Last Art for the Year!

 With the temperature totally unbearable outside at 43° C with a strong gusty wind blowing, the only thing to do was to become immersed in art for the afternoon. I'm back to the beetle imagery again, with 2 new stamps carved this afternoon and a couple of play prints using them. The one above uses the new stamps plus on old one on top of an old collagraph print. I quite like it actually, although I did only set out to play.

 

The one above is less successful, but as I was starting with a previously unsuccessful collagraph print it wasn't really surprising.

 

This one is another of my favorite inversions of the colours of the original image in Photoshop. Again, I quite like this one and it gives me ideas for another colour combination in the future.

Lucky Find!

Having dismantled our large covered vegetable garden beds, which allowed us to erect copious yardage of shade cloth,we are now left with the dilemma of how to shade our precious vegetables when the temperature hits 43° C as happened a week or so ago and is predicted to do so again tomorrow. While out walking in the cool of early evening last Sunday we came across this very large umbrella out on a 'hard rubbish' collection. The items are collected very early on a Monday morning, so it was now or never! We grabbed the umbrella and with a few modifications it is now installed over a bed of tomatoes giving much needed shade in the heat of the day.

One Year Later.

 This gorgeous Groodle pup was 13 months old when she 'caught' a brain infection and didn't respond to any treatment. Her owners were devastated especially the children aged 8 and 11, who adored their puppy. RIP Luna.

Another gorgeous Groodle, but quite different in colour and type of coat, reflecting the poodle component of her breeding. Molly has now joined the bereft family and will hopefully provide years of companionship and joy for all.

Sunny Day - Stormy Sky.

 I was intrigued by the reflection of clouds in the windows of a local office block, and as usual I inverted the colour with a Photoshop filter and ended up with the stormy skies seen below. 

With the predicted temperature the day after tomorrow being 42°C, it's wishful thinking that we could have storm clouds and rain I think.

Tiny Tree!

 Here is this year's Christmas Tree, a tiny little cypress in a pot from the plant nursery. I would have liked to add some tinsel, but I just didn't have anything that is fine enough to be in scale with this tiny tree.

Not having small people around for Christmas this year, it seemed a bit unnecessary to have our usual large pine tree. I must admit however that I miss the fresh pine smell, an essential part of Christmas for me since childhood. I do still have the little figure of father Christmas from my childhood though, here he is to the right of the big green bell.

Australian 12 Days of Christmas.

Once again, this was a group challenge, the topic of which was decided early this year. I was not at the meeting, so I didn't get my say, but I was not thrilled to hear what the challenge was. Especially since it was a textile group and I really didn't want any more textile bits and pieces lurking in the cupboards! I decided to once again use my rubber stamp carving skills and make stamps for the various animals, and to use backgrounds that were my own photographs from areas suitable for the different animals/birds/fish. There are many different versions of the Aussie 12 days of Christmas, so I chose from all of them, deciding on images that appealed to me most and were suitable to carve stamps from. Being printed on gloss paper, the end results in the photos are rather shiny, but I think with enlargement (click on above) you can see what I have done. I had a lot of fun with these, choosing the animals and sourcing the backgrounds, but I am happy to have finished them all before Christmas.

A year of Beetles.

At the beginning of the year the textile group that I belong to, set
a challenge to be completed each month on the general theme of 'bugs'. I chose beetles, and each month the group chose a colour to be either the background colour as in my case, or the colour of the bug itself.

 I first carved each beetle in a soft rubber to make a stamp and then also carved some vegetation to add to the image.
 Sometimes the colour was too dark to really use a stamped image on it, so I have stamped on some lighter fabric, cut the beetle out and appliqued it to the background.

 I have added painted colours to each insect, in some cases the paint is metallic, as in the two above. After painting, I stitched around the beetles and the leaves in simple machine stitching.

The only insect that I'm not really happy with is the red one shown on the right in the above image. The background colour was to be charcoal, hence the red beetle worked so that it shows up, but I don't like the colour or the shape of the beetle! I might even redo it sometime.

All the fabrics used were my own hand dyed ones, and it was good to find a use for some of them that were dyed many years ago.

Summer?

                                 Yesterday was the official first day of summer here in Australia.

 Whilst these photos weren't taken today or even yesterday, it feels so cold however that they might well have been!

 A few bracken fern fronds with a dusting of frost, the photos taken in what was officially Winter.