miniature Schnauzer.

The day I saw my first one I actually met three. The first was 9 months old, the second an adult and the last a puppy. Teasel came from the same breeder as that puppy so is probably a cousin.

I'd add to the description in the book: non-shedding, low drool, gets noticed.

Don't Shoot the Dog: I'm rereading this at the moment. Having had a puppy for several months I've already fallen into some bad habits with respect to training her. This and other books mention the problems that can come when one says no without teaching the dog what it ought to do instead... The most obvious example I have is that Teasel has learnt that she is not to chew books if I am there... however when I'm not there she clearly considers them fair game.

There is considerable pressure from other people to tell one's dog off. I'm observing this more and more, from other dog owners and people in general. It seems we live in a society that thrives on seeing inappropriate behaviour punished rather than an appropriate behaviour being encouraged.

The Power of Now: Something that I've read/heard over and over is that dogs live in the now. This obviously doesn't mean that they can't learn or remember but that they don't dwell on the past or worry about the future the way we do.

Eckhart Tolle brings Now even closer. I find his writing very inspiring and encouraging.

I've yet to give up worrying or dwelling in the past but I'd like to!

This is a book that I started several months ago and am still reading.

The Illustrated Spirit of the Home - How to make your home a sanctuary: And this too is a book I've been reading slowly and working through over the last several months. So far I've found it very encouraging.

Its is all about exploring what home means and making the place one lives into one's home.

I'll probably blog more about this one in 2009.

Something you may have noticed is that none of the books were fiction books. I simply didn't read any in 2008. So to set the balance right I'm starting off 2009 by reading a P. G. Wodehouse.

So now having finally finished this posting - I'd like to wish you a Happy Nearly New Year!

Christmas Decorating

2008-12-22T12:28:00.003Z

Teasel has been getting over excited by Christmas so we've put her stocking up early. The snow-being in it was one of the first decorations that she stole from the boxes of decorations that were "secure" in the spare room...

Later she helped me make a wreath for our door - she found the holly on the pavement and added bite marks for decoration:

However, later still, she was caught red-mouthed with this present, the only one so far to have arrived by post... which had been put, we thought, out of reach:

It is now even higher up in the boughs of the fibre-optic Christmas tree:

Jim decorated it yesterday and found three cute reindeer decorations to put on it. I don't remember these at all... perhaps that's part of the fun of Christmas - the surprises in the decorations box!

This tree is currently in the hall.

In the past we've had it in the sitting room but those lights flashing all the time drove me so mad that I put a set of ordinary Christmas tree lights on it and kept the fibre-optics off most of the time! In the hall its constant twinkle is much better and more welcoming!

I may not have time to post again before Christmas - so Merry Christmas to you all!

Goats Butt...

2008-12-22T09:00:00.000Z

"Core - I see a face!" - I'm always seeing things...

Tinker and Leah suggested, in reply to my posting about the inscription in the book by Aviva Gold, that it was made out to Goat Lady - which certainly made more sense than Goat Judy! I was thinking about this today and wondered if there was more of a message for me in this... it had been "For April" and then I remembered the goats at Paradise Bottom earlier this year:

"Tinkling Goat" - photo by Jim

Jim took this photo on March 21st and it was on this walk, after seeing the goats, that for the first time in ages, I really felt that being near an animal gave me something of its power. I was inspired to go up and down hills with far more energy and sure-footedness that day than usual. That was just a little bit before April... I looked through my archive of photos from April itself and on the 21st of April found this:

A water butt kit! And we all know that goats butt don't we... ;-)

Another goatish synch is that a friend of mine share's her house with an astrologer - I'd teased him for ages by not letting him know when my birthday was - I was most intrigued to find out what he thought my sign was, and besides not being into astrology myself I felt much happier with his not knowing - his first guess about four years ago was Leo - I think my hair might have been having a good day that day - this November he tried Capricorn - still wrong but maybe he was picking up on something else! Though I'd consider the message, if there is one, to be that I'm a water goat which isn't in the Western Astrologer's menagerie.

Okay I've stretched this one as far it'll go... unless someone else has some suggestions?

Power Dip

2008-12-15T17:35:00.009Z

This arrived today - from the US - Leah recommended it last Monday and I'd only ordered it on Tuesday from a reseller on Amazon.com. Amazon had told me to allow until February 9th 2009!

As I was reading the first chapter we had a most unexpected power dip. I was just in the section where where she is describing her own journey to the type of painting she calls "Painting from the Source":

And I even had to say good-bye (power dip) to the fear of being connected and whole.

Which I must admit seemed significant to me at the time. There was a second power dip a little later when I wasn't reading - I was cutting up red peppers... I can't see any significance to that one ;-)

This copy is even signed, though its really hard to read, I think its signed by the author.

My best guess is:

For April,
Keep Painting, Goat Judy
Love Aviva Gold

Can you make it make more sense?

As I tried to post this I got a message saying

Conflicting edits

There was more than one attempt to edit this resource at the same time. This may have been because you double-clicked a link or a button or because someone else is also editing this blog or post.

Please hit the back button on your browser and try again. If the problem persists, please contact the Blogger Help Group. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Weird! I wasn't doing more than one thing at once...

Any suggestions for what that means also welcome!

Christmas Cards

2008-12-15T06:00:00.001Z

This is what I made this weekend - in fact mostly on Saturday - it felt very productive to get them made (even if not written and posted) before the last posting day - something that doesn't always happen - indeed last year I didn't get around to making any new ones at all - so lots of people ended up without one from me - sorry!

