Patience

Patience - Mixed media on cardboard

I wanted to try something I haven't done before and here it is. This piece is a layered mixed media piece with perhaps a tad too much glitter. This piece started out life with gel medium and the heart shapes embedded within this medium. And there it stayed hanging around my messy workspace waiting for me to play with it a little bit, it waited and waited and waited - it was very patient.

I'd been wanted to try something different as a background so I pulled out some old little square ink pads and literally dragged them across the cardboard. It was a lot of fun and very, very messy. Some of these ink pads are now only sponges, but hey that's okay they served their purpose. The thing with ink is that it takes a long time to dry so there was more waiting.

Next using a square-edged brush I wrote the word joy (you can see my calligraphy training in this, because it's italic script). Still I wasn't happy and the piece once again had to wait while I thought about what I wanted to do. Some music was added with stazon ink and a stamp roller, then I pulled out some letter stickers and added them (I think they belonged to an Ali Edwards kit that I purchased about 6 years ago!).And then came the glitter, and more glitter, and more glitter and just a bit more. I was completely covered in glitter when I finished. Still an oft-quoted mantra of mine is - everything looks better with a little glitter! 

And the piece once again waited until I was sure I wanted to take a photo, and then waited again until I was sure I wanted to share it. It's so different to what I really do, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. But finally the wait was over and here we are. So, you can see why I have called my little piece Patience. And isn't having patience as part of your repertoire  a joy!

What's that smell?

Had to quickly share this story while Bailey and Nathan are safely eating brekkie and watching Shaun the Sheep.

Last night we put the boys to bed as normal, Nathan fell asleep almost immediately, Bailey however, having had a catnap at around 5pm decided not to go to sleep. That's okay, Andrew was on duty and just kept putting him into bed. Around 9pm when all was quiet I said to Andrew - Can you smell something? So we decided to check to make sure that Bailey hadn't got into anything . . . . yes . . . you guessed it . . . this is a real toddler/preschooler moment!

Bailey had found the Curash Nappy Rash cream, which is like thick zinc cream. Now not only had he decided to smear it all over his bed and the spare bed, he had also decided to completely cover a few toys, to try to feed Nathan some while he was sleeping . . . oh and to eat some himself! Andrew and I went into complete recovery mode, we rang Nurse-on-call who then passed us onto Poison's Australia, who advised us that this stuff was non-toxic and the worst case scenario was some diahorrea. So we cleaned out Bailey's mouth, cleaned his teeth, gave him lots of water to drink stripped the beds, washed the sheets, chucked the toys, tried to explain to Bailey why it's important not to eat things that are in strange tubes . . . and all the while Nathan kept sleeping.

I'm sure that this won't be the first time the boys eat something they are not supposed to, but hopefully it will all turn out okay like last night.

Next post will be some photos of Andrew's 40th, just need to find the time to post them!!!