A Touch of Paint.

 These two prints are more or less rejects, being too dark and not rubbed back enough. They are therefore ideal candidates for me to practise painting the grasses for future prints.

This one above is really a mess of lines and blur, but useful nevertheless for choosing colours for such an image. I thought that I needed white to give the grasses some sparkle, but in fact it's the orange that makes a real difference.

Gorgeous Roses.

 I don't think that I have ever seen such a wonderful display of roses as I saw in the Benalla Rose Garden this week. I was trying to locate the flower with the most iconic rose perfume, so I seem to have only photographed the red flowers, although there were many other colours too.

 There were all sorts of variations in the form of the roses, from the expected  shapes of the blooms above, to the almost cabbage like flowers below.

 This one caught my eye just as I was leaving, just so pretty with the deep colour on the outer edges of the petals to the white in the centre.

A Good Season for Irises.

 I have no idea what the names of these Bearded Irises are, but they are all equally beautiful I think.

    The previous owner of our property planted all the blue varieties, and I added the yellow one.

More Butterflies.

 I just love butterflies, I love to watch them and to photograph them. These are all photos of butterflies that occur in my garden in the foothills of the Victorian Great Dividing Range, in the Strathbogie Ranges. This above is our Australian Admiral.

 I have only seen the  Glasswing butterfly in the garden during one season, as it is much more of a tropical butterfly.   This particular year they were around in their hundreds, but have never returned.

 This is a female Common Brown.  The male has different markings and is about a third smaller.

                This is just one of several 'Browns', which are quite often hard to tell apart.

A Chequered Swallowtail is also not a common visitor, but here it is sitting on a bright Azalea flower in my garden.

For Something a Little Different.

 The caterpillars that I posted yesterday were all butterfly larvae, which are usually not very hairy. Moth larvae on the other hand are very often extremely hairy. The one above, belonging to a Cup Moth is spiky rather than hairy however, but look at the amazing colours and patterning!

 These different moth caterpillars are sometimes called woolly bear caterpillars because of their very woolly coats of course. I have no idea what sort of moths they will turn into.

Who is Eating my Mint Plant?

I noticed that there were large pieces missing from my healthy looking mint plant, and it didn't take me long to locate the culprit, this large bright green caterpillar. It may be the larvae of the ubiquitous Cabbage White butterfly, but I have my doubts. It's a much brighter green than those caterpillars usually are, but then it's not eating dull old cabbage leaves, but somehow it doesn't look quite right to me.

 Below is the Cabbage White Butterfly that we all know, this time on a Loquat tree flower.

 This beautiful butterfly below is a Dainty Swallowtail, previously called a Dingy Swallowtail. I think that the new name is far more appropriate. 

 The caterpillar above left is the Dainty Swallowtail larvae and the one to the right belongs to the Orchard Swallowtail, the butterfly seen below. Both butterfly larvae feed on citrus fruit leaves, but the Orchard Swallowtail rarely ventures south a far as Melbourne. With global warming perhaps we'll see this splendid butterfly in our suburban gardens  competing with the smaller Dainty Swallowtail which is reasonably common in Melbourne during the summer.

Garden Pots.

This is a little corner of my back garden where lots of plants are in flower and where I seem to have a mini collection of earthenware pots. While they are a nuisance because they collect rainwater and provide a home for mosquito larvae, I really love the juxtaposition of plants and pots, as evidenced by some past embroideries of mine.

 I can't identify most of the plants here, but I do know that the front right are nasturtiums. The background is an automatic stitch on my sewing machine and the rest of the stitching is free motion machine embroidery.

Some years a group of 10 (I think) embroiderers from the Embroiderers Guild Victoria were nominated to take photos of a Melbourne garden, produce several textile works reflecting the garden and to mount an exhibition as a fund raiser. For quite what I have forgotten I'm afraid. The garden was open during some of the time that the exhibition was on, and it was all a great success, selling 40 of the 42 textile artworks that were on sale. This work above shows a corner of the house and some huge concrete pots.

 I loved this shady corner of the garden, with flowering hydrangeas reflecting the blue of the pot, orange abutilon and the large tree behind. I have no idea what the ground cover was, but it was very densely covering all the soil.

Rescue?

I was hesitating about throwing these prints out because of the waste of expensive printing paper, so I decided to paint the grasses and see what the image looked like.

 It is certainly an improvement, but I'm not sure how appealing such an image might be at an exhibition. I need some more contrasts or something.  Thinking............

                   You can of course click on the image for a slightly larger version.

This is a print using another collage plate that I wasn't happy with . It wasn't looking too bad until I made a bit of a mess in the lower middle. Perhaps I can chop out the better bits to use in something else ! I'm still not quite sure about painting the prints, but it's been an interesting exercise.