I made these in a similar way to the ones I made in 2006 (first stage, final ones) and indeed looked at and was again inspired by this tutorial. I got carried away adding bits and bobs before they were all cut up which meant I ended up having to cut some of the shiny confetti pieces and of course add more later. I also found it much easier to tape them into the cards than glue them. Quite a lot of my potential cards didn't have windows so I used a square hole card punch to make them.

Last time I used stamps on tissue to put greetings inside and I did something similar this time - I like the effect of a couple of layers of tissue although it does mean more glue and mess! At least Pritt stick was all that was necessary for the tissue.

Anyone else making cards?

What's on the Outside of Your Fridge?

2008-12-14T14:05:00.002Z

Andrea has asked what is on the outside of people's fridges - this is ours.

The monster on the left is something Jim and I made in our first year together using a similar method to the fish next to it. Jim's mother had made that for him some years before. She was inspired by Make Something Ugly...for a Change: The Definitive Guide to Papier/Cloth Mache by Dan Reeder. (Unfortunately it seems that this is out of print and people are asking ridiculous prices for the copies available.)

The green tortoise magnet was made for Jim last year by his nephew, Alex.

What's on your fridge? (Do post a link here if you decide to blog it!)

'Tis the season to be colourful

2008-12-13T12:52:00.001Z

I've been having lots of fun with paint.

Life, Paint and Passion

2008-12-08T12:38:00.003Z

Yes! I've finally got my studio back so I can paint again.

Last August Jim removed the old carpet (which had moths and had to go) and painted the floor - unfortunately the cement paint was VERY smelly so I couldn't go back in straight away.

Then we got Teasel and it was the best place to put her as it had a floor that wasn't precious... now she is (more or less) house trained she is inhabiting the upstairs more and I get the basement back!

I'm restricting myself to poster paints for the moment until I'm sure Teasel isn't going to take up paint eating. But that's no problem as I rather like them - they are cheap and colourful and I love their consistency and opaqueness. They are, incidentally, the type of paint recommended by one of my favourite art books:

Which I've recently re-read.

Its amazing how one can completely misremember a book.

The last time I read it and was inspired to paint by it I produced a whole series of paintings that were colourful weird and very detailed (though I used acrylic paints then as its what I had and knew). They formed the last exhibition of paintings that I did. That was in 1996. I blogged one 10 years after that in June 2006.

Now I realise that one of the things the book does is caution against showing this sort of art work to anyone!

Because its so personal.

I somehow missed that entirely before. Though I didn't try to sell them as I felt they were too personal to sell... but at the time I hadn't really worried about whether I might feel over-exposed by showing them... Looking back now I think that showing them did block me from letting myself paint more this way. As though I'd broken a trust with myself. So this time around I will not be showing them, not even here on my blog. (I have been painting on and off this year and not shown it here for the same reason.)

Also I'm sure when I first worked with the process in the book I felt that just splashing paint on "wasn't allowed"... hence the relatively tight and detailed work and yet the book is extremely clear about there being no rules... it makes suggestions that are not all mutually compatible because different things are going to be appropriate at different times. I think I must have got quite a lot of rules into my head when really the idea of the book is to free oneself from ALL the rules!

The idea is more about painting whatever it is appropriate to paint now; not to analyse it at any point, just to let it come.

So given that when I happen to tell Jim "this is such fun" and he responds "is it very messy?" this time around I will let the inner messy painter out!

This process is not about painting for those who intend to make a living from painting. It is about self-expression and painting for the sheer fun of it.

Michele Cassou has her own website - and the first thing that struck me about it is that her name was mispelt (Michell) on the cover of the Life, Paint and Passion book!

She has several other books, plus DVDs and CDs for sale there.

I would love to go on one of her workshops...

Anyone else used her methods or even been to one of her workshops?

IF - Opinion

2008-11-21T16:24:00.005Z

Opinion - for Illustration Friday - in Corel Painter

Have you noticed that opinions seem to bloom whenever they are given a chance? I remember, when a teenager, that a classmate said she hadn't realised she had so many opinions until she went to a dinner party and was asked what she thought about this and that.

Today I realised I had some strong opinions about Miniature Schnauzers - we met one that was a couple of years old and its owner told me very forcefully that:

Miniature Schnauzers all bark
Their recall, when called, is bad
That they are terriers

Now I do realise that I've only had Teasel for a few weeks but one of the things I did before we got her was a lot of research about dog breeds and once I'd started to seriously consider a Miniature Schnauzer even more about them.

One book did warn that many of them bark as a hobby - however not all the owners I've met so far have had barky dogs and Teasel is the quietest, least barking puppy in the puppy class we go to - she can bark and will give the odd bark but not repetitively - and her mother didn't bark at us as far as I can remember - so although I do know it could be a problem its not necessarily so. (Any hints on what to do if she starts to get barky would be appreciated!)

On the recall... Teasel's is currently good (most of the time and especially when there is sausage in the offing) and certainly very good compared to the older ones. I assume that this is something we'll have to keep on working on. However I have noticed that none of the other owners take treats of any sort out to reward their dogs for returning - its as though they assume that just because the dog knows that its meant to come back it will and this is despite also knowing that their dog isn't that good at coming to them when they call... we currently take the tastiest treats with us when we are going to the park and I think that is something I'll continue for as long as necessary... it may well be that she'll always needs some sort of an incentive.

