Godiva and May

I have a picture in my head and I wish I could get it out....

I had looked at some images of Godiva and found this lovely picture (where I can't remember). Godiva is linked to May, I read this on a blog but I can't remember which either.

The images of Godiva and this picture and may poles with ribbons have recombined in my head to give a face with bright swathes of hair flowing out and covering the page like ribbons. I wish I felt I had the skill to get it there....

Trevithick Day Scavenger Hunt

If you want to know where the images come from then read on....

1) local currency
This is a special edition £2 coin commerorating Trevithick.

2) local flag
I really expected to find a St Piran's Flag (Cornish Flag) which is black with a white cross but I didn't... This was a tiny flag on the windscreen of a vintage Mini Cooper on display.

3) local food
Cornwall is famous for clotted cream, and the icecream made from clotted cream. This is an icecream van selling Cornish clotted cream icecream.

4) something rusty
Well it used to be rusty! This is the water pump that used to power the organ in the chapel where the flower festival was. It has been fully restored and pictures of how it used to be were displayed behind it.

5) local wildlife
Well.... At the flower festival, celebrating God's Wonderful Word, this was my favourite display, entitled Kingfisher... Hence wildlife...

6) Local nature
The trees and stuff are all nature but I wanted to squeeze in a picture of the Battle Stone or Maen Cadorath. It once resided elsewhere, between villages called Gwithian and Gwinear and was said to commerorate a battle with each dot and line remembering a death in this battle. It was moved in 1904. I think this is typical of christianity in Cornwall - Celtic Christianity which grew from the people and landscape as well as from the cult of Christianity is somehow a little mroe forgiving of things that might be deemed pagan - it adopts them whole and swallows them up, adding them to itself in recognisable form so little is lost.

7) local stamp
Not exciting stamps, sorry but there are some nice Finnish stamps there to.

8) part of your neighbourhood
View down the main street.

9) traditional house
A typical street with typical granite terrace houses.

10) a local person
Commercial Square with the Holman Male Voice Choir singing - if there isn't a local somewhere in this picture then....

11) local weather
Another display from the flower festival entitled Storm.

12) local transportation
A replica of the Puffin' Devil, the first ever steam powered mobile transportation device, created by Trevithick.

13) traditional local clothing
The children's dance in which the girls dress as Bal Maidens (the ladies who waited at the mine entrances to process the ore) and the boys as miners.

14) night sky
From my back door...

15) sunrise
Very cloudy day so the sun didn't really rise, the cloud cover just got lighter.... Again from my back door.

16) local product (non-food)
Craft fair stall showing carved wooden bowls and vases.

17) something furry
A dog...

18) something feathery
Penzamba samba band member with lovely feathery headress.

19) a sign of the season
Primroses and wild garlic growing on an old grave in Camborne Churchyard, just round the corner from the Battle Stone.

20) a part of you
An accidental photo...

21) your main hobby
Books...

22) a local shop
A fabric shop which had a lovely display to commemorate Trevithick Day.

23) a local restaurant
Tyacks is an 18th century Coaching Inn which is now a hotel, pub and restaurant. They often have live bands as well. All of the buildings shown are part of the hotel.

24) a street sign
Union street

25) a local mailbox
A mailbox in the corner with the Golowan Band in the background.

Orphaned Postcards!

Postmuse has a very interesting project. A large collection of blank postcards with no stamps, or postmarks, or writing. Claim a postcard and it will be sent to you, to write on and send back. You don't have to live in the place the postcard shows, just having visited it is enough...

I claimed three and they arrived today. I had to scan them in....

I have a picture of Cadgwith, a postcard showing old engravings of Kew Gardens and a map of Cornwall. Luckily I get to go post things tomorrow so off they will go again....

Can you help a poor orphaned postcard?

Goodbye Kitty

My latest postcross card called for a slight diversion from my normal diet of landscape cards. The only thing they listed as liking was Hello Kitty... I looked online and saw no cards so the chances of finding any in my small town are kind of low. I did look in the biggest local supermarket which has a whole aisle of cards, but no trace of hello kitty...

