After a long absence from my blog site I am back but then has anyone missed me? I guess not. I am sure the people who read this blog are far and few between. This blog is an outlet and idea post for me to record stuff. Anyone who actually reads this, well that's a bonus and I do hope you you enjoy what I post. So, what have I been up to while I been away from this site.

A 3 month trip to France from mid June 2007-mid Sept 2007 for starters, which resulted in the small sum of some 8660 images. Well ,that lot has taken some sorting out. Some of the resultant images reside on my webshots albums at; webshots.com./user/mazaquilt .

This weekend, just gone, has been a creative one. I've ripped paper, pasted it onto a shoe box, slathered the box with PVA glue, then painted, foiled and drawn on it. The result I am very happy with. Wait for the next post to see the result when I'll give a blow by blow account of what I did.

As well as tizzying up a shoe box I also created some fabric from left over fabric scraps and thread then used it to create a few mini quilts, 5" x 7" in size. A fun weekend. Wish I didn't have to go to work tomorrow. I am in the mood for creating, sewing, beading, painting, ripping paper, glueing and creating a mess. So til next time I bid you adieu and like the sunset above I'll depart in a blaze of creativity.

The photo at the top of this post was taken in my backyard a few days ago.

My Day of Fame

My day of fame began with an email from the crew at Webshots letting me know one of my albums had been selected as one of the three Featured Albums of the day. The album in question was; 'Natures Textures and Patterns'. The album was featured on the Webshots Community home page on the 8th of May 2007. It has now been archived in their Featured Albums archive. I feel very honoured to have been chosen for this distinction as there are many superb images to be found in amongst the webshots Community.

This album has been a recent addition to my collection on Webshots and contains the images of nature in all its variety. The beautiful textures of bark curls on a gum tree, the symmetry of leaves on the Jacaranda tree and even the beauty you can find in a dried up puddle. The following images are some of the ones I have in my album.

Jacaranda Leaves

Mud Art

Bark Curls

myspace site [no longer active]

All decked out in my tribal belly dance outfit. This photo was taken at the Woodford Folk Festival on New Year's Eve before we headed down to the site to party 2007 in.

Belly Dance Logan City. This is where I go to learn about belly dance with the wonderful Debbie Larcombe.

Today I decided to enter into the myspace blog world. Not as easy to navigate around as this one but its all a learning curve. This week I started back at belly dancing after a long time away from it. It didn't help when at the begining of December last yearI fell and took a small flake of bone off my left ankle and tore a ligament.

On Saturday Debbie, my belly dance teacher, had the first of the tribal belly dance classes. We spent some time sorting out how everyone wanted the class to run then did a workout and discovered all those muscles we hadn't used over the christmas break.

Woodford Textures

The first few days at the Woodford Folk festival were rainy and cold ,unseasonal weather for the 'sunshine' state. It didn't take long for the dust to turn to mud, mud which threatened to suck your shoes off and squelched up between your toes if you were wearing thongs. While the music from the venues filled our ears with glorious sound, the stalls dotted around the site provided our eyes with a colourful diversion. The rough textures of colourful bags hanging out side the stalls, colourful clothing hanging inside, racks of scarfs, and a jumble of hats teetering in a large pile on a table.

Once the sun began to shine and the raincoats came off the colourful parade of people filled the streets ,the stalls tempting then with their wares. Small butterflies on sticks beckoning to children with their gaily
wings.

Playing with Textures

The dawn of a new year.At the end of December 06 we headed off to the Woodford Folk Festival to spend the end of the year and begining of 07 relaxing and enjoying the sounds of music. The above photo ,taken from near our campsite, is the first rays of the sun on January 1st 2007. As well as all the great music we listened to I also did a workshop with local artist, Noela Mills, but more about that later.

The above piece of collage I made before the festival, little did I know it would be a similar technique to the piece I would do at the workshop! After a recent spate of buying books on collage art I decided to try out a few techniques on a small frontspiece for my Woodford journal.

I covered a piece of paper with craft glue and after crumpling up a piece of tissue paper stuck it down onto the glued page going over the page with a glue loaded paint brush pushing the tisuue around forming interesting shapes and texture.I also added chipboard letters of my name. I let the piece dry and then painted it. A coat of brown paint first and when that had dried, painted green,copper,purple and pewter paint across the crumpled surface. The paint picked up the ridges creating a great textural finish. The look was metallic.To highten the semigloss finish, and to seal it, I then painted the page with varnish.

Now to the workshop with Noela. I learnt lots. The techinque Noela used was similar to the way I had done my pre-festival journal frontspiece. We used PVA glue to stick our bits of tissue paper to a page of copy paper. The resulting page in the above photo.When it had dried we scrumbled metallic paint across the surface and finished the piece with highlights of gold foil.

The page was then cut to size to fit on an A5 book and glued into place with double sided tape.

The above photo shows the final art piece. Noela's workshop was delightful and enthuses me to try more of this type of techique and to see what else I can discover while playing with textures and paint.

Sites I like

The following are blog sites I enjoy visiting
birdwomanau, a fellow quilter, Rosdye and threebeautifulthings,
In this photo are three things I like, Jacaranda trees, rain, and the colour purple.
http://birdwomanau.blogspot.com
http://threebeautifulthings.blogspot.com
http://rosdye.blogspot.com

Rain

Over the weekend we had some wonderful rain and my rain tank is now well and truly overflowing. We mostly take photos when it is sunny and when it rains the camera remains tucked away. I have been documenting the changes around my the backyard I thought why not photos of the rain.As you can see,when we get a huge downpour, I end up with a 'river' running through my yard. When the builders built my house they cut out a pad for it lowering the house relative to next doors property, the result being I receive the run off from the storms from the higher properties. Across the front of the house I have a 'river' as the water flows out to the storm water drain running around the edge of my property. I realise a few well placed drainage systems would remedy this but then I'd miss out on my moat.
During the morning, between some of the lighter showers, I had ventured outside to photograoh the creeper hanging over the lattice fence between me and my neighbour. The delicate pink of the blossoms are glorious. The flowers are not robust and after a particulary heavy downpour I wondered how the flowers had fared.
The same bunch I had photographed earlier where decidingly worse for wear. The blooms bruised and battered.
But amongst the battered flowers their delicate beauty still remained and the soft petals glistened with small bubbles of water.
The blooms yet to open had survived the battering of the falling downpour. Late in the afternoon the sun peeped through the storm clouds and shone with a beautiful warm glow. I grabbed my camera and sped outside to capture some more images.
In the glow of the late afternoon sun the flowers took on a much deeper colour.
The soft pink of the flowers earlier in the day replaced with a rosy pink hue
Even though some of the flowers no longer had their petals they still appeared majestic.