Miniature Schnauzers are Schnauzers, not terriers. In this country they are in the same kennel club category as the bigger Schnauzers (utility dogs), in the US the American Kennel Club has them in the terrier category but they were not actually breed from terriers so have no more genes in common with them that with other types of dogs.

What they do have in common is that they were breed to hunt rats and other small creatures. This means that they like to shake things and can be very persistent. But they don't have the same argumentative nature that so many terriers have though here too there are, of course, exceptions in both directions. As a child we had two West Highland Terriers - the first was as sweet as pie, the next an absolute monster!

Tagged: Another 6 curious things

2008-11-19T17:36:00.002Z

My Mind Reels - in Corel Painter

Connie has tagged me to divulge 6 random things about myself - I've done at least one version of this tag yonks ago (though that one wasn't very random as they all seem to be about elephants!) but there must be another 6 things for me to confess to - especially if I can now dismiss elephants from my mind:

When people say "Try not to think about pink elephants..." and then wait a while before saying "I bet you thought about pink elephants..." - I usually haven't as I purposely programmed myself to think about something completely different when challenged like this... and from this you may deduce that I was teased a lot as a child and found various coping strategies!

One of the ways of getting away from something like that quickly is by playing word association games:

pink elephants - purple tigers - red pantaloons - green macaws - squawk - animal noises - etc.

(I have no idea why those pantaloons crept in... )
When I was first working and living in north London I discovered that I had a fear of going down escalators. I got over it by learning to ski downhill - and in particular to learn how to stop whilst skiing downhill. I tackled a fear of hypodermic injections by having acupuncture - once I'd survived all those needles being put in me I no longer panicked when I needed a jab from a single needle.
Long ago I heard about the theory that if one disliked someone else intensely it was likely to be because we were projecting parts of our own unacknowledged shadow onto them. I discovered that sometimes this was clearly true and consequently made friends with all sorts of people I'd otherwise have avoided.

It also helps when one inadvertently happens to be on the wrong end of someone else's dislike or fear; though they are less likely to want to come to terms with it!
Before I went to university I was really into making or growing things and selling them - somehow I lost this entrepreneurial urge when I started to work and had to earn a living.

For instance, in the sixth form (aged 18ish), I painted stones that I made into jewelry and was thrilled when I sold some to a local boutique. I was even more thrilled when I saw someone wearing one of them that they had bought
I used to love wearing wigs to parties. Come to think of it I loved wearing a wig to a party only last April...
When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up I used to say:

An astrophysicist or an artist

I'm not going to tag anyone else explicitly (too many of my tags have been ignored in the past to encourage me to tag explicitly any more) but do let me know if you do it - I'd love to see what you've written.

A splash of Colour

2008-11-15T11:10:00.004Z

I painted this in Corel Painter yesterday but if I wait for the words to go with it you'll never see it. So here it is!

Time

2008-11-09T09:00:00.004Z

How come there seems to be so much more time in the day these days but its all filled with puppy?

Teasel photos on Flickr

Hot Dog!

2008-10-31T11:46:00.003Z

This month there have been any number of synchronicities and general happenings around hot dogs - here are a few:

The MSH had a category "hot dog" for which I submitted the above photo
Despite being told not to feed a dog pork I've also been told by lots of people that sausages, and in particular hot dogs, are wonderful as treats during training
Jim likes the children's cartoons about Charlie and Lola - he showed me one he'd recently recorded that featured Lola "training" a friends dog who is called Sizzles and "will do anything for sausages" - after watching it we went out and for the first time met a dachshund in the park
Soon after this I bought a fox from the dog toys available at the vets... Jim then pointed out that Lola had a fox toy she's got Sizzles to play with... not so much a synchronicity as suggestion!
We've enrolled on a puppy training course and one of the recommended training treats is hot dogs - when I saw the price of the ones specifically for dogs I was rather amazed - when asked the trainer said that those for human consumption were okay for dogs... so I got a tin from Tesco but I didn't like them much... then yesterday I was in Waitrose and not thinking about hot dogs at all when I overheard a woman rejecting the jar of Frankfurters that some Waitrose staff had found for her and then being led off to the fresh ones in the chillers.

I stooped down (they were on the bottom shelf) and picked them up - it was the last jar there! And they are altogether nicer than the Tesco ones... if I have to share sausages with my dog these will do!

I also looked at the ones in the chillers but they won't last long enough... Teasel is so small she only needs about quarter of a sausage to make lots and lots of treats!
We've been out with hot dogs as rewards for coming when called a couple of times - she is pretty good at coming for these... the day I forgot them and attempted to use less tasty dried treats she seemed to go deaf ;-)

Yesterday in the park was this little girl in her Halloween costume a little early:

Crossed Wires!

2008-10-26T20:31:00.010Z

Last night Jim and I played "You Don't Say" a game invented by Karen Pryor to teach clicker training through experiencing it. In each round of the game one person is the learner, the other the teacher. No one speaks. Only the teacher clicks. (Anyone else present watches, and probably laughs.)

It comes with all sorts of small objects, a clicker and a little booklet giving various games to play.

As the leaner one simply reads the learner's section that pretty much tells you the idea is to explore the things on the table and to collect tokens. Every time one does something the teacher wants to encourage one gets clicked and each click earns a token.

The teachers section is a bit longer and gives instructions for several different games.

As I started off playing the learner I didn't have any idea what the teacher's instructions were until after the game.