Never one to turn down a challenge I thought I would make one!

The pink gingham is tissue paper. The flowery paper on the right is fairy paper with said fairy removed. The flowers on the left are a vinyl tape. The for you at the bottom is sticky ribbon. The heart is a peel off. Kitty herself is some clipart I printed off.

I then laminated it so it hopefully won't fall apart in the post.... I stuck a label on the back for the stamps.

I can't imagine she will get to many hello kitty cards so I hope she likes it!

Punk Postcross

I have recently started using Postcross. A lovely idea for exchanging postcards with the world. I sent my first five, of which only two have so far arrived and this entitled me to send two more. So far I have just sent normal landscape and nature cards of Cornwall but my seventh address called for something a little different...

This person is an artist who likes altered art... They want things half destroyed, changed, whatever and of course, I had to rise to the challenge....

The plain white card was splotched with cats eye inks. I then used stickers to do the writing. Crumpled the card then cut it up and finally stuck it back together with tape... I hope they like it!

Easter

It isn't that I haven't been creating - it is just that carrying my laptop up to my scanner and making room on my craft table amongst the drying things only happens when I have time.... This piece and the butterfly swirl piece have taken quite a bit of time and have had various drying stages.... I know this piece is a little late but hey...


The bottom layer is some nice bright wrapping paper. Pictures were stuck on top and then light green coloured gesson smeared over. I then added the tissue paper rainbow leading to the card eggs. I wrote Wordsworth poem about daffodils in gold pen down the middle and the story of Easter over the rainbow (the one where the Goddess comes to earth on a rainbow to heal a bird but the wings were too broken so she made it into a hare that laid brightly coloured eggs and whose appeareance each year ushers in Spring).

Over the picture of Mary discovering the stone rolled away from the tomb I drew a sun in gold and used chalks to colour it like a sunrise. I then added a gold frame and added a little gold to the whole piece. I added the names of Easter and other Easter time festivals in green metallic paint around the border.

The Easter picture is from a childs book, the old picture is of the Goddess and I found it on wikipedia, the little passover picture was from a website giving free Jewish clipart, the hare is from my llewyllns calendar, the hot cross buns music is from a childs nursery rhyme book. My favourite picture is the one in the middle by artist Thalia Took who kindly allowed me to use her work here.

I am not sure how much I like it - I think i have a lot to learn about using pictures in my work...

Butterfly Swirls

These pages were made using strips of blue tissue paper in various hues. I then put very long thin strips of silver and white tissue paper over the top. I then mixed some clear gesso with some cheap silver premix and a tiny bit of good blue acrylic. This gesso was mostly see through but added to the blue of the page and the silver gives just a tiny bit of glittery sheen. The butterflies and flowers were punched from holographic paper and glued on. At the bottom I used some art fibres but these haven't come out very clearly, they irridescent in two shades of blue and two clear ones with blue or green sheens. I then made little trails behind the butterflies with my glus pen and added some blue green glitter. I then spray fixed it.

As normal the scanner can't capture the play of light on all the glittery bits on a page like this...

Mylandia

I created this map of Mylandia in response to CollageDiva's lovely prompt which you can see here.

Renee's Award

Ann has given me this lovely award, right back at you! Go have a look at Ann's altered art and her lovely little paper dolls!

It was started by Bella and Ces to honour their friend Renee.

I now need to pass it on to eight artists I admire and there in lies the difficult bit! Eight! Only eight! How hard is that?

Well here they are!

I found Sue sometime ago and she has two blogs one for doodles and another for mandalas and both are full of gorgeous art.

Dianne has a lovely range of art, from proper arty drawings to luxuriant collages. Her recent Kandinsky inspired pieces are divine!

Thalia Took creates beautiful Goddess art that shows the many, many faces of woman. I love reading about her different Goddesses and what they have to say...

Magic Cochin is an illustrator and print maker. On her blog she talks about many things but you have to go see her latest print...

