Friday, August 27, 2010

Sweet jam of summer

 

Three days this week - three different kinds of berry jam.
First we picked wild blackberries in the rain on Sunday, fighting off mosquitoes. The jam was cooked on Monday - my first try at blackberry jam.

Tomato jam is from the tomatoes from friend Valerie J's garden. With little slivers of ginger, it is comfort food for us, and something so many of our Canadian friends have never heard of, but are willing and eager to taste and to adopt.

Our raspberry bushes are literally covered in berries! So, today it was the turn of this wonderful fruit that we first tasted fresh here in 1997. As soon as we had our own house, we planted four --- but by now they have taken over the back yard, and we gladly share with squirrels, birds and sometimes friends!
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Sunday, August 15, 2010

Quilled frog pond

Because of the Lyme disease, I've lost a lot of fine motor skills and strength in my hands. For moths I haven't touched any artistic projects, since it was just too disconcerting and upsetting to have my eyes all blurry and the hands not doing what they were supposed to do!

However, being on the antibiotics has created another set of problems, but I've regained much of the use of my hands, as well as other benefits.

A weekend ago, I tried my hand at quilling again. Nothing fancy, and just playing, using old CDs as the base. The finished project is not as "tidy" as I would have wished, because the application of Mod Podge at the end relaxed the paper more then planned, so the coils opened - but since the theme is water with ripples all over the place, I guess it doesn't matter.


The edge consists of a double layer of "rocks" made of different combinations of brown and cream strips. The water has different colours and I tried to make the rings even more irregular by folding the paper before rolling it, where the frog dives in. I'll add some more green leaves to the one big water lily.

The base has about 5 old CDs glued together. The top is covered with a layer of paper, to which I've applied Mod Podge before starting to glue down the quilling.
The frogs were all made separately, sealed with Mod Podge and allowed to dry before applying to the CDs.

Everything is paper, except the CDs and the googly eyes!

It was fun to make, and forcing the stubborn hands to do the same movement over and over again, while knowing that the rocks and circles didn't have to be completely uniform in this case.

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