I started off touching various objects on the table - when I got to the red dinosaur I got my first click - yippee!

I bounced the dinosaur up and down vigorously in front of Jim. Jim clicked some more. Then he realised that although he'd clicked me he hadn't given me any silver tokens. I'd forgotten about the tokens too - I wasn't yet "conditioned" to getting a token for a click - so I was especially delighted to get several along with the clicks my enthusiastic bouncing had caused.

I think he thought I'd been so bouncy because I hadn't had my token... and maybe some where deep inside me that was true but it wasn't conscious.

I now proceeded to play with the dinosaur a lot - I put it in various places and on me in lots of ways - I sat on it, decorated myself with it - my favourite place was behind my ears - made it bite other things, etc. and I was getting clicks and tokens but it also seemed like I wasn't doing whatever it was that he wanted me to do with it... and then he held up the Queen of Spades.

I felt like he'd thrust it far too close to me and rather aggressively (I'm long-sighted and it was too close to focus on). Oh oh I thought - I've been black-carded! That must mean stop; whatever I'm doing isn't right... yet he also clicked me and gave me a coin... confusing! Okay that must mean I'm right about the dinosaur but I need to do something different with it...

I then tried several different things with the red dinosaur and all of them seemed to earn me the black card, plus clicks and coins... what was I doing wrong? What else could I do with it? What on earth had I missed out? Why did I keep getting clicks and coins when I'd been black carded?

Then Jim took away the dinosaur!

I was bereft. I'd obviously been very naughty and got it all wrong...

I picked up all the other things that were left - and I got a click and a coin! Oh maybe the point was to pick up everything except the dinosaur! I shook them and threw them about... I wasn't really aware of what was getting clicked and what wasn't at this stage.

Then as I was picking up all the pieces off the floor I happened to be holding the blue die. Now what do you do with one of these? Roll it of course! So I did. I got lots of clicks and lots of tokens.

In fact I'd got all the tokens... and then Jim simply swooped in and stole all my tokens!!!

What on earth had I done to deserve that. He hadn't even given me an IOU!

I kept on playing with the blue die and got some of my tokens back. Then he showed me another card... the two of diamonds! That isn't the black card so it must mean carry on.

I carried on rolling.

I began to worry about what number was coming up and whether I'd yet managed to roll all the numbers... Jim kept on thrusting the 2 of diamonds right in my face... too close for me to focus on it... hmm... he must mean he wants the number 2. So I picked the die up and showed him the face with 2 dots and carefully angled it so it was as much like a diamond as a square face can be. I got a click and a token...

Then he took the blue die away from me!

I was devastated.

I'd lost both my toys.

The ones that had earnt me all those tokens (and don't forget all the stolen tokens too)... and now I was just left with all the boring other ones... none of which had apparently been any use before...

I was feeling much less enthusiastic by now.

But then I got a click for touching the green fluffy ball.

Yes.

Now I just KNEW it must be to do with a sequence.

He wanted me to put coloured things into a sequence - red, blue then green!

We carried on for a bit longer and at some point I got back the dinosaur and the die. Jim held up various cards to annoy me and I attempted to get things into the right sequence.

Eventually I'd managed to put the red dinosaur on top of the Queen of Spades card (it was face down on the table but I knew which card it was), the blue die on top of the two of diamonds and the green fluffy ball on top of another card that Jim had also started to flash about.

Jim said we'd finished and that I had obeyed all the cues.

But I didn't really understand at all!

I may well have been performing as he expected but in that part of me which has any vague semblance of consciousness I was still thinking of these cards in all the wrong ways.

From Jim's point of view he thought I was being particularly obtuse to take so long... the idea had been that each card was a cue to each object. That when shown the Queen of Spades I was meant to touch the red dinosaur, when shown the 2 of diamonds to touch the blue die (without any concern over the number showing or the orientation) and when shown the eight of hearts to touch the green fluffy ball. He claims that by the end of the game he'd got me doing that and that he'd done so without sticking to any particular sequence....

I now have a great deal of compassion for any animal being trained... although I doubt they'll have my sorts of confusions going on they could have all sorts of others and at a stage when it seems they have really got it may still be operating on an entirely incorrect set of rules!

For some great examples of pets being clicker trained see the free flicks at clickerflicks. My favourite so far is of a miniature pony being trained to pull a cart and a close second is this of a cat doing an agility course.

Catch up time!

2008-10-24T10:08:00.004+01:00

This is what I won in Ellen of Creative Laundry's giveaway. Isn't it gorgeous! Thank you so much Ellen.

Looking at it is giving me ideas for using the same technique.

Though when that will be I've no idea - time currently revolves around puppy things.

I have had time to read some books - dog related ones - my favourite of the most recent ones is Don't Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor (UK, US):

Its a great contrast to the No Diet Diet as its all about creating behaviours, skills (or habits) and using rewards to ensure that the best behaviours are encouraged. The book is full of anecdotes about training all sorts of animals, as the author used to train sea mammals to perform for fish or other rewards and has used the technique of marking a good behaviour (e.g. with a click or a whistle) and then rewarding it to train all sorts of creatures - including cats, fish, elephants, polar bears and of course dogs. And also of course humans - herself included.

At the moment I feel its an idea that I understand intellectually and think sounds really useful but really don't seem to be able to put into practice... so I've ordered a DVD to help me see it in practise... after all humans learn by copying others.