I only just found Misty but I was impelled to look through her blog and I fell in love, over and over again. Her dragons, her faeries, her lighters, her jewellery. She is one prolific lady!

Go have a look at the little folk of Bone Head Studios... They are ever so endearing!

Suzi is a calligrapher and she makes words into art. The words she chooses always speak volumes and she truly makes them come alive...

Aimeslee shows me what is possible in the world of multi-media creativity and I hope someday to have some measure of her skill...



There is of course one other person I have to honour - I admire my blog soul sister Mel and her path seems to so often mirror my own. So much so, I don't think I can be entirely objective, she has to sit at the top there everytime!

Scavenging

I have made a decision about this hunt. I shall go to a May Day celebration in two weeks time in a Cornish town and try and take pictures of all 25 things in one day! This has the benefit that things like traditional clothing should be covered. There are three big May Day celebrations - Flora Day in Helston on Friday, Trevithick Day in Camborne on Saturday and Obby Oss in Padstow on Friday. Since I have to work, Trevithick Day it is!

Tag

Suzi from Spirit Whispers has been tagged, and in turn, has tagged me!

Here are the rules if I tag you!

1. Link to your original tagger and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

I never know what to write on these things - it's like leaving and birthday cards at work.... So here goes...


1) In my teenage / very early twenties I was a goth. I used to wear black eyeliner and mascara and back comb my hair and wear lots of black in general...

2) My right side of my body is bigger than my left - my right leg and arm are longer for instance...

3) I have a long standing fascination with celtic knotwork and spirals. I am not sure how this started exactly. A long time ago my sister became pregnant while she was part way through her degree. The first weekend she was going home after my parents were told was going to be a hard one and I purposefully went home and acted the clown. I managed to redirect my Dad in this manner quite a few times. My sister never realised what I was doing or why but my Mum knew. A few days later when I had returned to work two books arrived in the post from my Mum and they were some of Aiden Meehan's wonderful series. My Mum and I have never spoken about this, it was just understood.... A quiet, unspoken thank you....

4) As a child I never used to have nightmares. My sister would drift through my room fairly regularly like a ghost to go sleep with my folks after a bad dream. Sometimes I would wake in the night and be bored and lonely and want to go sleep with my folks. I would think of the nastiest things I could to upset myself so I could go and sleep with them.

5) I am really bad with plants, I would love to have green fingers and maybe I do have them - they just haven't connected yet... I have managed to kill a few plants in my time. Now I only buy desert plants - cacti, succulents and things like yuccas and dragon trees... *sigh*

6) I haven't been to a dentist (except once to an emergency dentist for an abscess) in fifteen years and I have no fillings.

7) I have a little fledgling collection of cuddly dragons named Domestos, Harpic and Big Blue. They are all toilet cleaners and domestos 'kills all known germs' *grin*. I also have purple lobster, a seahorse, a crab and three eyed fish.

So on to the tagging... (because Suzi tagged this blog, I am only going to tag folk from this side of my bloggy endeavours)

Aimeslee
Alice
Ann
Barb
Emma
Siobhan
Sue

Unfinished

These pages have started life in various ways - either experimenting with new supplies or using up bits of paint....
Black left over acyrlic with green coloured gesso over and finally left over gold acrylic.


Words - each layer has words starting with a different letter of the alphabet and goes in a different dirrection. I used kids metallic markers - more pearly than metallic!

Experimenting with some new kids window paints and glitter glues... I love the softest of this page.

I played with a new multi coloured ink pad and the bag of little creative type I found from the things I saved when my Dad retired as a printer. The green is left over gesso and the words matched the type - the past does indeed seem to live on in me, from one generation to the next.

Experimentation splodges with ink stamper pens and some new stamps - I need practice at stamping!

Photographic Scavenger Hunt

I have as one of my 101 Things, to complete a Photographic Scavenger Hunt. I don't like the idea of competing right now or of having a time limit. So I am going to take a previous hunt's list and search for them at a better speed for me. Maybe sometime in the future I will do a more formal and competitive hunt, I do after all, have plenty of time till my 1001 days are up!

