Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

Happy Earth Day ... Earth Day is an annual event celebrated on April 22. Worldwide, various events are held to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First celebrated in 1970, Earth Day events in more than 193 countries are now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network. Numerous communities celebrate Earth Week, an entire week of activities focused on the environmental issues that the world faces. In 2017, the March for Science occurs on Earth day (April 22,) Respect our environment ... 

Today, 18 April is World Heritage Day and today, on Tag Tuesday  , I am the featured designer , Naturally , I chose the theme Heritage .   Hope you will join us and create an art tag and put your own link on the Tag Tuesday site. If you don't want to make a tag, just go to the link and have a look at the tags others create - each fortnight, there are lots of new ideas! My first tag uses a torn section of one of my photos of a temple dancer carving in the World Heritage complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. The background is so far removed from that - it is waxed and painted 'butcher's paper' but I like the aged look it has.  The second tag is very simple - a manipulated photo ( again from Angkor Wat) transformed into a line drawing for the background. The panels pasted over the top are strips from a magazine page. And the gold blob is my attempt to gild one of the visible statues. A couple  of years ago, I also made a 'family heritage ' tag so though...

I love this way of decorating eggs for Easter - it is a natural process and we can eat the eggs without too much guilt or damage to our waistlines. All I did  today was boil up some brown onion skins /peel. I prepared the eggs by cutting up some nylon stockings and placed a leaf down over the stocking and then the uncooked egg on top. Then I pulled the nylon stocking tight around the leaf and egg, making sure the leaf was placed where I wanted it, and secured the parcel with a rubber band. I put the eggs in the dye bath and slowly brought them to a boil, let them cook for about 10 minutes, and let them cool in the dye bath for at least.an hour. I think the better results came from the heavier, stronger leaves -   the upper left is grevillea, and the lower left is rosemary or perhaps you prefer the more delicate prints from the ferns? Happy Easter!  

Wednesday's child is full of woe...  In this ongoing series about the inmates of the Newcastle Industrial School 1867-1871, I have been sharing the progress of my proposed art installation for the "Stitched Up" project and exhibition. I have previously written about the background story on  March 1   and then a couple of weeks later on  March 16   about the process.I am using to create 193 stick dolls representing the girls who were at the school during those four years. Please refer to these previous posts to put everything into perspective  I am happy to report that since then, I have made more progress. Today, I am sharing more of the process, so that by the end of this series, these posts will serve as a tutorial as well as information about the project. In the last post, I ended with the sticks at the stage pictured below.... Sticks collected from the bush - covered with aluminium foil, two way stretch fabric and then cotto...

If you haven't caught up yet, Tag Tuesday has changed its format as an open blog with links to participants' posts.  Here's  the Tag Tuesday link to an amazing array of tags, creative ideas on various themes. The current theme is "Things with Wings" ( but no birds!) . Above is my very simple stitched tag on a piece of printed fabric lurking in my stash for a long time, just waiting for this occasion! I used whipped running stitch for the words. I also got out of my stash a bag of  beautiful butterfly wings made by Suzy Brewer , thinking they could be inspiration for another tag,... and discovered that someone has lost a wing! In fact, two bodies have lost wings it appears. A mystery yet to be solved.