One of the anecdotes in the book was about a cat watching a dog being taught to rock on a child's rocking chair and being given meat rewards along the way. After an hour of training the dog had mastered it and the training session finished. Then with the rocking chair unoccupied the cat coolly got on and demonstrated how it should be done and to get its own meat reward!

Now you might think that being a copy cat like that makes the cat cleverer than the dog since it only had to be shown and it could do it too... but the dog will have got more than one reward as it went along... and a whole hour of attention too.

Last Saturday one of Jim's cousins was here having played a concert in Bristol the night before - she plays the baroque horn and let us both have a go - it was most odd attempting to make it sound and just getting little tiny squeaks coming out near my right ear - she then showed us how it was done and she found that there was one note that got Teasel singing too - since then we've had several family howls as we all sing along together unaccompanied!

For the monthly scavenger hunt this month one of the categories was "black and orange" - now I'm sure that was there so people could put in pictures of their Halloween things but this is my entry:

Puppy Party!

2008-10-14T22:13:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I was 50 but tonight it was Teasel who had a party... she preferred the little girls who were there with their puppy to the other puppies... some of the other puppies were enormous compared to her despite their being several weeks younger!

Secret Feathers

2008-10-04T11:37:00.005+01:00

In my last posting I showed the above white feather and pink feather and asked what you thought they might mean if interpreted as a sign - thank you for all your suggestions - its great to have different ideas. I loved them all whether they'd been given somewhat tongue in cheek or seriously.

I put a comment on that posting to a flickr photo of what I'd bought whilst at the shops just after taking the pink feather photo. The first of the books that I've looked at (and already read most of) was this one - The Secret by Rhonda Byrne:

I bought it from a charity shop and its in nearly new condition - indeed if a volunteer hadn't used an overly hard pencil to write its price in I could get away with saying it was new - and I might have been tempted to give it away as a present to someone else...

Instead I've read it. In the foreword I found this:

Note the "specific feather". And later on in the book the story of such a specifically imagined feather coming when asked for is given (pp 64-65):

I've been vaguely aware of The Secret as a phenomenon and must admit was rather annoyed at all the fuss! And having read it I'm still annoyed at all the fuss but I will admit that the ideas are very well described - however they are hardly a secret from anyone who has read a self-help or spiritual book in the last 30 years! And if the fuss has helped more people play with the ideas then maybe I'll stop being upset by it...

It is all about intention and setting one's intention appropriately. Lots of different people have ideas about how to do this effectively and in The Secret Rhonda Byrne has set out some good guidelines.

When talking to both Jim and my sister about it they mentioned this book from 1977, Illusions by Richard Bach:

Which brings us back to feathers again.

A good day

2008-10-02T21:10:00.003+01:00

This is a feather I saw this morning when I went down to the shops.

Later in the day we discovered that Jim had won £1100 on the premium bonds! He's putting it down to Teasel being a lucky puppy... I think its the surge of love he's feeling for her! This evening she's been with us a full week.

I then went down to the shops again in the afternoon - I felt quite compelled to go.

Outside the front door was this:

If you wanted to interpret a message that came this way - first as a white wet feather on a black mini that reflects the sky and then as a bright pink dry feather amongst leaf litter - what would you think?

Teasel makes herself at home

2008-10-01T20:58:00.002+01:00

We picked Teasel up on Thursday evening... and since then everything seems to have been puppy... or recovering from puppy...

The worst thing so far was yesterday... Jim had put up a small run so we could let her out into the back garden without fear of her escaping... and in the hope that this would help in house training her too.

He then went out.

A few minutes later he returned and rang the door bell... he'd forgotten his keys... he only came back because he'd put a few photos of her onto his USB stick and was hoping to show them to Colin... having said goodbye again Teasel and I went out into the outside run... after waiting in vain for ages for her to actually relieve herself one way or another it started to rain... in I thought... but no!

Somehow the door latch had come down and we were locked out!

Two and half hours later one of the neighbours came back from work and took us in... Jim returned about half an hour after that... and rather luckily had his keys with him!

The neighbour was one I'd said hello to before but never chatted to, I didn't even know his name before... he took us both in, gave me a hot drink and didn't even seem to mind when the long awaited wee came out of Teasel in his flat! (Given how hard it seems to be for her to control herself - how on earth did she keep this in so long???)

Thank you to Nick our lovely neighbour!

Here are some more photos of Teasel:

Sorry I've hardly visited any blogs recently... I'm just too tired most of the time... that or I'm sitting in the garden huddled up against the rain hoping Jim will come home!

Metal Sculpture

2008-09-25T09:58:00.004+01:00

First news about the puppy - we'll be collecting her either today or tomorrow. And her name will be Teasel.

We aren't yet as ready as I'd hoped...

Partly because we've just spent a long weekend on a sculptural blacksmithing course. Jim had often said he wanted to make metal sculptures so I booked him onto this course as his birthday present, he's had to wait 4 months for it. I went on the course too but wasn't as strong as the others so wasn't very good at the bashing with hammers part - my wrists just weren't up to it.

Hope you've all been having fun too!

Puppy Visiting

2008-09-16T10:10:00.003+01:00

Yesterday we went to see some Miniature Schnauzer puppies - this little black and silver bitch is the one I've chosen - we'll be going to collect her at the end of the month.

It was wonderful to see them all and very hard to choose between them. If I could I'd have chosen several as the hardest bit is the idea of separating them from each other. At least we'll be giving ours a home with nearly full-time human companionship - I just feel its not quite the same as have a sister or brother to play with!

