Dreaming Spirals

Sue Andrus has written a brilliant tutorial on indoor sunprinting with lots of photos. Great for those of us in the UK who haven’t seen much of it recently (though at least it hasn’t rained here in Newport for a couple of weeks….).

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I took so many photos of trees on Saturday that I saved them for another post.  I think there’s a tree series somewhere inside me if only I could find the time to sit down and start it…

I think this one is coppiced.

The photo’s a bit blurry, but just look at those roots!

I love trees silhouetted against the horizon.

I love the look of these branches intertwining like snakes….

And these branches are crooked, zigzaggedy…

Almost back to the car park … a clearing lit by the late afternoon sun…

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We had a nice family walk to some waterfalls in the Brecon Beacons (a range of Welsh mountains) this afternoon.  The path wound along the side of a river, which gradually became a gorge and had several spectacular waterfalls along its length.   It was quite rocky and I was glad I was wearing my walking boots, particularly as I twisted my ankle and went flying before we even reached the footpath!  So I am now the proud possessor of various black and blue parts of my body… I expect it’ll be difficult to get out of bed tomorrow morning!  It was worth it though, to get out into the fresh air and the kids enjoyed it.   Anselm is studying gorges and waterfalls for his geography GCSE so he particularly wanted to go there and took as many photos as I did!

I loved the mossy trees along the first part of the walk - it made me think of Lord of the Rings!

The waterfalls were all pretty spectacular too.  I used the ’sports’ button on my camera - it is designed to take more than one photo at a very high speed to capture moving images.

Another one:

There has been so much rain lately that we knew the waterfalls would be good!   A lot of other people seemed to have the same idea - the area was quite crowded.

This last waterfall was the main destination because the path actually goes underneath!  The kids went there and got pretty wet…

There was spray even from where I took the photo! 

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I thought I’d show you some photos of other people’s artwork which I’ve bought over the last year or so.

I bought these two collages from the Baker’s Dozen Collage Exchange a couple of years ago (now called the International Collage Exhibition and Exchange) run by Dale Copeland.   Participants send in 13 collages; they are put on an online exhibition.  One is put up for sale, one is donated to The Centre for Adult Education in Melbourne, Australia and the rest are swapped with the other participants, so if you take part you get 11 of other people’s collages back.  I keep meaning to take part in this but never managed to yet… If you’re interested, you’ve got till March to get them to New Zealand!

This is entitled Cliffs & Canyons series #3 and is by Linda Distel of WI, USA.  I love the way she has built up the layers and texture of the cliffs.

This is ‘Veiled’ by Adele Carew.  I love the mysterious feeling you get from the image - the photo doesn’t do justice to it. 

The next photo is a postcard I bought recently from Rayna Gillman of Studio 78 Notes.   I have been reading Rayna’s blog for a couple of years now and really love her work so I am so pleased to have a little bit of it!  I seem to see more each time I look at it.

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Here are a few postcards I have received from people over the last few months in a postcard swapping group I am in.

This one is by Carol of Textile Tales.  It is very textural.

This one is by Margaret from Digital Gran.  She has digitally manipulated it on the computer and printed it.  It is Egyptian inspired, she says.

This is from Sue in Australia.  It is silk painted.

And this one is from Penny in France.  Lots of overlapping sheers and stitching.

Thank you, everyone!  I love them all.

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I made a salad for the kids yesterday and as I was making it, I took photos of each stage.  Then I decided to make them into a collage using Picasa.  Here we go!  Nice and colourful… see if you can work out the order!

Unfortunately you have to have pictures in multiples of four or nine and I only had six so a few of them got repeated!  Still, it makes an interesting image.

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Jill Smith has a new website.  Make sure you put your sunglasses on before visiting it, because it is very bright!

She is still doing her online workshops and she says that if you tell her when you book that you read about it on my blog you can have 10% off the price. 

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Found this over on Lesley Riley’s blog:

So - what sort of reader are you? Tell me!!

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