So the list I have chosen was hosted by Nicole B Photography.

The list is as follows!

1) local currency
2) local flag
3) local food
4) something rusty
5) local wildlife
6) Local nature
7) local stamp
8) part of your neighbourhood
9) traditional house
10) a local person
11) local weather
12) local transportation
13) traditional local clothing
14) night sky
15) sunrise
16) local product (non-food)
17) something furry
18) something feathery
19) a sign of the season
20) a part of you
21) your main hobby
22) a local shop
23) a local restaurant
24) a street sign
25) a local mailbox

The only requirement for me, is that I don't give away whereabouts I live in Cornwall, or photograph any people I actually know... Our camera does have a zoom but there is a real loss of quality so some pictures will be very challenging to take and may have things in them in a very, very small way....

Elemental Photo Mosaics

I really enjoyed making my first photo mosaic so I thought I should make some more for Project Spectrum and Creative Every Day. Over the course of eight months Project Spectrum will look at the four directions with links to various traits such as colour; earth - green, air - yellow, water - blue and fire - red. The theme for Creative Every Day this month is colour.

I entered the appropriate colour in flickr search and choose 9 pictures from the first page of results...

A Picture of Me

I found this on Quinceberry's site earlier:

Thauna issued a challenge on her blog...and I accepted. Up above is my life in pictures...this was fun! I'll explain., and then join me if you like.

1. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
2. Using only the first page, pick an image.
3. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into FD's Mosaic Maker.


The Questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favourite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favourite colour?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your Flickr name.


I don't want to say the words I typed in to get these pictures as many of them are names. What I did do was select the picture I liked best on the first page of the search results - even if it had nothing to do with the search term. For instance Heath Ledger gave me a woman with two wolves because the artist had been listening to Heath Ledger and included this in their writing about the piece. Do have a go though! It is really good fun!

Doing this hunt I found these lovely silhouettes. I particularly liked this one and it seemed full of synchronicity that is was inspired by Clarissa Pinkola Este's 'Women who run with the Wolves'. There has been much talk about this book recently in my e-verse. I bought and read it some time ago but the memories of this book are fuzzy n my brain - maybe I should get it out again...

Cheating?

It has become obvious that I am not going to get five people to take part from my small set of followers, not that I blame them - some of them sell their artistic endeavours, some just don't have time, there would be as many reasons as there are people...

However, there are a whole bunch of other people who have already signed up to this, who are also struggling to find five people....

Is this cheating?

I have no idea but having decided I want to make five things for five people within a year, I don't care...

Blog Candy

I have signed up to Aimeslee's Blog Candy give away, so here it is... (I felt no need to change her wording *laugh* except for the country related bits)

Here's how it works:

The first 5 people to respond to this post will get something handmade by me! I will choose, but it will be made with you in mind. Could be any kind or size of card, bookmark, an altered object, but it will be something that can fit in an envelope or padded envelope for receipients in the UK, and in an envelope for those of you in foreign countries. Like I said, just a little sump-sump! :-))

This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:

1. I make no guarantees that you will like what I make, but I will try hard for that goal and I'll do my best work, too.

2. What I create will be made with you in mind so it will be unique.

3. It'll be done sometime this year (You old-timers know an entire year just might not be long enough, haha, but I am committing to it!).

4. I will not tell you what it's going to be. It will hopefully be a surprise.

5. The catch? Oh, the catch is that you must offer this blog candy on your blog! This is how we expand the love.

Re-post this on your blog, offer handmade creations to the first 5 people who do the same on your blog (then come here and post).

Add my name to the #1 slot on your card- I am your first participant. When you create your give away, you will become the first participant on the new list for the people who participate with you. The first 5 people to do so and leave a comment here telling me they did (I will go to your blog to check that you have this posted) win a handmade gift by me.

Oh, and be sure to post a picture of what you win when you get it!

SO ...... who will be the first 5 folks????

1. Aimeslee

2. Mel

3. Ann

4. Suzi

5. Savannah