Month: October 2018

A beautiful video of beautiful people

This touched me so deeply.  I just want everyone who has kids to learn to sing along with this signing and smile with these smiling faces.  lyrics below, and link to the video are provided. Thank you to those of you who created the music (Katy Perri), found the inspiration to gather the women and children, teach them the signing Makaton and assemble this video.

Heart beats fast
Colours and promises
How to be brave?
How can I love when I’m afraid to fall?
But watching you stand alone
All of my doubt
Suddenly goes away somehow

One step closer

I have died every day waiting for you
Darling, don’t be afraid
I have loved you for a thousand years
I’ll love you for a thousand more

Time stands still
Beauty in all she is
I will be brave
I will not let anything take away
What’s standing in front of me
Every breath
Every hour has come to this

One step closer

I have died every day waiting for you
Darling, don’t be afraid
I have loved you for a thousand years
I’ll love you for a thousand more

And all along I believed I would find you
Time has brought your heart to me
I have loved you for a thousand years
I’ll love you for a thousand more

One step closer
One step closer

I have died every day waiting for you
Darling, don’t be afraid
I have loved you for a thousand years
I’ll love you for a thousand more

And all along I believed I would find you
Time has brought your heart to me
I have loved you for a thousand years
I’ll love you for a thousand more

Resin coaster made with my garden weeds

Getting flowers to maintain their color, shape and depth during the drying and/or dehydrating requires patience and special equipment (thats what the commercial businesses use). I just grabbed some of the common weeds from my own yard and my neighbors yards along the parkway and flattened them between pieces of paper towel and pressed them until dry under stacks of books.

This particular item was made with a left over and unwanted ring bracelet, kind of a brass color, that I could not figure out anything else to do with. I used packing tape to seal the back side, and poured just a thin layer of resin.

The plants i had dried I used some of that resin (before it cured) to just lightly coat the tops and bottoms of the flattened flowers, and when that cured, I organized them within the ring.  I poured one thin coat of resin and let that cure. BTW I also added some “seeds” from some of the weeds.

The next step was to remove the packing tape from the bottom, sand off the bumps and flatten as best i could, and then repour the final back-side coat of resin and let it cure.

The last step was to pour the top side…. before that coat I also sanded off the areas that stuck above the top rim before i poured the resin. I added a tiny bit of gold glitter to the last pour on the top.

It is kind of fun, but the flowers would be prettier if the colors had stayed.

FYI this is NOT an egg, though it is posted under the “egg” cateory.

No wonder I love to work with clay! My paleobrain wants to write with clay and a stylus.

I am quoting from this website (here) about the earliest known method for writing and recording goods and exchanges. If our first means of communication (outside of verbal), thus documenting in “hard copy” our possessions and transactions began with little objects made with clay, then I allow myself to participate in the modern day counterpart of this activity — working with polymer clay.

I look at the favorite activities of my children and grandchildren – who would have guessed that play doh (and we used salt and flour clay and real terracotta clay as well) was fulfilling one of our earliest language desires. To make objects of what we love, we own and remember.

According to the article in Scripta, 2009, by Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Tokens and writing: The cognitive development. Shapes – cones spheres and discs, were measures of grain, and the tetrahedron was a measure of labor.

Jump ahead (in the mind of those same individuals)

Here is a scholarly website that explains more about this language and the method for creating the markings and provides links to some old tablets in museums around the world. This image is a crop from the gilgamesh flood story.

And this quote from the site above says the “scribes” were kind of like secretaries. but apparently male — “a scribe whose hand can keep up with the mouth, he is indeed a scribe!”. btw…. i learned to type in high school… i can keep up!! haha.
Wikipedia says: “Cuneiform or Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform, one of the earliest systems of writing, was invented by the Sumerians. It is distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, made by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. … The system consists of a combination of logophonetic, consonantal alphabetic and syllabic signs.” THe part i like is the LOGOPHONETIC CONSONANTAL ALPHABETIC SYLLABIC. All inclusive, everything there. I think english might have been all inclusive at one point, and probably like all things, morphed from some prototype… but it has lost so much of that logo portion that it is hard to see. An interesting thesis would be to find those letters in english which do still retain some of their original pictographic elements. And yet, right here and now, pictographic elements of speech are used in the emoji and congi symbols as we “speak” so to speak. haha. (but wait…. we have color as part of the glyphs.

What i think is even more bizzare is that I made four styli from leftover polymer clay this morning, with the partially rounded side, and two flat sides that meet at right angles. They are about 2-3 inches long. I can’t wait to make my first “clay” (polymer clay that is) tablet.

Breast cancer awarness ribbon: mosaic chicken egg

Breast cancer awarness ribbon: mosaic chicken egg made with dyed chicken eggs, with Egglands Best eggs with the breast cancer awareness pink ribbon logo stamped, and with regular white egg shell.  White ribbon on one side, and mosaic with the Egglands Best pink print on the other.

Instructions: emptied brown chicken egg as a base, glitter nailpolish over the pink ribbon logos on the Egglands Best egg to keep the print from “running”, lightly breaking the egg shells into small pieces, white glue as an adhesive, Aquathane as a glossing agent. This particular egg is free to whomever asks first.

egglands best chicken egg pink ribbon stamp mosaic egg breast cancer awareness

My little ponies: Corins rendition of Strawberry sunshine

Using her tablet, Corin has gotten very good at making “my little ponies”  Here is Strawberry Sunshine….  how could one have guessed that a 7 year old could work with computer graphics so well.  Awesome Corin, just awesome.

The little strawberries on the hind quarters are, per Corin’s own phrase, “it is a magical mark that comes when ponies figure out what they are good at something”. One of those strawberry marks are for Corin’s artistic talent!


Corin @ 8 2018