Friday Egg

We're late! We're late! For a very important date!

JoJo decided for the first time in her short life that she wanted to stay up playing and/or crying and/or screaming until 10 p.m. Her normal bedtime is 7:00, so you understand that this put a mighty big crimp in my blogging style. She finally collapsed exhausted at her door and went to sleep on the floor. I went in a few minutes later to try to gently put her in bed without waking her and wouldn't you know it, she had gotten into bed and tucked herself in all by herself. Funny kid. I live in hope that she will sleep in tomorrow morning.

Today's egg is a stylized owl done on a brown chicken egg. A woman at one of my Easter shows saw an egg with the same type of placement of lines and thought it looked like owls, so I decided to try it. I like how it worked out, and will be trying a more advanced version next time with more details. Please forgive the funky photos (see above!)

Happy Friday to everyone, and I hope your bedtimes go more smoothly than ours did today.

Friday Egg

Some weeks doing the Friday egg seems like no big deal. Then there are weeks like this week where at 3:30 p.m. I realize I haven't even started to work on an egg, much less make an egg I like well enough to post on the blog. I decided to work on an egg I got last weekend from a vendor at the Hope Farmer's Market. It is from a Phoenix Bantam chicken and about 3/4 the size of a chicken egg.  The smaller the egg, the less time it takes to make, and I wanted to get this done, cleaned off and photographed by midnight tonight!

I was thinking of a geometric abstract sea creature design made with dots. I don't remember the name of the creature I am thinking about, but it has a series of dot-like nubs that get smaller and smaller as they travel toward the central point on the body. The net design in the background was a last minute decision, and I like the idea but the black may be too dark with the light greens and yellows.  I think that the light green background is a little too pale, and next time I will try it with some stronger colors (red, dark red, golden yellow, black).  Hope you like it!

Oh, and even though Mother's Day is this Sunday, my delightful husband saw that I might have need of my present before then (we are busy busy busy until Sunday night). Ta-Da!

The very first latte from our brand new reconditioned espresso maker from Texas Coffee Traders.  I'm so excited - I love my lattes!  

Also, a lovely orchid plant.  I love getting these instead of cut flowers because they last months instead of days.  This one is a replacement for the one I got for Valentine's Day that just dropped its last blossom last week.

And here's my sweet kitty Blanca, at her usual spot on the back of the couch:

Yay for early Mother's Day!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Friday Egg

I will call this my Kimono Quilt egg.  When I do a variation on it, there are some things I will change, but I enjoyed making it.  Not a lot of egg luck this week.  Just various things that went wrong or didn't go the way I planned.  I think that I will put the eggs away for a few weeks and forget what I think they should look like and then when I take them out again, I will probably like them better.

I hope you enjoy the egg today:

Happy Friday!  

Scavenged Arrangement

I realized on my morning walk with the dog that there are some really lovely spring weeds growing. So instead of scooping poop with my plastic bag, I toted home some nameless weeds and combined them with some flowers and foliage from our yard et, VOILA!  Instant arrangement.

Check out this rose bush!  It is totally overgrown and at least 12 feet tall with the most perfectly scarlet roses. We don't water or fertilize it which is probably why it is so happy.  We just leave it alone to do what it will.

Here's an unknown type of tree/shrub that is blooming in our backyard that I also used in the arrangement:

Here's the finished arrangement:

Anyone know what this green weed is?:

I think it turned out amazingly well, considering I spent absolutely nothing on it.

Happy spring everyone!

Friday Egg

Today I will show you an egg that I like so much that I am not selling to anyone.  This egg is an unvarnished brown egg, with a celadon green and white background.  When I first looked at the finished egg, I realized that if I put a shiny finish on it, it would lose some of it's beauty.  Normally I like a little shine and glitz, but the large blocks of quiet color demanded a more natural finish.  When I was doing my experimentation with gilding, I decided to gild just one bird.  I think it makes for a very special egg.  I hope you enjoy it.

Friday Eggs

This week we are back to traditional style!  A customer at Artworks bought two eggs in process, so essentially sight unseen, that were traditional style.  As soon as it stops raining I will be able to varnish them and get them delivered.  In the meantime, I have been playing with the same design a bit and here you can see the same basic traditional geometric design with minor tweaks (because I can't do the same thing twice!) on a chicken egg and a goose egg. I was a bit surprised at how little the dynamism was affected by the difference in size.  Sometimes working on a larger egg makes the design less exciting somehow, but I think it works on both sizes here.  What do you think?

Goose egg:

Chicken Egg:

Friday Egg? Nope - I'm on egg vacation

This week I haven't worked on eggs at all!  I've been on my post-Easter egg break.  I am currently taking an online xhtml/css class so I can completely re-make my website.  It's been feeling pretty tired for a while, and I just need a complete makeover.  The class started three weeks ago, but I haven't been able to concentrate on it until this week.  I hope to have a new site up and running within a month or so.  Also, I am working on getting set  up on Etsy. The only thing that has been holding me up is shipping, but I think I got it figured out on Thursday.  I feel like I'm so busy these days that even my downtime is scheduled and sliced and diced into little bits.  If only I could free myself of those addictive and time-sucking social networking sites - it is too easy to lose an hour without realizing it.

I did work on a little painted panel that I will post.  Used sharpies and sharpie paint pens with gilding.  It's that elephant again. Red this time with a tapestry blanket, on a gilded background framed in a traditional diamond pattern. Enjoy!  I will be back to regularly scheduled programming next week!