I may be off-line rather a lot in the next couple of weeks - partly because I'm having a lot of problems with my connection to the internet - it just keeps on dropping which is frustrating - and partly because we've got to get the house and garden puppy-ready - as we've had no children or pets living with us here before I think there might be quite a lot to do - especially in attempting to make the garden escape-proof!

Any suggestions on what to look out for would be most welcome.

My Dreamboard

2008-09-14T14:11:00.001+01:00

IF - Island

2008-09-12T20:46:00.003+01:00

Island by Caroline in Corel Painter

This illustration started off as a smudgy pen and ink treasure island on paper that I was doing for Illustration Friday in June when the prompt was hoard. I was planning to do a map to buried treasure. Somehow I didn't get it finished. This was a version that I scanned in and that later became a pretend postage stamp which is why there is a version of the island as a sort of Queen's Head on it.

Habitweb - the No Diet Diet is all about becoming more aware of ones habits and breaking free of them.

Today a dreadful one took hold of me!

I had decided to break a habit I have of getting a hot drink (usually just hot water) and then sitting with it at the computer. One reason for wanting to break this one is that I've broken several keyboards that have not coped with even minor spillages of water on them...

So today several times I was very aware and sat downstairs whilst drinking my hot water. I put a cold water by the computer with the idea that it would help me if I knew there was something there to drink.

And then around lunchtime just when I was planning on going out, I was sitting at the computer and knocked the cold water everywhere, including over the keyboard - and what did I knock it with?

The mug of hot water that I hadn't noticed myself bringing in!

Oh dear.

Not only water everywhere and the worry that my keyboard might no longer work but realising just how much I had failed in basic awareness!

Luckily the keyboard does seem to still be working - though if I go off line for several days it may be because its stopped!

However my determination to break this habit is now very much stronger.
No water or other drinks are to be allowed in here at all!
And that's final!

What's your worst habit?

More islands this week at Illustration Friday.

Week 5 of the No Diet Diet begins

2008-09-10T19:19:00.004+01:00

Today Jim and I had a lovely lunch with Connie, her husband Brian and their dog Bella - it was great to meet them and of course it meant I could hand over the loot to Connie straight away as she'd won the journal cover etc. from my giveaway. She's a fascinating woman as well as fun illustrator! I've got lots to think about from our conversation.

On the dog front, apart from meeting the delightful and probably unrepeatable Bella, today I also talked to a neighbour who has a couple of Cocker Spaniels, both were rescue dogs and have somewhat bad habits but not too terrible, I'm going to go for a walk with them soon!

Whilst out on my evening walk I found these:

They reminded me how, as a child, I found it very confusing that there was a polar bear on a sweet that seemed to be called Fox. After them I found this:

Aren't those goggles a similar blue to the sweet wrappers! And I've decided that as a message I'm going to interpret them as "Icy before but I see clearly now".

As the title of this post reminds me this is the start of the fifth week on the No Diet Diet. This is where we go into maintenance mode. I don't have time to describe it properly now so I'll leave that to another day. So far I've lost 7-8 pounds which is very pleasing.

Any ideas for different things to try?

Update: Following Leah's comment I should clarify this and ask for any ideas that are unrelated to food as the No Diet Diet is about focusing on new activities and behaviours.

Playing Around

2008-09-09T09:05:00.004+01:00

Imelda has just posted this game on her blog. The idea is to take the list and highlight each item that one has personally done. Then to add something new that one has done at the end.

