Wednesday, December 28, 2022
A New Project For A New Year
Wednesday, July 27, 2022
Re-Igniting My Blog! Yes!
It's been a while........but I've re-discovered my desire to blog regularly. So much water under the bridge since I last made an entry here, in fact too much to even contemplate writing about, so I'm just going to launch in and post some pictures of recent work. I will try faithfully to make regular updates.
So, here are some recently-completed works, starting with some art pieces:
Friday, October 9, 2020
Galah Baby?
I've just completed this "galah baby" in recent days - another foray into oil painting heads. Why galah baby? Well, that's not her real name - she doesn't have one yet, but I've always loved galahs for their wonderful colouration and, well, their galahness. So the colour choices I made in the dressing of this new child.........soft greys and muted pinky mauves just reminded me of galahs, hence the "working title".
I stained the muslin body with thinned-down acrylic paint mixed to match the head colour and there is a bit of blushing on the knees, hands and feet. The neck has a flange joint and it is attached to the body in such a way that it has side-to-side movement.
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
Some New Work
Although my doll-making has tailed off a bit due to the commitment I have made to renovating my house and garden, I'm still constantly making them, albeit more slowly.
Firstly, I have this brother and sister pair in their winter woollies. They are both about ten inches (25 cms)
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
Little Oak Caps
When I got home, I got to thinking that they would make perfect little hats for some tiny people, so I got out some materials and started to make some. The heads are tiny, because they had to fit into the little caps, so the bodies were made to suit the sizes of the heads. This is the first one, complete with some needle-felted toadstools:
Here's number two - I made him the tiniest jumper, using two-ply wool and then I thought he needed a chair, so I made this crookedy stick chair for him to sit on. I've had a lot of fun making these and I still have lots of little caps, so I can make a lot more, if I feel like it. It's not as if I don't have time!
Monday, March 23, 2020
A New World
So what has changed for me? Not too much, actually, as I work from home and I like to cook rather than eat out........the biggest change is that both the band and the orchestra I play in have suspended activity for the forseeable future. So only solo playing for now, but plenty of practice time!
The other big change is that my resident grand-daughter is working from home for the time being. She's lucky that her job is one where that can be quite easily done (though it took a few days to get the tech glitches ironed out) At least she still has a job - it's just terrible to see tens of thousands thrown out of work on one day because suddenly restaurants, cafes, cinemas, theatres, hotels, any tourist venture etc etc have no patrons and have to lay off staff. I can't imagine where or when this is all going to end. Here in Australia, the inexorable trend of virus spread is still very much up and in the USA things are starting to look, frankly, quite frightening.
It's quite interesting to me to learn what people are impelled to do when confronted with an unknown and uncontrollable threat - it seems in some, the instinct is to hoard toilet paper or beer, but my first impulse was to dig more garden and plant what I could at this time of year. That's a bit limited as we creep towards winter, but there is always stuff that will grow. I don't usually bother too much with a winter garden, but this year I'm determined! So I've been digging, weeding fertilizing and mulching - hard yakka - but the exercise is good and productive. I'm making plans for how to enlarge the growing space even more, despite the fact that I only have a smallish suburban back yard.
Here's two days' work, with more to come when I pull out the remains of the spent summer vegetables. The wire cages are to prevent tha blackbirds from scratching out my silverbeet, Japanese spinach and bok choy seedlings. I've also planted broad beans, beetroot and coriander. I'm still getting tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchinis and digging over the patch yielded quite a few escapee spuds.