Month: June 2018
Mosaic eggs with fingernail polish
This was an experiment in mosaic and color and utilizing those left over bottles of nail polish (i dont use nail polish but my daughter does/did and these have been on the shelf for about 20 years). It was an opportunity to get great color, lots of gloss, glitter and do mosaic at the same time.
I just washed out the egg shells from breakfast, peeled off the inner membrane and let them dry. After that I painted the rounded side with various shades of nail polish. I broke the pieces of painted egg shell into the sizes that I was willing to work with, and glued them with slightly diluted white glue on to a whole shell (this one was a brown egg, contents blown out — and scrambled for breakfast as well).
The white border on this egg was glossed with clear polish with glitter on a white egg shell, but other colors were painted over brown eggs. This is just a matter of choice, and how dense you want the color.
After the glue dried, I glossed the egg twice with varathane. In looking at it, i felt it needed some kind of dimensional border between the white band and the flower area, so i made a thin rope of black polymer clay and placed it on the border between those areas, then cured polymer clay on the egg for about a half hour at 265 F. In an ideal world one would have roughened up the border with a little sand paper, and applied the polymer clay BEFORE glossing to make sure it would stick. I will see how long my black rim stays attached.
A princess at 4
How privileged for a child to grow up with the dream of being a princess. I wonder though how so many little girls, ravaged by war, famine, and abuse are deprived of that dream. Lets work to give children security and care. @2016
A good hair day!
Wish I had “good hair days” like this little lady.
cartoon by corin, text by grandma M. @2016
Broccoli?
I dont know why it is so hard to get kids to eat greens. There must be some “biology” behind it… perhaps a protective, built-in mechanism that helps them NOT put things in their mouths that have the potential to be harmful before mom or dad can educate them on the wild edibles. It is not even a leap to consider this as an survival instinct since in days of yore kids roamed the outside to learn and grow.
@2016
What are you looking at me for?
Age just turning 5, my granddaughter’s cartoon, which I vectorized from her sketch. I love the expressions and freedom in her art, and children’s art in general. @2016
Tile family room floor with game boards
This little (not so little) project was a huge undertaking for me. I like mosaic, and have done mosaic with all kinds of tesserae, but until about 10 years ago had not really used mortar and tiles and grout. I decided to do the floor in the basement which routinely floods regardless of how much landscaping I do or how many times a year I clean the gutters, etc. Carpet is not going to work, and the peel and stick vinyl tile from the previous owners did just pop off, after so many soakings.
I wondered if i could tile the floor. First two years were spent learning that asphalt? asbestos? stickly black mastic requires some heavy duty preparation before it will let thinset adhere. So the first 1/10 of the tiles came up, and i decided to practice tiling the washing machine room (just plain concrete)… that project was finished about 4 years ago and counted out at about 10,000 pieces of tile all from scrap. (ah, i might have purchased one or a half dozen tiles, but really it is all out of the trash bin at a local tile place). I put a stained glass window in the window well (also left overs from a bathroom window I was replacing in a rental property, which rented before i finished).
I began the bathroom that is in the basement next to the family room, and finished that, and a little stained glass window (a long thin small window) with little half moons of glass, kind of in memoria of the outhouse half moons.
Then to begin again the family room which now has a central mosaic of the shield which is carved in stone on the fireplace on the front of the house, and I bordered the entire room with a three-row motif –about 1sq inch for two rows which contained two inch tiles of various widths and colors. Across the fireplace i replicated the arch as a variation of the border. The remainder of the room is just random tiles, mostly 2×2 squares which i cut from various scrap pieces.
The fun part was to mosaic in some board games. Monopoly, checkers/chess, a small version of go, scrabble, ur, sennet, chinese checkers and tic tac toe. That actually kept me interested in finishing…. this floor, plus the hall and bar and bathroom (sampled in a stratified random approach, with the min and max) comes in at about 25,000 pieces. You can see part of the scrabble board in the lower left.
The sad thing for me is that i developed a sensitivity (apparently) to the metals and additives and have to go back to quilting for a while.