01. Bought everyone in the bar a drink - (trivially so as I've been to a bar on my own and been the first person there - I was dating the barman at the time ;-)
02. Swam with wild dolphins
03. Climbed a mountain
04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
05. Been inside the Great Pyramid
06. Held a tarantula
07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
08. Said “I love you” and meant it
09. Hugged a tree
10. Bungee jumped
11. Visited Paris
12. Watched a lightning storm at sea
13. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise
14. Seen the Northern Lights
15. Gone to a huge sports game - (Wimbledon counts doesn't it?)
16. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa - boo they were closed when I visited!
17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables
18. Touched an iceberg
19. Slept under the stars
20. Changed a baby’s nappy
21. Taken a trip in a hot air balloon
22. Watched a meteor shower
23. Gotten tipsy on champagne
24. Given more than you can afford to charity
25. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
26. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment - (at my mother's funeral - you can't get much worse than that can you? It was the priest's fault... we'd told him her name was Gillian and he shortened it to Gill... all her life she had hated that happening and this man who had never actually known her did it to her in death!)
28. Bet on a winning horse
29. Asked out a stranger
30. Had a snowball fight
31. Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
32. Held a lamb
33. Seen a total eclipse of both the sun and moon
34. Ridden a roller coaster
35. Hit a home run
36. Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking
37. Adopted an accent for an entire day - (that'll be speak like a pirate day, me hearties!)
38. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
39. Had two hard drives for your computer
40. Visited all 50 states - (7 I think but who is counting?)
41. Taken care of someone who was drunk
42. Had/Have amazing friends
43. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country - (oh my goodness... yes... my mother and I went to Greece and she chatted up the waiter at our hotel and got him to take me to a disco - horrendous!)
44. Watched whales
45. Stolen a sign
46. Backpacked in Europe
47. Taken a road-trip
48. Gone rock climbing
49. Midnight walk on the beach
50. Gone sky diving
51. Visited Ireland
52. Been heartbroken longer than you were actually in love
53. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger’s table and had a meal with them
54. Visited Japan
55. Milked a cow
56. Alphabetized your CDs
57. Pretended to be a superhero - (for ages after seeing Superman for the first time!)
58. Sung karaoke - (never, ever again...)
59. Lounged around in bed all day
60. Played touch football - (don't know what that is...)
61. Gone scuba diving
62. Kissed in the rain
63. Played in the mud
64. Played in the rain - (as children we used have this brilliant game in the rain with wellingtons on both hands and feet, walking like and elephant and with a cardbox over our bodies... )
65. Gone to a drive-in theater
66. Visited the Great Wall of China
67. Started a business - (well I tried...)
68. Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
69. Toured ancient sites
70. Taken a martial arts class (karate, tai-chi, qi gung, Kuk Sool Won)
71. Played D&D for more than 6 hours straight - (the bad part was the fish finger curry the hosts made...)
72. Gotten married
73. Been in a movie
74. Crashed a party
75. Gotten divorced
76. Gone without food for 5 days
77. Made cookies from scratch
78. Won first prize in a costume contest
79. Ridden a gondola in Venice
80. Gotten a tattoo
81. Rafted a river
82. Been on television news programs as an “expert”
83. Gotten flowers for no reason
84. Performed on stage
85. Been to Las Vegas
86. Recorded music
87. Eaten shark
88. Kissed on the first date
89. Gone to Thailand
90. Bought a house
91. Been in a combat zone
92. Buried one/both of your parents
93. Been on a cruise ship
94. Spoken more than one language fluently
95. Performed in a Rocky Horror Picture Show
96. Raised children
97. Followed your favorite band/singer on tour - (Jim is in a band... surely that must count!)
98. Passed out cold - (sort of when I cut my thumb once...)
99. Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country
100. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over - (does getting a job there first count?)
101. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
102. Sang loudly in the car, and didn’t stop when you knew someone was looking
103. Had plastic surgery
104. Survived an accident that you shouldn’t have survived
105. Wrote articles for a large publication
106. Lost over 100 pounds
107. Held someone while they were having a flashback
108. Piloted an airplane
109. Touched a stingray
110. Broken someone’s heart
111. Helped an animal give birth
112. Won money on a TV game show
113. Broken a bone
114. Gone on an African photo safari
115. Had a facial part pierced other than your ears
116. Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol - (I used to be a crack shot with my brother's air gun, though not as good as him of course... I also fired a "real" gun on an army stall at a fair )
117. Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild - (when I collected them with a friend who was good at identification but when I tried to collect some on my own I was too scared to eat them - next thing I knew they'd gone maggotty! Yuck!)
118. Ridden a horse - (not well...)
119. Had major surgery - sort of... I insisted on only having a local anaesthetic...
120. Had a snake as a pet
121. Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
122. Slept 30 hours in a 48 hour time frame
123. Visited more foreign countries than U.S. states (like Imelda that's easy, when you don't live in the U.S..... Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Greece)
124. Visited all 7 continents
125. Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
126. Eaten kangaroo meat
127. Eaten sushi - (yum! I've had "proper" sushi in a fabulous place in California, supermarket sushi and I've made my own sushi twice recently too.)
128. Had your picture in the newspaper - (but not since I was a child...)
129. Changed someone’s mind about something you care deeply about
130. Gone back to school
131. Parasailed
132. Touched a cockroach
133. Eaten fried green tomatoes
134. Read “The Iliad” - (at school, a translation only and I can recall none of it now!)
135. Selected one “important” author who you missed in school, and read
136. Killed and prepared an animal for eating - (I helped when we kept chickens when I was a child, I didn't actually do the killing though...)
137. Skipped all your school reunions
138. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language - (yes and it was lots of fun!)
139. Been elected to public office
140. Written your own computer language
141. Thought to yourself that you’re living your dream
142. Had to put someone you love into hospice care
143. Built your own PC from parts
144. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn’t know you
145. Had a booth at a street fair
146. Dyed your hair
147. Been a DJ
148. Shaved your head
149. Caused a car accident
150. Saved someone’s life
151. Organized a HUGE event!
152. Seen something you can't explain with science.
153. Had a book published.

and my addition:

154. Solved Rubik's cube.

Do let me know if you decide to add to this one!

400th post and results of Givewaway!

2008-09-08T15:06:00.007+01:00

Hurrah this is my 400th post!

I was hoping I'd get the timing right so I could use this one to announce the winner of the giveaway!

All the people who commented on the giveaway are listed below in the order in which they commented, this is so I can then choose which of you is the winner using a random number generator - there will only be ONE winner of the journal, etc:

Connie, an Illustration Friday regular who lives in Scotland and is visiting Bristol this week - so I'll be meeting her, her husband and small dog soon.
quitecontrary1977, who appears to run a blog devoted to giveaways but, despite having commented here, did not advertise my giveaway on it - I guess that means she is really hoping to win it for herself ;-)
Maria, who lives in Vienna and shows many photos of it on her blog - as one of my brother's lives close to Vienna but only ever sends me photos of his son or wildlife her blog is a great way to picture his newly adopted home.
webradio, a French blogger who has just posted a wonderful cat and mouse photo
tinker, one of my most oldest and highly valued blog friends
Anji, someone I recognise from Dru's blog but haven't been visiting before now, she is interested in postcards
Dru, someone I know from flickr and her blog, she lives in Bristol but we've yet to turn up to one of the flickrmeets at the same time
soulbrush, a recent frequent visitor who has been encouraging me to get a dog...
Joy Eliz, another long-standing blog friend
Ces, someone who inhabits the same blog orbit that I do (in other words she's a frequent commenter on blogs what I too visit) but whose blog I've only recently visited
Andrea, one of my earliest and longest-lasting blog friends of all!
Jo, whose blog is full of the most amazing colours of yarns that she's dyed and spun herself - I used to knit a lot but haven't in yonks...
cms, someone Jim used to work with and whose blog I read - the very best story on there is about his dog and the lost keys

Thank you all for commenting and celebrating my 3rd blogiversary with me.

As I mentioned above I have decided to use one of the random number generators to pick the winner, so without more ado here we go. This is grabbed from the screen given by random.org's sequence generator:

This shows you exactly how close each of you was to winning. But top of the list at number one is #1 and wow - its Connie with whom I'm due to meet up for the first time ever this week - what amazing luck! Since that's going to save me the postage I'd assumed I'd be paying, I'll also send something to the second on the random list... and that is #9 - Joy Eliz!

Congratulations to both of you and I hope you enjoy your prizes (though, as yet, I've no idea what I'm going to give Joy Eliz!).

Whilst I was typing the above the doorbell went - it was the window cleaner who is a fascinating person to talk to. Today he let me take his photo:

Notice that his T-shirt has a puppy on it.

In one of my recent posts I mentioned that I was wondering about getting a pet. One of the things that I have realised is that I really want a dog. Whenever I talk about moving into the country one of the main reasons I give is its so that I can have a dog.

I grew up in the country and we had all sorts of animals including several dogs. When my father died and we had to sell up and move into town, the dog and cats came with us, whilst our hens, and other more country oriented animals, went to new homes. Unfortunately our dog did not like the transition from a life of great freedom in the country to one of great confinement in the town.

One day we were all out and when one of my brothers got home it was to see Torrie, our Bearded Collie, balanced on the windowsill of one of the upper storey bedrooms. There was a huge crowd below none of whom had had any idea what to do. My brother went in and lifted Torrie back in. We were careful not to open the lower halves of the sash-windows after that.
Another thing that upset me was that, as number one dog-walker, I had to put up with abuse from various "dog-lovers" who would shout at me that such a dog ought not to be living in town. I just longed to tell them that such a dog would not be living in town if my father hadn't died and nor would I! It added immeasurably to my grief at the time.

Bearded Collies are sheepdogs first and foremost and Torrie had been used to having at least some of us around all the time, not least, my father who was always there. Town life tended to mean we weren't in so much, and of course, Daddy wasn't ever there any more.

As a pack we'd disintegrated, lost our territory and failed to elect a new leader! She was doing her best to keep us together and keep an eye on us...

I've been reading The Dog Listener by Jan Fennell and Dog Watching by Desmond Morris which is why I am thinking about dogs in terms of their position in the pack. I think I'll order The Practical Dog Listener: The 30-day Path to a Lifelong Understanding of Your Dog also by Jan Fennell - as I was so impressed by her first book and am now determined that when I do get a dog I'm going to make sure it knows that Jim and I are the top dogs and it doesn't have the stress of attempting to fill that role with us so all of us can relax and be happy!

Yesterday we went to visit a possible dog to buy - it was, unfortunately, extremely badly behaved and clearly saw herself, at 13 months old, as very much the top dog. She was advertised as a Miniature Schnauzer with a bit of West Highland Terrier in her, though apparently a vet had identified her as mostly something else, I can't remember what. She looked more like a Westie to me (probably because she was mostly white) though with a very strange coat and somewhat larger. They were selling her because she "couldn't be left on her own". She jumped up on their settee and barked out of the window whenever anyone went past. We decided that she was too much of a challenge for us - we did not fancy being woken up all night long with her barks as people went by - and besides we really didn't warm to her - if we had, it would have been different!

Her owners had bought her as a Miniature Schnauzer, though without any papers. They also had another one that really did look like one - he was a completely different kettle of fish - or rather dog - and altogether calmer, softer, nicer. He was a few months younger than her and clearly was happy to let her be top dog whilst he had a quieter time of it.

We then went to visit one of my friends who has recently moved. We all went for a walk around her new village, which is only a mile or so from her previous one. Whilst we were out we met some people with a lovely dog. I asked them what it was. As I'd suspected it was a male adult Miniature Schnauzer! I asked them if they knew where I could get one too (after they'd told me what a sweetie he was of course).

They mentioned that there was someone near the Old Neighbourhood pub who had recently had one as a puppy. It turned out that the people with the puppy were living in the house next door to the one my friend had only just moved from! So it was easy to find and we went there on our way home - they most kindly gave us all the details of the breeder from whom they'd got their puppy and let us play with him for a while too.

I don't know if we will end up with a Miniature Schnauzer or not... but I certainly liked all of the actual ones that I met yesterday!

Something else that has challenged my ideas about what one can do in the town was seeing a chicken in someone's garden on one of my morning walks. However these wonderful pigs might be a little more than our neighbours could cope with:

I had to get right inside the hedge to get that photo whilst we were out walking yesterday - what a lovely day out we had!

I'm so excited at the idea of getting a dog that I'm going to have to calm down before I do.

Congratulations once more to the winner of the giveaway - Connie!